Ryan O’HanlonNov 14, 2025, 06:45 AM ETCloseRyan O’Hanlon is a staff writer for ESPN.com. He’s also the author of “Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game’s Analytics Revolution.”Follow on X
play1:47Will Chelsea’s youth transfer policy finally work?Gab Marcotti and Julien Laurens react to Chelsea signing Geovany Quenda and Dario Essugo from Sporting in deals worth up to $81 million.
play0:34Arteta: Zubimendi joined Arsenal despite many opportunitiesArsenal manager Mikel Arteta believes new signing Martín Zubimendi joined the club despite “many opportunities.”
play0:46Why Bryan Mbeumo is a ‘great signing’ for Manchester UnitedMark Ogden reacts to Manchester United completing the signing of Bryan Mbeumo.
Yamal situation playground stuff’ from Barcelona and Spanish FA (1:49)Julien Lauren believes the Lamine Yamal situation could be “easily figured out” if both Barcelona and the Spanish FA “speak to each other” to sort it out. (1:49)
Will Chelsea’s youth transfer policy finally work?Gab Marcotti and Julien Laurens react to Chelsea signing Geovany Quenda and Dario Essugo from Sporting in deals worth up to $81 million.
Gab Marcotti and Julien Laurens react to Chelsea signing Geovany Quenda and Dario Essugo from Sporting in deals worth up to $81 million.
Arteta: Zubimendi joined Arsenal despite many opportunitiesArsenal manager Mikel Arteta believes new signing Martín Zubimendi joined the club despite “many opportunities.”
Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta believes new signing Martín Zubimendi joined the club despite “many opportunities.”
Why Bryan Mbeumo is a ‘great signing’ for Manchester UnitedMark Ogden reacts to Manchester United completing the signing of Bryan Mbeumo.
9. Arnaud Kalimuendo, €30 million, Stade Rennais to Nottingham Forest
8. Fábio Silva, €22.5 million, Wolverhampton to Borussia Dortmund
7. Omari Hutchinson, €40 million, Ipswich Town to Nottingham Forest
5. Dário Essugo, €22.7 million, Sporting Lisbon to Chelsea
4. Ardon Jashari, €36 million, Club Brugge to AC Milan
3. Charalampos Kostoulas, €30 million, Olympiacos to Brighton
2. Giovanni Leoni, €31 million, Parma to Liverpool
5. Martín Zubimendi, €70 million, Real Sociedad to Arsenal
4. The young, midtable goalkeepers: Djordje Petrovic and Caoimhín Kelleher
3. Álvaro Carreras, €50 million, Benfica to Real Madrid
2. Bryan Mbeumo, €75 million, Brentford to Manchester United
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.
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 completed, let’s take a look at the 10 worst-performing transfers — and five of the best — from the first three months.
– Are Chelsea succeeding? 9 stats that explain their season – Ranking the Champions League field at midway point – How the USMNT combats jet lag: Fly kits, supplements, sleep masks
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
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 has played 70% of the minutes so far, but he still ranks in the bottom 10.
The same applies at a leaguewide level. Premier League teams spent way more than everyone else, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.