Are Manchester City distorting the transfer market?

Are Manchester City distorting the transfer market? The transfer window has been open for only a month and, with the World Cup underway for pretty much the entirety, only a few clubs have made serious moves. Of course, it hasn’t stopped there being quite some scrutiny around big deals which were made early doors. Well, one big deal in particular. Manchester City formally signed Elliot Anderson on 2nd July for a club record fee of £116 million (or anything up to £150 million depending on which rival fan you’re listening to on any given day), making him the second most expensive British player of all time, behind Morgan Rogers and his £117 million move to Chelsea just weeks later. What I’m about to say may shock you, but this transfer raised eyebrows across the footballing landscape. “How can City do this? They’re distorting the market! Elliot Anderson is never worth that kind of money! Did you watch him in this World Cup? He didn’t even score! Will somebody please think of the 115 charges?!?” The latter points are kind of irrelevant to me. Anybody who actually watched him at the World Cup would see he was a consistent performer, doing the exact kind of things City have been sorely lacking in midfield, and will lack even more so now Bernardo Silva has left the club. He’s essentially just carried on doing exactly what he did in the league last season. As for the 115 charges, if you’ve watched Manchester City’s transfer activity since the charges came in and the case was heard, I don’t know how you could convince yourself that City feel in any way as if they’re in danger. The players they’re signing certainly don’t seem to think so. Of course, the cope for this from rivals is that City are stockpiling talent, knowing that the drawbridge will soon be raised on their ability to sign players when they’re relegated to the National League North or whatever it is people think the punishment will be if they’re found guilty. The reality is probably just that City (and the players they sign) can’t change their behaviour based on something that ultimately hasn’t happened yet. The argument I’m much more interested in is that of the “distortion of the market”. A lot seems to be being made of Anderson costing this much as if it’ll usher in a new era of players costing silly amounts of money. So, having signed Morgan Rogers for a new British record transfer fee, are Chelsea now distorting the market? Well, the answer is actually yes, but not because of the England international. A lot of people point to the record transfer list when adjusted for inflation, though this list doesn’t really interest me too much. Whilst I fully accept Rio Ferdinand for £32 million back in 2004 was an amount of money which basically no other club was willing (or able) to spend, it was insane, I don’t genuinely believe it’s the equivalent of £200 million in today’s market. I much prefer to look at the transfers in the context of current day, comparing with what has happened around this time. The damage has been done in the midfield market for a few years now. Back in January 2023, only six months after signing for Benfica for about £10 million, Enzo Fernandez was signed by Chelsea for almost £110 million – a Premier League record fee at the time. Six months of performances in the Primeira Liga and a decent World Cup and Fernandez’s valuation went up by close to £100 million. City didn’t do that, Chelsea did. Fast-forward to July 2023 and Arsenal bring in West Ham’s Declan Rice for a new record fee for a British player, surpassing Jack Grealish, at £105 million. A 23-year-old English, homegrown midfielder playing for a team which had finished around that bottom quarter of the league the season beforehand and a regular feature in the England team. Remind you of anyone? City didn’t do that, Arsenal did. You don’t need to go much further ahead than that to get to the next seismic transfer in midfield, as in August 2023 Chelsea make their second £100m+ signing, bringing in Moises Caicedo from Brighton, breaking the Premier League transfer record once again. The transfer of Caicedo, a 21-year-old who had only really had one season of Premier League football under his belt, had seen Brighton sell a player they signed for £4 million for almost 30 times that amount. City didn’t do that, Chelsea did. Jump forward to just last summer, June 2025, and Florian Wirtz joins Liverpool for a fee which, if all add-ons are met, could rise to £125 million. The initial fee is reported to be “only” £107 million, however if all add-ons are met then he becomes the new Premier League record fee for a midfielder. City were, of course, in the picture for Wirtz but, whether it was due to player interest or City not being willing to pay the sums of money on the table (and Liverpool were throwing money around for fun last summer), they ultimately decided not to do the deal. City didn’t do that, Liverpool did. And this is just in the Premier League. Elsewhere you have Jude Bellingham joining Real Madrid for a fee which could potentially rise to £110 million, though he looked