5 times clubs massively overpaid for players

#3 David Luiz - £50m to Paris St. Germain, 2014

By making him the world's most expensive defender, Paris St. Germain overpaid hugely for David Luiz

There aren’t many top players who can be signed by the same club twice, and yet only cost the club a total of around £2.5m, but that’s the case with David Luiz. The Brazilian defender was signed by Chelsea for around £22.5m in the January 2011 transfer window and then spent three-and-a-half seasons at Stamford Bridge, where despite showing flashes of his potential, he came into a lot of criticism for some sloppy defending too.

Pundit Gary Neville famously compared his defending skills to a player “being controlled by a 10-year old on a Playstation”, and after a disastrous performance in Brazil’s infamous 7-1 loss to Germany in the 2014 World Cup, it seemed the defender’s stock couldn’t drop much lower. But somehow, Paris St. Germain came in with a crazy £50m offer in the summer of 2014 that Chelsea basically had to accept. Incredibly, it was a world-record transfer fee for a defender!

To be fair to Luiz, he did win the Ligue 1 championship and the Coupe de France twice during his time in Paris, but then with PSG’s status as the biggest and most powerful club in France, that was probably to be expected. It came as almost as big a surprise then when Chelsea’s then-new manager Antonio Conte re-signed the Brazilian in the summer of 2016 for a far lower fee of around £30m.

Luiz actually performed well in the 2016/17 season as Chelsea won the Premier League title, and although he lost his place in 2017/18 and appears to be reaching the end of the road at Stamford Bridge, his transfer fees still represent good business for the Blues, given how heavily PSG overpaid for him.