Caicedo, Rice and Mount next: Ranking all 22 previous £40m-plus intra-Premier League transfers

Dave Tickner
Manchester City are good at them; Chelsea are not

With even more big-money moves going on between Premier League clubs again this summer, it feels like the perfect time to rank those which came before.

Moises Caicedo, Declan Rice, Kai Havertz and Mason Mount have all transferred within the Premier League for considerable sums this summer, with Harry Maguire among the others who could still do so.

But how have previous such moves worked out for the players involved? We’ve ranked every previous such move between Premier League clubs and set an entirely arbitrary ‘big-money’ benchmark of £40m and then inevitably had to guess in the margins because undisclosed fees are the scourge of the industry and more importantly this kind of feature.

Ultimately, though, this doesn’t matter too much here because we’re ranking the success of the move rather than the size of the fee, which is but one small factor in our very scientific (ahem) calculations and we have to cut things off somewhere. Got it? Grand, let’s crack on.

 

22) Gylfi Sigurdsson (Swansea to Everton, August 2017, £45m)
Was quite good but never really £45m good for Everton and then <redacted>.

 

21) Marc Cucurella (Brighton to Chelsea, August 2022, £55m)
In fairness to Chelsea, they were not alone in bidding for Brighton’s Player of the Season during the summer of 2022. They were alone in going as high as £62m, with Manchester City offering around half that before realising the futility of trying to haggle with the Seagulls.

Todd Boehly, as he does, bypassed that impasse with a bid that would be difficult to justify since at a tenth of the value. Chelsea brought as many Brighton employees along as they could to make it work but Cucurella already looks out of place under Mauricio Pochettino.

 

20) Wesley Fofana (Leicester to Chelsea, August 2022, £70m)
Through little to no fault of his own, Fofana has been a dreadfully disappointing Chelsea signing. The centre-half will be stuck on 20 appearances for the foreseeable after suffering the second serious knee injury of his nascent Blues spell during pre-season training.

 

19) Kalvin Phillips (Leeds to Manchester City, July 2022, £42m)
“I spoke to quite a few of the lads about their first season at City and how difficult they found it. They said exactly the same thing, saying it takes at least 12 months for somebody to really understand what the manager wants you to do, the way he wants you to play and how he wants you to work.”

Phillips will hope to follow in the footsteps of Jack Grealish, Rodri, Riyad Mahrez, Bernardo Silva, Joao Cancelo and Nathan Ake after his first Guardiola year produced a new winner’s medal every 200 minutes or so. One Super Cup from the bench so far in 2023/24, is it?

 

18) Richarlison (Everton to Tottenham, July 2022, £50m)
Wound Nottingham Forest up by showboating. Wound Antonio Conte up by existing. Wound himself up so much that he kept celebrating goals by getting booked for whipping his top off, only for them to be subsequently disallowed. And the one time he scored legitimately, he was still putting his shirt back on as Liverpool cancelled out his stoppage-time equaliser with an immediate stoppage-time winner.

Tottenham striker Richarlison celebrates his goal against Liverpool

Richarlison cannot keep his top on

 

17) Raheem Sterling (Manchester City to Chelsea, July 2022, £47.5m)
It has been an imperfect storm of managerial upheaval, indifferent form and inconsistent fitness for Sterling, who knows scoring nine goals and setting up four as one of Chelsea’s senior players after joining for up to £50m represented “one of the lowest points in my career”. It was certainly a chastening season after all the plain sailing he managed with Manchester City.

 

16) Anthony Gordon (Everton to Newcastle, January 2023, £40m)
Blessed with enough self-belief to realise his horse had not bolted when Chelsea finally walked away after Everton would not relent at £60m, Gordon scored a single goal between the end of the summer transfer window and the start of the winter iteration, then stopped rocking up for training, yet still only saw his valuation drop a little.

Newcastle would swoop in a mid-season move which has produced one goal in 16 appearances so far. Against Chelsea, natch.

 

15) Romelu Lukaku (Everton to Manchester United, July 2017, £75m)
Now only his second most disastrous and eye-wateringly expensive move to a Premier League club so that’s… something. Lukaku’s numbers at United really weren’t bad – especially in light of his struggles at Chelsea – but he never truly seemed settled at Old Trafford, especially once Jose Mourinho had made way for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.

Managed 16 Premier League goals in his first season and 12 in his second with United which at the time, and in the context of a 25-goal season for Everton that prompted United to make their expensive move, seemed disappointing. With our 20-20 hindsight, the unmitigated disaster of his Chelsea return and the precision with which he has burned his bridges everywhere else including to Inter, it looks like a golden age.

