- Did Arsenal really had a bad transfer window, and miss a load of bargains?
- The summer of ’26 window: the record breakers and clubs running into trouble
By Tony Attwood
When I was a teenager my family moved from north London to Dorset. Not being able to see Arsenal each week (TV coverage was pathetically limited in those days) I watched the few minutes (rarely of Arsenal) that Match of the Day gave me on Saturday evening, but for live football adopted my local club, Poole Town.who played in the Southern League Division One. My dad took us back to London to see Arsenal three or four times a season.
And I mention this because although the relative merits of Poole Town and Arsenal have not changed that much since those ancient days, there are changes afoot, as set out for example in the article from the BBC. As that shows, Premier League clubs then as now were breaking their all-time summer transfer records. Indeed in the last window the spend was £3.49 billion (ie £3.49 with seven noughts afterwards, which is quite a lot really.). Meanwhile the annual salary figure of the 20 Premier league clubs added together is about two billion pounds a year.
And yet despite these phenomenal turnover figures, in 2024/25 only four clubs in the PL made a profit – and those that did will have a hard job repeating the trick next season.
For example, Newcastle made a profit by selling their stadium to a subsidiary of the owners of the club. Aston Villa, sold their women’s team and ground to a subsidiary, (although Uefa refused to recognise that). These are one-off deals you can’t repeat.
Bournemouth on the other hand didn’t run into any admin problems over their profit as it came from a £91m profit on player sales. Good work by them, but hard to replicate this season.
The final profitable club, Liverpool, won the league, had a record turnover, returned to the Champions League and got a lot of new sponsorship. So yes they made a profit – and their situation shows us exactly what has to be done to make a profit that can go on year after year. But will their next figures show further profit? I’m not sure.
Arsenal came sixth in the profit league by reducing their loss to £1.38m from £17.7m the year before. This was due to a Champions League run to the semi-fnals and a rise in income from the kit deal with Adidas, plus £81m profit on player sales However Arsenal wrote off £15.2 million in player values, which took them back into a loss.
We could say that in profit terms, after years of edging upwards, Arsenal are almost there. In the profit and loss league they are the sixth best performing team, and the next set of figures should show them in profit.
But the big majority still lose money. Like Chelsea who lost £262.44 million (compared with a profit of £129.6 million profit in 2023/24). And we might also note West Ham who lost £103.59 million, which given the fact that they were given their stadium and pay only a nominal rent, is quite something.
Finally we might also notice Tottenham who lost £94.67 million and put that down to rising staff costs, and declining broadcast venue (as they keep coming 17th), although winning the Europa League helped them. The next set of results however could be an utter disaster.
Now in any other industry that would suggest that spending money to buy success doesn’t work.and yet the clubs go on dong it over and over again. And it is not as if clubs haven’t got experience. The Premier League spending went beyond the £3.11bn of last summer and yet Tottenham have come 17th in the league, in consecutive years.
We might also note that over half of the transfers this past window were transfers of players from one English club to another. Now no one has come up with a definitive view as to why this is, but I’d suggest the answer is that that players from overseas will take quite a while to adjust to the “English way” and what counts as a foul in the Premier League.
I have been puzzling over this issue for some time, wondering what it is that makes owners of football clubs spend amounts of money that most of us can’t even imagine, while knowing that they will never get it back. (Although maybe they really do believe that they have the magic touch, and given even time and a fair wind, they will suddenly start seeing the returns).
Now one of the reasons for thinking that is the fact that over half of the transfers we see in which a Premier League club is involved, actually involves not just one but two English clubs.
Put another way, some people are starting to call the English pyramid a closed collection of leagues because clubs there will only deal with each other English clubs, not least because clubs from elsewhere simply won’t spend that sort of money. Indeed as one correspondent covering European transfers put it to me, if an English club comes sniffing around, the price doubles.
Now this has an interesting impact, because many big clubs in Europe are very conscious that they are starting to be seen big hitters in their own country, but not really making it on the international stage. Juventus, InterMilan, AC Milan, and the like don’t like to see themselves outbid by the likes of Fulham, Ipswich or Crystal Palace.
This has an effect in Italy where the biggest clubs are trying to spend in the way the English clubs do, and this leads to two outcomes. One is such clubs can make some pretty awful mistakes with their buying, and the second is that the media will make it very clear what they think of clubs that try to crawl up the league by copying the English model.
And yet there is a contradiction here, because surely in terms of exciting football it is better to have five teams fighting for the title, rather than the German model of the same club winning the league virtually every year.
But the overall tendency in more and more leagues is that one third of the clubs spend two thirds of the transfer money. In Spain 15% of the top division’s clubs (3 out of 20) spent 75% of the transfer money. In such circumstances the competition dies
So now Premier League clubs don’t buy from certain countries, and so their market suffers.
Meanwhile in Germany where we all know who is going to win the league this year, next year, and the year after.. As a result shareholders can edge the club towards spending less on transfers, because they already know they are going to win the league.
But there is a problem in countries where there is only one possible winner (PSG, Bayern Munich) rathe than two (Real Madrid or Barcelona) or more. Such situations leave 85 or 90% of the league with no chance to win the competition. Meanwhile TV audiences get bored and income declines.
Now some European leagues are becoming dependent on English teams buying up their youngsters. But that leads to the TV companies losing interest as audiences decline.
So competition is certainly reduced. Players might go to foreign shores, but fewer do it as they see how hard it is then to return to a top league in Europe. Leagues without at the very least a couple of teams challenging for the title each season are finding harder to keep the crowds. Even the Premier League audiences became less interesting when Manchester City win the league six times in seven seasons.
Two things became clear. Fans want their team to win the league, and if they don’t, then they don’t want the same team winning it each year. Put another way, the only people who liked ManCs six out of seven were ManC fans.
Now prior to ManCs four successive wins and six titles in seven years, Manchester Unite had twice won the Premier league five times in seven seasons, and TV viewing declined. Liverpool achieved a run in the 20th century with four titles in five seasons, and again audiences declined.
The media say “we’ve never seen anything like this before” and encouraging youngsters with no set allegiance to attach themselves to the new always-winning team, but now with six ManC wins in seven years, the old notion that anyone can win the league has died.
Of course no one want to league fixed, but that is what we have been getting, and no one is quite sure how to stop it happening.
Everyone should read that NBC article where Dean said he would have mini games during matches when he was ref.