This transfer madness has to be stopped
Behind the headlines
EVERTON’S £45m purchase of Gylfi Sigurdsson means their record transfer fee is now higher than neighbours Liverpool’s.
While it doesn’t quite put them in the same marketplace as the Manchester clubs and Chelsea, the fee for the Icelander is just a couple of million below Arsenal’s biggest lay-out for Alexandre Lacazette, ahead of Tottenham’s new record and it blows the rest of the Premier League out of the water.
More significantly, it’s more than Bayern Munich, AC Milan, Inter Milan, Atletico Madrid or Borussia Dortmund – all Champions League finalists in the last decade – have ever paid for a single player.
At the same time Sigurdsson was moving from Swansea to Goodison, French midfielder Blaise Matuidi was leaving PSG for Juventus for just £18.6m.
Earlier in the summer, Leonardo Bonucci, arguably the best central defender in the world, moved from Juve to AC Milan for £38m, £12m less than it cost Manchester City to buy Kyle Walker from Spurs.
City, who have already spent £213m in this window, are interested in West Brom’s Jonny Evans – an £8m Manchester United reject a couple of years ago, but who is now likely to cost in the region of £25m.
When English clubs enquire about a player at home or abroad, the pound signs light up in the eyes of the sellers. Like street con artists, they can spot a man with a bulging wallet a mile off.
Premier League outfits are cash-rich from the mega TV deals and that means the price goes up. Players worth £20m to anyone else, suddenly go for £40m and £40m players are valued at £60m.
In this transfer window, over half the Premier League clubs have already broken their own records.
Chelsea, Arsenal, Everton, Spurs, Manchester United and Liverpool – when the add-ons for Romelu Lukaku and Mo Salah click in – West Ham, Bournemouth, Watford, Brighton and Huddersfield have all set new benchmarks.
The ridiculous £198m fee paid by PSG for Neymar has had a knock-on effect on the prices of far-less talented players, though only our clubs seem inclined to pay silly money.
With little sense of irony, considering that no other English club has ever spent more in a single window than his own, even Pep Guardiola believes that spending on such levels is unsustainable.
That’s all very well, but knowing it’s unsustainable doesn’t necessarily mean it will stop. After all, the lower divisions are littered with cash-strapped clubs who didn’t know when to stop spending money.