Very easy, isn’t it, to get excited about the ol’ big-money signing? Spending megabucks on the shiny new player who will either solve all your problems or bring you whole new ones? Lovely stuff. Even if you do have to faff about selling your women’s team to yourselves to pay for it thanks to namby-pamby woke PSR red tape.

But do you know what can sometimes be even better? A lovely bargain. Feels like you’ve cheated somehow, doesn’t it? When you get a bargain? Even more than the actual cheating – sorry – ‘loophole exploiting’.

With Manchester United apparently considering an £8m move for Wilfred Ndidi, we find ourselves wondering who’s played that game best recently? Hint: It’s not Manchester United.

Anyway. Let’s have a quick look at 10 such bargains. Few ground rules to sort out first. We’re going for £10m as our cut-off here, and obviously in this age of undisclosed transfer fees and uncertainty over which currency the fee was actually paid in, that means there’s going to be a bit of guesswork – only some of which could reasonably be described as educated – involved.

Rest assured, if your favourite is inexplicably missing it’s not because we forgot about them, or are biased against both him and the stupid club you support, but because by our calculations he actually cost £10.01m okay? Good.

We’re also excluding free transfers completely. That feels like an entirely different category of bargain hunting, often involving the sneaky running down of contracts and resultant increase in wage packet. And no goalkeepers either, because with a couple of massive outlying exceptions they do still seem to exist on a completely different transfer-fee payscale to everyone else. Sorry, Matz Sels.

Another layer of inherent subjectivity comes with the fact a £10m signing in 2024 and a £10m signing in 2004 are very different beasts. We’ve not set ourselves a specific cut-off point, but have in more woolly and unscientific fashion vaguely attempted to favour more recent deals over older ones. For once, recency bias might actually be a virtue.

 

10) Justin Kluivert (Bournemouth)
Feels like you can’t have this list without a little bit of Bournemouth after their transfer dealings of the last few years, but at the same time it’s also true that their smartest and canniest work has probably happened slightly outside the scope of this particular list.

Selling Dominic Solanke for around £60m and replacing him with Evanilson for about half that, for instance. It’s incredibly smart transfer operating, but tis no bargain on our terms. The same applies to the signings of central-defensive duo Dean Huijsen and Ilya Zabarnyi for about £20m each over the last few years. Huijsen has already been sold on at a hefty profit, as will Zabarnyi if he were to move this summer.

At the actual sub-£10m bargain bucket deal, though, the best has probably if we’re being sensible been Antoine Semenyo, but we’re not that interested in sensible. We’re going for Justin Kluivert, largely because our own gut instinct was that even at just under £10m this was a colossal waste of money for a player who had already failed in Europe’s other four big leagues.

Achieving the milestone of playing and indeed scoring in all five of Europe’s top leagues – England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France  – by the age of 24 is certainly notable. But it’s not definitely good, is it? Especially when you’ve also got a famous name to trade on. It does suggest a certain itinerant flightiness, and more than one club discovering the name might be all you actually have to offer.

At Bournemouth and in the Premier League, though, he has shown signs of settling down and finding an environment that works. He has already played more league games here than anywhere else, and scored not just more goals but also at a better ratio.

And last season he also became the first Premier League player to score a hat-trick of penalties, so that’s fun isn’t it?

 

9) Callum Hudson-Odoi (Nottingham Forest)
We definitely needed some Forest in here after the events of last season, but alas boxed ourselves unnecessarily into a very stupid corner with our £10m cutoff.

Sure, it’s a lovely round number and we all enjoy those, but it also just rules out what was last summer’s most obvious actual bargain buy in Nikola Milenkovic, whose reported fee was somewhere around £11m. A staggering bargain for sure, but utterly useless and irrelevant to us.

What fools we are.

Luckily the previous summer, Forest brought Callum Hudson-Odoi from Chelsea for a fee that was definitely well below our arbitrary and self-defeating line.

A one-time wonderkid who had been linked with Europe’s great and good, Hudson-Odoi’s career had stalled almost entirely, and there was little evidence from a season on loan with Bayer Leverkusen in 2022/23 that he could still become the player his youth records promised.

