Anderson, Fernandez, Rogers: Can a player ever be worth £100m to a football club?

There is a reason eight of the most expensive 10 transfers between English clubs this summer involved central midfielders. Of all the factors that go into valuing a footballer – age, length of contract, performance metrics, injury record, Tottenham’s desperation – the starting point for any negotiation is to benchmark a player against the market. Once Spurs bought Mateus Fernandes for a club record £85m from West Ham in June, and then broke that record buying Sandro Tonali from Newcastle for £100m four days later, the reference points were set for Bruno Guimaraes, Morgan Rogers, Elliot Anderson, Carlos Baleba and Enzo Fernandez later in the window. At the end of a two-month frenzy in which Premier League clubs spent roughly the GDP of Andorra, plenty of supporters and figures inside football are still trying to wrap their heads around the numbers. Each individual transfer is a unique case, but together they raise wider questions, about what players are worth, about what value they truly add. In short: can a footballer really be worth £100m to a football club? Manchester City have splurged on a entirely new midfield (Manchester City) There are two connected parts to the answer: a player’s impact on performance, and a player’s impact on the club’s commercial success. On the latter point, only a handful of global stars have the ability to move the needle of a major Premier League club’s commercial revenues. On the point of performance, there are some dramatic examples of individual influence. Virgil van Dijk missed most of Liverpool’s 2020/21 season with injury, and they fell 30 points short of the previous campaign. The true impact of Van Dijk’s absence is impossible to know, given he was part of a wider injury crisis in Jurgen Klopp’s squad, and given poor finishing was Liverpool’s main weakness. Man City had a similar collapse without Rodri in 2024/25, but again, his absence was only one factor in a wider malaise. Omar Chaudhuri is chief intelligence officer at Twenty First Group , which advises football clubs on transfer strategy. The company has spent years researching and understanding the market, and has found that most transfers do not drastically change a club’s outcomes on their own. So is there any justification for the £100m footballer? “In intrinsic value, no,” says Chaudhuri. “Because if you analyse how much any one individual footballer can influence the outcome of a team over the course of the season, it’s never going to be more than three, four, five points – unless you’re Lionel Messi at Inter Miami, where the gulf between you and the other players is so big. “Enzo Fernandez is a good player, but he’s not a transformative player, and it’s very hard to get transformative players in the Premier League because the quality is already so high. It’s a £125m transfer fee, but over the course of a deal you might be spending £200m on a player. You couldn’t really say that the difference between having Enzo Fernandez and not having Enzo Fernandez is worth £200m in revenue to Manchester City, it’d be difficult to make the sums add up. But ultimately you have to pay the prices that the market dictates. And if everyone is prepared to pay those prices, then you just have to accept that you’re operating in an inflated market.” Enzo Fernandez has joined City in a £125m transfer (Reuters) The market has become increasingly distorted as clubs are drawn into spending huge sums, often under pressure after a run of poor results, or simply because they see transfers as a shortcut to improvement. And this idea of the market as a route to rapid success has repeatedly proved itself to be misguided. “The transfer market is a vastly overrated opportunity to improve your team,” Chaudhuri says. “It’s obviously seen as the main opportunity because fundamentally you look at the quality of your players being the driver of your on-field success. But if you look historically, the amount a club net-spends in its transfer window has no bearing on the extent to which they improve or get worse over the following season – literally no bearing – which is kind of staggering. A club that spends £200m net is not expected to improve their position any more or less than a club that generates £200m net income.” The reality is that a steady, focused execution of a long-term plan outperforms scattergun spending – although the big clubs’ prodigality offers opportunity for the rest. Brighton and Brentford have been able to punch above their weight by selling players at the most extreme end of the Premier League market, while finding replacements in more realistic waters. “Whenever we advise clubs, they’re looking for that silver-bullet strategy or market you can recruit from,” says Chaudhuri. “The slightly more boring fact is you just need a plan and you need the discipline to execute against it. It almost doesn’t really matter what the plan is. The failing of most football clubs is that they don’t have a really clearly defined plan. “We talk a lot about Brentford and Brighton. It’s very rare that you have clubs that are almost tunnel-vision in the way in which they operate. The amount of clubs that flip-flop from one season to the next in the way in which they set up their structure and management, their coach, playing style, recruitment, it’s all over the place. But having a plan and being consistent against it – it sounds so basic, but it’s lacking in so many clubs.” Brentford signed Mamadou Sangare during the summer window for £38m (Getty) There is another element of the modern transfer market, which is that many of these large transfer fees are somewhat superficial. Most include add-on clauses that may not be triggered. Almost all fees are now amortised, so the outlay is spread over the length of the player’s contract. The £125m Manchester City spent on Fernandez will be parcelled up at £25m per year for the next five years, and even if he is sold for only half that price after three seasons, the money recouped will be enough to write off the remaining debt. As The Independent’s alarming report explained this week , this almost casual reliance on debt is now the pile of sand on which the Premier League is built, and some figures within the game are warning it could give way to a serious collapse. Yet until that day comes, nothing is going to stop clubs spending wild sums in an overhyped market. Chaudhuri suggests there is another way. “I think too few clubs actually focus on improving their own players. The amount of times we see performances ebb and flow, and over one part of the season a club could be demonstrating Champions League form when over an earlier part of the season it might have had mid-table form. That shows that clubs have the ability to generate much better performance out of the same group of players, rather than needing to recruit. There’s so little focus on what clubs can actually do to build cohesive teams and improve their own players, and I think many clubs have lost sight of that in the last few years.”