Is There a Premier League Transfer Club?

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, though, we got stuck on something neither of us could quite explain.

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. This isn’t an argument about him being rubbish. 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.

Meanwhile Rashford — an England international with more than 100 goals for Manchester United and plenty of Premier League pedigree — seemed to have far fewer 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 potentially has more resale value. Transfers are messy, and comparing two players directly is rarely fair.

Still, we couldn’t get past it.

Because once you start paying attention, deals like Jackson’s don’t feel particularly unusual in the Premier League anymore.

English clubs routinely sell players to one another for £40 million, £50 million, £60 million or more. Some clubs seem especially good at finding another Premier League side willing to pay. And often, the same names keep appearing on both sides of the deals.

That led us to a slightly more mischievous question:

Is there a transfer club inside the Premier League?

Not a literal cabal. There probably isn’t a smoky room where a handful of sporting directors decide who gets to buy whom.

The reality could be much more mundane.

Some clubs may simply have better access to the Premier League’s internal transfer market. They know the right people. They have dealt with one another before. They understand what kinds of payment structures the other side will accept. They can move quickly. And, crucially, they have counterparties willing to put serious Premier League money on the table.

If that is true, then being part of this network has value.

You don’t just need good players.

You need clubs willing to buy them.

And perhaps that access isn’t distributed equally.

So instead of arguing about whether Jackson is really “worth” £65 million, I pulled the transfers apart and asked a different question: who actually has 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%, according to Sky Sports.

By the end of the 2026/27 summer window, The Guardian’s post-window analysis put the domestic share at 39.3%.

Reuters put total Premier League summer spending at a record £3.46 billion and found that 38% of deals were between Premier League clubs.

So the interesting question is no longer whether Premier League clubs buy from one another.

They clearly do.

The question is who gets the money.

2. Who gets the money?

Once the transfer fees are plotted directly, the four roles become much easier to see.

For 2026/27, I have added a conservative estimate from the final post-window club-by-club reports. The reported fee-bearing deals between the current Premier League clubs add up to about £1.36 billion this summer alone.

The scatter is more interesting as a set of roles than as a league table.

Chelsea are the outlier: roughly £749 million spent and £768 million received inside the league. Brighton are the clearest supplier at about £115 million spent and £534 million received. Manchester United sit on the opposite side: about £470 million spent and only £131 million received.

Manchester City and Arsenal are also buyer-heavy, while Villa and Newcastle are more two-way. The exact quadrant boundaries will move as the sample changes; the useful part is the shape. Some clubs mostly feed the market. Some mostly consume it. A few do both at scale.

But the scatter still cannot tell us which clubs keep finding one another.

3. Who actually deals with whom?

The scatter tells us which clubs buy and sell inside the league. The network underneath it shows where those transactions actually concentrate.

The first thing that jumps out is Chelsea. Five of the 13 £100m-plus corridors in this view involve them. The three largest are almost tied: Chelsea–Villa at roughly £243 million, Chelsea–Manchester City at roughly £240 million, and Chelsea–Brighton at roughly £237 million.

But they are not the same kind of relationship. Chelsea–Brighton is overwhelmingly one-way: about £230 million has flowed from Chelsea to Brighton in the fee-bearing summer deals captured here. Chelsea–Villa is genuinely two-way, at roughly £140 million from Chelsea to Villa and £103 million the other way on this basis. Reuters counts eight permanent or loan deals between the clubs since 2022; the network is still narrower because ordinary loans are excluded, while mandatory purchase obligations are counted as committed transfer value.

None of that is evidence of collusion. Emery described the Villa–Chelsea relationship as business rather than friendship. What the network does show is something more mundane, and probably more useful: some clubs repeatedly find another Premier League club willing to transact at Premier League prices.

That is much closer to the question we started with.

4. Maybe the market needs hubs

At this point the graph starts to look less like a football curiosity and more like a market-design problem.

The transfer market has no central order book. Manchester United cannot list Marcus Rashford at 9:00am and discover the market-clearing price by lunch. A club has to find the right buyer, agree a fee, wages, payment terms, timing and agent terms — and get the player to say yes.

Economists call that a search friction. In over-the-counter markets, assets become more liquid when buyers and sellers can find each other more easily. NBER ↗

Those markets often develop a core and a periphery: a small number of highly connected participants sit in the middle because they have more routes to a deal. Federal Reserve ↗Stanford SIEPR ↗

Chelsea are not a dealer or a market maker. But in this network they look like something close to a liquidity hub. They buy from many clubs, sell to many clubs, and repeatedly appear on both sides of major domestic transfers.

That may be an advantage in itself. A club with ten plausible exits for a player is playing a different game from a club with two. It can move faster, negotiate against more counterparties and take more risks when it buys.

Which brings us back to Jackson and Rashford.

Maybe Jackson did not become a £65 million player because somebody proved he was intrinsically worth £65 million. Chelsea found a buyer willing to make him one. United, despite their size, did not find the same permanent market for Rashford.

That is the part I did not expect when I started looking at this: player value is partly a property of the network around the player. Search-and-bargaining models say harder-to-find counterparties create illiquidity discounts; football adds wages, agents, squad fit and human choice, but the intuition survives. NBER ↗

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

So the next time a transfer fee looks absurd, maybe the better question is not “Is he worth that much?” but “Who had access to a buyer willing to make him worth that much?”