- It is the legal entanglements that catch players and teams as much as the results
- The duplicity of the media on issues relating to Arsenal knows no bounds.
By Tony Attwood
(suggestion: if standing, you might want to sit down to read this).
I was contemplating the rather tedious job of totalling up the spend of various clubs over the past five or so seasons, and really wondering if I wanted to spend that much time on the calculator, when I found that Football 365 had done the job for me. Many thanks and full acknowledgement. I’m much obliged.
Full details are of course, on their site – I’m just taking the spend across the five years. But I am adding a note of where the clubs ended up in the league following this spending, as part of my eternal research into whether buying players at significant cost really does do anything for the club’s performance. (Hint: it can do, but as often as it does help, it doesn’t).
The spend figures in the published research include the money spent so far for 2025/26 but I am taking that out from the total so I can compare spend with league positions.
The table looks at where the club has moved over the last four seasons. Chelsea were for example, in 3rd place four seasons ago, and finished in 4th this last season, so they are down one place overall (-1). They have spent £692.55 m in transfer fees across the four years, and thus their achievement overall has been a decline of one place in return for the £692.55m investment.
The table is below, but here are the findings we can take from it.
Four clubs out of the eight we have considered actually went up to a higher place from whence they started. Arsenal, Liverpool, Newcastle and Aston Villa. The final column shows how much it cost the club per place rise or fall. For Newcastle and Villa, rising from lower positions in the league, it didn’t cost remotely as much to rise up as it did for Arsenal and Liverpool. The clubs going down were of course, Chelsea, Manchester C, Manchester U and the Tottenham Hots.
| Club | Spend 21/22 – 224.25 (£m) | Placements | Placement change | Spend per average place change £m |
| Chelsea | £692,55 | 3,12, 6, 4 | -1 | £692.55m decline |
| Man United | £604.78 | 6, 3, 8, 15 | -9 | £71.64m decline |
| Arsenal | £491.11 | 5, 2, 2, 2 | +3 | £163.70m rise |
| Tottenham H | £384.42 | 4, 8, 5, 17 | -13 | £29.57m decline |
| Liverpool | £291.32 | 2, 5, 3, 1 | +1 | £291.32m rise |
| Manch City | £230.64 | 1, 1, 1, 3 | -2 | £115.32m decline |
| Newcastle U | £353.39 | 11, 4, 7, 5 | +6 | £58.59m rise |
| Aston Villa | £91.22 | 14, 7, 4, 6 | +8 | £11.4m rise |
The big losers here are Chelsea, who spent £692.55 million and went down a place over these four years.
Because Tottenham have fallen so far in the last four years (from fourth to 17th in fact) the cost to them of each place declined in the table is very modest – £29.47m. But although that seems like a lot less than it cost Chelsea, if we spell it out – they went down 14 places – it seems pretty awful.
This is especially awful when we remember that Tottenham spent £384m on new players during this time, and as a direct result, they went down 13 places during the four years.
Arsenal’s cost of rising up three places and staying there was £163.70m per place, which shows just how much money and energy there needs to be to make these final moves upward. But Liverpool’s rise cost almost twice as much more: £291.32m per place.
But beyond doubt, the most frightening result of this little exercise in expenditure on players over the past four seasons is that Chelsea figure. £692.55m spent on players across four seasons, all to achieve a drop in one place.
If ever there were proof needed that simply spending loads of money on players is not a guarantee of the club moving up the league, then Chelsea must be it.
But also from this table we can take the interesting point that Aston Villa and Newcastle made rises up from the lower half of the league at a cost of between £11m and £58m per place. That is small compared to what some clubs have been spending, but if we stand back and look at it in isolation, it is frightening in the extreme.
For it is costing between £11m and £58m to move up one place in the League table, even from a fairly lowly position. But there is something even more frightening and worrying here for clubs, and that is it is possible to spend all this money and actually sink down the table. Four of the clubs indeed, in this little selection, have done just that.
To spell it out, they have spent money – lots of money – and then slipped further down the league table.
So yes it has cost Arsenal £163.70m to rise up just one place in the league and stay there – but actually looking at all these figures, and remembering that some clubs have spent far more and gone down, that’s not bad going.
And the key thing to remember above all else is that Chelsea managed to spend £692.55m and end up one place below where they started four years before!
