Erling Haaland extended his contract at Manchester City this year, tying him to the club until 2034: nine and a half years, the longest deal any player has signed in Premier League history. It beat the previous record by some distance: Cole Palmer’s nine-year Chelsea contract, signed in August 2024.
Exact figures haven’t been made public, but reporting puts it among the most lucrative sporting contracts ever agreed, and Sportico described it outright as an “American-style deal,” the kind of long-horizon commitment you see in the NFL or NBA, not usually in football.
That comparison is the real story. Here’s why.
Football contracts are normally short on purpose
Most top-flight deals run three to five years. That’s not an accident, it’s risk management. Form dips, injuries happen, relegation reshuffles a club’s finances overnight, and the transfer market moves fast enough that locking in wages for a decade has traditionally been seen as reckless. A club betting nine and a half years on one player’s body holding up is a genuinely unusual risk to take on.
The real mechanics: this isn’t a transfer, so it doesn’t hit the books the same way
If City had bought Haaland fresh for a huge fee, that fee would be amortized: spread as a cost across the length of his contract for accounting and Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) purposes. But this is a renewal of a player already on the books, not a purchase. No transfer fee, no amortization schedule. The cost shows up purely as wages, which are treated differently under PSR than capital transfer spending. In practice, that means City can lock in one of the world’s best strikers long-term without it landing the same way a marquee signing would against their regulatory spending limits.
Removing the buyout clause was the other half of the deal
Haaland’s original 2022 contract, signed when he joined from Borussia Dortmund, included a release clause: a fixed price at which another club could trigger a move. That’s gone now. City has full control over any future sale price, rather than a competitor being able to activate a discount exit. What they’ve reportedly kept instead is a release clause set for 2029, high enough to function as a pressure valve rather than a bargain door. It’s a hybrid structure: total certainty for years one through four, then an expensive off-ramp after that.
What to watch
Palmer’s nine-year deal in 2024, followed by Haaland’s nine-and-a-half in 2025, looks less like a one-off and more like the start of a trend. Big clubs are using ultra-long contracts to remove buyout leverage and manage PSR exposure at the same time. Worth watching whether other clubs follow with their own core players, and worth watching what happens to a club’s wage bill flexibility a few years into one of these deals if form or fitness dips. Locking in certainty for a decade only looks smart in hindsight if the player holds up.
The Wage Bill