The biggest sell-on fees ever received as Rogers to Arsenal threatens to shatter Chelsea record | OneFootball

Arsenal must help shatter a ridiculous Moises Caicedo transfer record if they are to sign Morgan Rogers from Aston Villa this summer.

Villa’s valuation of Rogers – who Arsenal are “close” to agreeing terms with – at £130m is no coincidence; it would land the Villans a record sell-on fee, blowing this current top 10 out of the water.

10) Dominic Solanke – £7.2m to Liverpool

It is vanishingly rare for any transfer to have been completed in the last two decades without a Michael Edwards clause inserted which in some way benefits Liverpool.

Their modern success has been built on the foundations of prescient sales, impactful signings, add-ons and perhaps soon even buy-backs as they safeguard and future-proof their position at the forefront of the market.

Liverpool had one such option on Solanke but little reason to explore it for years after he left to join Bournemouth. Only 18 months after the England international moved to the south coast, the Cherries were relegated to the Championship.

That arguably accelerated Solanke’s development. Two seasons in the second tier produced 44 goals and 16 assists in 86 appearances as he rediscovered his scoring touch and refined his overall game.

But it was the appointment of Andoni Iraola which really moved Bournemouth and Solanke to the next level. The 2023/24 season marked his first Premier League hat-trick and Player of the Month award, attracting interest from Spurs.

Liverpool could have hijacked that club-record deal but they preferred to sit back and wait for a healthy pay-out to land in their bank account courtesy of a clause entitling them to 20% of any profits Bournemouth made on his sale.

If they had anything about them, the Reds would have engaged in a bidding war before pulling out to artificially drive up the price and their subsequent proceeds. Edwards was probably busy fiddling with the aircon.

9) Michael Keane – £7.5m to Manchester United

As former reserve team manager Warren Joyce once had it, Keane “played against Real Madrid on a pre-season tour and Gareth Bale gave him a bit of a chasing,” so Louis van Gaal decided against integrating him into the first team.

It was very much the spiritual contrast to Cristiano Ronaldo giving John O’Shea the runaround.

A few loans later and Keane was sold to Burnley for £2.5m, much to Joyce’s disappointment.

“To be fair to Van Gaal, I met him in a bar in Portugal after he’d left and he said ‘you were right about Michael Keane, I was wrong’,” Joyce added in an interview years ago, by which point Keane had moved on to Everton for a cool £25m.

Manchester United raked in a decent amount as a result but they were actually favourites to sign Keane themselves when the auction commenced in summer 2017.

Jose Mourinho instead settled for Victor Lindelof, who would outlast the Portuguese and about seven other managers at Old Trafford.

8) Raheem Sterling – £9m to QPR

It goes down as the biggest Academy sale in Liverpool history but the role of QPR cannot be airbrushed from Sterling’s story.

The Hoops picked him up as a 10-year-old and navigated interest from far and wide well into Sterling’s teenage years, going as far as considering giving the forward a first-team debut at 14.

But his departure was inevitable and Liverpool were the only club willing to offer £500,000 up front with up to £2m more in bonuses.

That deal was ratified during the reign of Rafael Benitez, with Sterling breaking through under Kenny Dalglish before flourishing due to the threat of being sent on the first plane home by Brendan Rodgers.

After three seasons in the Anfield first team delivered a monumental title bottling as its peak, Sterling engaged in a bitter and controversial exit plan culminating in rejected contract offers, two snubbed Manchester City bids, the withdrawal from a pre-season tour squad and two days of missed training due to an apparent illness.

The £49m Liverpool eventually held out for made Sterling the most expensive English footballer in history at the time, while securing QPR some extra funds on top of the parachute payments they would soon receive due to relegation.

7) Kevin de Bruyne – £10m to Chelsea

It is often held as one of Chelsea’s biggest transfer mistakes but things could actually have been far worse.

And ever the politician, Mourinho made it sound like a masterclass in problem-solving and negotiation.

“If you have a player knocking on your door and crying every day that he wants to leave then you have to make a decision,” he said in summer 2015, shortly before Wolfsburg made a gargantuan profit on the deadwood they inherited from Stamford Bridge 18 months prior.

If selling De Bruyne immediately or after another year were indeed Mourinho and Chelsea’s only options then it is difficult to argue they took the wrong course.

But one-and-a-half seasons in the Bundesliga were more than enough for De Bruyne to prove his worth and improve his value, to the extent that Chelsea’s add-on actually exceeded the fee they paid to sign the Belgian from Genk in the first place.

