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By Tony Attwood
The domination of talk about transfers every summer suggests that transfers are all it takes to get a club up the league. And the league that dominates each transfer window is undoubtedly the Premier League as we can see from the CIES Football Observatory Weekly Post which on occasion looks across the leagues at which teams have “committed the most money in transfer fees to recruit their current squad”.
The list is dominated by the Premier League with Chelsea topping last year’s spending with outgoings of €1.28 billion. The year before Chelsea were second having spent a mere €1.13bn.
We can also see that the seven clubs in the Premier League for expenditure in 2023/24 were the same seven as the year before, only the order has changed just fractionally. Spending money, it seems, is a continuous habit for those aiming for the top.
Indeed the top seven based on Premier League squads by value in September 2023 were also the top seven based on squad value in September 2024. Only the value order for the top two has changed.
In 2024 the order was Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Tottenham, Liverpool, Newcastle.
In 2023 the value was Manchester United, Chelsea, Manchester City, Arsenal, Tottenham, Liverpool, Newcastle.
Just one tiny change – the flipping of positions between the top two in expenditure terms, while neither of those top two spenders, could launch any serious challenge to get to the top.
The implication clearly is that clubs with highly valuable squads go on being clubs with highly valuable squads, by bringing in new high value players as older players start to lose their value. But spending in order to break into the top group, is not a guaranteed route to success.
We can also note that the most valuable team in the list has gone up as well. One year ago it was Mancheseter United at €1150m now it is Chelsea at €1263. Manchester United across the last two seasons have come third and eighth, while Chelsea have come 12th and 6th. These figures suggest that although spending lots of money can help a club stay in the top league, it either doesn’t have much to do with maintaining its position, or if it does it also requires other factors to be in place, for example, a good manager and a team that is already playing well together and just needs some tweaking.
In 2023 Arsenal’s squad value was given by Football Observatory as being €836m compared with Manchester United’s €1150m . That is Arsenal’s value was 73% that of Manchester United.
In 2024 Arsenal’s squad value is given as €798m compared with Chjelsea’ €1263m. In other words Arsenal’s squad value is said to have declined by €38m and is now 63% of the value of the most expensive squad. Incidentally, Manchester City’s squad value is also reported to have declined as has Manchester United’s, and indeed as has Totteham’s, and Liverpool’s. Only Chelsea among the top-valued clubs has managed to increase its squad value.
Yet as we look at the league tables Chelsea were not in the top five for either of the last two seasons, but Aston Villa and Tottenham Hotspur have both appeared in the top five for last season.
Aston Villa’s expenditure was €486 and €475m across the two seasons – so a decline in expenditure but a rise up the league from seventh to fourth across the last two seasons. Tottenham’s expenditure was €829m in 2022/23 and €787m in 2023/4.
The top club from outside the Premier League was Paris St Germain. In 2022/24 they were in fourth place behind Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City. For 2023/24 they were in sixth place, also behind Arsenal and Tottenham Hots.
So what can we conclude?
This past summer, for the first time in a long while the amount of money spent on transfers went down rather than up.
But although the teams that achieve some success do indeed spend huge amounts of money, just spending the money is by no means a guarantee of success. Manchester United slipped from third to eighth across the last two seasons, Emulating Arsenal’s recovery of a few years back, Tottenham rose from eighth to fifth.
At the other rend, the demise of Everton in recent years could be put down to their lack of spending, this dropping from €418m two seasons ago to €291 last season.
Yet Fulham have managed to stay in reasonable positions in the league while building their new stand, and spending €245m and then €293m on players in the last two seasons. In other words, Chelsea spent €2397m over the last two seasons on new players while Fulham spent €538m.
Put another way Chelsea spent over four times as much as Fulham over the two seasons. Last season Chelsea got 16 more points than Fulham having spent €1859m more. That is to say around 116m Euros per point.
Which is quite a lot when you come to think of it.
A common theme from ex-player “pundits” is that spending = ambition. Just another example of the rubbish which most of them talk.
You have written on this before.
That’s true Charles, but our readership changes all the time and I generally take it that if someone sees a topic that I have written on before and they don’t want a reminder, they will stop reading.