A final gross figure of £3.528bn again underlined the enormous accessible wealth within the Premier League, a 13 per cent rise from 12 months previously. Premier League clubs are spending less on players in the peak 24-27 age band even though those players are increasingly the core of their selections. The net spend, meanwhile, was also a record at £1.35bn.
World football had only ever seen 14 fees run into nine figures before this summer but then along came another five, with four in the Premier League. After Anderson to City came Rogers to Chelsea, Bradley Barcola to Liverpool and Fernandez, also to City.
Fourteen of the 20 Premier League clubs had a gross spend of more than £100m, with 41 players eventually bought for a fee in excess of £30m. In total, £506m was spent on deadline day alone, up from £391m last year. Eleven clubs in all have broken their transfer records, six of them on more than one occasion.
Premier League clubs have never been more willing to buy and trade with one another on such a scale, with intra-Premier League deals accounting for £1.627bn of the final sum. Seven of the summer’s top 10 deals across all of Europe ended up being one English club buying from another.
Tottenham, a team that has finished 17th in its last two seasons, had a net spend (signings versus sales) of over £150m in a window where Aston Villa turned a £51m profit after qualification for the Champions League. Chelsea set a new record for fees recouped inside a single window, with the sale of Fernandez taking their sales figure up to £383m (a figure that does not include the potential fees coming through loans struck this summer, including Alejandro Garnacho and Mykhailo Mudryk). Manchester City’s latest splurge came against the backdrop of players leaving for £297m, while Paris Saint-Germain, the Champions League winners of the past two seasons, raised funds totalling £286m after allowing Barcola to join Liverpool. That left PSG with a surplus of £156m for the summer, the largest of any club in Europe.
Multiple sources describe how the approximately £3.5bn spent this window has been built on more debt than ever before. “A credit challenge is coming,” one club figure says. “The game should be worried.”
Reporting: RTÉ, Inside World Football, The Athletic, Mirror, The Guardian, The Independent.