#3: The summer transfer window was as crazy as ever
2017 saw some crazy money being thrown around during the transfer window. Paris St. Germain smashed the world transfer fee record by signing Neymar for nearly £200m, completely eclipsing 2016’s £89m for Paul Pogba, and Barcelona responded by signing Ousmane Dembele for around £100m. Nobody really thought that 2018 could push things any further.
Sure, Barca also signed Philppe Coutinho from Liverpool for around £106m in January, but that was more a continuation of the Neymar saga from the summer. The summer transfer window couldn’t possibly be as wild this year, right?
And yet it totally was. The most expensive move saw Kylian Mbappe officially move to PSG from Monaco for a fee of around £158m.
Now that may have been expected given he’d already spent a season on loan there. What wasn’t expected, however, was that the world record fee for a goalkeeper would be broken twice – firstly by Liverpool, who paid somewhere around £60m for Roma’s Alisson Becker, and then less than a month later by Chelsea, who parted with a crazy £71m for Athletic Bilbao’s Kepa Arrizabalaga.
This was after Liverpool had already broken the record fee for a defender by spending £75m on Virgil Van Dijk in January, of course.
Elsewhere we saw a huge shocker as the world’s best player, Cristiano Ronaldo, finally moved from Real Madrid after 9 years with the Spanish giants. Many fans expected CR7 to end his career at the Bernabeu, and so they were stunned when he made a move to Juventus largely out of nowhere for a huge fee of £88.5m – giving Madrid a slight profit in the process.
In the end, of the 50 most expensive transfers in football history, 14 of them took place in 2018. Considering people thought the transfer market had peaked in 2017, that’s pretty crazy.
Only time will tell whether 2019 can top this again, but there’s no denying that 2018 was a memorable year for transfers.