Under no circumstances should 27 be considered old.
But football’s transfer market rarely deals in conventional wisdom, and Arsenal’s big-money move for the 27-year-old Viktor Gyokeres stands out as something of an old-age outlier, with the rest of the market pouring its resources into fresher-faced talent.
Liverpool’s capture of Florian Wirtz from Bayer Leverkusen this summer makes him the third player aged 22 or under to be signed by a Premier League club for £100million ($136.4m) or more in the past four seasons, joining Chelsea’s Moises Caicedo and Enzo Fernandez.
Young talent is clearly in demand in the 2020s, but just how much have Premier League clubs shifted their recruitment towards attracting the shiny new wonderkids?
A common way to measure this is by taking the average age of new signings, but this doesn’t fully capture the nuances of modern squad-building. Clubs often bring in a flurry of budget signings to plug gaps rather than form a team’s foundations.
When Arsenal paid Chelsea £5million for Spanish goalkeeper Kepa Arrizabalaga, it was as backup for David Raya — a role reflected in the modest fee.
Instead, The Athletic has calculated average age by weighting a signing’s age by their fee. The more expensive a player, the more importance is placed. This reduces the influence of the stopgap options and is more reflective of where the clubs’ recruitment priorities lie.
The results confirm just how bullish the market has become on youth. The weighted average age dipped below 23 for the first time in Premier League history last season, and early signs from the 2025-26 summer window suggest that trend is continuing.
Any approach based on transfer fees inevitably favours financially dominant clubs. According to Transfermarkt estimates, Chelsea have spent £865million on players aged 21 or younger since BlueCo took over in May 2022, more than £400million ahead of the next biggest spender, Manchester City (£343million).
And historically, it has been the stronger clubs that have tended to buy and sell younger players than the rest of the league. Premier League champions lead the way here and recruit youngest — typically around 23 years old — using their position of strength to refresh and evolve for a title defence.
At the other end of the table, relegation-threatened sides don’t have that same luxury of long-term planning. With survival the priority, they tend to favour experience, signing players who are, on average, around two years older than those brought in by top clubs.
But the landscape is shifting. In his book Leading, Alex Ferguson wrote about the twofold benefits of youth: “Our emphasis on youth produced two things — the pipeline of talent for the first team and a very healthy sideline business.”
During the final decade of Ferguson’s reign, Manchester United had the youngest transfer-weighted average age in the league (23), closely followed by other financial behemoths of the era: Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur.
Since then, the profile of clubs most focused on youth recruitment relative to their budget has changed dramatically.
It’s no longer the preserve of the elite. Instead, Brighton & Hove Albion and Brentford — clubs defined by data-first principles — have emerged as the modern leaders of the trend.
While Ferguson rightly highlighted the financial upside of signing young players and selling them on, United and other big clubs of the time were mostly acquiring young talent with the intention of keeping them at the elite level for years to come.
Brighton and Brentford, by contrast, are far more aggressive in their sign-young, sell-high model, with their transfer-weighted average signing age more than a year younger than United’s during Ferguson’s final decade.
Without the vast commercial revenues available to the ‘Big Six’, both clubs have leaned heavily on player trading to fund their rise. Brentford’s then-co-director of football, Rasmus Ankersen — now at Southampton — outlined this philosophy in 2017: “You want to try to sign players who are in their peak or on their way to their peak, rather than being a declining asset.” Former managers of both clubs, Roberto De Zerbi at Brighton and Thomas Frank at Brentford, have previously described their teams as “selling clubs”.
Both have been remarkably successful in executing that model. Chelsea under Clearlake and Todd Boehly may be aggressively buying youth, but it’s often Brighton who get there first. Joao Pedro, Caicedo, and Marc Cucurella were all signed by Brighton before being sold on at a hefty profit, with Chelsea the buyer in each case.
Bryan Mbeumo joining Manchester United from Brentford for £71million this summer is a successful case study unfolding live in front of our eyes that ticks all the boxes.
First, he is evidence of Brentford’s ability to intelligently cast their recruitment net wider than the prominent European leagues, coming from second-tier French club Troyes in 2019, aged just 19. Now 25, there’s evidence that Brentford might have sold him at the peak of his value.
The chart below shows the average fee paid for signings across different age brackets in the Premier League. Players between the ages of 21 and 25 tend to command the highest fees, before declining in value as they age.
But it’s not just understanding of player value that’s fuelling the youth obsession; it’s also about where on the pitch clubs are now focusing their spending.
In the 1990s, the brief for club directors from managers was often simple: get me a striker. In the early years of the transfer-window era, over 30 per cent of transfer spend was allocated to forwards.
That trend is pronounced when you look at the progression of British transfer records from that era: Andy Cole, Stan Collymore and Alan Shearer all broke the record in the 1990s, all centre-forwards.
But as football evolved into an intense, high-pressing, positionally fluid game, the traditional centre-forward has fallen by the wayside, with the Premier League spending less than 20 per cent of its transfer funds on them in the previous four seasons. Their former prestige in the transfer market has gradually been eroded by versatile, high-energy attacking midfielders and wide forwards — such as Wirtz.
This summer could mark a turning point, as clubs shift their focus back to strikers. Hugo Ekitike has joined Liverpool in a lucrative transfer and Gyokeres is set to sign for Arsenal, while Chelsea’s Nicolas Jackson could be on the move too after Enzo Maresca refreshed his forward line with the addition of Joao Pedro and Liam Delap.
Centre-forwards typically take longer to reach their peak, with physical strength playing a more critical role in their development. Using the share of minutes played by age across each position as a proxy for peak age, centre-forwards tend to be most prominent around 27 — roughly two years later than central attacking midfielders and the same age as Gyokeres is now. Signing younger attacking midfielders offers both the promise of quicker on-pitch impact and the opportunity to capitalise on their resale value.
Clubs agitating over peak age and transfer values in the centre-forward market risk going too early on promising but unproven strikers and missing out on the glaringly obvious. Arsenal need a potent goalgetter to spearhead their dangerous attacking unit, and Gyokeres resoundingly fits that bill — his age is a peripheral concern for Mikel Arteta.
Ferguson wrote that when United signed Robin van Persie for £24million in 2012, the largest fee the club had paid for a player over the age of 27, “the only questions the Glazers asked were about his age”, an indication that they were concerned about buying a declining asset.
Despite his 26 goals propelling United to their last league title in 2012-13, the Glazers’ concerns were financially justified, with Van Persie sold to Fenerbahce for just £4million after three seasons.
Van Persie’s bright but brief flame at United embodies the tension between short-term success and sustainable long-term performance that is at the heart of all transfer decisions. Arsenal are taking the similar view as United did back then, prioritising immediate impact over future upside and are desperate for the same results.
The rest of the league, meanwhile, are largely taking the long-term view, backing young prospects to boldly lead them into the future.
(Top image: Liverpool FC/Getty Images; design by Will Tullos for The Athletic)