Premier League clubs dominate the European landscape in terms of money
spent on assembling their squads, with eight of the costliest teams in Europe’s
‘Big 5’ divisions coming from England.
Manchester City have spent £408.8million on transfer fees to put together
Manuel Pellegrini’s table-topping squad, with record signing Kevin De Bruyne
accounting for £54.5m of that.
Manchester United have spent £389.1m on their current squad and Chelsea have
spent £297.1m. That trio are are all in the top five in Europe along with
Spanish giants Real Madrid and oil-fuelled Paris Saint-German.
Liverpool (£251.1m) and Arsenal (£222.7m) both make the top five in England
the top 10 in Europe. The full details are in the accompany tables below.
Some Liverpool and Arsenal fans might be shocked to see the order in which
their clubs appear, the former wondering why they are not doing better having
spent so much and the latter wondering why Arsene Wenger has not spent more
with so much cash in the bank.
Premier League clubs spent almost £900m on new players in the summer to
take total outlay on transfers assembling first-team squads to £2.8BILLION.
New analysis published by experts from the Football Observatory in Switzerland
shows City now have the most expensively assembled squad of any Premier League
team.
Only Real Madrid across the whole of Europe’s ‘Big 5’
leagues have assembled their squad at a greater cost. They have spent £428.5m
on stars including Gareth Bale - the world’s most expensive footballer ever and
Cristiano Ronaldo
The outlay of all 98 clubs across the Premier League, Spain’s La Liga,
Germany’s Bundesliga, Italy’s Serie A and France’s Ligue 1 can be seen in full
at the Observatory website.
The Premier League’s eight clubs in the top 20 across the ‘Big 5’ are
completed by Tottenham at No 11, Southampton at No 15 and Newcastle at No 19.
The fact that this ‘middling’ trio of English clubs have spent more on their
squads than Serie A giants Milan emphasises the extent to which TV riches have
boosted Premier League sides.
Half of the Premier League’s teams have cost more than £100m in fees to
assemble and even Bournemouth at the bottom of the spending league in England
have spent more than £25m.
The Premier League’s collective spend on their first team squads is more
than DOUBLE that spent in any other league.
Compared to £2.8bn in the Premier League, La Liga clubs have spent £1.3bn, most
of that by Real and Barcelona. In Italy it is £1.1bn and in Germany it is
£896m. In France’s Ligue 1, the 20 clubs have spent £740m and PSG,
staggeringly, have spent more by themselves (£383m) than the other 19 clubs in
France’s top division alone.
This wealth divide is a cause for concern among some experts, including
analysts at the Football Observatory. In a report they published in March of this year they concluded: ‘The
big clubs spend ... and win!’.
They wrote: ‘Our analysis shows that a process of concentration of
investments is taking place.’
They calculated that the five biggest clubs in each league were spending
almost 70 per cent of all the money being spent on fees. ‘This result reflects
the increasing power of a small circle of clubs who aspire to becoming, or
already have established themselves as, global brands.
‘The analysis by league indicates that the investment concentration is
particularly strong in Spain and France.’
In other words, increasingly, nobody in Spain has any realistic chance of
winning other than Real Madrid and Barcelona, and in France the same is true of
PSG.
‘The concentration of wealth and investments in transfer fees within
top-level teams is reflected in the results obtained,’ the analysts say.
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