Manchester City agreed a deal worth £116 million to sign midfielder Elliot Anderson from Nottingham Forest, the club confirmed Thursday, making the 23-year-old the most expensive British player in history and the first major addition of the Enzo Maresca era at the Etihad.
The fee breaks the previous British record, the roughly £115 million Real Madrid paid Borussia Dortmund for Jude Bellingham in 2023, and ranks as the third-highest transfer in Premier League history behind Liverpool’s moves for Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz, both completed last summer. City’s statement described the fee as flat, “with no built-in add-ons or bonuses,” and said Anderson would sign a five-year contract with the club holding an option for a further year.
The move was struck while Anderson was still competing for England at the World Cup, and both clubs made clear the transfer’s formalities would wait until he returned home. “Manchester City and Nottingham Forest have reached an agreement for the transfer of Elliot Anderson,” City said in its statement. “The formalities of the move will be finalised upon his return to England… everyone at Manchester City wishes Elliot and the England squad the very best of luck in their World Cup campaign.” Forest confirmed the agreement separately on their own site the same day.
Anderson started all 37 of Forest’s Premier League matches last season, contributing four goals and four assists while ranking among the league’s leaders in tackles and passes, numbers that underpinned City’s willingness to pay a record fee for a player who had never featured for a traditional “big six” club. Forest signed him from Newcastle United for £35 million in June 2024, meaning Thursday’s deal nets the Midlands club roughly £81 million in profit over two years, a swing that will reshape their own transfer business this summer.
British reporting around the deal has put Anderson’s wages as high as £300,000 a week with bonuses, though neither club has confirmed exact salary terms. Manchester United had also been credited with interest in the midfielder before City moved decisively to secure him, a detail that underlines how competitive the market for young English talent has become since Bellingham’s departure reset expectations for homegrown fees three years ago.
A record that looks smaller with context
Anderson’s fee is a nominal record, but not a record once football’s changing economics are accounted for. Using an index built by football finance academic Kieran Maguire and Professor Jason Laws, which adjusts historic transfer fees for the growth in Premier League broadcast and commercial revenue rather than standard inflation, Anderson’s £116 million actually ranks 31st all-time. Alan Shearer’s £15 million move to Newcastle in 1996 adjusts to roughly £237 million by that measure, still the largest transfer in English football once resources are accounted for, ahead of Rio Ferdinand’s 2003 move to Manchester United and Fernando Torres’s 2011 switch to Chelsea. It is a reminder that record fees say as much about the game’s overall wealth as they do about any individual player.
City’s business under Maresca is now firmly underway. Anderson becomes the successor’s first signing after Pep Guardiola’s departure, and the fee is the clearest early signal of how the club intends to operate under its new manager. Nottingham Forest, for their part, will look to reinvest a windfall that instantly becomes one of the largest transfer profits British football has produced in a single deal, a shift that fits a broader pattern in how club ownership models now treat player trading as a core part of the business. More on how the numbers behind deals like this one work can be found in our look at football’s data-driven finances, and the latest transfer activity is tracked in our sports business coverage.
