Premier League transfer spending spree has made a dog’s dinner of Europe’s old elite

You know what’s fun? Tight games of football with a couple of nice goals.

Interspersed with plenty of creative passages of play until the team you support wins and you go for a lovely pint. Or, actually, battering the other lot 5-1, who cares about the quality then?

You know what’s not? Contracts, painstaking negations to make the rich richer, sub-clauses, arithmetic.

The transfer window is closed. Resources have been moved between Premier League teams and fans of every club are a bit annoyed except, perhaps, Ipswich? (Write in).

One of my friends (big up Tim Spiers at The Athletic) got the unenviable task of ranking (and justifying the rank) of every transfer made into a Premier League club this window. All 155 of them, only half of which, you’ll be amazed to know, have been made by Manchester City and Tottenham.

Tim is largely joking but the point is this fairly arbitrary ranking reflects what fans are trying to do in every argument about transfers across social media and in real life all the time. More to the point, much of this goes on before any signing has even kicked a ball for the club.

The belief you can make this make sense is kind of the point of the transfer window for the fan. It’s not real.

These aren’t real sums of money, the players aren’t real people, you can’t form accurate opinions on it because who knows? The variables are infinite and team chemistry is an art.

This feeling of throwing your hands up and enjoying the ride makes sense as a fan, because the angst you feel has zero impact. You might as well get exercised, have a pop, believe yourself all-knowing, because why not?

But that same energy seems at times to be driving recruitment strategies at our clubs. The summer 2026 obsession has been with the Premier League-proven player. As I’m sure you get, it just means buying a guy from one of the other teams in the league, not anything more significant like actually having proven yourself in the Premier League.

History may report it went like this. Premier League clubs set up scouting departments, bought occasional flops from various other leagues and then thought, okay here’s one way of removing an unknown variable: just buy the players belonging to the clubs with lower resources in the league than you. Call it a reverse-Moneyball, if you will.

And here we are where Enzo Fernandez becomes a £100 million-plus player on two separate occasions. I am old enough to remember when £100m was a fee reserved for once-in-a-generation talents like Kylian Mbappe.

The sums of money involved in all of this are obviously gross. That’s one reason I think I’m sitting here considering them only as units that compare with each other, rather than, say, what the analysts themselves might make at a Premier League club. Or, worse still, people doing real work in hospitals or schools in the UK.

There is one market that can be used to draw useful comparisons, though, without making ourselves sick and that’s with other top-tier leagues in Europe – the Premier League’s competitors for Champions League and Europa League spots.

Newly promoted Hull, who came up by winning the Championship play-off final (so in absolute terms the lowest-ranked team starting this season’s Premier League) spent more money this window than 36-time Italian champions Juventus, current Serie A title holders Inter, Bayern Munich and Atletico Madrid.

Celebratory-sounding posts after the window slammed shut confirmed the top flight had again broken the all-time summer transfer record, with half a billion spent on deadline day alone. This paints the £3.49bn spent as symbolic of us plucky Brits overwhelming the footballing product of other nations with our unparalleled canniness and grit. But, in reality, flooding one corner of European football with money doesn’t seem smart for its future.

Looking at these sums alerted me to something I’d missed. I had spent the last few seasons enjoying the fact smaller English clubs were lately going up against traditional European football superpowers. It felt like an underdog story when Crystal Palace won the Conference League.

But looking at the numbers this window you come to realise it is not.
Nearly all European clubs are now underdogs to anyone in the Premier League and that’s not good news for anyone with a dog in that fight.

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