Issue number 346 of the Weekly Post presents the annual CIES Football Observatory analysis on big-5 league teams’ transfer fee spending to assemble their squads. With an estimated €1.08 billion invested to sign their current players (possible add-ons included), Manchester City remains at the top of the rankings. However, with respect to the start of the 2020/21 season, the gap with Manchester United went down by almost €140 million: from €192M to just about €58M.
The Manchester teams are the only ones to have spent over a billion euro in transfer indemnities to make up their current squads. Paris St-Germain complete the podium (€957M, + €69M with respect to the previous season), followed by Real Madrid (€787M, + €79M) and Chelsea (€780M, + €17M). Three further English Premier League teams (Liverpool, Arsenal and Tottenham), as well as Barcelona and Juventus, also paid more than €500 M in transfer fees to assemble their squads.
Per league, the average transfer expenditure per team to sign current squad members vary between €410 million for the English Premier League (with a minimum of about €87M for Norwich City) and €131M for both the French Ligue 1 (with a minimum for Clermont Foot) and the German Bundesliga (with a minimum for Bochum). The data for 2020/21 are available here.
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