Six months on from his dramatic, failed deadline-day move to Crystal Palace, Dwight McNeil is finally their player, as part of a deal that sees Brennan Johnson go the other way and join Everton.Straight swap deals of this nature are increasingly rare in football. In recent seasons, clubs such as Aston Villa, Chelsea, Everton and Newcastle United have traded mostly academy graduates in a bid to achieve regulatory compliance, but made sure to register them as separate transactions.Those moves were scrutinised by the Premier League to establish whether they were carried out at fair market value and, while no repercussions were felt domestically, that was not the case abroad. UEFA’s specific regulations around ‘player exchange transactions’ necessitated a reduction in the profits those clubs made by sending players in opposing directions.Before those deals, you have to go back to January 2018, and the transfer where Arsenal forward Alexis Sanchez and Manchester United counterpart Henrikh Mkhitaryan swapped places, for another example of Premier League sides directly trading players without any money being exchanged. Neither signing worked out, with Sanchez managing five goals in 45 appearances over his two seasons before leaving for Inter, while Mkhitaryan departed for Roma in 2020, having scored nine in 59.Sources consulted for this piece by The Athletic, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, point to the increasingly complex nature of swap deals at the top level.Contracts often contain intricate, bespoke clauses pertinent to a specific player, while image rights are also a consideration. Two sets of terms need to be agreed for such a deal to get over the line.Alexis Sanchez and Henrikh Mkhitaryan moved in a swap deal in 2018 (Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)Meanwhile, in both the PSR (profitability and sustainability rules) era and the new SCR (squad cost ratio) one, there is a need for each transfer to work financially, and in an accounting sense, for the clubs involved.“It’s hard enough to get one player to move, let alone two in the same deal,” one Premier League owner told The Athletic in 2021, during the pandemic. “Obviously with less money (around), the idea is that you can do a player-plus-cash. But the club you’re buying off has to fancy one of your players, and you have to be willing to let him go, and the player has to be willing to go to that club — that’s very difficult to organise.”With transfer fees and wages amortised — i.e., spread out — over the duration of a signing’s contract, clubs are usually keen to protect the ‘book value’ of a player and not incur a loss by selling for a lower amount than their ‘paper’ value. There are also separate agents’ fees to agree, and any purchase by a Premier League team is subject to a four per cent transfer levy (soon to rise to six per cent).In that context, achieving an agreement in which both clubs pay the exact same amount is particularly challenging, albeit not impossible.How do transfers actually happen?Adam LeventhalBut here we have a genuine example of a swap deal between two Premier League sides, brokered by the same agency — Johnson and McNeil are both represented by Unique Sports Group (USG) — and with the players involved valued at the exact same level.