Liverpool flop and genius deal feature in list of most expensive loanees ever with Chelsea man in at 9)

Who are the most expensive players ever to be sent out on loan by the clubs who spent a fortune signing them? Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United feature.

10) Arthur (£68.3m)
Arthur’s switch to Juventus in 2020 was one of the more peculiar deals of recent years. The midfielder moved from Barcelona for €72m, at roughly the same time Miralem Pjanic went the other way for €62m. Those figures seem steep, right?

It was a swap in which the fees exist in isolation from each other, part of a plan concocted between the two clubs to help them creep towards a profit on the balance sheet. That sort of loophole arrangement became common practice in the great PSR Separate Deal Summer of 2024 but back then it was bizarre.

Nobody was surprised when Arthur made just 24 league starts over two seasons for Juventus before being made available for loan to a panicking Liverpool. His entire stay consisted of 76 minutes: 13 in a 4-1 Champions League defeat to Napoli, and just over an hour of a 1-0 loss to Rochdale in the EFL Trophy.

9) Kepa (£71.6m)
In a fine reminder that Chelsea have always had the tendency to be a bit daft when it comes to transfers, regardless of owner, their reaction to clubs briefly going mad and spending bucketloads on goalkeepers was to break the world record for someone who had never justified the outlay.

Kepa was decent for Athletic Bilbao, a promising shot-stopper who had attracted interest from Real Madrid. But when Los Blancos moved on to Thibaut Courtois instead, Chelsea inherited their Kepa curiosity and went oh so big.

He was first-choice at Stamford Bridge for two seasons, back-up for a couple more, randomly the regular starter again in his fifth campaign and then sent on two different loans. And we mean different: Real Madrid first and Bournemouth second.

8) Nicolas Pepe (£72m)
Arsenal overpaid for Pepe. The fact the Gunners felt it necessary to hold an internal investigation over the deal is acknowledgement of that. But Napoli wanted to pay more.

Apparently, the Italian side were willing to go as high as £85million, including some add-ons, to sign the Ivorian from Lille. But because Arsenal were on good terms with the French club’s owner, and the player wanted to move to north London rather than Naples, saw to it that Pepe and the Gunners got their way.

They probably wish they hadn’t. Pepe showed the odd glimpse of the form that made him such a hot property in France but Mikel Arteta, after replacing Unai Emery, came to rely on him less and less.

So off he went to Nice, with eight goals and a single assist in 26 games doing nothing to persuade Arsenal against cancelling his contract a year early upon his return.

7) Jadon Sancho (£73m)
It seemed like a genuine coup when Manchester United finally captured Sancho from Dortmund in the aftermath of Euro 2021. The forward’s missed penalty in that final was a rare hitch which was not expected to extend into his burgeoning club career; things somehow got even worse.

An ordinary first two seasons were interrupted by personal issues which Sancho was allowed to work through, but a public disagreement with Erik ten Hag derailed any hope of a prosperous stay back in England. Sancho returned to the safe haven of Dortmund for half a season and even played in a Champions League final, before bridges were mended in summer 2024. It turns out that might well just have been to restore some of his value before shipping him off to Chelsea, who desperately needed a wide forward.

6) Gonzalo Higuain (£75.3m)
Higuain became the third most expensive player of all time in 2016 when Juventus forked out the £75.3million required to buy him out of his Napoli contract. Few doubted it was a savvy move. The season before, Higuain notched 36 league goals in 35 games.

Two years and 55 goals in 105 games for Juventus later, the then 30-year-old was deemed surplus to requirements. Harsh, perhaps. But that’s what happens when Cristiano Ronaldo rocks up to take your place.

Chelsea were heavily linked with a permanent move for Higuain but the ex-Real Madrid striker opted to stay in Italy with AC Milan on a try-before-you-buy deal. He tried; they didn’t buy. Instead, his loan to Milan was cut short and Higuain was dispatched to Chelsea mid-season on a similar deal with a similar outcome.

Having scored eight goals in 32 games back at Juventus in 2019/20, both parties agreed it was best to just knock it on the head. Then he went to play for Pip Neville at Inter Miami before deciding it was time to retire.

5) Gareth Bale (£85m)
Spurs sold Elvis and bought the Bootleg Beatles in 2013, bringing in seven players with the world record £85m Real Madrid chucked their way for a player who had just proved himself the best in the Premier League with an astonishing season.