6) Harry Maguire – £10.2m to Hull

The last Hull squad to play in the Premier League was quite the eclectic mix: Maguire, Andy Robertson, Jarrod Bowen, Tom Huddlestone and Shaun Maloney somehow didn’t survive despite the combined coaching efforts of Mike Phelan and Marco Silva.

Maguire was the breakout star, the Players’ and Fans’ Player of the Year in his first and only full season with the Tigers, who cashed in for £17m when the vultures of Leicester circled upon relegation.

Two years with the Foxes – and an inflatable unicorn-based England breakthrough in between – sent that valuation into the stratosphere; Maguire remains the most expensive defender in football history, and Hull received a chunk of that record outlay.

5) Antoine Semenyo – £10.5m to Bristol City

As the first professional club to show faith in the dormant but nascent brilliance of Semenyo, Bristol City are entitled to continue benefiting from his rise.

The £10.5m they received from Bournemouth in January 2023 was doubled three years later when the Cherries flipped their own preposterous profit during a state of mild Manchester City panic.

Bristol City “believed in me from the beginning and that will not be forgotten” by Semenyo. The Robins will remain grateful for the intermittent financial reminders of his excellence.

4) Hugo Ekitike – £13.8m to Paris Saint-Germain

It doesn’t seem particularly fair that as the best team in the world, with the finest players, most talented coach, unlimited funds and a domestic league so in thrall to their monopoly that fixtures are shifted around to their advantage in European competition, PSG have developed that Chelsea knack of dominating the seller’s market too.

No club should really be breaking their transfer record on Goncalo Ramos, not least on the back of a PSG season in which he started just 15 games. But AC Milan were happy to pay the Paris tax.

And even their biggest failures don’t really hurt them. PSG signed Ekitike for around £30m, wasted two years of his career and sold him to Eintracht Frankfurt, who almost immediately helped the Frenchman realise his potential.

Two seasons in the Bundesliga turned Ekitike into that most common of current footballing commodities – a Newcastle target Liverpool will sign anyway – and landed PSG 20 per cent of the initial £69m Frankfurt made through his sale.

3) Tino Livramento – £15m to Chelsea

Chelsea are particularly well-versed in the art of selling players and engineering the majority of those deals to benefit them eventually.

There might not be many Academy graduates who make the grade for the Blues but Chelsea have enough alumni dotted around – and stocks in most if not all of them – to ultimatly take advantage somehow.

“It’s probably the best academy in the world that anyone would want to go to and develop,” Livramento himself said when he took his diploma to Southampton. “Maybe one day,” he added of the prospect of Chelsea activating a £50m buy-back clause.

That never made sense after 34 appearances and an injury-disrupted spell on the coast, but Newcastle were willing to take the £32m plunge in August 2023.

A sliding sell-on clause meant Chelsea were due almost half of that sum, meaning an initial £5m sale ended up netting them £20m in the long run.

2) Ousmane Dembele – £17m to Rennes

The extent to which Barcelona entirely lost their financial sh*t and lumbered themselves with economic responsibilities still felt to this day should never be downplayed.

Losing Neymar to PSG triggered a catastrophic collective head loss; signing Dembele, Philippe Coutinho, Paulinho, Gerard Deulofeu, Nelson Semedo, Yerry Mina and Marlon Santos in response was sub-optimal.

Liverpool had Barca’s pants down over Coutinho but it was Rennes who were able to capitalise most on the Dembele situation.

German media at the time stated that the French side put a clause into the small print of his £13m move to Dortmund in the summer of 2016 entitling them to around £17m of any subsequent sale above £70m – which Barcelona’s ludicrous £135.5m bid very much was.

So justifiably pleased with their work were Rennes that when Dembele’s switch to the Nou Camp a year later was confirmed, the Ligue Un side released a back-patting statement about “the quality of Rennes’ training and how the future Ballon d’Or winner “took advantage of the ability of the club to make every effort to bring him to his highest level”.

1) Moises Caicedo – £23m to Independiente Del Valle

“It’s a ton of money for us,” said Independiente Del Valle’s honorary president Michel Deller of a windfall which outstripped their initial profit by about five times.

While Manchester United balked at paying £4.5m for Caicedo, Brighton did not blink. The Seagulls might well have sensed that their investment would eventually down that inexorable path to Stamford Bridge.

But even in their wildest dreams, Ecuadorean club Independiente would have struggled to foresee Caicedo being moved on for nine figures at the end of an embarrassing battle between Chelsea and Liverpool.