How much does the Premier League cost?
As with everything in the modern game, the Premier League’s bi-annual transfer windows have become commercialised like never before with wall-to-wall coverage and spend-ometers sprialling into the billions and trillions. Money in football has always been a topic of much discussion from Trevor Francis’ £1 million transfer and Sol Campbell’s £100k per week contract to Newcastle’s recent sale to the Saudi Public Investment Fund but can we quantify how much investment is required to contend in the Premier League?
Using fbref.com’s historical records of Premier League Starting XIs, we can start to paint a picture of who has been taking the pitch the most in the past matches and seasons: limited between 2016 and 2021. In that time, only Arsenal, Everton and West Ham have started over 55 different players but it is unsurprisingly Manchester City who have averaged the highest transfer cost per starting player at an eye-watering £28.8 million — the latter data provided by TransferMarkt does not factor in the wages being paid to these superstars.
There is a clear disparity here in the depths of clubs’ pockets. Manchester City and Manchester United spending an average of over £25 million per player to appear in their starting XI’s while Cardiff didn’t even break £2 million for their lone season in the top flight. Perhaps even more worrying is that the basic logic is that in a balanced league, those that used fewer players would be spending more per player (buying higher quality) and those that rotate through players would be sharing their money around on a wider range of players: trading individual player quality for squad depth. In reality, those that are using more players are also largely able to spend more on these players creating a total imbalance.
What’s unclear is whether this problem has always existed or whether with the increasing commercialisation of the game, the rich have got richer and have left the rest for dead.
The average transfer costs spent on a Starting XI in the Premier League has risen over the five seasons from a touch under £100 million to over £170 million. These figures are anchored by the relative spending minnows of Norwich, Watford and Brentford or any other recently promoted team who simply can’t get into bidding matches with the big boys. All three of those teams putting out XIs at the beginning of 2021 with a cost of under £40 million (Norwich’s was £8 million!).
Manchester City blow these measley figures out the water as their Starting XI averaged £325 million to start 2016 but by 2021 was surpassing £530 million. This increase in over £200 million is more than the rest of the league was averaging. Chelsea looked to be catching City with a trajectory to perhaps even exceed their transfer bill at the start of 2018 but in recent seasons this trend has flipped on its head. The combination of a transfer ban and Lampard/Tuchel’s increasing reliance on academy graduates has dramatically reduced the amount of money Chelsea were spending on their starting players. Since 2018, the average has dropped from over £400 million back down towards £250 million in the space of three seasons.
Chelsea’s spending has curtailed in the last few years, with the exception of a few big splashes, while still being way higher than the average Premier League club and this just shows the vast imbalances between the haves and the have nots. This pattern is even more stark when you compare a team’s finishing position with their spend on starting players. The extra revenue that comes from the exposure to European football and prize pots means those that are competing at the very top can afford to reinvest their winnings into recruitment — only further cementing their places and reinforcing the division. The lowest amount spent on a Starting XI to finish in the top 4 was Tottenham in 2018 who’s average cost was £151 million, just hovering around League average at the time.
This plot illustrates the importance of spending in the race to European football in the Premier League. The investment in transfer fees drops off a cliff as we move down from the top four— dominated by Manchester City on the field (winning three of the last five titles) to eighth where we start to see a level playing field emerge. Even on a relatively equal keel, there is still a drop in spending as we reach the bottom three. There will always be some outliers but the vast majority of clubs are seeing a greater level of success after a greater level of spending. Clubs coming up from the Championship have to decide whether an all-in approach to the transfer market will bolster their chances of survival in the Premier League, knowing full well that failure to remain could leave them scrambling to balance the books when they’re gone.
The bottom line of this analysis is that the Premier League is expensive. To compete for the best players available each transfer window, teams are forced to dig deeper and deeper into their pockets. No team has done this more than Manchester City in recent years which has translated to their on field success. In their three winning seasons, they are spending almost £300 million more than the average team on players in their Starting XIs. While Chelsea and Liverpool have also topped the tree in the last five years, they too have blown the opposition out of the water spending way beyond the rest. The money ball revolution will have to wait for the Premier League.
