Over the summer, clubs across the world spent $9.76 billion on acquiring about 12,000 new players.
Both numbers were record highs, according to FIFA. Around 1,000 more players changed teams in 2025 than did in 2024, and the near-$10 billion outlay was a more-than-50% increase over the summer spending in the previous year.
Most of the money was spent by UEFA clubs: $8.5 billion, which was a $3 billion increase from just the year before. About 7,350 players joined new teams in UEFA, around 20% of those players required transfer fees to acquire, and the average price of those transfer fees was $4.27 million -- a $1.2 million per-deal average increase from 2024.
Unsurprisingly, most of that money was spent by members of the Big Five top leagues in Europe and their associated lower-down-the-ladder clubs. England led the way with $3.19 billion spent on transfers, while Spain, Germany, France, and Italy all spent over $650 million, too. All in all, clubs across these five countries spent $6.5 billion -- two-thirds of the entire global transfer spend.
And what did they get? Per Transfermarkt data, there were 203 transfers for at least €10 million across the Big Five leagues over the summer. And through mid-November, those players have combined to play ... only 45% of their team's minutes. It gets a little better when you look at the more expensive deals, but not by much: the players with fees of at least €35 million have played 49% of the minutes.
When you're investing this much money into simply acquiring a player -- and we're not even accounting for the contracts -- two things are true: (1) you expect that player to play more than 45% of the minutes, and (2) you're thinking much longer term than the first 10 or 12 games of the year.
It's still too early to write off any move as a failure or start celebrating anything as a massive success -- but you also don't get to extend a player's contract just because he started slow, and you can't reclaim lost points just because your new midfield took a couple months to gel. These games have already happened -- you're never getting them back.
So, with nearly a third of the season already completed, let's take a look at the 10 worst-performing transfers -- and five of the best -- from the first three months.
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What makes a bad transfer?
Almost by definition, the worst deals among these 203 moves for €10 million or more are going to be some of the most expensive ones. And if we look at "value left on the bench" -- a player's transfer fee, multiplied by the percentage of minutes he hasn't played this far -- then it's going to skew heavily toward the biggest deals.
If a team paid €10 million to sign a player, then €10 million is the max that can be left on the bench. If a team paid €100 million, then, well, yeah, you see where I'm going. By this crude metric, here are the 10 worst deals among the Big Five leagues so far:
1) Alexander Isak, Liverpool: €107.88 million left on the bench
2) Yoane Wissa, Newcastle: €57.7 million
3) Nick Woltemade, Newcastle: €46.95 million
4) Xavi Simons, Tottenham: €43.2 million
5) Jamie Gittens, Chelsea: €41.83 million
6) Noni Madueke, Arsenal: €38.7 million
7) Tyler Dibling, Everton: €37.95 million
8) Omari Hutchinson, Nottingham Forest: €37.8 million
9) Florian Wirtz, Liverpool: €37.5 million
10) Jorrel Hato, Chelsea: €36.71 million
Liverpool broke the Premier League transfer record for a frequently injured player, and they're already experiencing pretty much all of the downside from that bet: Isak has only played about one-fourth of the Premier League minutes so far.
But even when you play a significant number of minutes, it's hard not to rate poorly when a team pays nine figures to acquire you. Before Isak, Liverpool broke the Premier League transfer record for Wirtz earlier in the summer, and he's played 70% of the minutes so far, but he still ranks in the bottom 10.
The same applies at a league-wide level. Premier League teams spent way more than everyone else, and so transfers made by Premier League clubs make up the majority of the bottom of the list. In fact, there's only one non-Premier-League transfer in the bottom 20 by this method: AC Milan acquired midfielder Ardon Jashari from Club Brugge for €36 million, and he's only played 1.6% of the Serie A minutes because he broke his leg in late August.
However, we're only grading these moves based on the downsides. Let's say you sign someone for $80 million and he only plays 50% of the minutes every year ... but he also gets you 12 goals and 5 assists every year. Is that a failure? A success? A combination of the two?
Transfermarkt also estimates the market value for every player in the world using crowd-sourcing. If we take that and multiply it by the percentage of minutes each player has played, we can come up with another crude number: a version of the value he's provided to his team thus far. (It's not perfect -- estimated transfer values aren't 1-to-1 with player performance -- but it at least lets us apply the methodology to each player equally.)
