Manchester City has torn up its own transfer ledger. The club has agreed a £116 million deal with Nottingham Forest for midfielder Elliot Anderson, a fee described as final with no built-in add-ons or bonus clauses attached, making the 23-year-old the most expensive player City has ever signed.
The move eclipses the £100 million City paid Aston Villa for Jack Grealish in 2021, which had stood as the club record for nearly five years. It also briefly made Anderson the priciest British footballer in history, surpassing the £115 million Real Madrid paid for Jude Bellingham when he left Borussia Dortmund in 2023, a distinction that lasted only a couple of days before Chelsea’s move for Morgan Rogers. In its statement confirming the agreement, City said “the formalities of the move will be finalised upon his return to England,” adding that “everyone at Manchester City wishes Elliot and the England squad the very best of luck in their World Cup campaign” while he completed his medical at England’s training base in Kansas.
Anderson has since returned from international duty, having been part of an England squad whose World Cup run closed out with a bronze-medal finish. That return clears the way for City to formalize a deal that had effectively been agreed for weeks but could not be signed off while its subject was still on national team business on another continent.
Even at £116 million, the fee is not the biggest paid for a midfielder this summer, let alone the biggest in the Premier League. Chelsea’s £117 million deal for Morgan Rogers, agreed just days later in the same window, pushed Anderson’s fee back to second place among 2026 Premier League deals, while Alexander Isak’s British-record £125 million move from Newcastle to Liverpool the previous summer remains the largest fee ever paid for a Premier League player. It is a useful reminder of how quickly the ceiling on fees has moved. Two seasons ago, spending in excess of £100 million was rare enough to define a transfer window on its own. Now it barely guarantees the biggest deal of the summer at your own club.
The number also tells a striking story about Forest’s business. They paid £35 million to sign Anderson in 2024, and inside two years have more than tripled that outlay by selling him on to City. In between, he made 92 appearances in all competitions for Forest, contributing six goals and 11 assists, and this past season alone he started 37 of the club’s 38 Premier League matches, adding four goals and four assists. A Newcastle United academy product who made 55 senior appearances, including 44 in the Premier League, before joining Forest permanently in 2024, Anderson has built his reputation on relentless work rate and ball-carrying rather than eye-catching numbers. That is precisely the profile incoming head coach Enzo Maresca has prioritized in midfield rebuilds at his previous clubs, and Anderson’s arrival is being framed as the first major signing of the Maresca era at the Etihad.
For a City side reshaping itself after a difficult stretch domestically, breaking the bank for a box-to-box midfielder rather than another marquee forward is itself a signal. The Grealish deal in 2021 was about adding a proven Premier League winger who could unlock deep defenses immediately. Anderson is a different kind of investment: younger, less decorated, but seen internally as a long-term core piece rather than a name bought purely to make an immediate splash. It is also the sort of deal that only becomes possible once a rival’s academy graduate has spent two full seasons proving himself in the same league, which is exactly the path Anderson followed through Newcastle’s youth system and Forest’s first team before this move materialized.
Whether the fee looks reasonable in a year’s time depends on how quickly Anderson adapts to a City midfield built around different principles than the counter-pressing football he thrived in at Forest. Fans have reason for patience given the scale of the wider squad rebuild happening around him this summer, but £116 million buys very little margin for a slow start. Set beside Chelsea’s £117 million move for Rogers and Tottenham’s own club-record fee for Tonali, City’s outlay on Anderson shows just how far Premier League clubs are now willing to stretch for midfield reinforcements they view as generational fits rather than short-term upgrades.