a bonafide superstar in the making in a way that none of these other signings really do. However there’s no way a transfer like that hasn’t informed the market in some way. Of course, the obvious counter to this is the signing of Jack Grealish . I don’t doubt being the first club to hit the mythical £100 million mark had some knock-on effects and maybe that’s the biggest damage we’ve done to the market, maybe ever. However that £100 million number, reached in 2021, remained untouched for basically two years until Chelsea and Arsenal surpassed it three times in a year. Liverpool have done it twice since through Wirtz and Alexander Isak, and Chelsea have done it for a third time with the signing of Rogers. Even Spurs, who’ve nearly been relegated twice in as many years, have just signed Sandro Tonali for £100 million when all is said and done. If you need any further evidence, most reports suggest Forest were citing the Declan Rice fee when negotiating with City. Early in negotiations, City were told repeatedly Forest were looking for a fee comparable to Declan Rice – the benchmark in that English midfielder bracket (understandably when you look at age, homegrown status and talent between him and Anderson). Where are the reports saying Arsenal have distorted the market with Rice? I’m not somebody who personally cares too much about transfer fees. I’m beyond that now. It’s not my money and we live in a world now where top level midfielders in the Premier League are probably going to cost you over £100 million. If you don’t like that, I totally understand it, however that’s the reality. The sums of money involved in the game right now are ridiculous and the top line is always going to be triple-digit millions. I find it interesting to look and compare how players are valued, but if City want to spend X amount of money then they can go for it as far as I’m concerned. We’ll probably see one or two more signings after Morgan Rogers which eclipse the £100 million mark. These kind of transfers are going to become the norm every summer – Manchester City are just playing by the new rules of the market. The part I find more of an interesting conversation is that of Ayyoub Bouaddi . I’m going to ignore euros, as I have done throughout this entire thing. The new trend of English journalists reporting on English club transfer fees in euros is absolutely bizarre to me – especially as we’re in a world now where the transfer fees in pounds are already insanely high, they don’t need the help of a different currency to look bigger than they are. With that said, roughly £90 million for an 18-year-old would be pretty mental. It’s a fee which has made a lot of people uneasy, perhaps understandably, and if you’re one of those people who just outright believes 18-year-olds should never cost that much money then it’s pretty likely that nothing I’m about to say will change your mind. But read it anyway. Please. Now I’m not going to sit here and write a detailed piece on how good of a player Bouaddi is. Partly because I can’t be bothered but primarily because I just haven’t watched him play enough football to be able to tell you if he’s worth the hype. I watched him play a little bit in the World Cup for Morocco, where by all accounts he played a very different role to that which he’s played for Lille on a weekly basis, so not the best barometer for his quality. The interesting part, for me, is that this move by City is the one that could legitimately “distort” the market. The main thing signings of players like Anderson, Fernandez, Caicedo and Bellingham have shown (Rice was an academy product for West Ham so is excluded) is if you want to wait for these players to move to a stepping stone club to become established entities who are proven, reliable performers then you’re looking at spending £100m+ for them when they do eventually establish themselves. That’s just the way the game is nowadays. The incentive, therefore, is to try and find the next big thing before they become the next big thing. Or at least as early in the cycle as possible, in order to avoid the crazy inflation that will come further down the line. It’s a more inherently risky strategy, however it’s one which has the potential to save huge sums of money if the gamble pays off. Joao Neves is a perfect example – PSG made the move when he was 19, spending around £60 million to do so. Another year, or maybe a move to a stepping stone club like Borussia Dortmund where he could establish himself in a more reputable league, and the transfer fee he’d command is probably double. If you wanted him to get him out of PSG right now, you’d probably be looking at a record fee for a midfielder to make it happen. We’ve already seen some elements of this since the arrival of Hugo Viana. Abdukodir Khusanov isn’t a player who anybody was really talking about at Lens, yet he still cost City around £35 million. In the Txiki Begiristain years, we’d have waited for a player like that to go to a club like Brighton or Bournemouth to prove top level quality and then ended up being forced to spend double that amount. Likewise with a player