 

14) Harry Maguire (Leicester to Manchester United, August 2019, £80m)
Signed in the misguided belief that simply making any mid-table Premier League centre-half the most expensive defender in world football transforms both that player into an elite talent and that club into a ruthless winning machine, Manchester United spent almost an entire summer trying to figure out how to get Leicester to come down from their £80m demands before realising it was easier to just meet them.

Maguire was given the armband within months and showed flashes of club excellence in between regular international tournament dominance, but he was never The Guy and once Manchester United employed an actual adult human as manager, the writing was on the slab. Erik ten Hag signed the smaller but, crucially, better Lisandro Martinez and even put Luke Shaw ahead in the centre-half queue. But not even that ignominy is enough to tempt Maguire into joining West Ham.

READ MORE: In defence of Harry Maguire: His Man United dreams may be delusions, but he’s entitled to them

 

13) Aaron Wan-Bissaka (Crystal Palace to Manchester United, June 2019, £45m)
It is to the immense credit of Wan-Bissaka that he has managed to salvage a Manchester United career which looked summarily lost during The Dark Timeline. The right-back lost his way and his place under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Ralf Rangnick and Ten Hag but has fought to improve his all-round game and become a viable first-team option for the previously unconvinced Dutchman.

There remains a vast discrepancy between Wan-Bissaka’s phenomenal one-v-one defending and his lacklustre impact going forward, and he still cannot defending his back post at crosses, but that the 25-year-old is still even there at all is testament to his character and ability.

 

12) Fernando Torres (Liverpool to Chelsea, January 2011, £50m)
One from the archives here and a reminder of how the balance of power within the so-called self-appointed Sky Big Six has shifted over the last 10 years. Chelsea back then were able to bully Liverpool into selling them their beloved star striker who had scored 65 often wonderful goals in 102 Premier League appearances. Now they just bully them by signing all their targets at inflated prices.

Torres managed only 20 goals in 110 games for Chelsea, but did prompt Gary Neville’s infamous goalgasm as Chelsea beat Barcelona en route to their 2012 Champions League triumph. Also won an FA Cup and Europa League in his time with Chelsea, having won nothing at Liverpool which probably tells us a great deal about all sorts of things if we want it to.

 

11) Nemanja Matic (Chelsea to Manchester United, July 2017, £40m)
A dependably solid and reliable operator who is seemingly at his happiest when working with Jose Mourinho. Each to their own. Played nearly 200 games for United throughout their trophyless run and we would challenge you to remember a single one of those appearances for either good or ill.

 

10) Gabriel Jesus (Manchester City to Arsenal, July 2022, £45m)
Not content to play second fiddle to the incoming Erling Haaland at Manchester City, Jesus instead sought the open arms and guaranteed minutes of Mikel Arteta. And at various stages that seemed like an inspired decision by all but those at the Etihad as the Brazilian provided the platform for a surprise title challenge.

Jesus scored 11 goals and assisted seven in his debut season with the Gunners, even after suffering a knee injury which robbed him of a proper go at the World Cup. But the forward was powerless to keep Arsenal on track after William Saliba was sidelined, with his former employers applying salt to Jesus’ wound by sauntering to the Treble.

 

9) Ben White (Brighton to Arsenal, July 2021, £50m)
That debut against Brentford feels an awful long time ago. White has grown into the dependable, versatile and smooth defender Arsenal knew they had signed soon thereafter, and the constant comparisons with Raphael Varane have thankfully subsided, which is a positive sign in the England international’s favour.

 

8) Ben Chilwell (Leicester to Chelsea, August 2020, £45m)
It is mainly injuries that are keeping Chilwell and Chelsea from breaking up the City-Liverpool duopoly ahead of them here. He’s a good player, £45m was a perfectly decent price all round, and his successful return from a long-term injury has coincided with the appointment of a club manager who feels perfect for his development.

Chilwell is also one of the longest-serving players in the entire Chelsea squad now; he joined in August 2020.

 

7) Jack Grealish (Aston Villa to Manchester City, August 2021, £100m)
After the aforementioned usual Guardiola growing pains came an explosion of both brilliance and public adulation for Grealish, whose two seasons at Manchester City have ended in some rather merry but entirely juxtaposed celebrations.

