The bar to clear to make the top ten list of the most expensive summer deadline day Premier League transfers is £35m, thanks to some awful Man Utd deals. 10) Danny Drinkwater – £35m (Leicester to Chelsea, 2017) Clubs will stop spending money to try and make Antonio Conte happy at some point. Napoli will soon discover that not even unwrapping a brand new Scott McTominay can sate the Italian manager’s appetite for drama.
Conte might actually have had a point when it came to Chelsea’s summer after winning the Premier League title in 2017, though. They built on those foundations with Willy Caballero, Antonio Rudiger, Tiemoue Bakayoko, Alvaro Morata, Davide Zappacosta and Danny Drinkwater. That is an impressively poor hit rate.
One of those transfers ended in an actual apology from the player half a decade later , which says an awful lot. Drinkwater started 12 games in five years at Stamford Bridge, last featuring for them in the Premier League in March 2018 before being sent on four different loans, including two underwhelming top-flight spells with Aston Villa and Burnley. The Blues released him in 2022 but Drinkwater did not officially announce his retirement until October 2023.
9) Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain – £35m (Arsenal to Liverpool, 2017) “It would be not fair to put the defeat at Liverpool, where the whole team had a bad performance, on one player,” said Arsene Wenger in December 2017 , the wounds from a 4-0 shellacking at Anfield four months prior having bare.