like Vitor Reis, a player who I think (hope) will eventually come to reflect the value of the £32 million fee, you can’t convince me Begiristain would have made that signing either. It feels like a very Viana-led strategy and it’s one I’m a fan of. Abdukodir Khusanov’s agent sheds light on Newcastle talks before 2025 Man City transfer My biggest annoyance from this past approach of Manchester City’s is Rodri. We signed Rodri for £62 million, paying his release clause to get him out of Atletico Madrid. Well, 12 months prior, Atleti had signed him from Villarreal for £20 million. Why did we wait? Now, there are obviously some positives to a strategy like that – if we knew the release clause was around £60 million then we knew it wasn’t going to be prohibitively costly should he make that next step, and a year learning under Diego Simeone can be no bad thing for a defensive midfielder. Yet, if you think about it, the club just paid an extra £40 million for a year of being tutored by Diego Simeone. If City see the vision, they should just put the money down early and sign him, which ultimately frees up the money elsewhere to make the real serious big money signings that the squad sometimes needs. Ayyoub Bouaddi is no doubt somebody City see as the next guy. The club have often been reluctant to hit these kinds of fees for other midfielders, walking away from the likes of Wirtz and not really getting seriously involved in Declan Rice to the levels that were required, so this is certainly a huge change in transfer strategy if they were to make this deal happen. When you look at his CV, he’s about as established as you can possibly be at the age of 18. He’s played almost 100 games for Lille, including appearances in the Conference League, Europa League and Champions League. He’s also a regular feature for the national team, including a World Cup campaign with Morocco. There’s not really much more that a player of his age could do to justify the hype. If you’re asking me to wildly speculate (and oh boy, I will), Bouaddi is probably a player City had earmarked for next summer in the instance that Rodri leaves the club, or at the very least see him as the ideal person to come in to replace Rodri when the day eventually comes. At his age, they might have assumed a transfer was unlikely to come this early, however the breakout season he’s had with Lille has made him very much come to the fore and attract attention from multiple clubs, forcing their hand to act early. And, with multiple suitors, Lille can hike up the price, especially when multiple Premier League clubs are involved and midfielders are moving for the kinds of fees I’ve already mentioned. City are probably worried that Ayyoub Bouaddi could join a club where they’ll just never be able to get him out, like Arsenal or Manchester United, or that he’ll join a club where the next step will be to pay a fee which is even crazier than the one currently being quoted in a couple of years’ time. However, a fee of this size for an 18 year old is pretty unprecedented. It would certainly have a major knock-on effect for players who are similarly highly rated in future when it comes to their selling clubs and the fees they might demand. This, I feel, would be a genuine market changing move, whoever it is that gets it over the line. City’s midfield is the part of the pitch which is most in need of major surgery, with Kevin De Bruyne and Bernardo Silva having both walked out the door in the last 12 months and with Rodri looking like he may well do so in another 12 months. The signings of Cherki and Anderson have ensured that some of that work has been done, however the Rodri-sized hole in the squad is looming and it’s a position which City simply cannot afford to get wrong. If they truly believe Bouaddi is the guy then they are probably correct to just put the money down and make it happen, especially as it seems that if they won’t then somebody else will. If he were to go to Arsenal, for example, with a loan back to Lille, he’d be rejoining the North London club in the summer of 2027, just in time for us to lose Rodri on a free if he doesn’t sign a new deal. Watching Bouaddi rock up at Arsenal when we’re scrambling around for a replacement would only compound the frustration of losing Rodri, which I’m sure is something the club want to avoid, as well as the idea that their main target joins a rival. To bring it back round to the idea of context within a modern market – a £90 million signing in a £125 million record Premier League fee world is the equivalent of signing somebody for £60 million in the days where Pogba was the Premier League record fee. Would we still be complaining about a £60 million signing back in the 2018/19 days? Who knows. Possibly. It does feel outlandish for a teenager. Should the Ayyoub Bouaddi transfer happen, I feel like we’re probably going to see £100m+ signings become even more common than they already are, particularly when it comes to young wonderkids who are yet to become household names. And if that happens, I won’t be able to say that City weren’t instrumental in that shift in the market.