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There is a reason why eight of the 10 biggest transfers between English clubs this summer were for central midfielders.

Among all the elements that shape a footballer’s valuation — age, contract length, performance data, injury history, and Tottenham’s urgency — the first step in any negotiation is to measure a player against the market. Once Spurs signed Mateus Fernandes from West Ham for a club-record £85m in June, and then surpassed that figure by bringing in Sandro Tonali from Newcastle for £100m four days later, the benchmarks were established for Bruno Guimaraes, Morgan Rogers, Elliot Anderson, Carlos Baleba and Enzo Fernandez later in the window.

After a two-month spending spree in which Premier League clubs laid out roughly the GDP of Andorra, many supporters and people within football are still struggling to process the figures involved. Every transfer has its own circumstances, but taken together they prompt broader questions about how players are valued and what they genuinely contribute. Put simply: can a footballer really be worth £100m to a football club?

Manchester City have splashed out on an entirely new midfield.

There are two linked parts to that answer: a player’s effect on results, and a player’s effect on a club’s commercial performance. On the commercial side, only a very small number of global superstars can significantly shift the revenues of a major Premier League club.

When it comes to performance, there are striking examples of how much one individual can matter. Virgil van Dijk missed most of Liverpool’s 2020/21 season through injury, and the team finished 30 points worse off than in the previous campaign. The exact impact of Van Dijk’s absence can never be fully isolated, given he was part of a wider injury crisis in Jurgen Klopp’s squad and poor finishing was Liverpool’s main issue. Manchester City suffered a similar drop-off without Rodri in 2024/25, but again, his absence was only one part of a larger downturn.

Omar Chaudhuri is chief intelligence officer at Twenty First Group, a company that advises football clubs on transfer strategy. After years spent studying and understanding the market, the firm’s conclusion is that most transfers do not, by themselves, dramatically alter a club’s fortunes.

So is there any real justification for the £100m footballer?

“In intrinsic value, no,” says Chaudhuri. “Because if you analyse how much any one individual footballer can influence the outcome of a team over the course of the season, it’s never going to be more than three, four, five points — unless you’re Lionel Messi at Inter Miami, where the gulf between you and the other players is so big.

“Enzo Fernandez is a good player, but he’s not a transformative player, and it’s very hard to get transformative players in the Premier League because the quality is already so high. It’s a £125m transfer fee, but over the course of a deal you might be spending £200m on a player. You couldn’t really say that the difference between having Enzo Fernandez and not having Enzo Fernandez is worth £200m in revenue to Manchester City, it’d be difficult to make the sums add up. But ultimately you have to pay the prices that the market dictates. And if everyone is prepared to pay those prices, then you just have to accept that you’re operating in an inflated market.”

Enzo Fernandez has joined City in a £125m transfer.

The market has become more and more distorted as clubs are pulled into paying enormous sums, often under pressure after a poor run of results, or simply because they view transfers as a shortcut to progress. Time and again, though, this belief in the market as a fast route to success has proved misguided.

“The transfer market is a vastly overrated opportunity to improve your team,” Chaudhuri says. “It’s obviously seen as the main opportunity because fundamentally you look at the quality of your players being the driver of your on-field success. But if you look historically, the amount a club net-spends in its transfer window has no bearing on the extent to which they improve or get worse over the following season — literally no bearing — which is kind of staggering. A club that spends £200m net is not expected to improve their position any more or less than a club that generates £200m net income.”

The reality is that calm, disciplined delivery of a long-term plan works better than scattergun spending — although the lavishness of the biggest clubs creates opportunities for others. Brighton and Brentford have managed to outperform expectations by selling players at the very top end of the Premier League market while sourcing replacements at more sensible levels.

“Whenever we advise clubs, they’re looking for that silver-bullet strategy or market you can recruit from,” says Chaudhuri. “The slightly more boring fact is you just need a plan and you need the discipline to execute against it. It almost doesn’t really matter what the plan is. The failing of most football clubs is that they don’t have a really clearly defined plan.

“We talk a lot about Brentford and Brighton. It’s very rare that you have clubs that are almost tunnel-vision in the way in which they operate. The amount of clubs that flip-flop from one season to the next in the way in which they set up their structure and management, their coach, playing style, recruitment, it’s all over the place. But having a plan and being consistent against it — it sounds so basic, but it’s lacking in so many clubs.”

Brentford signed Mamadou Sangare during the summer window for £38m.

There is another aspect to the modern transfer market: many of these headline fees are somewhat superficial. Most deals contain add-on clauses that may never be activated. Almost all transfer fees are now amortised, meaning the cost is spread across the length of the player’s contract. The £125m Manchester City paid for Fernandez will be divided into £25m per year over the next five years, and even if he is sold for only half that amount after three seasons, the money brought back would be enough to clear the remaining debt.

As The Independent’s worrying report set out this week, this near-casual dependence on debt has become the pile of sand on which the Premier League now stands, and some people inside the game are warning that it could eventually give way to a major collapse. But until that moment arrives, there is little to prevent clubs from continuing to spend huge sums in an overheated market.

Chaudhuri believes there is another path. “I think too few clubs actually focus on improving their own players. The amount of times we see performances ebb and flow, and over one part of the season a club could be demonstrating Champions League form when over an earlier part of the season it might have had mid-table form. That shows that clubs have the ability to generate much better performance out of the same group of players, rather than needing to recruit. There’s so little focus on what clubs can actually do to build cohesive teams and improve their own players, and I think many clubs have lost sight of that in the last few years.”