There was a point, early on, when it looked as though the chaos of the pandemic would throw the Premier League’s established order out of sync.
Manchester City started terribly: two defeats and three draws in their first eight games. They were 13th in the table after eight weeks. The title appeared impossibly out of reach.
After 13 weeks, Pep Guardiola’s side were still only ninth. Southampton, meanwhile, were up to third. Everton loitered menacingly just outside the top four. Leicester City were showing promise. Arsenal were looking dangerously like a side who could become tangled in relegation’s tentacles. Although perhaps that’s not such a surprise these days.
For the neutrals, it added a dash of welcome intrigue to what has been becoming a fairly predictable exercise. Yet over time the wheel of familiarity slowly turned, and money made the difference.
West Ham United and Leicester did their best to hang in there, to tease that the top four might look different this year. David Moyes’s Hammers were out of it with a few weeks to spare, Brendan Rodgers’s Foxes heartbreakingly slipped out of the top four on the final day.
And it left familiar names qualifying for the Champions League: Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea. They also just happen to be the four clubs who’ve spent the most money on transfers in past decade.
Manchester City, £1.5bn. Chelsea, £1.4bn. Manchester United £1.24bn. Liverpool, £990m – a Xherdan Shaqiri away from joining the Billion Club.
In fact, if you look at the Premier League expenditure table of the past 10 years, according to the Transfermarkt website, it looks awfully similar to the actual Premier League table.
The top 10 biggest spending clubs make up nine of the Premier League’s top 10. Only Leeds United have bucked the trend – adding further credence, if any was needed, to the brilliance of Marcelo Bielsa’s coaching.
Leeds are 27th on the spending list, having spent £158m in that time, or £15.8m per season. Aston Villa are actually the 10th club in terms of expenditure in the past decade. This season in the Premier League they finished… 11th.
West Ham and Leicester have been great stories this season, but when you put it in the context of still being eighth and ninth in the spenders table, is it so outlandish?
Burnley, meanwhile, are another whose manager, Sean Dyche, deserves every bit of credit for keeping them competitive even though they are 24th in the transfer table – spending £171m during the period in question – or £17.1m per season. These days that probably won’t get you a leading but untested striker in the Championship.
Look further down the transfer spending table and the correlation between buying players and Premier League status is alarmingly aligned.
A major complaint about the failed Super League plans were that it removed jeopardy – this mystical, intangible soul of English sporting competition. Yet in the modern Premier League, there is really only the illusion of jeopardy, when all bar three of the past season’s 20 clubs were in the top 20 biggest spenders.
The three who weren’t? Bournemouth, Stoke City, Watford.
And if you examine the transfer expenditure of those clubs outside the Premier League, those who’ve been spending the most money are – surprise, surprise – the most likely to return to it.
Norwich City – the 23rd biggest spenders in English football’s past decade – and Watford were promoted automatically, bouncing straight back up. Bournemouth made the play-offs. If Swansea City beat Brentford in the play-off final, English football’s 22nd highest spender will return to the Premier League.
The message arising from this seems to be: spend, spend, spend, and take your fines for breaking financial fair play rules if you get them; you’ll be better off in the long run.
In recent weeks, Uefa has promised to take measures to curb spending on transfers.
Could there, perhaps, be concern that the Premier League’s big spenders will start skewing Uefa’s own competitions?
English clubs have, after all, made up seven of the last 12 finalists in the Champions League and Europa League. One all-English Champions League final is fun. Two in three years starts to look troublesome.
And, again, it directly correlates with who has spent the most on players. In La Liga: Barcelona, £1.4bn, Real Madrid, £1bn, Atletico Madrid £990m. In Italy: Juventus, £1.3bn, Inter Milan, £920m, Roma, £830m, AC Milan, £810m. Bayern Munich have punched above their weight, spending £670m.
Paris Saint-Germain have established themselves as Champions League contenders, by spending £1.2bn. They win their leagues, but they’re not spending as much as the English clubs to keep up.
England’s Big Six – the Greedy Six who founded the Super League – have spent £6.58bn since the 2010-11 season. In Spain, it’s £4.76bn. In Italy, it’s £4.97bn. France, £3.26bn. Germany, £2.85bn.
And, yes, you can point to Leicester winning the Premier League title in 2016, or Lille’s historic Ligue 1 trophy confirmed on Sunday. But they are rare exceptions to the rule.
Lille, by the way, have spent £280m. That puts them fifth in France, but sandwiches them between Watford and Stoke (15th and 16th) in England.
More on the Premier League
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- The making of Everton’s versatile defender whose rise surprised even his own manager
- Hall: Martial is running out of chances to prove he is part of the future at Man Utd
- The Czech ‘warriors’ who rose from obscurity to fire West Ham into European contention
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3oRtyRp
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