Under no circumstances could 27 be considered old.
But the transfer market of football rarely goes into conventional wisdom, and Arsenal's large money movement for the 27-year-old Viktor Gyokeres stands out as something of an old bucket, with the rest of the market that deposits his resources into a fresher talent.
Liverpool's conquest of Florian Wirtz from Bayer Leverkusen This summer makes him the third player of 22 years or younger to be signed by a Premier League club for £ 100 million ($ 136.4 million) or more in the last four seasons, who joined Chelsea's Mosises Caicedo and En en En en En En En en En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En En Et.
Young talent is clear in the question in the 2020s, but how many are Premier League clubs moving their recruitment to attracting the shiny new Wonderkids?
A usual way to measure this is to take the average age of new signing sessions, but this does not entirely explain the nuances of modern team building of. Clubs often bring in a flurry of budget signing sessions to connect gaps instead of forming the basis of a team.
When Arsenal Chelsea paid £ 5 million for Spanish goalkeeper Kepa Arrizabalaga, it was a back -up for David Raya – a role that is reflected in the modest compensation.
Instead, athletics has calculated the average age by weighing the age of a signature by their reimbursement. The more expensive a player, the more importance is placed. This reduces the influence of the stopgap options and reflects more where the recruitment priorities of the clubs are.
The results confirm how Bullish has become the market on the youth. The weighted average age fell under 23 in the Premier League history for the first time last season, and early signs of the Summer Window 2025-26 suggest that the trend will take place.
Every approach based on transfer costs is inevitably in favor of financially dominant clubs. According to Estimates of Transfertmarkt, Chelsea has spent £ 865 million to players aged 21 or younger since Blueco took over it in May 2022, more than £ 400 million prior to the next largest spender, Manchester City (£ 343 million).
And historically it was the stronger clubs that tend to buy and sell younger players than the rest of the competition. Premier League champions are at the forefront of this and recruit the youngest – usually about 23 years old – with the help of their power position to renew and evolve for a title defense.
On the other side of the table, relegation-threatened parties do not have the same luxury of long-term planning. With survival the priority, they tend to favor experience, sign players who are on average about two years older than those brought in by top clubs.
But the landscape is shifting. In his book Leiden, Alex Ferguson wrote about the dual benefits of the youth: “Our emphasis on young people produced two things – the pipeline of talent for the first team and a very healthy secondary activity.”
During the last decade of Ferguson's reign, Manchester United had the youngest transfer-weighted average age in the competition (23), closely followed by other financial colossi of the era: Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur.
Since then, the profile of clubs that are the most focused on the recruitment of young people compared to their budget has changed dramatically.
It is no longer the domain of the elite. Instead, Brighton & Hove Albion and Brentford clubs were defined by Data-First Principles-to-be as the modern leaders of the trend.
While Ferguson rightly emphasized the financial benefit of signing young players and selling them, United and other big clubs of that time usually acquired young talent with the intention of keeping them at the elite level for years.
Brighton and Brentford, on the other hand, are much more aggressive in their drawing young, sales high model, with their transfer-weighted average signed age more than a year younger than United's during the last decade of Ferguson.
Without the enormous commercial income available for the 'Big Six', both clubs have leaned heavily on players' actions to finance their rise. Brentford's then-co-director of football, Rasmus Ankersen-NU in Southampton scored this philosophy in 2017: “You want to try to sign players who are in their peak or on their way to their peak, instead of being a falling property.” Former managers of both clubs, Roberto de Zerbi in Brighton and Thomas Frank in Brentford, have previously described their teams as “selling clubs”.
Both have been remarkably successful in carrying out that model. Chelsea under Clearlake and Todd Boehly may be aggressive, but it is often Brighton who arrives first. Joao Pedro, Caicedo and Marc Cucurella were all signed by Brighton before they were sold with a good profit, with Chelsea the buyer in any case.
Bryan Mbeumo who joins Manchester United from Brentford for £ 71 million This summer is a successful case study that unfolds live before our eyes that checks all the boxes.
Firstly, he is proof of Brentford's assets to take their recruitment network more wider than the prominent European competitions, originating from the second -class French club Troyes in 2019, only 19 years old. Now 25, there are indications that Brentford may have sold him at the height of his value.
The graph below shows the average fee that is paid for signing sessions about different age brackets in the Premier League. Players between the ages of 21 and 25 tend to control the highest reimbursements before they fall in value as they get older.
But it is not only understanding of player value that feeds the youth's obsession; It is also about where the pitch clubs now focus their expenses.
In the 1990s, the assignment for club directors of managers was often simple: give me a striker. In the early years of the transfer-Window era, more than 30 percent of the transfer expenditure was assigned to Forward.
That trend is pronounced when you look at the progress of British transfer records from that time: Andy Cole, Stan Collymore and Alan Shearer all broke the record in the 1990s, all center-forwards.
But as football evolved into an intense, high-printing, positionally flowing game, the traditional center-forward center has fallen through the road, with the Premier League spending less than 20 percent of the transfer funds in the past four seasons. Their former prestige in the transfer market has gradually been eroded by versatile, energetic attacking midfielders and broad attackers-such as Wirtz.
This summer a turning point could mark, while clubs shift their focus back to strikers. Hugo Ekitike has become a member of Liverpool and Gyokeres in a lucrative transfer to sign for Arsenal, while Nicolas Jackson of Chelsea could also be in motion after Enzo Maresca had renewed his forward line with the addition of Joao Pedro and Liam Delap.
Center-Forwards usually takes longer to reach their peak, whereby physical strength plays a more crucial role in their development. With the help of the share of the minutes that are played by age in each position as a proxy for peak age, Center-Forwards are usually the most prominent around 27-year-old two years later than central attacking midfielders and the same age as gyokeres is now. The signing of younger attacking midfielders offers both the promise of faster impact on Pitch and the possibility to take advantage of their resale value.
Clubs that agitize more than peak age and transfer values in the center-forward market risk, go too early promising but unproven strikers and miss the obvious obvious. Arsenal needs a powerful goalter to spear their dangerous attacking unit, and Gyokeres fits on that account – his age is a peripheral care for Mikel Arteta.
Ferguson wrote that when United Robin van Persie signed for £ 24 million in 2012, the biggest fee that the club had paid for a player older than 27 years, “the only questions that the glazers asked were about his age”, an indication that they were concerned about buying a falling property.
Despite his 26 goals that United propelled to their last league title in 2012-2013, the worries of the glazers were financially justified, with Van Persie being sold only £ 4 million to Fenerbahce after three seasons.
Van Persie's clear but short flame at United embodies the tension between success in the short term and sustainable long -term performance that forms the core of all transfer decisions. At the time, Arsenal takes the same picture as United, and priority gives an immediate impact on future upward and are desperately looking for the same results.
In the meantime, the rest of the competition largely takes the long -term vision and support young prospects to lead them to the future.
(Top image: Liverpool FC/Getty images; Design by Will Tullos for athletics)