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

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.

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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