Which clubs have earned the most from player sales in the last 10 seasons? Top 20 ranked

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The January transfer slammed shut at the start of the week and with its conclusion we can now start to draw some conclusions from where the most money was spent in the transfer window over the course of the entire 2024/25 season. Football fans, understandably, are usually only interested in how much money their cherished club is willing to spend on new players, but the hundreds of millions of Euros that are deposited into club accounts twice a season for the most promising young players in the sports is perhaps just as interesting. So which clubs have made a habit of flaunting their best talents in the shop window in the modern era? Looking back over the last 10 years of transfers, we can now reveal the top 20 clubs with the highest incomes from player sales across the world. 

Chelsea and Man City dominate in England

The club that have made the most money from player sales over the last 10 seasons may surprise some readers. While the likes of Borussia Dortmund (fifth) or Monaco (third) may be the names that come to mind first when most football fans think of “selling clubs” the very top earner in the transfer window over the course of the last 10 seasons happens to be Chelsea. Rather remarkably, the Stamford Bridge side have earned no less than €1.3 billion in player sales, which puts them comfortably at the top of the list. While the Premier League giants have earned fortunes from selling key players like Eden Hazard (sold for €120.8m), Kai Havertz (€75m) and Oscar (€60m), the club’s bank balance has instead tended to bulge thanks to the constant signing and then sales of young players that never tend to make it to the club’s first team. This season provided multiple examples of that, as the club earned €44.5m from the sale of Ian Maatsen to Aston Villa, €33m for Lewis Hall’s departure to Newcastle and €23.5m when Ipswich bought Omari Hutchinson. 

Chelsea are far and away the most successful English club when it comes to selling players in the transfer window, but they’re not the only Premier League representatives in the top 20. In ninth place are none other than Manchester City, who have earned €877m from player sales over the course of the last ten seasons. Like Chelsea, the perennial English champions tend to finance the signing of world class players like Rodri, Erling Haaland and Ederson by routinely moving on younger players that are of little use to Pep Guardiola’s first team. Of course, they have sanctioned some big-money sales, such as Julián Alvarez’s €75m move to Atlético Madrid or Raheem Sterling’s €56.2m move to Chelsea, but over the course of the last 10 years they have only sold four players for more than €50m, with the average price of their 90 sales standing at just €9.7m. 

While the top 20 is populated by numerous clubs from Europe’s top five leagues, eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that the list also includes all three Portuguese giants, with Benfica sitting second after earning €1.27b from player sales, while Porto (€846m) and Sporting rank 10th and 19th on the list. This may come as something of a surprise, considering that the Portuguese top-flight’s overall income from player sales over the course of the last 10 seasons only places the league sixth among all others in Europe. However, in the aforementioned trio, the small nation clearly has three clubs that have mastered the art of making remarkable sums of money from the players they scout and train into top-class players. 

Indeed, when we consider the largest transfer fees of all time, no less than two of the top 10 involve Liga Portugal side Benfica, following Enzo Fernández’s €121m move to Chelsea in the 22/23 season and João Félix’s €127.2m move to Atlético Madrid in the 19/20 season. In fact, over the course of the last 10 seasons, no less than 13 players have left the Portuguese top-flight in deals worth €50m or more in transfer fees for any of the big three clubs in the country. And in this transfer window alone, we saw the most recent example of that, when Man City opted to sign midfielder Nico González for €60m. Interestingly enough, of the top 20 biggest transfer fees received by Portuguese clubs, 10 involved players that didn’t hold a Portuguese passport. Which goes some way to underlining the remarkable scouting networks that the three big clubs run and their ability to find players from across the world, to later sell to richer European clubs for a handsome profit.