£1 BILLION AND COUNTING
But is the biggest splurge in history sustainable?
NEYMAR’s staggering £198million move from Barcelona to Paris St Germain will be by far the biggest single deal of this transfer window but records will fall in the Premier League, too. The 20 clubs will collectively break the £1bn spending barrier for this summer within days and are sure to pass the all-time spending record for one division in one window. They set that mark a year ago by spending £1.18billion, gross.
The ‘net spend’ last summer was £695m — money that was not shuffled around between them. The current equivalent is close to £500m.
Individual records are being broken everywhere you look, notably by Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho — the first manager in football history to take his career transfer spending past £1BILLION.
He passed that landmark when he signed £75m Romelu Lukaku, and has now spent £1.1bn in 17 years as a manager. Pep Guardiola has spent £859m in little over half the time, almost £400m of it in the 14 months since joining Manchester City.
City’s spending of £218m in the window equals the all-time record outlay by one club in one window. Real Madrid spent the same in summer 2009 when Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaka, Xabi Alonso and Karim Benzema were among eight purchases.
City have paid for six players so far — Portugal international Bernardo Silva for £43.6m basic, three fullbacks including Kyle Walker, costing
£129m together, an uncapped goal keeper in Ederson (£34.7m) and a £10.7m teenage midfielder Douglas Luiz, already sent out on loan.
Second in gross spending behind City are Mourinho’s United, paying £145.8m — not counting add-ons or agents’ fees — for Lukaku, Victor Lindelof and Nemanja Matic.
Chelsea (£130.4 m) are the only other club spending more than £100m gross, so far, although Everton will inevitably join them. The biggest spending spree Goodison has
witnessed already involves an outlay of £94.9m, with Jordan Pickford, Michael Keane and Davy Klaasen the three biggest incomers by value and Wayne Rooney the biggest name.
Arsenal and Liverpool appear to be keeping their powder dry. Both have spent ‘only’ around £50m.
Tottenham stand out, not spending a single penny while selling players for more than £74m — but this has not been unusual for chairman Daniel Levy, a clever trader maintaining an exciting squad. Notable is some of the spending by the middle-ranked and ‘smaller’ clubs, with Leicester the third largest net spenders behind the two Manchester clubs.
Is the Premier League’s bubble about to burst? It has not actually been a bubble; 25 years of consistently rising TV income has underpinned growth, in an era of vast societywide media change.
A year ago, the 20 clubs were collectively digesting £1.64bn in TV cash and prize money from the 201516 season, or £82m each. They have only recently split £2.4bn for 2016-17 (£120m each) and it is that extra cash, the best part of £800m between them, that is now being spent.
The 12 billion dollar question — $12bn being the Premier League’s domestic and international TV earnings from 2016-19 — is how much longer the cash will flow. Already some foreign rights for 2016-19 have been sold, at vastly increased rates in the USA, China and Africa.
The tender for the next domestic deal is on the horizon. Early next year we will know what value Sky, BT and any others put on keeping the show on the road. We will also know what dividends this summer’s record spending have brought.