Manchester City Spent £458m This Summer and Signed Enzo Fernandez on Deadline Day for a Joint British Record
Manchester City signed Enzo Fernandez from Chelsea for £125m on the last day of the window, equalling the joint British record, and closed a summer in which they spent £458m.
Manchester City signed the Argentina midfielder Enzo Fernandez from Chelsea for £125m on Monday, the last day of the English transfer window, at a fee that equals the joint British record set by Alexander Isak's move from Newcastle to Liverpool a year ago.
Fernandez is 25. Chelsea bought him from Benfica for £106m in 2023 and he won the Conference League and the expanded Club World Cup there. He joins a City midfield that has been rebuilt from the ground up in a single summer.
The other two pieces cost more than he did between them. Elliot Anderson came from Nottingham Forest for £116m and Ayyoub Bouaddi, who is 18, for £86m. The three of them add up to £327m. Iliman Ndiaye arrived from Everton for £65m. City's club record fee was broken twice inside the same window.
The total outlay for the summer is £458m, a Premier League record for a single window. Across the calendar year City have spent £542m and recovered £334m, a net £208m. Savinho went for £75m, Rodri for £65m and Tijjani Reijnders for £52m, and Tottenham are obliged to buy Omar Marmoush for £60m when his loan ends. Bernardo Silva and Nico Gonzalez also left. The midfield that carried the club through its most successful decade has effectively been dismantled and replaced in eleven weeks.
Across the division, Sky Sports put Premier League gross spending at £3.48bn against £2.17bn of sales, a net £1.30bn, ahead of a previous record of £3.19bn. Twenty players joined English top-flight clubs for £50m or more. Bradley Barcola went for £123m, Morgan Rogers for £117m and Sandro Tonali for £100m.
The window shut at seven o'clock on Monday evening in England. Scotland and the Women's Super League had until Thursday.
What the figures describe is a club solving a squad problem with cash on a scale no rival can match, in the first window of a new manager's tenure. Enzo Maresca replaced Pep Guardiola this summer and coached Fernandez at Chelsea, which is the plainest explanation for a deadline-day fee of this size. City had won their opening two league games before the international break. The new midfield has not yet played together.