The Chema Andres Real Madrid story has taken another turn — and once again it ends with money flowing back into Valdebebas. Brighton & Hove Albion have confirmed the signing of the 21-year-old midfielder from VfB Stuttgart, and because Los Blancos kept half of his federative rights when they let him go to the Bundesliga, roughly half of the fee lands in Madrid’s accounts.
According to Marca, Brighton are paying €23m, with Real Madrid due €11.5m of it. Mundo Deportivo reports the deal at €22m and Madrid’s share at €11m. The precise figure will settle somewhere in that range, but the shape of it is not in doubt: a player Madrid sold last year for €6m has just generated almost double that again in a single afternoon.
Chema Andres Real Madrid: how the sell-on was built
Jose Maria Andres Baixauli — Chema Andres to everyone who watched him come through Valdebebas — was born in Betera in 2005 and developed as a tall, left-footed holding midfielder in the Real Madrid academy system. He left for Stuttgart in the summer of 2025 for a reported €6m, a fee that looked modest at the time for a player who had captained youth sides and trained with the first team.
The detail that mattered was buried in the small print. Madrid retained 50% of his rights, which meant the club were effectively taking a stake in his development rather than simply cashing out. Stuttgart took the risk and gave him minutes; Madrid took half the upside. A year on, that clause is worth roughly double the original sale price.
The trade-off is that this is the end of the line. As Mundo Deportivo notes, Madrid now lose their rights over the player entirely, and it is Stuttgart who have inserted a percentage on any future sale. If Chema Andres becomes a €60m midfielder in three years’ time, the Bundesliga club will be the ones celebrating.
What Brighton are buying
Brighton are not exactly known for sentimental signings, and the numbers behind this one stack up. Chema Andres played 39 matches across all competitions in his debut Bundesliga campaign, totalling 1,939 minutes, and finished the season with four goals — three of them in the league — and two assists, per Marca. Mundo Deportivo puts his appearance tally at 41; either way, for a 21-year-old in his first season in Germany, that is a serious workload.
At 1.90m he is also a genuine set-piece weapon at both ends, which is exactly the profile Premier League clubs pay a premium for. Brighton sporting director Mike Cave made a point of name-checking the pedigree: “We are delighted to welcome Chema to the club. He has an excellent background, having come through at Real Madrid, and then had a very good season with Stuttgart last year,” he said in comments carried by Mundo Deportivo, adding that Brighton had been aware of Chema’s potential for a long time.
He becomes Brighton’s tenth signing of a window in which the Seagulls have spent around €166.5m, alongside deals for Luka Vuskovic, Zadok Yohanna, Pascal Struijk, Jaouen Hadjam, Costinha and others. Brighton’s model — buy young, develop, sell high — is the closest thing in England to what Madrid are now doing with their own graduates, which makes the pairing oddly fitting.
La Fabrica has become a cash machine
Strip out the marquee arrivals and the most striking line in Real Madrid’s 2026 accounts is what the academy has generated. Marca’s tally of the summer’s outgoing business is remarkable reading for a club whose critics still insist the youth system produces nothing:
- Nico Paz — €66m from Como
- Gonzalo Garcia and Cesar Palacios — a combined €50m from Fulham (€40m and €10m)
- Chema Andres — €23m from Brighton, of which Madrid bank roughly half
- Jacobo Ortega — €10m from Strasbourg
That is well north of €100m of value created by players Madrid did not have to buy, and it is money that has underwritten a summer in which the club rebuilt an entire defensive line without a single headline-grabbing fee. Marc Cucurella arrived from Chelsea for a reported €60m, Denzel Dumfries from Inter for a reported €20m, and Bernardo Silva and Ibrahima Konate both came on free transfers. The Gonzalo Garcia sell-on clause is the template; Chema Andres is the latest payment on it.
The 50% model, and who is next
What ties all of this together is the retained-percentage structure Madrid now apply almost as a default. Manuel Angel’s exit was built the same way, and so was the departure of right-back David Jimenez, who joined Real Oviedo on a contract to 2029 with the Asturians paying nothing up front and Madrid keeping 50% of his rights.
The most immediate live case is Sergio Arribas. The 24-year-old, last season’s Segunda Division top scorer, is an Almeria player in whom Madrid still hold a 50% stake, and Mundo Deportivo reported Benfica interest in the closing hours of the Spanish window. Arribas has a €40m release clause that Benfica were not minded to pay, and while Spain’s window shut at 23:59 on 1 September, the Portuguese market runs until 4 September — so any resolution there would be worth watching. Madrid hold a buy-back option on Arribas but are not, per the same report, contemplating using it. Treat all of that as reported rather than settled.
Why Madrid could afford to let him go
The sporting question is whether a club should be selling a 21-year-old Spain Under-21 international at all. Look at the midfield Jose Mourinho inherited and the answer becomes fairly obvious. Captain Federico Valverde and Aurelien Tchouameni anchor the centre, Jude Bellingham is playing in his favoured advanced role, Eduardo Camavinga stayed put after a summer of Premier League noise, Arda Guler has established himself, and Bernardo Silva’s arrival added a senior, tournament-hardened option in the same zone. Thiago Pitarch, the academy midfielder Madrid did keep, is currently sidelined with a knee problem.
In other words, the pathway Chema Andres needed simply was not there, and Madrid took the commercially rational route: sell half, keep half, and let somebody else fund the development. It is not a romantic way to run an academy. It is, on the evidence of this summer, an extremely effective one.
The bigger picture for Mourinho’s Madrid
Mourinho’s second spell has started well — a 2-1 win over Espanyol followed by a 4-1 dismantling of Real Sociedad, with Madrid early pacesetters in La Liga — and the squad he is working with was assembled largely on academy money. That is worth holding on to when the club’s transfer strategy gets discussed. The deadline-day picture was one of a club that did not need to sell anybody it wanted to keep, precisely because the graduates already gone had done the heavy lifting.
There is a legitimate counter-argument, and it was put bluntly by one pundit in Mundo Deportivo this week: it is debatable, whether a club of Madrid’s stature should be beating its chest about the millions it extracts from its own academy rather than the players it promotes from it. Nico Paz at €66m is the case study that will follow the sporting department around for years.
For now, though, the ledger reads well. Chema Andres gets a Premier League move at 21, Stuttgart double their money, Brighton get a ready-made Bundesliga performer, and Real Madrid collect an eight-figure cheque for a player they last saw in a youth shirt. Everybody in that chain can reasonably claim a win — which is more than most transfers manage.
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