Forest took the plunge, though, and have been rewarded handsomely, with Hudson-Odoi a key figure in one of the more unlikely storylines of the last couple of seasons, helping Forest first beat relegation despite a points deduction in 23/24 and then propelling them into a European position last season. A player who had never managed more than two league goals in any season ever has now contributed 13 across two seasons at the City Ground.

 

8) Yoane Wissa (Brentford)
Brentford are without doubt one of the more adept Premier League teams at this particular craft, and casually chucking a mere handful of millions Lorient’s way for Ivan Toney’s replacement two years before they even knew they needed one is among their very best bits of business.

The numbers from Wissa’s first couple of seasons look uninspiring on first glance, with seven goals from 30 games in 21/22 and seven from 38 in 22/23. But even a slightly deeper look reveals some hefty mitigation, with only 28 of those 68 appearances coming from the start.

Since Toney’s ban and subsequent departure, Wissa has emerged from his shadow and truly come into his own with 12 goals in 2023/24 and then 19 last season as his partnership with Bryan Mbeumo reached new levels.

MAILBOX: Is Bryan Mbeumo ‘worth’ £63m? Well he is to Brentford…

 

7) Kaoru Mitoma (Brighton)
Brighton are the undoubted masters of the art when it comes to scooping up budget replacements for players they are going to sell at a vast profit 12 months later. Far more often than can possibly be coincidence those budget replacements become the vast profit-makers themselves a couple of years further down the line.

Slightly annoyingly, though, a lot of the more recent signings of that nature come in just over the £10m mark and anyway, we don’t want this entire feature to become bogged down entirely in vulgar price-taggery and gauche net spend tables.

While in many ways the game has never felt more gone than it does right now, let us at least take some comfort that it remains a sport where someone like Mitoma can and does thrive in a league like the Barclays.

He is perfect. Just if anything for me, Clive, a fraction too maddening for the big beasts to come sniffing around too seriously, meaning Brighton fans get to enjoy for an extended period of time a player who at his best is as joyous and joyful as any to have graced these shores in many a long year.

Long may his mercurial reign continue. He is, in our eyes, the absolutely perfect example of a player who will steal the limelight in a 2pm Super Sunday game, have pundits raving and saying things like “If anyone tops that in this game from Anfield/Old Trafford/the Emirates/the Etihad today we’re in for a treat” before the dullest Big Six 0-0 of all time nevertheless hoovers up all the attention entirely and Mitoma’s goal and two assists in a 3-1 win over Everton are instantly cast to the fringes, because life is just stupid and unfair.

 

6) Antonee Robinson (Fulham)
Signed for a mere £2m after Wigan were relegated from the Championship, Robinson found himself in the Premier League for the last of Fulham’s yo-yo relegations. Having instantly popped back up again, Robinson has been a crucial part of the Cottagers pulling off the rare trick of ending the yo-yo business by defying gravity and staying up rather than down. West Brom and Norwich could never.

Robinson has missed a grand total of seven games across Fulham’s three successful seasons as a reliably entertaining and entertainingly reliable mid-table team, being named the club’s player of the year in 2023/24 and last season only seven Premier League players – all of them very much attacking players – provided more than Robinson’s 10 assists.

With three years left on his extended Fulham contract, it’s reasonable to conclude he’s not going anywhere for £2m again any time soon.

 

5) Fabian Schar (Newcastle United)
Newcastle may have had a frustrating time in their bid to simply buy their way to world domination as pesky rules interfere with their righteous pursuit of spending lots of lovely Saudi lucre on every player in sight, but there’s been plenty of upside.

For one, Newcastle have done pretty bloody well even without being able to spend quite so freely as they might like on everyone they might have liked. They’ve qualified for the Champions League now in two of the last three seasons while also ending the trophy drought nobody talked about – and it turns out doing so just in time to avoid being the club with the most conspicuous trophy drought. That unwanted title skips Newcastle altogether and lands now on Villa.

