The Top 10 Most Expensive Players Signed in 2025
- Think Football Ideas
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 4 hours ago
Money has always spoken in football. In 2025, it didn’t just speak, it boomed, echoed, and rattled the windows. English clubs alone burned through £2.8 BILLION on new signings, a figure so vast it almost stops meaning anything once you say it out loud.
According to FIFA’s Global Transfer Report, Premier League and EFL sides were once again the sport’s great accelerators. They kept buying, selling, flipping, and reshaping squads at a pace nobody else could match.
Globally, transfer fees climbed to a staggering £9bn, fuelled by 86,158 international deals. That was a 50 per cent jump on 2024. English clubs banked £1.3bn in sales, even as they continued to dominate the spending charts. This was football’s economy at full throttle.
At the centre of it all stood Swedish striker Alexander Isak. Elegant, devastating, and inevitable. Liverpool didn’t just sign him; they made a statement.
£130million to prise him from Newcastle United and install him as the new spearhead of a title-winning side. It was the defining deal of 2025, the one that crowned it, rather than set it in motion.
Liverpool, in fact, set the tone for the entire market. Their summer spending spree also pulled Florian Wirtz and Hugo Ekitike into orbit, pushing the club’s ambition beyond subtlety and into something louder, brasher, unmistakable.
Manchester United were not far behind. Old Trafford swallowed big numbers again, welcoming Benjamin Sesko and Bryan Mbeumo for a combined outlay that nudged £145m. This was a club still trying to buy its way back to certainty, still searching for rhythm through reinvention.
Elsewhere, Newcastle moved swiftly to soften Isak’s departure. Nick Woltemade arrived from Stuttgart, joined by Yoane Wissa, as the club reshaped rather than retreated.
Arsenal, meanwhile, went shopping with purpose - Eberechi Eze and Viktor Gyokeres recruited not for hope, but for a title push that demanded polish and edge.
Not every blockbuster involved England. Victor Osimhen’s move from Napoli to Galatasaray - £64.8m - stood as the most expensive deal outside the Premier League’s gravitational pull.
And Luis Diaz’s £65m switch to Bayern Munich became the biggest foreign sale by an English club, proof that even the sellers were cashing in heavily.
This was not just a year of excess in men’s football either. Women’s football recorded 2,440 transfers, up 6.3 per cent, with spending reaching £20.7m - modest by comparison, but moving steadily in the same direction.
The numbers tell one story. The feeling tells another. 2025 was a year when ambition outweighed caution, when clubs leaned fully into the future and paid whatever it took to chase it.
Below are the ten deals that defined that frenzy.
The Top 10 MOST EXPENSIVE PLAYERS SIGNED IN 2025
Rank | Player | From ➤ To | Fee |
1 | Alexander Isak | Newcastle ➤ Liverpool | £130m |
2 | Florian Wirtz | Leverkusen ➤ Liverpool | £116.5m |
3 | Hugo Ekitike | Frankfurt ➤ Liverpool | £79m |
4 | Benjamin Sesko | RB Leipzig ➤ Man United | £74m |
5 | Bryan Mbeumo | Brentford ➤ Man United | €71m |
6 | Nick Woltemade | Stuttgart ➤ Newcastle | £69m |
7 | Eberechi Eze | Crystal Palace ➤ Arsenal | £67.5m |
8 | Luis Diaz | Liverpool ➤ Bayern Munich | £65m |
9 | Victor Osimhen | Napoli ➤ Galatasaray | £64.8m |
10 | Viktor Gyokeres | Sporting ➤ Arsenal | £63.5m |
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