Spurs would make weird history if Brighton shatter transfer record for Vuskovic | OneFootball

Spurs ‘plan to accept a new offer’ for Luka Vuskovic – and it could represent a record fee for someone who has never played for the selling club.

The suggestion is that Vuskovic would quite like to move in the opposite direction to Jan Paul van Hecke, who will join Spurs from Brighton this summer.

That has created further competition for a centre-half place under Roberto De Zerbi in north London and Vuskovic reportedly senses that opportunities might be easier to come by at Brighton.

The Seagulls have had a £35m bid for the Croatian teenager rejected and will likely have to break their own transfer record of £40m to sign Vuskovic. But it might well break another record, making him the most expensive footballer sold by a club he never played for.

Vuskovic joined Spurs for £12m in July 2025 and immediately went on loan to Hamburg for the season, meaning he has yet to represent them and could be moved on before he gets the chance to do so.

These, we believe, are the most expensive players ever to be sold by a club they never played for.

Mattia Caldara – Juventus to AC Milan for £32.6m

There is a degree of typical Serie A financial murkiness to take into account, with Caldara and Leonardo Bonucci swapping clubs at the same time, while Gonzalo Higuain was even thrown in on loan as a sweetener for Milan.

But it officially went down as a £32.6m sale for Juventus, the Old Lady more than doubling their initial outlay on a centre-half who never represented them in a competitive game.

Caldara has told the story frequently since, having retired due to injury aged just 31 in 2025:

Caldara did at least play for Milan, but barely. An Achilles tendon and ACL rupture in separate incidents in his first 12 months ultimately limited him to three appearances in six years, and contributed to his decision to hang up the boots, if anything, two decades too early for an Italian defender.

Savinho – Troyes to Manchester City for £30.8m

It was a transfer which exposed ‘the absolute sham that is multi-club ownership’. And just because Savinho turned out to be not all that great for Manchester City – although still enough to tempt Spurs into parting with £60m – it doesn’t justify just how royally screwed over Troyes were in the process.

The warning signs were there when Savinho was widely referred to as a CFG signing in July 2022; his five-year contract with Troyes and status as their ‘record signing’ was purely symbolic, mere formalities to circumvent certain restrictions and bring a player into the multi-club orbit to ultimately serve the team at the top of that food chain.

Only if the Brazilian teenager had not progressed adequately enough would he have ever played for Troyes. But his rapid development on loan at PSV and then CFG club Girona meant Manchester City enacted the final part of the plan and basically recruited a player from their own system, signing Savinho for £30.8m.

In the process, Troyes were robbed of the services of a player who might have been handy as they sank from Ligue Un to the bottom of France’s second division.

Yankuba Minteh – Newcastle United to Brighton for £30m

“In my opinion, it was absolutely the right thing to do. But it still hurts to have done it,” said Eddie Howe. “We had no other option. We couldn’t breach PSR. We couldn’t face a points deduction. The only two deals on the table at the time were the two deals that we did.”

It is worth wondering whether Newcastle might have acted differently in hindsight. Perhaps taken Liverpool up on their Anthony Gordon interest, or swallowed a punishment which would have sacrificed Champions League qualification but allowed them to keep two excellent players in key positions, while sparing them one of the worst and most embarrassing transfer windows in history.

Newcastle should have just taken the points deduction, is what we’re saying here.

And not only in the case of Anderson. Howe himself said Minteh’s profile “fit what we needed” but he, too, was offered up at the PSR altar.

His move to Brighton was at least an ostensible transfer success story in isolation for the Magpies, who banked £30m on a player they signed for around one-fifth of that the year before. A single season under Arne Slot at Feyenoord did wonders for Minteh’s value.

Ernest Nuamah – RWDM Brussels to Lyon for £21.6m

The hope is that Nuamah has overcome the dread fear of joining Fulham.

That was where he was bound in the summer of 2024, completing part of his medical with the Cottagers before vanishing and eventually tearfully requesting to have some sort of a say in his future instead of being packed off to the first Premier League suitor available by Lyon president John Textor in the middle of a financial crisis.

Nuamah had only joined Lyon permanently that July, having enjoyed a season on loan with the Ligue Un club from fellow Textor plaything RWDM Brussels.

The former RWD Molenbeek had snapped Nuamah up from the same conveyor belt Mohammed Kudus was found on: that productive Right To Dream Academy and Nordsjaelland pathway.

But Nuamah never once played for his Belgian employers, who instead were used as a sort of financial loophole stepping stone to shift the Ghana international to Lyon without incurring any PSR-adjacent punishments.

Yan Couto – Man City to Borussia Dortmund for £20m

It is Manchester City’s transfer cheat code to make a fortune on players who have never played for them.

The examples are absurdly abundant but the most expensive of all was Couto, who signed for the Etihad club in July 2020 and was sold for more than £20m just over four years later, making fewer appearances than Scott Carson in between.

Two of his four loans on the City books were obviously to Girona; perhaps he and Savinho share happy stories about never playing for the clubs who sold them.