Introducing The Athletic’s Transfer Tiers, our expert view on the top transfers in each position

Imagine you are in a recruitment meeting ahead of the summer transfer window.

Your club needs a striker. In front of you is the board of targets. There is a name at the top — and the list rolls on through possible alternatives.

This is the reality for teams planning their summer transfer business. Yes, every club has an ideal top target. But the market is not that simple. They might be unavailable. Other clubs might come in for them. Before you know it, the board changes and the targets shift.

The Athletic posed a simple question — could we, through the knowledge of experts from across European football, replicate the boards of goalkeepers, central defenders, full-backs, midfielders, attacking midfielders, wide forwards and forwards that will be under consideration at different clubs?

Welcome to our attempt — The Athletic’s Transfer Tiers.

Ahead of the summer, The Athletic built a long list of players who were likely to move or attract significant interest in the upcoming transfer window. We sorted them into seven positional categories, each roughly 20 players deep, before sending the completed pool of players to people who work within the football industry.

In total, nearly 40 experts responded to The Athletic’s questions. These included sporting and technical directors, coaches, scouts, intermediaries, analysts and, in a few instances, people with important local knowledge.

What we asked them to do was relatively simple. From the players available, in each position, select and rank three players they expect to be targeted by elite clubs (a Champions League contender), three more who they think will be prioritised by clubs from the level just below, and a further three who will be pursued by teams broadly defined as being part of the game’s wealthy middle-class.

Tier One is targeted at Champions League contenders (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)

The lines between those categories are blurred and hard to properly define. But to provide as much clarity as possible, Manchester City or Paris Saint-Germain would be considered Tier One; Aston Villa, Inter Milan and Borussia Dortmund belong in Tier Two, even if there are financial differences between them; and Brighton, Bayer Leverkusen — process-led clubs, essentially — would belong in Tier Three.

Rather than being an outright ranking of clubs, the Tier system really represents how these clubs think about the transfer market, how they have historically behaved, and where their ceilings — both in terms of wages and fees — have traditionally existed.

There are some caveats to be aware of.

First, it’s entirely possible that having missed an initial target, a Tier One club ends up signing a player from a Tier Two category, or vice versa. A simple way of thinking about this is that if you are on the board, you’re able to play a role in your position at any level in a top-five European league.

Secondly, certain players have been excluded. While every major club in Europe would surely be interested if, for instance, Lamine Yamal were to become available, there is next to no chance of him actually leaving Barcelona. There is always the possibility that something absurd might occur — the equivalent of Neymar’s 2017 move to Paris Saint-Germain, for instance — but that’s extremely unlikely. No sensible recruitment policy would be built around signing him this summer.

Players with long-term injuries have also been left out. For the sake of an example, Tottenham’s Cristian Romero appears because he is expected to recover from his knee injury within the next few weeks, but Xavi Simons was not, as his ACL injury will likely see him miss much of the rest of the year. No team is going to be considering Simons in the summer of 2026. That’s where the line is.

It is also worth saying that while teams who would fit into the Tier One category might be more selective about style than a team in Tier Three, ultimately, very few teams in Europe who know they have a clear gap in their squad would avoid making a signing if the style does not quite match up. Stylistic preferences can go out of the window in the heat of the moment.

And a last point: nobody we asked had any connection to the players or clubs involved. That was important. We wanted the answers to be dispassionate and analytical, rather than reflective of what anybody wanted to happen.