Then, we can rank each deal by both of these numbers -- value provided, value left on the bench -- and then we can combine the two numbers to get a general sense of the performance of each transfer so far.
The 10 worst transfer deals so far
10. Ben Doak, €23.1 million, Liverpool to Bournemouth
Herein lies the upside and downside of spending significant money on signing a 19-year-old. Doak has only played 5% of the minutes for Bournemouth so far this season, but there's still so much more time left for him to come good. He won't hit his prime years for another five seasons.
And yet: he won't be in his prime for another five seasons. That's a lot of potential time where a player you invested €23.1 million into still might not be good enough to contribute for your first team.
9. Arnaud Kalimuendo, €30 million, Stade Rennais to Nottingham Forest
With all of Forest's struggles, I pin pretty much all of it on the ridiculous ownership of Evangelos Marinakis and almost none of it on the players or the three coaches they've employed this season. Kalimuendo has started zero matches, and he's a center forward who has so far attempted three total shots. That's a rate of €10 million per shot.
8. Fábio Silva, €22.5 million, Wolverhampton to Borussia Dortmund
The year is 2035. Fabio Silva has transferred from Atletico Madrid to Marseille. It's his 10th team in 10 years. He's never garnered a fee more than the initial €40 million that Wolves paid to acquire him from Porto as a teenager, and yet the cumulative transfer fees over his career make him the most expensive player in the history of the sport. He is a 32-year-old center forward who has never scored more than eight non-penalty goals in a single season.
7. Omari Hutchinson, €40 million, Ipswich Town to Nottingham Forest
Forest paid a combined €152 million to acquire Kalimuendo, Hutchinson, Dilane Bakwa, James McAtee, Jair Cunha, Igor Jesus, and Dan Ndoye this past summer. On average, they've played 26% of the available Premier League minutes.
6. Tyler Dibling, €40.5 million, Southampton to Everton
This is the "Doak Problem," times two. Everton paid a lot of money to sign a teenager with only one discernible skill: his ability to dribble past defenders. As we're seeing with Jérémy Doku's explosion at Manchester City this season, that can be the right long-term bet. But it took Doku until his age-23 season to really become a winning player. Dibling won't get there for another four years.
Gab Marcotti and Julien Laurens react to Chelsea signing Geovany Quenda and Dario Essugo from Sporting in deals worth up to $81 million.
5. Dário Essugo, €22.7 million, Sporting Lisbon to Chelsea
I don't know what kind of Faustian deal Chelsea's ownership made with a corporate-connected practitioner of the dark arts, but the record-breaking amounts of money they spent to sign midfielders Moisés Caicedo and Enzo Fernández has mostly worked out. These deals had to hit their 95th-percentile outcomes to be worth it, and Caicedo is a legit superstar, while Fernandez is one of the better passing midfielders in the world. But any time Chelsea have tried to acquire a third midfielder, it has almost immediately fallen apart.
Romeo Lavia -- remember him? -- has made 12 starts across three seasons, thanks to a succession of injuries. And now Essugo's Chelsea career has started off similarly: He's played zero minutes and is out until at least the start of 2026 after undergoing thigh surgery in September.
4. Ardon Jashari, €36 million, Club Brugge to AC Milan
The loss of Jashari hasn't hurt Milan much because 40-year-old Luka Modric is the latest midfielder to drink from the fountain of youth that is the Serie A tactical environment. He's completed 99 progressive passes, while no one else in the league has more than 79, but he's also made 36 tackles and interceptions, which is 12th-most in Italy.
3. Charalampos Kostoulas, €30 million, Olympiacos to Brighton
The 19-year-old Kostoulas has only played 32 Premier League minutes, and he's attempted two shots. That puts him ahead of Kalimuendo on the millions-per-shot leaderboard. But he's still way behind Isak's six shots, at a rate of €24 million per attempt.
2. Giovanni Leoni, €31 million, Parma to Liverpool
This probably isn't the name you expected to see from Liverpool, but Leoni provided zero Premier League value to Liverpool before tearing his ACL against Southampton in the Carabao Cup in late September. Among the players in our dataset who have played zero minutes this season, Leoni's move required the second-highest transfer fee.