Seven years later, Elvis was back in the building on a season-long loan after a nightmare seven years in Madrid where he has scored only 105 goals and won just five Champions League titles. More damning still, Bale scored crucial goals in only two of those five Champions League finals he won, and in only one of them did he produce one of the greatest goals ever scored in a major final. It is, frankly, piss poor.

With injuries and ennui blighting his last years in Spain, Bale devoted his energies to golf and not socialising with his team-mates before deciding to cheer himself up a bit by popping back to England to play at Jose Mourinho’s Joy Factory at Spurs.

When his Real deal finally expired, he nipped off to LAFC to keep himself fit for Wales’ World Cup campaign. With that in the rear-view mirror, Bale saw little point returning to MLS and jacked it all in.

4) Romelu Lukaku (£97.5m)
Inter pulled Chelsea’s pants down here.

The Italians signed Lukaku for around £73million, which seemed awfully steep at a time he’d floundered badly at Manchester United. At Inter, Lukaku showed all the qualities his supporters know him to possess, bagging 47 goals in two seasons and winning Serie A in 2021.

Inter than made a profit of almost £25million by selling him to Chelsea, where Lukaku flopped even harder than he did at Old Trafford. By the end of the season, Thomas Tuchel could barely hide his disdain for the Belgian.

Inter were happy to take him back but they pleaded poverty. It worked. They borrowed Lukaku for a year for around £7million before returning him as soon as he turned 30. Lukaku was packed back off for another spell in Italy with Roma before setting himself up permanently at Napoli under Antonio Conte.

3) Antoine Griezmann (£107m)
After the stick Griezmann received for ‘The Decision’, you’d think the France star might have had a word with Paul Pogba to warn his mate about making The Pogmentary. Apparently not.

Griezmann used his TV show to tell the world whether he would sign a new contract at Atletico or accept a huge offer from Barcelona. He stayed. For a year.

Twelve months after ‘The Decision’, he made another: to belatedly move to the Nou Camp. It went as well as his TV production. Two years and 22 goals later, Griezmann was being returned to Atletico on loan so Barca could shift at least some of his wages off their books.

As ever with Atletico and Barca, it wasn’t simple. Griezmann became a super-sub, rarely playing more than 30 minutes a game, owing to clauses in the deal, which was finally straightened out when Atletico paid Barca £20million to re-sign the attacker permanently.

A euro for Barca’s thoughts while Griezmann made the 2022 World Cup his playground in Qatar.

2) Joao Felix (£113m)
Only Neymar, Kylian Mbappe, Philippe Coutinho and Ousmane Dembele had moved for more money when Atletico forked out a sodding fortune to bring Felix from Benfica in 2019, when he was the world’s most expensive teenager behind Mbappe.

Halfway through his seven-year contract, having shown glimpses of the potential that tempted Atletico to break their transfer record, Felix finds himself out of the picture in Madrid. Had Diego Simeone sussed as much earlier, they might have got something close to their money back from a club as daft as a Manchester United, say.

The Portuguese instead slugged it out before adding Chelsea and Barcelona to his temporary resume, impressing at neither but somehow parlaying four goals in 16 games for the former into a permanent £42m move over a year after he first left them to zero reaction.

1) Philippe Coutinho (£142m)
‘He has played a total of 75 games as a blaugrana in which he has scored 21 goals and provided 11 assists,’ read the Barcelona statement announcing Coutinho’s year-long loan to Bayern Munich, thanking him for his ‘commitment and dedication’. That doesn’t really tell the whole story, does it?

Coutinho’s dream move to Barca quickly became a nightmare. The £142m price tag and the burden of expectation that came with being Neymar’s replacement proved too heavy for the Brazilian to bear.

The highlight of his Bayern career, and a perfect summary of the clusterf*ck that his Barca move has become, came when he scored the last two goals of an 8-2 spanking of his former club en route to Champions League glory.

Despite Barca’s best efforts to get rid, Coutinho stayed and barely played before joining Aston Villa on loan. After a positive half-season, Villa slammed £17million on a table at the Nou Camp and told Barca to take it or leave it. They took it. And he is now on his second loan away from Villa.

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