But another big plus of Newcastle having to live slightly more within their means has been the opportunity for players nobody expected to survive in the brave new world to thrive.

And few have taken that chance with greater alacrity or to wider surprise than Fabian Schar, who has now been at Newcastle for seven years after a £4m move from Deportivo La Coruna, defying logic and any sane prediction to become more rather than less important to the team as they’ve improved.

In his first four seasons at St James’ Park, Schar played a respectable but non-integral 24, 22, 18 and 25 Premier League games respectively. In the last three those numbers have been 36, 36, and 34 as well as playing every one of the club’s Champions League games in 23/24 and a full part in the successful Carabao run last season – missing only the second-round clash with Forest and the first leg against Arsenal when he was suspended.

 

4) Michael Olise (Crystal Palace)
Plenty of others considered it, but it was Palace in 2021 who took the plunge and triggered Olise’s £8m release clause at Reading.

Good as he was for Palace, and juicy as the 50-odd million pounds profit they made on him when Bayern Munich came a-wooing, there nevertheless remains a hint of unfinished business and what might have been. We suppose winning the FA Cup this season has put something of a lid on those pesky ‘What if?’ type thoughts, but nevertheless.

After his first two-and-a-half years at Palace it was obvious he was very good, but those final giddy weeks when he returned from injury under new manager Oliver Glasner at the end of the 23/24 season were something else entirely. Despite playing only 19 games that season, he still scored 10 goals and registered six assists. Four of those goals and three of those assists came in that wild 19-points-from-seven-games run at the end of the season.

And absolutely nothing about his subsequent efforts with Bayern suggest that elevated form was a mere blip.

 

3) Gabriel Martinelli (Arsenal)
There’s a strong argument now that Martinelli represents a markedly upgradeable member of their squad as they once again strive to take that final yet most difficult step from runners-up to champions.

But it’s also almost certain that whoever that upgrade might be they will cost far more than the reported six million quid Arsenal slung Ituano’s way for a teenaged Martinelli back in 2019.

Now, this is the sort of speculative youth signing that all teams look to make when the opportunity arises, but Martinelli stands out for the sheer speed with which he got himself in and around the first-team picture at Arsenal. Signed with a view to spending his first season with the reserve and age-group teams, he instead sparkled in pre-season and made his Premier League debut less than six weeks after joining the club in July 2019.

A month later he was starting in the Carabao, although sadly his second competitive start for Arsenal has now been struck from official club records for coming in the Europa League, a competition the Gunners no longer recognise.

 

2) Idrissa Gueye (Everton)
A move so nice, Everton did it twice. Now they might not be the first Premier League club you think of when you consider the phrase ‘astute and successful financial planning and spending’ but it’s hard to deny they’ve played a blinder down the years with Gueye.

They’ve had six years of stellar service from the midfielder across two spells having bought him from relegated Aston Villa for £7m in 2016, sold him three years later to PSG for £30m and then bought him back again after another three years for £2m.

Either side of helping himself to a couple of obligatory league titles in Paris, Gueye has been a rock of a defensive midfielder for Everton and picked up a player of the year award in each of his two three-season stints at Goodison.

He made more tackles than any other Premier League player in the 2024/25 season, with Everton understandably keen to keep him on for another season despite the fact he is now 35 and out of contract.

 

1) Alexis Mac Allister (Brighton)
Long gone are the days when the most interesting thing about Alexis Mac Allister was the fact his dad had both the most Scottish name and face of any Argentinean man ever.

Mac Allister was signed by Brighton for around £8m in 2019 from Argentinos Juniors and immediately loaned back for the remainder of the season, before spending another spell on loan back home at Boca Juniors.

Mac Allister finally made his Brighton debut in what proved to be their last game before Covid brought the world and even the Premier League to a halt.

When everything resumed, Mac Allister quickly established himself as a key member of the Brighton side, and by the time Brighton were finishing a lofty sixth to secure European qualification in 2022/23 Mac Allister was both Brighton’s clear star man and a World Cup winner.

He was Brighton’s top scorer and player of the season before making a move to Liverpool that was a) rather more than £8m and b) wildly successful.