Manchester United flop granted 'freedom' by Wirtz as new Liverpool man replaces obvious player

The Premier League is almost able to field an XI bought for £1bn, with Florian Wirtz replacing a Manchester United flop to finally breach that mark.

GK: Kepa Arrizabalaga (Athletic Bilbao to Chelsea, £71.6m)

Gianluigi Buffon was the world’s most expensive goalkeeper for 5,820 days. Ederson reigned for just over 13 months. Alisson only managed three weeks.

Kepa retains that mantle seven years on, despite spending much of the intervening time not even his own club’s best shot-stopper, nor even at his own club.

Chelsea continue to stumble and muddle through imperfect goalkeeping solutions despite otherwise spending literal billions assembling their squad, with Kepa deemed entirely surplus to requirements and ready to board the Arsenal train for a fair whack less than Chelsea paid.

CB: Harry Maguire (Leicester to Manchester United, £80m)

Another whose stock has fluctuated wildly between most expensive player ever in his position and saviour of the future, to poster boy for financial incompetence, Maguire is on his latest successful quest to win over a manager who tried to phase him out.

For his myriad faults and foibles, the England centre-half is as committed to the cause as they come and, as Ruben Amorim has taken barely any time to discover, can be useful if chucked up front while chasing a late goal.

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Manchester United definitely just tried to copy Liverpool’s homework but missed most of the working out, figuring that simply spending a world-record sum on a defender makes them an unbeatable leader of men for the best part of the next decade.

But across six years at Old Trafford, Maguire has given far more to the club than he has taken away. And if that sounds like a remarkably low bar for an £80m signing, he’s one of a handful who can say the same in that same timeframe.

CB: Josko Gvardiol (Leipzig to Manchester City, £77m)

The Premier League always seemed to beckon for Gvardiol. Leeds almost signed the Croatian in the season after their top-flight promotion, while the centre-half publicly discussed his dream of playing for Liverpool for years.

Try as they might, Chelsea simply could not extract Gvardiol from Leipzig in summer 2022, when Boehly was throwing money in every direction.

A £77.4m bid was not enough to persuade Leipzig to sell then, but Manchester City found their breakthrough with a similar figure 12 months later.

Gvardiol might not take immense pride in being named the club’s Player of the Season in what was a trophyless and often quite miserable campaign, but he has already collected a few winner’s medals in a brief spell at the Etihad.

CB: Virgil van Dijk (Southampton to Liverpool, £75m)

Before Liverpool signed Van Dijk on New Year’s Day 2018, the most expensive centre-half in history was David Luiz (£50m), the great man removing new teammate Thiago Silva (£32m) from that particular throne in 2014.

One further step back from Paris Saint-Germain’s Brazilian connection takes the lineage of the world’s most expensive central defender all the way back to Rio Ferdinand, who joined Manchester United for £30m in 2002.

The obvious importance of the position was appreciated, but not in transfer fee terms until Van Dijk. Liverpool laying £75m down on the Dutchman seemed to break the dam: there have been ten different moves worth at least £50m involving centre-halves in the subsequent seven-and-a-half years.

Each have been chasing that transformative impact Van Dijk had on Liverpool, turning them from exciting but porous entertainers into stable, brilliant winners. They reached consecutive Champions League finals upon his arrival and dropped just 32 points in his first two full Premier League campaigns.

The Dutchman has won the lot at Anfield, not missing a single minute of a title win and being named PFA Player of the Year in 2019, once again blazing a trail as the first defensive holder of that honour in 15 years.

Even now, with the 33-year-old slowing down and past his imperious, perhaps peerless physical peak, there are few better overall. The sums were astronomical but pound-for-pound, Liverpool have rarely spent more wisely.

READ MORE: Five times Liverpool failed with club-record transfers before Wirtz bids, including Van Dijk apology

RW: Antony (Ajax to Manchester United, £82m)

Doubts were expressed long before Manchester United completed the second most expensive signing in their history, and the only 180s conducted since have been by Antony himself.

Ten Hag vouched for and personally requested the purchase of his former Ajax colleague, which was a pitfall the Dutchman kept walking into until he was sacked.

Antony never has lacked the appropriate work ethic and his attitude has rarely been in question either, but a lack of pace and general one-dimensional style did not translate at all well to the Premier League beyond the first few weeks.

The years since his arrival have been defined by those involved in his signing trying their utmost to absolve themselves of blame. Antony has scored or assisted a goal every 319 minutes at Manchester United, compared to one every 152 minutes during that prodigious loan at Real Betis which has nevertheless not done quite enough to inflate his value to a point Old Trafford executives can sell without dying of PSR-related shame.

CM: Moises Caicedo (Brighton to Chelsea, £100m)

For about £4.5m, Brighton signed Caicedo from Independiente del Valle on deadline day of the 2021 winter transfer window. Two and a half years and 53 appearances for the Seagulls later, the midfielder was sold for a potential Premier League record fee thanks to some elite-level desperation.

Caicedo long seemed destined to join Chelsea in the summer of 2023, but some painful attempts at bargaining with actual professional poker player Tony Bloom saw their bids fall predictably short at £80m.

Then Liverpool crashed in with an offer of £111m, accepted by Brighton but certainly not by Caicedo himself, who had agreed personal terms with the Blues and was in no mood to renege.

