Crystal Palace bought Maxence Lacroix for £18m in 2024. Chelsea just paid £51m for the same player, two years later. It is the second time Palace have run this exact play. Marc Guehi left Selhurst Park for Manchester City in January for £20m, six months before Lacroix's move. Palace had signed Guehi for £18m back in 2021. Add it up and two center backs, bought for a combined £36m, just sold for a combined £71m. Lacroix earned that fee on the pitch. In his final Premier League season at Palace he played 35 games, kept 11 clean sheets, won 61 percent of his duels, and completed 88 percent of his passes. Sofascore clocked his top speed at 36 kilometers an hour, quick enough to cover ground behind a high defensive line. For Chelsea, the fee matters less than the rule it breaks. They have not paid a transfer fee for a player aged 26 or over since 2022, when Raheem Sterling and Kalidou Koulibaly arrived and neither move worked out. Every purchase since has targeted players in their early twenties, a policy new manager Xabi Alonso has now bent for the first time. The deal also pushes Chelsea's defender spending since the Boehly takeover past €500m, according to Transfermarkt. That is roughly €80m more than Manchester City have spent on defenders over the same period, and close to double what Paris Saint-Germain have spent on theirs in four seasons. Palace built a center back for £18m and sold him for nearly triple that price. Chelsea have now spent more than £250m on new players this summer alone, and Lacroix is only one piece of it.