Savinho, Minteh & Co - The most expensive deals for players that never played for the selling club

With every passing year football seems to get more and more complicated. Not only are there large conglomerates owning multiple clubs across Europe’s top leagues, but in some occasions players tend to get sold by clubs that they’ve never actually played for. This was certainly the case with Manchester City’s most recent signing, Savinho, who finally made the move to the English club this summer for a fee of €25 million. Although the Brazilian talent technically made the move from Ligue 2 side Troyes, Savinho had in fact been playing his football at high-flying Girona in LaLiga, prior to a spell in the Eredivisie with PSV. Since making the move to Europe two years ago, the 20-year-old talent never once played a single game for the selling club. And the new Man City star certainly isn’t the only player in football to have taken this odd route from one club to another. 

While Salvinho may be fresh in the memory of Premier League fans, he isn’t even the most expensive of such deals to get over the line in 2024. Ernest Nuamah, who made the move to Belgian side RWDM in 2023 for €25m from Nordsjaelland, was immediately sent out on loan last season to Ligue 1 side Lyon, where he has now joined the club on a permanent basis for €28.5m. Without playing a single game in Belgium. However, a deal that can top even that was Yankuba Minteh’s move from Newcastle to Brighton earlier in this very transfer window. Having joined Newcastle from Odense in 2023, Minteh spent last season on loan at Feyenoord, before returning to Newcastle, only to find himself on his way south to Brighton for a transfer fee of €35m. 

Although each of these deals has taken place in the last eight months, such moves certainly aren’t a modern phenomenon. As we can see when we flick through the top 20 such deals of all time, many have taken place over the course of the last 10 years. And some, such as Evanilson’s 2003 move from Parma to Dortmund, happened even before then. Elsewhere, there are a number of notable names on the list that some football fans may not have known were involved in such complicated deals at the beginning of their careers. These include the likes of Cristian Romero, who departed Juventus for Atalanta having failed to play a single game for the Turin club, Douglas Luiz joining Aston Villa in 2019 despite not playing at all for selling club Manchester City and France international Theo Hernández, who moved from one side of Madrid to the other in 2017 without making a single appearance for Atletico Madrid. 

How Chelsea and Man City profit from unwanted stars 

Although the list of such transfers is dominated by Italian clubs, since they typically tend to “co-own” young players at the start of their careers before one club agrees to buy out the other club, there has been a growing number of players from English clubs that were signed at young ages and sold on without ever making it to the first team of the selling side. To no great surprise,Chelsea have done notably well here, with no less than four players making it into the top 100 of such transfers. Patrick Bamford, Christian Atsu, Thorgan Hazard and Mario Pasalic all had their wages paid by Chelsea before they moved on to other clubs in their career. But not before the London club profited from their talents to the tune of €36.9m in transfer fees. This places them second on the rankings of English clubs on the list, just above Newcastle for the aforementioned transfer of Minteh to Brighton. However, one club in particular has gamed the system better than any other.

Indeed, while Man City may be near the top of the list for their signing of Savinho, the English champions have actually sold no less than 11 players that feature in the top 100. That includes - but is certainly not limited to - Pedro Porro, Aaron Mooy, Jason Denayer, Jack Harrison and the aforementioned Luiz all agreeing to join Man City, but never actually getting an opportunity to make a single appearance for the club before being sold on to another club. Remarkably, the English giants made an impressive sum of €117.6m from all 11 deals, with some certainly contributing to the profits the club has been making on youth academy players for the last 10 years to offset their lavish spending on first-team stars.