"Missed" transfer fee - Who is the "lost" club in the Premier League?

Anthony Ellanga's transfer to the north is of far-reaching significance. For Newcastle United, his joining marks the first real signing success in this frustrating summer transfer window. Ellanga also became the third most expensive signing in Newcastle team history, second only to teammates Alexander Isaac and Sandro Tonali.

For Nottingham Forest, who left, despite losing a winger who contributed 17 goals or assists last season in 28 Premier League matches, the club earned £52 million from the deal - a new record for their previous transfer sale (but Morgan Gibbs-White could transfer to Tottenham for as much as £60 million, a record that may be broken soon).

However, Forest will not receive the full amount of this transfer fee from Elanga, and this transaction further highlights Manchester United's transfer operations in recent years.

The Swedish striker left Old Trafford two years ago, and joined Nottingham Forest for £15 million; now, after two successful seasons in Nottingham, he has left the team at a price of more than three times the price of Manchester United sold that year. Although Manchester United has a 15% second transfer share clause and is expected to earn a profit of just over £5 million, it still means that their total income in Ellanda is less than half of Newcastle's investment this summer.

Manchester United's recent transfer operations have been attracting much attention, especially in statistics as of the end of March this year, they still owe other clubs more than 300 million pounds of net transfer payments. This high debt is often seen as a result of squandering, after all, over the past three seasons, Manchester United has invested more than £200 million in the introduction of new players each season.

But as the exchange revealed by Ellanda, Manchester United's problem is not limited to spending money, but also their poor performance in player resale. According to the latest reliable data we have (as of the end of the 2023-2024 season), Manchester United has earned only £174.2 million in total through selling players over the past ten seasons. This figure is only 18th in England; by comparison, they are all behind in their domestic competitors and are even far from comparable to Chelsea (£842.8 million) and Manchester City (£583.7 million).

We can easily see which clubs make the most money by selling players, but another more interesting question is: How much money do they missed that they could have made?

Take Ellanda as an example. Manchester United sold him to Forest for £15 million, and two years later he transferred for £52 million in the next stop, which means that Manchester United "missed" the difference of £37 million (of course, the second transfer share clause will partially make up for this gap).

The media uses data from global football transfer tracking websites to try to clarify which club "misses" the most potential gains in future player transfers.

This study involves multiple considerations. Do we only count the next transfer for the player? Or should all subsequent transfers be included? Should we count those cases where the transfer fee is lower than the previous time? Does the seller have a second transfer share clause?

To avoid complexity, we adopted the "single jump" principle for analysis.

In other words, if Newcastle sells Ellanda for £100 million in the future, according to our model, the forest will be considered to have “missed” £48 million of it. As for Manchester United, it will not be considered "missed" additional gains until two deals. Is this method perfect? not necessarily. But we can also understand that a player and his value cannot be linked to the club he has indefinitely.

We also exclude transactions with subsequent transfer fees lower than the previous one. For example, if Ellanda is sold by Newcastle for less than £52m, it means Forest makes more money than its next buyer, and this situation will not affect our overall estimate of Nottingham Forest’s “missing future transfer fees”.

Our purpose is not to judge the overall transfer operation level of a club, but to identify those clubs that have not benefited from the future value growth of players for various reasons. As we will see, the clubs that appear on this list do not necessarily mean they are bad transfer traders.

Regarding secondary transfer share, we did not consider the importance of the data due to the general lack of transparency (and the inclusion of these data in the global transfer records over the past decade may cause our IT system to crash), but we will clearly point out its importance. Even if a club misses huge transfer fees in the future, it does not mean that they have completely lost all their profits.

Considering that Manchester United has long been considered a botched seller, one would naturally speculate that they also suffered heavy losses in future transfer fees.

According to the above methodology, since the 2015-2016 season, the total amount of transfer fees "missed" by Manchester United has reached about £272.5 million - the second highest "missed amount" in England in the past decade. This includes the case of Ellanga, and that number will rise as Alvaro Carreras's transfer from Benfica to Real Madrid is completed. However, Manchester United will enjoy a 20% second transfer share clause in that deal.

Even this result contains some interesting details: £89 million of Manchester United's "missed amount" comes from Paul Pogba. The French midfielder was bought back from Juventus in 2016 at a high price, and when he transferred to Juventus four years ago, Manchester United had almost nothing. At first glance, it might seem strange to count the transfer fee paid by Manchester United as a "missed amount", but the logic holds: if they keep Pogba and use him like Juventus in the subsequent seasons, they don't have to spend a huge amount of money to buy back, and may even earn the amount equivalent to the buyback price by selling him..

Birmingham and other clubs on the list make a good example of the fact that negotiation chips directly affect a club's ability to extract the greatest value from the deal. For the Bellingham brothers, Kyle Walker during Shelch Wednesday, and Harry Maguire during Hull City (actually he played during Shelch Wednesday), the lack of experience in the top league, coupled with the mother's low position in the domestic league system, means they cannot initially sell at a high price, even if it proves amazing potential in the future.

Xie naturally hopes to get the fee of more than £45 million from Walker when he transferred to Manchester City at Tottenham, but when he was 19 years old and only made two appearances in the Championship, it is obviously unrealistic to expect such a transfer fee. In the end, the club only received £5 million, and Walker was loaned back to Xie on Wednesday by Tottenham for one year - although not perfect, it was a pretty good deal in the English football rating system.

If we expand our horizons outside of England, we will find another thought-provoking list, and even a club "missed" future transfer fees have exceeded the £300 million mark.

Just like Rennes and Dembele, there are many examples of huge single transfers in football that make the players' old masters regret it.

Inter Milan ranks second in our non-English club list. In 2013, they sold the Brazilian midfielder for a price that Liverpool reselled Coutinho to Barcelona five years later (£108 million lower). However, five years later, the Nerazzurri made up for the previous losses to some extent by selling Andre Onana to Manchester United for a price of 45 million pounds higher than the purchase price a year ago. And the one that was hit by the deal was Dutch club Ajax.

There are also two Brazilian clubs on our list. They are similar to those of England's sub-League teams - due to limited resources and insufficient market influence, these clubs lack sufficient bargaining chips. Teams like Santos and Sao Paulo obviously cannot expect to receive the sky-high fees reflected in future transfers from Neymar or Anthony. This is not because they make mistakes in the transfer operation, but because their status determines that they cannot have such pricing power. Of course, Anthony later brought considerable income to Ajax, so we have clearly outlined the power hierarchy map of world football in just two short paragraphs and three transfers.

In fact, examining which clubs “missed” future transfer fees does not necessarily mean that they perform poorly in the transfer market. This is true in some cases, but as far as Manchester City is concerned – we found in our research that its "missed amount" is the largest (that may still hold even if it is included in the second transfer share clause) – they are precisely one of the most successful transfer traders in the world.

On the contrary, all this reveals more clearly the inherent hierarchy of modern football: the giant clubs gather talents and select the top ones from them to stay; the rest of the players are allowed to leave, flowing to other places with reasonable but often far below their true value, and their potential is mostly realized elsewhere.

At the same time, clubs outside of top giants must seize every opportunity as much as possible. An epoch-making star may stand out from the youth training system and bring a considerable income to the parent team. But this is always relatively speaking.

The transfer market of football is full of far-reaching influence, and it follows a clear food chain: the strong become stronger, the weak seek to survive, and the flow of talent will always move along the established track.