Ranking every Premier League record-breaking signing from worst to best
Alexander Isak’s £125million move from Newcastle United to Liverpool makes him the 19th player to break the English transfer record in the Premier League era. But how many of them lived up to their big-money fees?
Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and even Blackburn Rovers and Leeds United (different times) are the seven clubs that have broken the record. It would be fair to say that some of these proved better value than others.
We’ve ranked the 18 record-breaking Premier League transfers from the worst to the best.
18. Robinho – £32.5m – Real Madrid to Man City (2008)
Just after Man City’s game-changing takeover went through in the summer of 2008, they were desperate to make a statement signing.
The Brazilian had his moments in Manchester but it was clear from the off that it was a move that hadn’t really been thought through by either party.
Given the turn his life has taken, we have no remorse over putting him rock bottom.
17. Paul Pogba – £89m – Juventus to Man Utd (2016)
The Frenchman is nowhere near the second-worst player on this list. You just have to look at his 2018 World Cup highlights reel to see he might well be among the very best in terms of pure ability.
He was also a pretty good, sometimes downright brilliant, player for Manchester United – particularly in his debut season, which saw him shine as they won both the Europa League and League Cup.
But looking back, it always felt like an unhappy marriage. Pogba’s final five seasons were trophyless and then he left on a free for a second time.
Disastrous business, and a psychodrama you can’t help but feel has done lasting damage for both the club and the player.
16. Angel Di Maria – £59.7m – Real Madrid to Man Utd (2014)
We’re not entirely sure why the BBC article omitted this one, but it was widely reported as a British £59.7million at the time, so we’re adding it to our list.
Fresh from his man-of-the-match display in Real Madrid’s La Decima triumph, Di Maria’s arrival promised so much and delivered so little.
The winger was utterly miserable in Manchester and desperate to leave.
They only made a small loss when offloading him to PSG after only one season, so things could’ve been considerably worse.
It almost looks like great business when you compare it to major missteps like Antony and Rasmus Hojlund in subsequent years.
15. Juan Sebastian Veron – £28.1m – Lazio to Man Utd (2001)
Spoiler alert – the top end of this list is testament to Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United rarely getting big-money signings during their pomp.
But their record wasn’t completely squeaky clean.
“He [Veron] is a f**king great player,” Ferguson infamously raged at journalists.
“And you’re all f**king idiots.”
Veron was undoubtedly a great player. We’re not questioning that. But, for whatever reason, he just never worked out in the Premier League.
14. Andriy Shevchenko – £30.6m – AC Milan to Chelsea (2006)
The only player in this list to arrive with a Ballon d’Or under his belt, Shevchenko’s eye-catching Community Shield debut pointed to a future Stamford Bridge icon.
The reality was considerably more underwhelming.
13. Fernando Torres – £50m – Liverpool to Chelsea (2011)
We still can’t believe El Nino made more Premier League appearances for Chelsea than Liverpool. That can’t be right, surely?
Despite that, Torres scored over three times as many league goals for the Reds as he did for the Blues.
A bit like Shevchenko (and so many other strikers Chelsea have signed), he turned out to be a shadow of the player they thought they were signing for £50million.
While he didn’t lift any silverware at Liverpool, his honours list at Chelsea boasted the Champions League, FA Cup and Europa League.
And you can’t take that goal against Barcelona away from him, though, can you?
READ: 8 legendary goalscorers we can’t believe never won a Premier League Golden Boot
12. Stan Collymore – £8.5m – Nottingham Forest to Liverpool (1995)
The last player that Liverpool broke the British transfer record to sign.
Adjusted for inflation, he’d would still make him Liverpool’s record signing, even ahead of Isak, at £137million in today’s money. Crazy numbers.
Collymore notched just over 50 goal involvements (35 goals, 16 assists) in 81 appearances across two seasons.
In hindsight, that’s a pretty decent return. The forward formed a decent partnership with Robbie Fowler, but was usurped by rising star Michael Owen faster than anyone could have predicted.
The man himself explains why the transfer isn’t 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.”
11. Enzo Fernandez – £107m – Benfica to Chelsea (2023)
We welcome the signing of Alexander Isak, if only to bring some much-needed clarity back to the Premier League’s record signing.
Florian Wirtz, Moises Caicedo and Declan Rice were all signed for somewhere in the region of £100million plus add-ons, but Fernandez still held the outright record for an initial fee.
For 18 months, he really struggled to live up to the price tag in a dysfunctional Chelsea team.
There was a time when they looked better without him, and he boasted the unfortunate record of boasting a worse Premier League win percentage than five-time-relegated defender Hermann Hreidarsson.
But as Chelsea have got their act together, Fernandez is starting to show his quality.
Caicedo is the more impressive of the two, but we can see the Argentinian World Cup winner holding his own in a side with ambitions of competing for the Premier League title.
The jury remains out. That fee remains eye-watering. But Fernandez could yet come good, and he’s certainly not a disaster.
10. Jack Grealish – £100m – Aston Villa to Man City (2021)
It was a minor footballing tragedy for English football’s most entertaining maverick since Gazza to be reduced to the role of ‘the rest station’ at Manchester City.