That prompted Chelsea to eventually find a breakthrough in talks with Brighton, paying a premium for the inconvenience caused and leaving Liverpool with a small amount of egg on their faces.

If enough of the £15m in clauses are activated, Caicedo will become the most expensive player in Premier League history. He is already the biggest transfer step down.

CM: Declan Rice (West Ham to Arsenal, £100m)

It took two rejected bids, a rubbish Manchester City hijack attempt, more chat about payment structure than anyone would care to admit and a torturous wait for The Paperwork to be filed, but Arsenal finally inserted what they hoped to be the final piece of their jigsaw before jetting off on their pre-season tour of the United States.

“You only ever get one career and I really believe in what Mikel is building here and the squad he’s building,” a giddy Declan Rice told his new employers. “I’m really looking forward to the future with Arsenal.”

If informed then that he would score two free-kicks in a Champions League quarter-final win over Real Madrid, he might have imagined that future to involve trophies. But two years in he has been unable to drag them over the line, although little of that is down to the shortcomings of Rice himself.

CM: Enzo Fernandez (Benfica to Chelsea, £106.8m)

There were precious few positives to glean from Chelsea’s miserable first season without their Roman Abramovich stabilisers. Beyond that time they scored a goal and the other time they scored a different goal, a whole wedge of money was spent to become an entire bunch of awful.

The most silver lining to that dark Stamford Bridge cloud likely benefited from not being tainted by any of the nonsense for too long. Fernandez completed his remarkable seven-month rise in the winter, from €10m Benfica signing and Argentina youth international in June to a British record transfer as a World Cup winner in January.

It took a while and some managerial change for things to properly click but Fernandez and Chelsea are finally on the right track.

LW: Jack Grealish (Aston Villa to Manchester City, £100m)

A year is a long old time in football. While Miguel Almiron caught some stray bullets from Grealish as the Manchester City winger was being a “moron” during the club’s Premier League title celebrations in 2022, the #antics of a Treble-winning national treasure were enjoyed heartily in 2023.

Then came the spiral. Grealish did not score a single Manchester City goal in 2024 and has been ostracised to the extent that 2025 will involve either joining a new club or signing up for months of training with the reserves.

It turns out that there aren’t many clubs out there willing to either match the sort of wage Manchester City offer, or the kind of fee they need to tick enough PSR boxes. And Pep Guardiola couldn’t care less.

AM: Jadon Sancho (Borussia Dortmund to Manchester United, £73m)

As far back as August 2017, Sancho has been on the Manchester United radar. Borussia Dortmund’s ability to grant the ambitious young forward a clear first-team pathway meant they secured the Manchester City academy talent but his immediate burst onto the Bundesliga scene only crystallised interest from back home.

For each of the subsequent years until he finally arrived at Old Trafford in 2021, Sancho was frequently linked to a club hoping to build around a youthful British core; Manchester United even ‘forced the Germans’ into selling the England forward 12 months before he actually moved.

But Sancho has been nothing close to the wait. Even during his “freedom” from 12 goals and six assists in 83 appearances for Manchester United, Chelsea paid £5m to specifically not sign him permanently.

This place will belong to Florian Wirtz soon enough.

CF: Romelu Lukaku (Inter Milan to Chelsea, £97.5m)

Work has rarely if ever been quite as unfinished as the papers Lukaku opened again in 2021, a decade after his first Chelsea move. And the pile only stacked up further, so disastrous was his second spell at Stamford Bridge.

The problem a teenage Lukaku encountered and suffered from at Chelsea was a lack of opportunities. He made 15 appearances for the club during the 2011/12 and 2012/13 seasons, playing at least twice as often on separate loans with West Brom and Everton, before being permanently sold to the latter.

The issue an experienced Lukaku faced on his Blues comeback was perhaps a little more complex. The Belgian was signed to play a role he has never particularly suited, and his yearning for the comforting embrace and mutual appreciation of Inter bore itself out in an unseemly interview saga, after Lukaku publicly discussed his unhappiness while criticising Thomas Tuchel’s tactics.

That was the end of the road. Chelsea made £14.9m in loan fees from Inter and Roma before shipping Lukaku off to £30m; the Belgian has reached a Champions League final, Europa League semi-final and Serie A title glory in those spells.

Buying clubs: Chelsea (x4), Manchester United (x3), Manchester City (x2), Arsenal (x1), Liverpool (x1)

Total cost: £962.9m

Most expensive players to miss out:

Paul Pogba (Juventus to Manchester United, £89.3m)

Romelu Lukaku (Everton to Manchester United, £75m)

Nicolas Pepe (Lille to Arsenal, £72m)

Kai Havertz (Bayer Leverkusen to Chelsea, £71m)

Wesley Fofana (Leicester to Chelsea, £70m)

Ruben Dias (Benfica to Manchester City, £65m)

Kai Havertz (Chelsea to Arsenal, £65m)

Darwin Nunez (Benfica to Liverpool, £64m)

Rasmus Hojlund (Atalanta to Manchester United, £64m)

Rodri (Atletico Madrid to Manchester City, £62.8m)

Matheus Cunha (Wolves to Manchester United, £62.5m)

Mykhaylo Mudryk (Shakhtar Donetsk to Chelsea, £62m)

READ NEXT: Transfer rumour power ranking: Arsenal blow, Spurs to beat Man Utd to Mbeumo?

Click here to read article