Top News

Enzo Fernandez’s £125million transfer from Chelsea to Manchester City has made him the 19th player to break the English transfer record in the Premier League era. But how many of those blockbuster signings actually justified the huge fees paid for them?

Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, and even Blackburn Rovers and Leeds United — in very different eras — are the seven clubs to have broken the record. It is fair to say some of those deals delivered far better value than others.

So we have ranked the 19 record-breaking Premier League transfers from the worst to the best.

Shortly after Manchester City’s transformative takeover was completed in the summer of 2008, the club were desperate to land a statement signing.

The Brazilian had a few moments during his time in Manchester, but it was obvious almost immediately that this was a move neither side had fully thought through.

Given how his life later unfolded, we have no hesitation in placing him right at the bottom.

The Frenchman is nowhere near the second-worst footballer on this list. A glance at his 2018 World Cup highlights alone is enough to show he may well be among the very best when it comes to pure talent.

He was also a very good player for Manchester United, and at times an outstanding one — especially in his first season, when he played a major role in their Europa League and League Cup triumphs.

But in hindsight, it always felt like an unhappy relationship. Pogba’s final five seasons brought no trophies, and then he departed on a free transfer for the second time.

It was disastrous business, and a long-running psychodrama that feels as though it caused lasting harm to both the club and the player.

We are not entirely sure why the BBC article left this one out, but it was widely reported at the time as a British record £59.7million, so we are including it here.

Fresh from a man-of-the-match display in Real Madrid’s La Decima victory, Di Maria arrived with enormous promise and delivered very little.

The winger was deeply unhappy in Manchester and keen to leave as soon as possible.

United only made a small loss when they sold him to PSG after a single season, so it could have been much worse.

In fact, compared to later expensive mistakes such as Antony and Rasmus Hojlund, it almost looks like decent business.

Spoiler alert — the upper reaches of this list are proof that Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United rarely got their major-money signings wrong during their peak years.

But their record was not completely spotless.

“He [Veron] is a f**king great player,” Ferguson famously snapped at journalists.

“And you’re all f**king idiots.”

Veron was unquestionably a great player. There is no debate about that. But for whatever reason, it simply never clicked for him in the Premier League.

The only player on this list who arrived already having won the Ballon d’Or, Shevchenko made an eye-catching Community Shield debut that suggested Stamford Bridge had a future icon on its hands.

The reality turned out to be far less impressive.

There is still every chance Isak can climb much higher on this list, but three league goals in his debut season at Liverpool was a meagre return.

Yes, the striker suffered a broken leg just before Christmas. But even before that, Isak looked short of sharpness and was too easily brushed off the ball by defenders, with the drawn-out move from Newcastle having disrupted his pre-season.

New Liverpool boss Andoni Iraola now has the task of trying to play Isak into form. We will see how that goes.

It still feels hard to believe that El Nino made more Premier League appearances for Chelsea than he did for Liverpool. That cannot be right, surely?

Even so, Torres scored more than three times as many league goals for the Reds as he managed for the Blues.

Much like Shevchenko — and so many other strikers Chelsea have signed — he proved to be only a shadow of the player they believed they were buying for £50million.

Although he won no silverware at Liverpool, his honours at Chelsea included the Champions League, FA Cup and Europa League.

And, of course, nobody can take that goal against Barcelona away from him.

This was the last player Liverpool signed after breaking the British transfer record.

Adjusted for inflation, he would still be Liverpool’s record signing today, even ahead of Isak, at £137million in present-day terms. Extraordinary numbers.

Collymore registered just over 50 goal involvements — 35 goals and 16 assists — in 81 appearances across two seasons.

Looking back, that is actually a pretty solid return. The forward built a useful partnership with Robbie Fowler, but he was overtaken by emerging star Michael Owen more quickly than anyone could have imagined.

Collymore himself has explained why the move is not remembered as a success:

“It’s weird because if you say to people that over two seasons that you either scored or assisted 50 goals in 80 games people would go, ‘That’s f**king really good’,” Collymore reflected in an interview with the Liverpool Echo.

“But it’s Liverpool.

“It was, ‘You are coming here to win us the title. Man United are our rivals and have won it the last couple of seasons. You’re the man to wrestle it back’.

“And I think that in that context, you go, yeah, well, that’s that’s a failure. He was brought in to be the missing link to knock down the noisy neighbours down the East Lancs Road and to put us back up our perch after the difficult days of Souness.”

In one sense, the signing of Alexander Isak is welcome simply because it has brought some badly needed clarity back to the identity of the Premier League’s record signing.

Florian Wirtz, Moises Caicedo and Declan Rice were all bought for figures in the region of £100million plus add-ons, but Fernandez still held the outright record for the initial fee.

For 18 months, he struggled badly to justify that price tag in a dysfunctional Chelsea side.

There was even a period when Chelsea appeared to function better without him, and he carried the unfortunate distinction of having a worse Premier League win percentage than five-times relegated defender Hermann Hreidarsson.

But as Chelsea have begun to get themselves back on track, Fernandez has started to show his class.

