At Euro 2024, Xavi Simons launched himself onto the global football stage. The attacking midfielder served up three assists for the Netherlands on their run to the semi-finals, where the 21-year-old also found the net against England. During the season prior to the quadrennial showpiece, Simons had scored 19 goals from midfield – making him the joint top goalscorer in the Eredivisie – and delivered 12 assists as he guided PSV to the league title.
Players like that are typically worth their weight in gold, so you can imagine PSV’s horror went it emerged that Simons had a buy-back clause inserted into his contract after leaving previous club, PSG. The upshot? The French champions were able to exercise their right to bring Simons back to the club in a deal worth just €6 million (£5.25 million) – a sum that would be around 10% of his true worth, by even the most conservative of measures. So, why do clubs keep falling for these buy-back clause ruses?
What Is a Buy Back Clause?
When a club sells a player, but wants to hedge their bets somewhat, they can negotiate a series of different contract clauses. Those include sell-on clauses, which net the original selling club a cut of any subsequent transfer deals involving the player, and buy-back clause.
As we learned in that Xavi Simons example, these buy-back clauses can be an ingenious way to sign a former player on the cheap who blossoms after they have left the club. But there is no obligation to enact a buy-back clause, so if the player holds no appeal to the selling club in the future, then they can simply let the opportunity pass by without a second thought.
When a bid comes in for a player, the selling club that stands to benefit from the buy-back clause may decide not to put an offer in. Should that player then complete a deal elsewhere, the clause is annulled in their contract with that new club. That’s what happened when Bournemouth sold Nathan Ake to Manchester City, with Chelsea (the holder of the buy-back option) choosing not to use it.
With pressure to adhere to Profit & Sustainability Rules (PSR), clubs are now more likely to sell their academy graduates – such ‘homegrown’ players count as pure profit on the balance sheet. One day, when they’re in a stronger financial position, they can then trigger the buy-back clause if the fee is considered to be equitable.
Players with Buy-Back Clauses
The canny bit of business deployed by PSG to buy Xavi Simons back at a snip of a price will likely be a blueprint for how other clubs negotiate the sale of young players with bags of potential in the future. But these buy-back clauses are nothing new, and in fact many clubs have been using them for years.
Chelsea sold Tammy Abraham to Italian club Roma back in 2021. The fee was a reported £34 million, although the Blues negotiated a buy-back clause in his contract worth £68 million. Okay, so this wasn’t Simons levels of ingenuity, but if Abraham does kick on and become a world-class striker, at least Chelsea might few the buy-back option as somewhat equitable.
Kyle Walker-Peters could secure a cut price move back to Tottenham if they enact the buy-back clause in his Southampton contract, while Liam Delap may one day return to Manchester City if he suitably impresses at Ipswich Town; the Cityzens have a live buy-back option if that comes to pass.
Who knows, maybe in the future we’ll also look at the buy-back clauses inserted into the contracts of Willy Kambwala (Manchester United to Villarreal), Facundo Pellestri (Manchester United to Olympiakos) and Bobby Clark (Liverpool to Red Bull Salzburg) as a stroke of genius.
If none of that trio progresses, at least the selling club have lost nothing by insisting on a buy-back option being included in the players’ contracts. Rumour has it that Tottenham even have a buy-back clause involving Harry Kane – whether they ever action it or not is another matter entirely.
Clubs That Have Used Buy-Back Clauses
Aston Villa showed smarts of their own in the summer of 2024. They sold academy graduate Jaden Philogene a year earlier for a fee of £5 million, and then watched as he produced plenty of goals and assists in the Championship for new club Hull City – including this cracker:
Jaden, that is 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗼𝘂𝘀 🤯#hcafc | @McVities pic.twitter.com/tjo5RipQtG
— Hull City (@HullCity) February 13, 2024
Satisfied that Philogene had started to fulfil his potential, Villa enacted not one but two contract clauses they had stipulated when the forward joined Hull. The first was a buy-back clause that allowed them first refusal when matching any other club’s bid for the player. In this case, that was Ipswich Town with £18 million.
The second was an extraordinary sell-on clause – presumably, the Villains hadn’t realised one day that they would be triggering their own option! So, instead of paying £18 million, with that 30% sell-on discount Villa coughed up closer to £13 million.
Gerard Deulofeu swapped Everton for Barcelona in 2017, with the Spanish side effectively taking a £6 million hit by re-signing the winger courtesy of his buy-back option. There are times when a buy-back clause goes down like a lead balloon with the player involved. Alvaro Morata loved his time at Juventus – so much so, he would return later in his career, winning two Serie A titles in 2014/15 and 2015/16.
But Real Madrid had inserted a buy-back clause in his contract when selling the Spaniard to the Italian giants, paying £25 million for the striker in 2016 having sold him for £17 million two years prior. And Morata later admitted that he didn’t want to move back to Madrid, but – contractually speaking – had no choice. “I would never have left Italy and Juve,” he admitted. “The disappointment was enormous.”
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