Of the 51 players to have broken the world transfer fee, the £85m Tottenham have just spent on Mateus Fernandes would be enough to buy all but three of them. Move up to the £116m Manchester City are preparing for Elliott Anderson and the figure is just one.
Football transfer fees forever changed in the summer of 2017 when PSG delivered a briefcase of £200m to Neymar so that he could buy himself out of his Barcelona contract. The genie was out of the bottle, the floodgates opened. Whatever analogy you want to use, transfer fees have hit different ever since.
Since that summer, 11 players have been sold for more than £100m but in recent years there has been a new developing trend – the price of an excellent central midfielder.
In previous eras, goalscorers secured the biggest price tags. Since 2000, six of the seven players to break the record have been forwards, with attack-minded Zinedine Zidane the only exception. And while that does still hold with the top four most expensive signings in football history all attackers, four of the top 11 are central midfielders; include Jack Grealish and it rises to five.
Central midfielders have always been important but the tactical shift away from 4-4-2 towards 4-2-3-1 has made them more important than ever. Their prices reflect that.
Declan Rice cost Arsenal £100m; adjust that for inflation and it is closer to £120m these days, but would anyone try and argue he has not justified that? Take away Rice and there is a strong possibility Arsenal do not win their first title in 20 years.
Moises Caicedo has developed into arguably Chelsea’s best player, making his £100m price tag justified.
There are factors other than on-pitch performance when negotiating a price. Does the player have a long existing contract? Does he have interest from multiple clubs who could start a bidding war? Is he young?
In Fernandes’ case, all three of those boxes are ticked. The 21-year-old has four years left on his West Ham deal and had interest from Manchester United. The Old Trafford side may not have been willing to go as high as West Ham wanted but they pushed the price up enough that West Ham could demand that figure from the more willing/desperate Tottenham.
Perhaps the only surprising aspect is that Fernandes has commanded that fee despite technically being a Championship player. The previous highest price for a relegated player was Romeo Lavia at £53 million.
But Lavia’s numbers were nowhere near as good as Fernandes’ for West Ham…
Elliott Anderson has the same multiplying factors. His Forest deal runs until 2029 and both Manchester clubs were clearly interested. Being English is probably what has pushed the fee north of the £100m mark.
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Then we come to Sandro Tonali. He has a contract for another two years, is Premier League proven and Newcastle clearly do not need to sell, given the money they received for Anthony Gordon.
Those figures are reflective of a changed market, for Premier League clubs are also several times more wealthy now than they ever have been.
Football finance expert Kieran Maguire calculated the relative price of some of the biggest Premier League transfers compared to the change in clubs’ purchasing power; Alan Shearer’s £15m sale to Newcastle comes out on top at an adjusted £236.9 million. Elliott Anderson would be 31st on the list and Fernandes nowhere near.
That is to say, the goalposts have moved on transfer fees far quicker than inflation in the real world. What many of us would consider a £30m player is now £60m. Our brains hear £85m and immediately think of Virgil van Dijk, but his £75m is £112m in today’s money.
Fernandes, Anderson and Tonali will be judged on their apparently exorbitant transfer fees when in reality, spending £80m-plus on one of the central figures in your team is now pretty much par for the course. Even for Tottenham, it seems.