Caicedo has looked the more impressive of the two, but we can certainly see the Argentinian World Cup winner standing his ground in a side with ambitions of challenging for the Premier League title.

The verdict is still not final. The fee remains staggering. But Fernandez could yet prove his worth, and he is certainly not a disaster.

It felt like a minor footballing tragedy that English football’s most entertaining maverick since Gazza was reduced to serving as a kind of ‘rest station’ at Manchester City.

In essence, the ball would be worked out to him and then recycled slowly and methodically so that Pep Guardiola’s finely tuned machine could click back into rhythm.

A return of only 17 goals and 23 assists from 157 appearances is plainly underwhelming for a player who, at his best, offers so much in terms of direct attacking output.

The romantic in us cannot help seeing Grealish under Guardiola as an awkward fit and a significant waste of his gifts, but it was not all negative.

He performed an important, if unspectacular, role in City’s 2022-23 treble and also developed a briefly productive understanding with Erling Haaland.

A brilliant partnership with Shearer. A league title. And, well, a relegation. Let us call it a mixed bag.

Blackburn doubled their money when they sold Sutton to Chelsea four years later, which says plenty about both transfer inflation at the time and how much his stock had risen.

There is no arguing with Van Nistelrooy’s goalscoring numbers at Manchester United.

He scored 150 goals in 219 appearances, including 95 in 150 in the Premier League — one of the finest strike rates in English football history. Yet he was not quite as successful as memory might suggest.

Van Nistelrooy won only one Premier League title, one FA Cup and one League Cup across his five years at Old Trafford.

That is not a poor haul by any means, but it looks rather modest when viewed against the broader backdrop of United’s dominant, trophy-filled years under Ferguson.

In the five years before he arrived, the club had won four league titles, the Champions League and one FA Cup.

In the five years after he left, they added four more league titles, two League Cups and another Champions League, while also reaching two more finals.

Was all of that down to Van Nistelrooy? Of course not. But there is certainly a case that the Red Devils were a better all-round side without such a pure penalty-box poacher.

Like Alexander Isak after him, it takes something special for a huge club-record signing to later be sold for close to a 100% profit.

Ferdinand is understandably not a popular figure in Leeds given where he spent the latter part of his career, but few supporters there would deny what a giant he was in their thrilling early-2000s side. He was exceptional during the run to the Champions League semi-finals in 2000-01.

He was the first Jenga block removed in the collapse of Peter Ridsdale’s precariously constructed tower.

Three FA Cups. Three Premier League titles. One hundred and twenty goals and almost as many assists.

That is an extraordinary return, and even those numbers and honours still do not fully capture the joy of watching Bergkamp with the ball at his feet. He was an artist.

“I wanted to play for them while I still had something to offer, and it was just everything that I wanted and hoped for,” Shearer said when reflecting on his decision to join his hometown club Newcastle United instead of Manchester United.

“To play at my club and score goals at the Gallowgate End where I stood as a kid, I mean, it was a dream come true, it’s every boy’s dream.

“I was the world’s most expensive player and I had the No. 9 shirt on, which I always wanted to do. It was 10 unbelievable years.

“If I had this decision to make again, I would make exactly the same decision.”

He did not win any silverware, but that was a collective failure rather than an individual one. Newcastle had the best No.9 in Premier League history, and he was one of their own.

Newcastle showed huge ambition in breaking the world transfer record to bring him home, but from that point onward they never quite assembled a team worthy of his greatness.

Blackburn may not have a statue of him, but there is a road named after the Premier League’s all-time leading scorer — Alan Shearer Way — just around the corner from Ewood Park.

Shearer joined Blackburn at the very beginning of the Premier League era and was an unstoppable force in those early years, averaging nearly a goal a game with 112 in 138.

His Blackburn spell may not carry the same emotional pull as his return to Newcastle, but we have placed it one spot higher because he won the Premier League title there and because Blackburn made a substantial profit after four glorious years.

Arguably the biggest shock transfer anywhere on this list, Cole’s £7million move from Newcastle to Manchester United felt seismic in 1995 — especially for the devastated supporters on Tyneside.

While Cole was never quite as outrageously prolific for the Red Devils as he had been in his astonishing breakthrough years at Newcastle, he still did rather well for himself.

Across seven years, he won five Premier League titles, scored comfortably more than 100 goals without taking penalties, and was a key figure in the 1998-99 treble-winning side.

The second player to appear twice on this list, Ferdinand became the world’s most expensive defender for a second time when he left Leeds for bitter rivals Manchester United in the summer of 2002.

Ferguson said he would become “the best defender in the world” and, while he may never have made that claim beyond all argument, he was certainly in that conversation for much of his 12 years at Old Trafford.

Completing our Manchester United top three, Keane broke Shearer’s record with a £3.75million move the following year. It is remarkable to think that fee would hardly buy you a League One left-back now.

Kenny Dalglish believed he had signed the legendary Republic of Ireland international to play alongside Shearer, but Ferguson hijacked the move and the rest is history.

Eric Cantona was the spark that launched Manchester United’s glory years, but it is difficult to imagine them ruling the 1990s in the way they did without their inspirational leader. Keane set the standards, and that turned out to be priceless.