Sell-on clauses: The transfer pre-assist that keeps some football clubs alive

May 05, 2024

It is July 2016 and the transfer ticker turns yellow: Jordon Ibe’s move from Liverpool to Bournemouth for a £15million fee is confirmed. And thanks to a sell-on clause being activated, so too is the immediate future of Wycombe Wanderers.

This summer Queens Park Rangers find themselves in the same boat, hoping and praying they might see Eberechi Eze’s name light up the transfer blogs and sports news segments across the UK in similar fashion. Carlisle United would probably be quite pleased if Nottingham Forest and Manchester United stopped doing the transfer tango and got a deal for Dean Henderson across the line, too.

Sell-on clauses are one of football’s most interesting peculiarities and they can be transformative in the histories of clubs in the EFL and below – sides who so often play the role of the transfer pre-assist behind each transfer window’s biggest deals.

Past cases are numerous, such as Ibe’s transfer to the Vitality Stadium some four years after he had left Adams Park for Anfield. At the time the fee received by the then-League Two club enabled them to pay off a £1million loan to ex-owner Steve Hayes six years early, securing the future of the club under the control of the Wycombe Wanderers Trust.

Ollie Watkins’ much anticipated move from Brentford to Aston Villa in 2020 for £28million was a game changer for boyhood club Exeter City, who have rebuilt on a model of developing and selling talented young players since they became fan owned in 2003. Though they are scrupulously run and are one of the EFL’s healthiest clubs in financial terms, the £4million sell-on fee they received from Watkins’ move was twice the sum they landed for his transfer to Brentford three years earlier and represented roughly the same as the club’s entire turnover in 2018-19 (£4,079,870).

The sell-on clause has, to look at the numbers in simple terms, paid for the club’s new £2million training facility at Cliff Hill which was completed in spring 2023. And this summer has seen the fruits of Exeter’s youth development policy come good again following Ethan Ampadu’s move from Chelsea to Leeds United for a reported £7million plus add-ons, of which the Devon club have at least a 20 per cent sell-on clause.

When the Welsh international — who made his Exeter debut at the age of 15 — first left for Chelsea in 2017, the two clubs went to a tribunal over the fee. That ended up being up to £2.5million — a disappointing resolution for City at the time, but one that has come good eventually.

There are plenty more deals either already completed or on the way to completion this summer that should see a financial windfall for EFL clubs. Teams who many times inserted sell-on clauses as much out of hope as expectation that they might receive more money for a player down the line. While the guaranteed transfer fee and structure of a deal is always a priority, particularly for lower-league clubs where money is scarce, sell-on clauses act as a means of sweetening a deal.

The payments will arrive based on a structure agreed between the selling and buying clubs, which more often than not means the fee is received in instalments. Some clubs who want the entire sell-on fee up front negotiate for that to happen, usually at a reduced percentage of the overall fee.

Ethan Ampadu’s move to Leeds from Chelsea this summer has rewarded his former club Exeter (Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)

Goalkeeper James Trafford, who this summer moved from Manchester City to newly-promoted Burnley for a reported £19million fee, originally started out at Carlisle United. They will receive a 15 per cent sell-on fee after he left the Cumbrian club for City as a 12-year-old. Speaking at a fan forum in June, Carlisle chief executive Nigel Clibbens explained how the structure of the deal will benefit the club, but only over a protracted timeline, saying “even at big, double-digit millions, it’s not going to help us too much” because of the delayed nature of payments by instalment.

“You get paid your money when the seller gets paid their money,” he said. “Say a player is transferred for £20m and it’s paid over four years, you get your instalments over four years. So anything we get on that kind of deal might be quite small, and a long time in the future.”

There is a temptation for clubs — particularly those strapped for cash — to live on the hope of a sell-on clause coming good, as was the case with Notts County and former player Steve Finnan. After moving to Fulham in 1998, Finnan was wanted by Liverpool in 2003 at a time when County were struggling financially and had been eagerly anticipating their cut of a future transfer fee for the right-back. However, Fulham acted quickly to buy out Finnan’s sell-on clause — a move that Notts County had to accept because of their immediate need for cash — before agreeing a £3.5million fee with Liverpool.

Steve Finnan during the 2007 Champions League final, eight-and-a-half years after leaving Notts County (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

Among those clubs waiting or, perhaps more accurately, hoping for transfers to happen this summer are Blackburn Rovers and QPR, who have both started the new season with uncertainty surrounding the future of their managers and their ability to compete in the Championship.

After banking a 25 per cent cut of former academy player Raheem Sterling’s £44million move from Liverpool to Manchester City in 2015, QPR understand the importance of a sell-on clause and fought hard to include one in the deal that saw star midfielder Eze join Crystal Palace in 2020.

Eze, who has since been capped for England, signed a five-year deal with Palace for an initial £16million fee – QPR’s record sale at the time. The deal became protracted because of their insistence on a sell-on clause and, as Eze enters the final 24 months of his contract, interest from bigger clubs is expected that could yet pay dividends for QPR.

Eberechi Eze playing for England earlier this summer (MATTHEW MIRABELLI/AFP via Getty Images)

Blackburn, meanwhile, came much closer to collecting some sell-on funds this summer. After selling goalkeeper David Raya to Brentford in 2019, the hope of a guaranteed return on their reported 12.5 per cent sell-on clause has been delayed by the Spaniard joining Arsenal on a loan deal rather than on a permanent basis. Arsenal retain the right to buy the 27-year-old for £27million next summer.

Brushes with big money moves for ex-players can be a bruising lesson. Birmingham City hoped for years that a clause in the deal that saw Jack Butland move to Stoke City in 2013 would pay off, with the goalkeeper ranked among the best in the country at the time. But after suffering relegation with Stoke, his free transfer to Crystal Palace seven years later put an end to any chance of that.

Birmingham were not stung again this summer when ex-midfielder Jude Bellingham moved from Borussia Dortmund to Real Madrid for a reported £88.5million fee, however, with a five per cent sell-on clause coming in addition to the £25million banked when he left the club in 2020.

Bradford City were anticipating big things (and a big sell-on clause payment) for former academy youngster Tom Cleverley when he was at Manchester United before he ultimately left Old Trafford to join Everton on a free transfer in 2015.

But the Bantams’ record transfer fee for a player remains the payment received as a sell-on when Oli McBurnie — originally sold to Swansea City for £250,000 in 2015 — joined Sheffield United in 2019, this time bringing in £3.2million.

You win some, you lose some. Either way, the anticipation of a sell-on clause being activated will continue to offer hope to many clubs throughout the pyramid.

(Top photos: Getty Images)

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