Watford’s Most Expensive Players

Posted on by Sam Jones
Sarr playing for Senegal in 2021

Over the past few years Watford have made an impressive amount from player sales. Impressive, that is, if you own the club, or believe a football club should be about finances more than anything else. Since the 2021/22 campaign, Watford have very much been a selling club, making tens of millions of pounds through player trading each season since then.

In 2022/23, for example, they brought in around £40m more than they spent. That is not a major surprise, as they were relegated from the Premier League into the Championship at the end of the campaign prior. That season, 2021/22, was the last time the Hornets had a net spend (where they spent more on buying new players than they made selling existing ones).

Even then they shelled out a relatively minor sum, certainly by the standards of the English top flight. They bought players for a total of around £40m, bringing in about £11m in sales. However, Watford have not always been a selling club and nor have they always been cautious in what they have risked in the transfer market. Let’s take a look at the most expensive signings ever made by the club.

Ismaïla Sarr, £25m


Transfer fees are frequently undisclosed these days; and even when they are disclosed, the waters are often muddied due to deals in different currencies and what exchange rate is used, as well as the issues of add-ons, bonuses and agent fees. Amounts used in this article are our best estimates based on available information and to that end, we make Senegal international, Ismaïla Sarr, Watford’s record signing at £25m.

The fee, paid in the summer of 2019 to French side, Rennes, was described as being around the €30m mark. Sarr had four decent seasons at Vicarage Road without ever really fulfilling his potential. In all, he played 131 games for the Hornets, scoring 34 times. Just 10 of those goals came in the Premier League, from 50 games, split over two seasons, both of which ended with Watford being relegated.

He was slightly more productive in his two seasons in the Championship but not spectacularly so, his best return coming in 2020/21 when he managed 13 goals in 40 games in all competitions. For a player who, in 2017, claimed that he had rejected the chance to join Barcelona, preferring a steady ascent through the football ranks, his career has not quite delivered. After Watford failed to earn promotion at the end of the 2022/23 campaign, the Senegalese forward was sold to Marseille for a fee just north of £10m.

He managed just four goals in France and a year later he moved to Crystal Palace, returning to the Premier League with the tough task of replacing the Bayern-bound, Michael Olise. Sarr has featured in all six of the Eagles’ opening league clashes, scoring once, and will seek to rebuild his career. Palace paid around £12.5m for him and, still just 26, they will hope they can help him reach his potential.

Andre Gray, £18.5m


Watford paid an undisclosed fee believed to be more than £18m to sign Burnley striker, Andre Gray, in August 2017. Born in Wolverhampton, the Shrewsbury youth product played for England at C level early in his career but would ultimately go on to play senior international football for Jamaica.

He spent much of the first part of his career playing non-league football until Brentford’s canny scouting recognised his potential and brought him to the Championship. 18 goals in the 2014/15 season and then two in two games at the start of the next earned him a move to Burnley. 23 league goals for the Clarets helped them win promotion to the Premier League and a solid return of nine goals in 32 top-flight outings meant that though his side failed to stay up, he personally did, via a transfer to Watford.

Sadly for player and club, he only managed as many as those nine goals across all competitions, in one of his four seasons with the Hornets. A little like Sarr, it was not a hugely successful transfer, and though he played 126 times for Watford, he managed just 21 goals, with only 14 of those coming in the Premier League.

It was a poor return on £18.5m and Gray spent the final 12 months of his contract out on loan with QPR in the Championship. His form was decent with the Hoops and he netted 10 league goals from 28 games but Watford released him when his contract expired, since when he has played in Greece and now Saudi Arabia.

Isaac Success, £12.5m


Watford’s third-most expensive signing of all time was another that was a club record at the time. The Hornets paid Spanish side Granada around £12.5m to bring Isaac Success to England in July 2016 and sadly his career did not live up to his name. Well, certainly not the surname, though Isaac means “one who laughs”, and the player himself may well have been laughing as he collected his handsome wages despite not truly earning them.

In fairness to the player, Success was just 20 years old at the time and was coming from another football culture, having played in Spain. He only left his native Nigeria a few years before that so it was always likely to be tough for him to adapt and live up to being an eight-digit record signing.

Nonetheless, despite having become the youngest player in Granada’s history, and doing well enough in Spain to earn a contract extension and then move to Watford, he simply did not deliver the goods in the Premier League.

He managed just one goal in 19 games with Watford in 2016/17 and played just once the following campaign before a loan move to Malaga. That brought nine games and no goals and back at Watford the following year he managed just four in 35. Two more seasons with the club brought just 17 more appearances and a solitary goal and in 2021 he joined Udinese.

Things did not work out for him in Italy either and in much the same way, all three of these big-money signings have failed to work out for Watford. None of these attackers, record signings one and all, repaid their transfer fees, so perhaps we can forgive the more cautious approach of the owners now. Or perhaps not!

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