Manchester City Sign Elliot Anderson for British-Record £116M (~$157M)

Manchester City signed England midfielder Elliot Anderson from Nottingham Forest for £116 million (~$157M), the most expensive fee ever paid for a British player and the first buy of the Enzo Maresca era.

Sports

uristocrat

July 7, 2026 2 min read

Manchester City Sign Elliot Anderson for British-Record £116M (~$157M) — Elliot Anderson, now Manchester City's British-record signing. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Key Points

Manchester City signed Elliot Anderson from Nottingham Forest for £116 million (~$157M).
The fee makes Anderson the most expensive British player ever, topping Jude Bellingham's £115M.
Anderson, 23, made 37 starts for Forest last season with 4 goals and 4 assists.
He is the first signing under new City manager Enzo Maresca, Pep Guardiola's successor.

Manchester City have signed England midfielder Elliot Anderson from Nottingham Forest for £116 million (~$157M), a fee that makes the 23-year-old the most expensive British footballer in history. As Sky Sports reported, the deal edges past the £115 million Real Madrid paid Borussia Dortmund for Jude Bellingham in 2023 — a record that had stood for three summers.

Anderson, currently at the World Cup with England, completed a medical in Kansas before the formalities are finalized on his return. He arrived at the City Ground only a year ago, joining Forest from Newcastle in July 2024 for around £35 million, and repaid it with the best season of his career: 37 Premier League starts, four goals, four assists, and a top-five ranking in the division for both tackles and passes. ESPN framed the appeal simply — he is a two-way midfielder who does the volume work City's system demands.

The timing is the story. Anderson is the first signing of the Enzo Maresca era, the manager City hired to replace Pep Guardiola after a decade in charge. When the club began preparing for Guardiola's exit, the open question was whether City would reinvent or simply reinforce — and hiring a Guardiola disciple rather than a disruptor like the Xabi Alonso hire at Chelsea already suggested the answer.

The read: paying a British record for a 23-year-old with one standout season is less a verdict on Anderson than on the market and the moment. City are underwriting the post-Guardiola project with the same financial force that built the last one — continuity bought rather than coached — and the "most expensive British player" headline says as much about transfer inflation, where £100 million is now the going rate for a very good Premier League midfielder, as it does about the player himself. Maresca inherits the most expensively assembled squad in England, and his first move made it more so.

Source: Sky Sports, ESPN.

That mark lasted sixteen days. On July 18, Chelsea agreed a £117M fee with Aston Villa for Morgan Rogers, edging Anderson's fee to become the most expensive British player ever.