Man City £5m transfer that blew away PSR worries in Premier League

It hasn't been a great week for the Premier League and several of its clubs.

Last summer first flagged concerns that the best way to be financially sustainable (while still spending hundreds of millions on new players) was to sell the most promising academy players for what Chelsea coined as 'pure profit'. Points deductions for Everton and Nottingham Forest over the last 12 months have heightened the need for clubs looking to maintain or improve their position to sell.

Everton, Forest, Newcastle, Aston Villa and Chelsea are among the clubs that have spent the last fortnight scrambling to arrange deals for unproven talent, with any sales counting immediately on the books while purchases can be spread over the length of the contract. It has brought unease about young talent being essentially swapped to ease financial situations, although it remains possible that it could also work out for the players.

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City have been able to avoid the PSR scramble because they generate more money than any club in England and have not spent exorbitantly in recent years, making sure to bring in sales to offset their incomings. That has been helped by the increasing value of their academy players after winning the Under-18s and Under-21s league three years in a row between 2021 and 2023.

It may not have been the most eye-catching deal of a summer where they signed Erling Haaland, but in 2022 a game-changing sale was the £5m received for young midfielder Darko Gyabi from Leeds. Gyabi was not seen as a player close to breaking into the City first team, yet had still been identified by a Premier