The summer of 2026 has once again seen records smashed across the transfer market. Elliot Anderson’s £116m move from Nottingham Forest to Manchester City briefly made him the most expensive British player in history — a record he held for only a few weeks before Morgan Rogers’ £117m Chelsea transfer took it, alongside Rogers becoming the most expensive English player ever. Tottenham broke their own club record twice in a single week, paying £85m for Mateus Fernandes before topping it days later with a package worth up to £100m for Sandro Tonali. To the casual observer, transfer inflation is as aggressive as it has ever been. But beyond the headline numbers, a clearer pattern is emerging: global transfer spending is increasingly dominated by the riches of the Premier League. English clubs are swallowing inflated purchase prices, but a different problem is emerging on the other side of the books.

Arsenal are a good case in point this summer when it comes to sales. The current Premier League champions and Champions League finalists should have a strong selling market, even for players deemed surplus to requirements in north London. Leandro Trossard left for Beşiktaş for a reported £15.3m, rising to £17m. Jakub Kiwior, bought for roughly £21m from Spezia in 2023, moved on to Porto for a fixed £14.8m, with an extra £2m loan fee and up to £4.3m in add-ons. Two squad players from the best Arsenal side in years, sold into continental Europe for fees that look more like a mid-table Championship deal than business done by champions. Does the Premier League have a selling problem?

Premier League clubs are dealing with the reality that years of revenue growth outpacing the rest of Europe has created a genuine wealth disparity. European clubs generally have lower revenue ceilings, tied to smaller league broadcast deals and thinner commercial opportunities. German football, in particular, is shaped by a fiscal conservatism in how squads are built and maintained, which depresses transfer fees further. This isn’t dissimilar to the spending power between a wealthy nation like the US and poorer countries around the world. Just as the US’s trade deficit means it exports far less value than it imports, English clubs selling into Europe don’t get the same currency back. Trossard leaving for £15-17m, Kiwior for £14.8m — these fees reflect what Beşiktaş and Porto can actually generate, the same way a foreign country buying US exports pays in its own constrained purchasing power, not in the inflated terms the US itself operates under domestically.

So why sell outside of England?

It seems odd for a club like Arsenal, in a position of strength and selling out of choice rather than necessity, to accept deflated transfer fees. Aside from individual player preference, a club like Arsenal doesn’t want to directly benefit a domestic rival. Trossard might be expendable at Arsenal, but he’d have a marked impact at many other top-half sides in the league. Given how much is financially at stake in the Premier League, accepting a lower fee from abroad is a trade-off Arsenal are happy to live with.

In theory, a European club could act as a broker, re-selling a player back to the Premier League within the same window — circumventing any reluctance a club like Arsenal might have about strengthening a domestic rival directly. FIFA, though, closed this loophole back in 2020, defining the practice as a bridge transfer: two connected transfers of the same player, run through a middle club specifically to get around the usual rules. Any player moved twice within roughly 16 weeks is presumed guilty of exactly that, unless the clubs involved can prove otherwise.

Arsenal aren’t alone in this. Aston Villa’s Lucas Digne — a current France international, fresh off the 2026 World Cup — left for Paris Saint-Germain this summer for what ESPN’s own transfer grades called a “relatively nominal fee,” with the outlet noting PSG “probably couldn’t find a cheaper deal for a player of this quality if they tried.” Spurs look set to sell both Cristian Romero and Djed Spence for what would again appear to be prices well below market value. There is also the exception of Anthony Gordon’s £70m move to Barcelona — a club alongside bitter rivals Real Madrid that does seem to have deeper pockets than most.  In reality, the price simply reflects where the European market is — defined by what a club is willing to pay for that player at that moment.

This isn’t an Arsenal problem. It’s what happens when English clubs try to sell into a market they don’t control the pricing of. The Premier League is rich enough to inflate its own buying market whilst shrugging off deflated sale abroad; this a symptom of success rather than failure. Whether this continues and remains sustainable is a separate issue. Envious European eyes might try to restrict spending some way through UEFA regulations, or the bubble around broadcasting and commercial revenue might simply burst. But right now the Premier League is seemingly rich enough not to worry.