The Premier League’s Liquidity Machine

A friend of mine is a Manchester United fan, which means a disproportionate amount of our conversations eventually turn into complaints about Manchester United. This summer we got stuck on one thing.

How did Nicolas Jackson become a £65 million footballer while Marcus Rashford couldn’t find a permanent buyer?

Jackson is a good Premier League striker. Aston Villa wanted him, Chelsea were willing to sell, and somehow a deal worth around £65 million got done. But £65 million is a lot of money. Rashford, meanwhile, is an England international with more than 100 goals for Manchester United and plenty of Premier League pedigree, yet he seemed to have far fewer permanent options.

There are obvious explanations. Rashford’s wages are high. Clubs may have had doubts about form, age, fit, or whether taking him on made financial sense. Jackson is younger and has more resale value. Transfers are messy, and comparing two players directly is rarely fair. None of that quite explained what bothered us.

Once you start paying attention, Jackson’s deal stops looking like an isolated oddity. English clubs routinely sell players to one another for £40 million, £50 million, £60 million or more, and the same names keep appearing on both sides of those deals.

We started calling it the Premier League’s transfer club. Not a literal cabal — there probably isn’t a smoky room where sporting directors decide who gets to buy whom. The less dramatic explanation is more interesting: some clubs may simply have better access to the league’s internal market. They know the people, have dealt with each other before, understand the payment structures and can move quickly when a deal appears.

That makes the network an asset in its own right. Good players are not enough if there is no buyer. I pulled the transfers apart to see which clubs actually have access to Premier League buyers.

1. The Premier League is buying from itself

In 2018/19, the share spent on players already in the division fell to a record-low 14%. Sky Sports ↗

By 2026/27, the domestic share had climbed to 39.3%. The Guardian ↗

Total Premier League summer spending reached a record £3.46 billion, with 38% of deals taking place between Premier League clubs. Reuters ↗ That settles one part of it: clubs are buying from each other at scale. The more interesting part is where the money keeps landing.

2. Buyers, suppliers and hubs

Plot the fees and the league stops looking like one market. It starts to split into buyers, suppliers and a few clubs doing both.

I added the 2026/27 window to the historical data. Among the current Premier League clubs, the reported fee-bearing deals come to about £1.36 billion this summer alone.

The scatter is not really a league table; it is a cast of characters. Chelsea are the freakish one: roughly £749 million spent and £768 million received inside the league. Brighton look like a wholesaler — about £115 million spent and £534 million received. Manchester United are almost the reverse at roughly £470 million spent and only £131 million received. City and Arsenal lean buyer, while Villa and Newcastle are more two-way. The exact quadrant lines will move, but the shape is hard to miss: some clubs feed the market, some consume it, and a few can do both at scale.

The missing bit is who keeps doing business with whom.

3. A few corridors do most of the work

The scatter gives us the cast. The network is where the plot gets interesting: the same clubs keep meeting each other.

Chelsea are everywhere. Five of the 13 £100m-plus corridors in this view involve them, and the three biggest are almost tied: Chelsea–Villa at roughly £243 million, Chelsea–Manchester City at roughly £240 million, and Chelsea–Brighton at roughly £237 million.

Those corridors do not even behave the same way. Chelsea–Brighton is almost entirely one-way, with about £230 million flowing from Chelsea to Brighton in the fee-bearing summer deals captured here. Chelsea–Villa is properly two-way at roughly £140 million from Chelsea to Villa and £103 million the other way. There have been eight permanent or loan deals between the clubs since 2022. Reuters ↗ You do not need a conspiracy to explain any of this. Emery described the Villa–Chelsea relationship as business rather than friendship; the useful point is simply that some clubs keep finding another Premier League club willing to transact at Premier League prices.

4. The hidden advantage is liquidity

Here is the bit I did not expect: a piece of market theory actually fits this quite well.

Football transfers look a bit like awkward over-the-counter trading, except the asset has an agent, a family, a preferred city and the ability to simply say no.

Manchester United cannot list Marcus Rashford at 9:00am and discover his market-clearing price by lunch. They have to find a buyer, agree the fee, wages, payment schedule and agent terms — and then Rashford still has to fancy the move.

Economists call some of this search friction. In over-the-counter markets, assets are more liquid when buyers and sellers can find each other easily, and trading tends to cluster around a small, well-connected core. NBER ↗Federal Reserve ↗Stanford SIEPR ↗

Football is obviously not a bond market. Bonds, as far as I know, rarely refuse to move to Birmingham.

But the basic idea is useful.

Chelsea are not literally a dealer or market maker, but in this network they look a bit like a liquidity hub. They buy from lots of clubs, sell to lots of clubs and keep turning up on both sides of big domestic deals.

That gives them something useful: exits.

If you think ten clubs might eventually buy your player, spending £40 million on him is a very different bet from spending £40 million while quietly wondering who on earth is going to take him off you later.

Jackson and Rashford look different through that lens.

Jackson did not become a £65 million player because somebody completed the Nicolas Jackson discounted cash-flow model and got exactly £65,000,000.

Chelsea had a player. Villa wanted him. The deal worked. So £65 million became the price.

United had a much more famous player in Rashford and could not produce the same permanent market.

That is the part I find interesting: player value does not live entirely inside the player. Part of it lives in the network around him.

Search-and-bargaining models predict that harder-to-sell assets take an illiquidity discount. Football adds wages, agents, squad fit and the minor complication that the asset has opinions. NBER ↗

A club can be rich and still be illiquid. It can own famous players and still struggle to turn them into cash. The clubs with lots of exits have something less visible than transfer budget: optionality.

Maybe the smartest clubs are not the ones that know what a player is worth. They are the ones that know who will pay it.