Manchester United only broke transfer record more recently than six Prem and Championship clubs | OneFootball

Manchester United will ‘not bid as high as the figures’ Nottingham Forest want for Elliot Anderson – so when will they break their transfer record?

A boringly sensible Manchester United will not engage in a bidding war with Manchester City over Anderson, finally learning that little good ever comes of those staring contests and they end up lumbered with Cristiano Ronaldo, Alexis Sanchez or Fred instead.

But it does beg the question as to precisely when they will break the longest-standing transfer record of any current Premier League club. The £93.2m Manchester United paid for Paul Pogba in August 2016 remains the biggest fee they have ever paid for a player.

No current top-flight team can match that. Everton come closest but even they have a solid year on their Old Trafford counterparts, signing Gylfi Sigurdsson for £40m in August 2017.

One must drop down to the Championship to find teams whose former lives of Premier League excess leave them with an older transfer record than Manchester United.

Stoke – Giannelli Imbula

Six months before Manchester United re-signed Pogba for a world-record fee, another French midfielder with a burgeoning reputation moved to the Premier League.

“If he is as good as we think he is, he’ll keep his value. You’ve got to think of it from a business point of view. We want him to be worth more than we paid for him,” said Stoke chairman Peter Coates at the time.

Imbula’s contract was cancelled by mutual consent four years later; he was not quite as good as they thought he was.

Stoke spent £18.3m to find out. By the end of Imbula’s first full season, manager Mark Hughes admitted “if there is interest in him then we would consider that,” but “we haven’t had any interest, in fairness”.

Imbula played 28 games, was loaned out thrice and thus missed their relegation, and once substituted himself during a game because Charlie Adam didn’t pass him the ball.

QPR – Christopher Samba

“Chris is just what we need. He’s a monster,” said Harry Redknapp of an “unbelievable signing” designed to keep QPR in the Premier League.

Anzhi Makhachkala certainly struggled to fathom what had happened. Club director German Tkachenko suggested that “QPR have lost their minds” adding: “When they agreed to pay his release fee we wept. He [Samba] wept.”

Little wonder. Anzhi received £12.5m for a centre-half who signed a four-and-a-half-year deal on £100,000 a week, with a clause that stipulated his earnings would not be affected by relegation.

That fate quite inevitably befell the Hoops, who won twice and kept a single clean sheet in Samba’s 10 Premier League appearances, while the Arsenal transfer legend busied himself saying he was ‘fed up with the money tweets’ before imploring supporters to ‘get over it’.

Anzhi kindly gave QPR a full refund five months later. Apropos of nothing, the Russian club was officially dissolved in 2022 due to financial difficulties and now operates on a semi-professional basis in the country’s fifth tier.

Portsmouth – Peter Crouch

Redknapp was in charge of Portsmouth when they made what is still their record signing too. It is deeply unfortunate that fiscal irresponsibility seemed to follow the owner of a Monaco bank account named after his dog and the year of his birth.

Crouch himself later admitted to sensing Pompey might not ultimately be good for the £11m they paid for him –  “it did occur to me how a club of that size could afford a team that good” – but by then he had already left after a solid year on the coast to join Redknapp again at Spurs.

Seven months after Crouch’s sale in a summer that also saw Glen Johnson, Sylvain Distin, Lauren, Sol Campbell and Djimi Traore leave, Portsmouth became the first Premier League club to enter administration.

Blackburn – Andy Cole

The sheer intoxicating brilliance of Cole can be summed up by how he became the most expensive player in the history of four clubs between 1992 and 2002.

He no longer reigns as the record signing at Bristol City, Newcastle or Manchester United. But the final move in that career-defining decade stands 24 years later as the most expensive Blackburn have ever made.

It was inspired by two factors: the arrivals of Juan Sebastian Veron and Ruud van Nistelrooy restricting his game time at Old Trafford; and a looming World Cup that represented one final opportunity for a 30-year-old Cole to represent England at a major tournament.

Despite scoring 13 goals in 20 games in a blistering first half-season for Rovers, including the winner in the Worthington Cup final, Cole missed out on Sven Goran Eriksson’s squad to go to Japan and South Korea.

He will forever be one of the best England players who never played at a World Cup or Euros.

Charlton – Jason Euell

As Euell himself once said: “I knew what I was about and knew what I could do. It is the clubs that agreed that price to get me from one to another.”

Charlton had failed with a £5m bid upon Wimbledon’s relegation in 2000, but the Dons could hold no longer after a prolific season in the First Division for the England youth international.

For £4.75m, Charlton secured their all-time top Premier League goalscorer, who struck in famous wins over Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool at the height of Alan Curbishley’s availability.

It is still unknown whether Sir Bobby Robson actually wanted to sign Euell instead of Carl Cort.