Essentially getting the ball out to him and be slowly, methodically recycled so that Pep Guardiola’s well-oiled machine could get clanking back into shape.
A return of just 17 goals and 23 assists from 157 appearances is distinctly underwhelming from a player who, at his best, promises so much in terms of direct end product.
The romantic in us can’t help but look at Grealish playing under Guardiola as both an awkward fit and a terrible waste, but it wasn’t all bad.
He fulfilled an important if unglamorous job in City’s 2022-23 treble and struck up a briefly fruitful partnership with Erling Haaland.
9. Chris Sutton – £5m – Norwich to Blackburn (1994)
A brilliant partnership with Shearer. A league title. And, uh, a relegation. A mixed bag, let’s call it.
Blackburn doubled their money when they sold Sutton to Chelsea four years later, which tells you something about the transfer market’s inflation during that period and how his stock rose.
8. Ruud van Nistelrooy – £19m – PSV to Man Utd (20001)
There is no arguing with Van Nistelrooy’s goalscoring return at Manchester United.
He notched 150 goals in 219 appearances (95 in 150 in the Premier League) – one of the greatest strike rates in English football history. He wasn’t as successful as you might recall, though.
Van Nistelrooy only won one Premier League title, one FA Cup and one League Cup during his five years at Old Trafford.
That’s not terrible – but it’s a pretty paltry return when you look at it through the wider lens of United’s imperial, trophy-laden peak years under Ferguson.
In the five years before he joined, the club won four league titles, the Champions League and one FA Cup.
In the five years after he left, they won four more league titles, two League Cups and the Champions League, as well as reaching another two finals.
Was that all down to Van Nistelrooy? Of course not. But there’s certainly an argument to be made that the Red Devils were better without such a penalty-box poacher.
7. Rio Ferdinand – £18m – West Ham to Leeds (2000)
A precursor to Alexander Isak, it takes something special for a mammoth club-record signing to later be sold for a near 100% profit.
Ferdinand is not a popular figure in Leeds, understandably so given where he spent his later years, but few of their fans would deny what a colossus he was during their heady early noughties years. Exceptional in the run to the Champions League semi-finals in 2000-01.
The first Jenga piece out in the collapse of Peter Ridsdale’s precariously built tower.
6. Dennis Bergkamp – – £7.5m – Inter to Arsenal (1995)
Three FA Cups. Three Premier League titles. One hundred and twenty goals and almost as many assists.
That’s a sensational return, and yet the basic numbers and honours don’t do justice to watching Bergkamp with the ball at his feet. The man was an artist.
5. Alan Shearer – £15m – Blackburn to Newcastle (1996)
“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 reflected on choosing to sign for his hometown club Newcastle United rather than 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 didn’t lift any silverware, but that was a collective failing. The Magpies had the best No.9 in Premier League history, and he was one of their own.
Newcastle showed great ambition in breaking the world transfer record to bring him home, but from there they never quite built a team worthy of his greatness.
4. Alan Shearer – £3.6m – Southampton to Blackburn (1992)
Blackburn might not have a statue, but there is a road bearing the name of the Premier League’s all-time record goalscorer – Alan Shearer Way – just around the corner from Ewood Park.
Shearer signed for Blackburn at the dawn of the Premier League and was a force of nature in those early years, averaging nearly a goal a game (112 in 138).
His Blackburn stint doesn’t have the romance of his homecoming, but we’ve put it one spot ahead by virtue of the Premier League trophy he lifted and the cold, hard business of them making a considerable profit after four glorious years.
READ: Recalling Shearer’s iconic PL debut and two forgotten thunderb*stards
3. Andrew Cole – £7m – Newcastle to Man Utd (1995)
Arguably the biggest bombshell transfer on this entire list, Cole’s £7million move from Newcastle to Manchester United felt earth-shattering back in 1995 – particularly to the heartbroken people of Tyneside.
While Cole was never quite as outrageously prolific for the Red Devils as he was in his astonishing breakthrough years at Newcastle, he didn’t do too badly for himself.
In seven years, he won five Premier League titles, scored well over a hundred goals (while not taking penalties) and was a star of their 1998-99 treble.
2. Rio Ferdinand – £30m – Leeds to Man Utd (2002)
The second name to feature on this list twice, Ferdinand became the most expensive defender in world football for a second time when he left Leeds for hated rivals Manchester United in the summer of 2002.
Ferguson promised that he’d become “the best defender in the world” and while he never quite emphatically made that claim outright, he was certainly up there for most of his 12 years at Old Trafford.
1. Roy Keane – £3.75m – Nottingham Forest to Man Utd (1993)
Rounding off our Manchester United top three, Keane broke Shearer’s record with a £3.75million transfer the following year. To think that’d barely buy you a League One left-back nowadays.
Kenny Dalglish thought he’d signed the legendary Republic of Ireland international to play alongside Shearer, but Ferguson gazumped him and the rest is history.
Eric Cantona was the catalyst that kicked off Manchester United’s glory years, but it’s difficult to imagine them dominating the 1990s as they did without their inspirational leader. Keane set the standards, and that proved priceless.
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