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Wednesday, 2 September 2026
Occupation RoadWatford

Note · recruitment

The Club That Bought Back a Sell-On

A club whose business is selling players spent money to enlarge its share of a sale that had not happened.

In the summer of 2025 Watford paid Bayern Munich £2m for a nineteen-year-old winger. Bayern kept two things: a right to buy Nestory Irankunda back, and half of whatever Watford eventually sold him for.

That right expired on 1 July 2026. Within weeks, Watford bought ten of Bayern’s fifty percentage points, moving the future split to 60-40 in their own favour. They had already turned down £10m bids that summer, from Hull City and from Sporting; this was not a punt on a player who might one day be worth something, but a club tidying its paperwork with a sale in view. Nobody was signed with the ten points and nothing on the pitch changed.

On 15 August the sale came. Irankunda went to Sporting Clube de Portugal for a reported £15m, and Adam Drury of the Watford Observer supplied the line that makes July legible: around £7m of initial profit to be banked, “as Bayern take 40% of the fee”.

So the purchase paid for itself unless it cost more than about £1.5m. Here the trail stops: what Watford paid Bayern has never been reported. It is not in Drury’s account, not in the sale coverage nineteen days later, and not in the German or Portuguese press, which followed the transfer closely and did not know the repurchase had happened at all: both describe Bayern’s forty per cent as the original term. Nor is that surprising. A variation to a clause between two clubs is nobody’s to announce, and Watford announce almost none of their own fees.

Nobody outside the club, then, can grade it. Bayern were not a naive counterparty; the player had scored at a World Cup and there were offers on the table, and both sides could price a percentage.

And between the two dates there was one more approach to Bayern. A Bola reported it in Lisbon at the time: Sporting would not pass their ceiling in fixed money, Watford asked the Germans to cut the forty per cent down substantially, and the transfer sat on that question until the paper reported it settled on 6 August. What they settled is not reported either, and when the sale went through nine days later the split was still being described as forty.

Each of those is ordinary on its own; the concentration is not. One player, three weeks, the same percentage bought, argued over, and — on Drury’s account — a fresh one taken from Sporting on the way out. It is the first time this club has been seen buying a sell-on back, and whether it is how they always work is not something a single player can show.

Luke Dowling, Watford’s sporting director, talking in August about what the club has got for the players it sold, named the fees and then went straight past them: “more important good sell-on fees.”

Watford have been paid by that arrangement. In July they paid to be less exposed to one running the other way, and in August they went back and asked again. A £15m move between Lisbon and Hertfordshire waited, in the end, on Munich, where nobody had employed the player since 2025 and nobody held anything but a percentage.

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