Premier League clubs spent a record £3bn in the 2025 summer transfer window, and the 2026 window has pushed the top end of the market higher again. Four of the five biggest incoming transfers in the competition’s history have been completed since June 2025. The scale of that spending is one reason so much attention sits on the Premier League odds before a ball has been kicked in 2026-27.
In this article, we run through the five largest fees an English top-flight club has ever paid, using the figures reported at the time each deal was confirmed.
Alexander Isak, Liverpool, £125m
Liverpool signed Isak from Newcastle United on deadline day in September 2025 for a fixed fee of £125m, smashing the British transfer record. Newcastle had rejected an opening offer of £110m earlier that month and had valued him at £150m.
The Sweden international arrived at Anfield on a six-year deal, having scored 23 Premier League goals the previous season, as well as the winner in Newcastle’s Carabao Cup final victory over Liverpool that ended a 70-year wait for a major domestic trophy.
Morgan Rogers, Chelsea, £117m
Rogers joined Chelsea from Aston Villa in July 2026 on a seven-year contract, becoming the most expensive British player in history. He left Villa with 127 appearances and 31 goals to his name after arriving from Middlesbrough for an initial £8m, and his final act in claret and blue was a goal in the 3-0 Europa League final win over Freiburg in Istanbul, where he was named the tournament’s best player. Arsenal had tracked him for months but were unwilling to match Villa’s asking price.
Florian Wirtz, Liverpool, £116.5m
Wirtz arrived from Bayer Leverkusen in June 2025 for an initial £100m, with Sky Sports reporting the total package at £116.5m once add-ons are included. He held the British record for only a few weeks before Isak’s move, and his first season on Merseyside brought seven goals and seven assists in all competitions, well below what a fee of that size implies. He is contracted at Anfield until 2030.
Elliot Anderson, Manchester City, £116m
City agreed a £116m deal with Nottingham Forest for Anderson in June 2026, then finalised it in July once the midfielder had returned from the World Cup, where he was a regular starter in England’s run to third place. The fee comfortably beat the club’s previous record, the £100m paid to Villa for Jack Grealish in 2021, and made Anderson the most expensive British player for three weeks until Rogers moved to Stamford Bridge. He signed a five-year contract with the option of a further 12 months. Two British records falling inside one window helped push the average top-end fee to £70.5m in 2026, up from £36.6m in 2024-25, with coverage stretching from squad analysis to betting sign up offers ahead of the new campaign.
Moises Caicedo, Chelsea, £115m
Caicedo is the outlier here as the only deal on the list completed before 2025. Chelsea signed him from Brighton in August 2023 for an initial £100m plus £15m in add-ons, a British record at the time, on an eight-year contract with the option of another year. Liverpool had a £111m bid accepted days earlier, only for the Ecuador international to make clear he wanted to go to Stamford Bridge. Brighton had paid around £4.5m for him in February 2021 and kept a sell-on clause in the deal.
Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester City account for all five of these transfers. With the British transfer record reset once since June 2025 and the record fee for a British player twice more this summer, the list is unlikely to stay settled for long.