After winning the Premier League title in 2022, he took a pot shot at Miguel Almiron. With the Treble in hand a year later, he was either a turkey or a pigeon whose thirst needed to be quenched. It was not exactly clear.

What was blindingly obvious was the talent of Grealish, shining through particularly in the second half of the 2022/23 season after the World Cup, helping inspire some Manchester City trophies. No-one really mentions the fee now.

 

6) Nathan Ake (Bournemouth to Manchester City, August 2020, £41m)
The lesson: even when Manchester City have so clearly, undeniably, irrefutably got it wrong, they’ve probably still got it right. When Nathan Ake made 29 starts in his first two seasons at the Etihad, it looked like a considerable transfer misstep. Pricing Chelsea out of signing him – which sounds theoretically impossible but still – felt like doubling down on the mistake. But then Guardiola decided the best full-backs are actually big old centre-halves and Ake became one of the best defenders in the country again, signing a lovely new contract in celebration of a Treble he helped as much as anyone to deliver.

 

5) John Stones (Everton to Manchester City, August 2016, £47.5m)
A fee that, at the time, made him the most expensive English defender in history and whose departure caused ructions from Everton fans enraged at the sheer modern football disgrace of a player moving to a bigger and better club because money had changed hands, unlike their own acquisition of Stones from Barnsley three years earlier which was quite different actually because reasons.

Stones initially struggled to adapt to life at City and admitted to disappointment after his first season at the Etihad, both with his own performances and a general lack of silverware. Both of those issues have been addressed in subsequent years, with a title-winning run of genuinely great form alongside Ruben Dias in 2020/21 beaten only by the realisation of his true Beckenbauer form in 2022/23.

John Stones battles for the ball with Arsenal midfielder Declan Rice

John Stones and Declan Rice bloody love the Community Shield

 

4) Riyad Mahrez (Leicester to Manchester City, July 2018, £60m)
Already assured of his place in Premier League folklore for his vital goalscoring and creating role in The Leicester Fairytale, nothing Mahrez could have ever done with City would have matched that. But 11 trophies, 78 goals and 59 assists in five seasons was a pretty solid effort. That his departure brought in £30m was a fortunate by product of the market, and the fact he departed England as soon as his former Foxes were relegated rounded that circle off nicely.

 

3) Kyle Walker (Tottenham to Manchester City, July 2017, £50m)
Hard to quite fathom now, but Guardiola’s first Manchester City team ended up below Tottenham in the 2016/17 league table. One reason why that happened then and hasn’t really looked like doing so since was Kyle Walker, whose £50m move to City that summer looked at the time like paying over the odds for a right-back, albeit a really good one. Fair enough, because City needed a right-back and could afford to do it; it felt like a transfer deal that suited all parties. Still does looking back with six years’ hindsight, really, but just without the £50m looking in any way like an over-the-top sum for a crucial figure in four Premier League title-winning campaigns and a Treble season.

READ MORE: Man City are masters of the £50m transfer and ‘odd’ Kyle Walker move as good as any

 

2) Raheem Sterling (Liverpool to Manchester City, July 2015, £44m)
As much as Liverpool are stumbling around looking for meaning now, their true banter era came not all that long ago. But they were still Liverpool and there was still widespread shock and horror among the Liverpool-adjacent punditocracy when Sterling refused to sign a new contract to help push through a big-money move to the ghastly nouveau riche Manchester City. The acrimony around it all probably played a larger part than most care to acknowledge in some of the frankly disgusting media coverage to which Sterling has often been so pointedly subjected.

Even with all Liverpool’s subsequent improvement, it’s still hard to argue that Sterling made the wrong decision even if he might have second thoughts about the precise way he went about achieving it. Speaking of regret, he might just look back and wonder what could have been if he’d stuck it out behind Erling Haaland for a season. Manchester City won the Treble as soon as he left, while Sterling endured the worst season of his career at Chelsea..

 

1) Virgil van Dijk (Southampton to Liverpool, January 2018, £75m)
City may dominate the upper reaches of this list but they have to concede top spot to Liverpool on this occasion thanks to their expensive but transformative acquisition of Virgil van Dijk four years ago.

The Dutchman’s impact was instant. Back in the first half of the 2017/18 season, Liverpool were an excellent and entertaining side but they were defensively vulnerable. Seemingly overnight, that problem was solved by Van Dijk who went on to prove himself the league’s pre-eminent defender. Even with an understandable drop-off since due to age, injury and his club’s own fallibility, he remains very good and has even become captain at Anfield.

F365 Features Kyle Walker

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