This methodology that I landed on also assumes that both Wirtz and Isak have performed to their requisite standard whenever they've played this season, so they avoided the top 10. But Wirtz is averaging 0.32 non-penalty expected goals and assists per 90 minutes, and while Isak's rate is better (0.54), that's without any of the build-up play responsibilities or pressing output that Wirtz has. More simply, they've combined for zero goals and one assist in the Premier League so far.
I've suffered my own whiplash in how to accurately assess Liverpool's disappointing season, but the simplest explanation is also probably the best: They broke the British transfer record to sign two different attackers this past summer (when you include add-ons), and their combined goal+assist output is less than that of James Milner, who turns 40 in two months.
1. Yoane Wissa, €57.7 million, Brentford to Newcastle
While there are all kinds of caveats with these rankings, no such conditionals apply here. Purely based on the first three months of the season, this is easily the worst transfer of the summer. Wissa hasn't played a single minute for Newcastle yet, but it's worse than that. Everyone else in this top 10 is 23 or younger. In fact, everyone else in the top 25 is 24 or younger. These are all players with plenty of time to improve and come good, to make up for lost time.
Wissa, though, is already 29 years old.
The five best transfers so far
Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta believes new signing Martín Zubimendi joined the club despite "many opportunities."
5. Martín Zubimendi, €70 million, Real Sociedad to Arsenal
He is the defensive midfielder for the best defensive team of the decade, and he's immediately slotted into the starting XI and played nearly every minute of every match. On top of that, per Gradient Sports, he's completed 62 line-breaking passes -- 24 more than any of his teammates and more than all but six other players in the league.
For a big-money deal for an already-in-his-prime player to work out, you need the player to contribute immediately, and Zubimendi has played at a league-winning level right from the start.
4. The young, mid-table goalkeepers: Djordje Petrovic and Caoimhín Kelleher
The minutes-based methodology either rewards or punishes keepers in an outsize fashion since most teams don't rotate keepers across the season and no teams will consistently sub out their starting goalkeeper. But 26-year-old Petrovic (€28.9 million from Chelsea) and 25-year-old Kelleher (€14.8 million from Liverpool) have both played every minute of every Premier League match for Bournemouth and Brentford, respectively.
It's still too early to say too much about their shot-stopping performance but both clubs could have found their starting goalkeepers for at least the next half-decade.
3. Álvaro Carreras, €50 million, Benfica to Real Madrid
Just as we all expected, Madrid have solidified one half of their full back pair with one of the better passers at his position in the world. It's just that it's Carreras on the left, and not Trent Alexander-Arnold on the right. While TAA has barely played meaningful competitive minutes for Madrid yet, the 22-year-old Carreras has played 99.3% of all of the LaLiga minutes so far. And they're not empty minutes, either. He's completed 108 progressive passes, while no one else on the team has more than 72.
Mark Ogden reacts to Manchester United completing the signing of Bryan Mbeumo.
2. Bryan Mbeumo, €75 million, Brentford to Manchester United
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most successful short-term moves skew much older than the least successful ones. The average age of the 20 worst-rated deals is 21.1, while the average age of the top 20 deals is 24.7.
As I wrote about over the summer, I didn't think the 26-year-old Mbeumo made sense for United, given how old he'd be when United might next realistically challenge for a league title. But if you wanted to make your team better immediately, there were few surer bets than Mbeumo, who had already been a very good Premier League player for multiple seasons and had done so while occupying just about every possible attacking role over his six years with Brentford.
Despite being an attacker, he's played about 97% of the minutes for United so far this season, and he's providing just north of 0.5 non-penalty goals+assists per 90 minutes. There's nothing to suggest that performance is unsustainable, so if he keeps it up and remains healthy, he'll end the season with around 17 non-penalty goals and three assists.
1. Lucas Chevalier, €40 million, Lille to PSG
We'll see if Chevalier ends up being the long-term No. 1 answer in Paris, but he's one of only six players in our dataset who have played every minute of every game: five goalkeepers, along with Sunderland's Granit Xhaka. And he's the only one doing it for the defending European champions.