Premier League clubs blow away the opposition in record-breaking £1bn transfer market – but it could damage English football
The likes of Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal all spent big in search of glory following global TV windfall
IT was the Germans who first coined the phrase “stupid English money”.
But now the whole of world football believes the Premier League has taken leave of its financial senses after splurging more than £1.2BILLION on transfers this summer.
It is the biggest spending spree in the history of the game, with 13 of the 20 top flight clubs breaking their transfer records.
Manchester United paid a world-record £89million to re-sign Paul Pogba, four years after selling him to Juventus for £850,000.
Yet it could be argued there have been far crazier deals than that in recent weeks as clubs, fuelled by the Premier League’s new £8.3bn TV deal, have gone for broke.
And it is not just the top flight teams. Championship clubs have spent an eye-watering £215m, with relegated Aston Villa paying more than £40m in a desperate bid to win an immediate return to the big-time.
Former QPR, Leeds and Crystal Palace boss Neil Warnock worries where it is all going to end.
He said: “The Premier League is swamped with money and owners are desperate for a taste of it. We’re seeing average players now being sold for £20million and some Championship teams paying wages of £50,000 a week.
“It’s almost like teams no longer care about financial consequences. The rewards for being in the Premier League are now so great that everyone is taking a gamble.
“It’s brilliant we can now attract superstar players like Pogba and Ibrahimovic and managers such as Guardiola and Mourinho. But the downside is that we are going to see a lot of managers getting sacked by nervous owners in the coming months.”
Even the PFA’s deputy chief executive Bobby Barnes admitted: “The transfer market has now become an arms race because everyone is competing for the same players and prices are inevitably forced up.
“Yes, fees and wages are higher than ever before, but they are not out of kilter with the money which we now have in the English game. I’m sure Manchester United did a detailed assessment of the Paul Pogba deal.
“They are not a charity and would have seen the economic value of having that player on and off the field. What makes the Premier League so successful is TV money is distributed evenly, giving all 20 clubs the capacity to challenge globally for players.
“That’s not the case in La Liga, for example, where the lion’s share of the money goes to the big two clubs and they have a league that is not that competitive.”
Yet the fact remains Spanish champions Barcelona paid just £25m to sign Valencia’s star striker Paco Alcacer while Italian kings Juventus bought eight players for little more than the fee they received for Pogba.
So there can be no doubt English clubs are paying a much higher price than the rest of Europe for the game’s top stars.
Over the next three years, Prem clubs will collect £5.1bn from English broadcasters and a further £3.2bn in worldwide rights.
To put that in context — Arsenal topped the Prem prize money list last season with £100.8m. This year the BOTTOM club will trouser £100m.
Transfer expert Simon Chadwick, Professor of sports enterprise at the University of Salford, said: “The Premier League is an industry leader and that’s something we should be incredibly proud of. It’s like the Harlem Globetrotters of football, a fantastic product to be sold all around the planet.
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"But this transfer window has seen huge fees paid for mediocre players because all the money in the world doesn’t create a massive pool of excellent footballers. We’ve also seen players who have played in England before returning for much higher prices than they were sold for — Pogba, Shkodran Mustafi and Marcos Alonso, for example.
“Another consequence of this spending is we are now seeing England players such as Joe Hart, Jack Wilshere and Calum Chambers having to leave their clubs on loan. As a nation, we have to ask how important the England team is to us.
“Are we prepared to accept a mediocre national team in exchange for brilliant, cosmopolitan club football? It seems it is not possible to have both.”
Philip Shepherd, a partner at world-leading auditors Price Waterhouse Cooper, added: “It’s clear the record spending spree has been fuelled by the new Sky TV deal. Nearly all the Premier League clubs can now be competitive in the European market as no other country has such a lucrative contract spread across the league.
"The issue for clubs now is to not spend all of this additional funding on new players and wages.
“Driving up player prices also forces up operating costs, to the potential detriment of the long-term sustainability of clubs and the development of young players.”