Benfica have made nearly £1billion in the last five years by selling their star players

Chelsea paid £107million for Enzo Fernandez on Deadline Day to break the British transfer record and hand the Eagles a huge paycheck.

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But that is not the only time the Primeira Liga outfit have walked away from a transfer window with thick pockets, in fact they have quite the habit of laughing all the way to the bank in recent years.

Fernandez was not even the biggest sale that Benfica have made after selling Joao Felix, coincidentally who is now also at Chelsea, to Atletico Madrid for £111m in 2019.

And there have been many other huge sales made in the last five years alone, including Darwin Nunez, Ederson, Ruben Dias, Victor Lindelof and Nelson Semedo.

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This year, Benfica made a whopping £231m from offloading players.

A massive total of that comes from Fernandes to Chelsea for £107m while there were also sales of Nunez (£64m), Roman Yaremchuk (£14m), Everton (£12m), Jota (£6.5m) and Gedson Fernandes (£5.3m).

Last year was a slow one by Benfica's standards, selling Pedrinho to Shakhtar for £16m, as well as Luca Waldschmidt to Wolfsburg for £10.6m and Nuno Tavares to Arsenal for £6.8m, with a number of other fringe players offloaded to total of £44.6m for the campaign.

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The sale of Dias to Manchester City in 2020 was the only major exit from the Stadio de Lux with the exits of Cristian Lema, Heriberto Tavares and Ivan Zlobin helping land a sum of £72.2m

In 2019, Benfica were printing money after selling Felix for £111m to Atletico, who was joined out the exit door by Raul Jimenez (£30m), Raul de Tomas (£20m), Luka Jovic (£19.8m), Andre Carillo (£7.5m) and Eduardo Salvio (£6.2m), totalling £212m.

And the year before, they continued to make a profit by getting rid of Talisca to Guangzhou Evergrande for £17m, Joao Carvalho to Nottingham Forest for £13m, Brian Cristante to Atalanta for £8.4m and Nicolas Castillo for £6.3m, totalling £63.6m.

The sales did not stop there, though, with the previous year seeing some departures in the form of Ederson (£35m), Semedo (£32m), Lindelof (£31m), Kostas Mitroglou (£13m) and a handful of reserves that saw Benfica earn £117.3m.

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It means that in the last five years, Benfica have made £740.7m from player sales - a truly astounding amount of cash - and that does not include the last decade that has included big sales of players such as David Luiz, Angel di Maria and Renato Sanches.

While the Portuguese side have no doubt made a pretty penny from their dealings in the past, it does beg the question over where they would be had they kept all their star players.

They would have quite the starting XI, brimming with attacking talent and a strong defence.