Liverpool, Huge Summer Sprees, Football Inflation, EPL Spending, and How Transfers Lead To Success
Free Read! A short-ish piece that should interest non-Liverpool fans, too
Premier League transfer prices up 33% on last season
How only Leicester in 2016 were ‘cheaper’ title winners than Arne Slot’s Reds in past TWENTY SEVEN years
How Ian Graham credited me in his book for all of Liverpool’s success**
The super-strong relationship between transfer spending and success
How long it takes, on average, for a big spend to reap big rewards
How TV money dictates transfer fees
How FFP, while flawed, has helped make Premier League much fairer in recent seasons, with massive narrowing in disparity between richest and poorest
How almost half the best 30 teams in Europe are in the Premier League
The 40 most expensive signings since 1992 in 2025 money, and where Alexander Isak fits in
How Liverpool’s 2025 spending (gross) ranks 11th in modern era (but will fall when 2025/26 inflation is applied to all others)
How, in 2025 money, Chelsea spent £1.12billion in one season (2003/04), then almost as much a year later
How Natalie Portman, quite cruelly, has not responded to my attempts at manifestation
** Massive overstatement
Calculating Premier League Inflation Since 2010
Over 15 years since Graeme Riley and I created a transfer inflation model (with Andrew Beasley helping to update it), the more media savvy Kieran Maguire (noted and omnipresent football finance expert) has created his own model.
I’ve no idea whose model is better, but we got there back in 2010. The bonus with Maguire’s model is that it has a dedicated website, and obviously he’s well respected within the game.
I noted back then that you can’t compare across eras as football inflation overall, despite a few years of deflation, has been astronomical.
The average price of a Premier League player is now more than 40x what it was in 1992/93.
What we didn’t do was take it to the masses, beyond a book, Pay As You Play (great data analysis, but not the most readable of books) and an academic paper, and to some degree, influencing Liverpool’s Ian Graham on transfer analysis as noted in his seminal book How To Win The Premier League (Subtitle: It’s All Down To Paul Tomkins, Obviously).
In 2012 I created a transfer-rating ‘algorithm’ that involved working in inflation, which was mentioned by Liverpool’s erstwhile data guru, Dr Ian Graham, in his book ‘How To Win The Premier League’:
“I am not the first to point out the surprisingly large proportion of failed transfers. Paul Tomkins’ book Pay As You Play looked at transfer fee inflation in the Premier League. A few years later, he revisited the work in his blog, the Tomkins Times, and compared transfer fees to ‘success’. His method for measuring success was more complicated than ours, with the benchmark depending on a weighted mixture of transfer fee paid, inflation, transfer fee received and number of games started. Tomkins’ conclusion was that only 40% of transfers succeed. This is a lower success rate than my simple starts-based measure but is in the same ballpark.”
This success rate was briefly dubbed Tomkins’ Law at the time by people on TTT; and for once, not by me. (Tomkins’ Second Law, that bald men are irresistible to all women, never caught on at all.)
I recently wrote a piece that was perhaps too long for most people, so I also wanted to summarise the highlights of that, and also contextualise Liverpool’s spending in 2025, now that the window has closed. (But for a far more detailed analysis of all this, see the article below.)
In that previous piece I explained that I’ll be copy and pasting fully adjusted transfer fees or spends from the database, to limit mistakes and make life easier. So, Andy Carroll cost Liverpool £137,080,348 in 2025 money (you got us there, Geordies), but it would be neater to change it to £137.1m, and the decimals involved mean you can quibble about the last £348. But as noted, it’s just easier to copy and paste and then I won’t end up re-typing an incorrect amount.
Precise transfer fees are always controversial (I recall the days of “It was not £36.6m, it was £36.7m, you fucking muppet – and as such, your whole work is invalidated”). And these days, even more complicated, with add-ons, loans-to-buy, etc. We’ve also tended to use the maximum fee payable.
In 2010 one journalist stated on Twitter that the whole concept was surely just a load of old bollocks. But unlike parts of me, it has stood the test of time.
Inflation 2025
First of all, below is the inflation graph from our starting point of 1992; not because we wanted to ignore the glorious 100 previous years, but because it was enough when we started in 2009 to research what was already then thousands of transfers, let alone going back to the dim and distant past, pre-internet era.
This season (so far) has seen a 33% rise in Premier League transfers on last season, but which itself was a dip on an another fairly predictable upward trajectory going back 15 years, and coinciding with booms in TV money (in contrast to the collapse of ITV Digital over 20 years ago).
While I struggled to find the full data for some recent domestic TV deals (Google kept giving me only results for five of seven sold packages), so for now this is the graph for money clubs received from broadcasters (not including the increasing overseas deals).
So with a new deal starting this year, you can see the effect. If we lay graph one over graph two, we get this:
(Edit: graph is the overall deal total and not the per season amount, but big changes remain relevant until recent seasons, when the rises have been more down to overseas deals as domestic deals stagnate.)
A provisional rate of inflation for 2025/26 (given that the season has one more window) is 33.26% on last season, after a few years of rise and falls that saw 2024/25 as little more expensive than 2017/18 and 2019/20.
From 2017 to prior to this summer, inflation hadn’t changed that much. The 2017/18 season was 27.1x the average price of a Premier League player from 1992/93, and by 2024/25, it was ‘just’ 30x. So a £100m player like Jack Grealish was only slightly more than a £100m player a few years later.
But in 2013/14 the average was 9.6x the 1992 baseline, meaning it leapt from 9.6x to 27.1x in just four years.
That’s when the domestic TV deals started to massively increase, as the graph shows, which also doesn’t include the new, multi-billion overseas deals.
The average price of a Premier League footballer (excluding free transfers and loans) this summer was £23,989,653, which is 40.4x more expensive than in 1992/93.
Liverpool have spent “relatively” more than they did on Isak on a single player on three previous occasions in the modern era (listed below).
It seems that FFP/PSR indirectly limited the upper bounds of transfer fees, in that most clubs no longer wanted to spend the £200m or more it would cost for single players had FFP not been introduced, in conjunction with squads getting bigger (and thus, lots was still spent, but less on any one individual, spreading the risk across multiple signings and insuring against collapses with extra players).
The hitherto slowing of inflation in the last seven years means that players who cost £100m a few years ago haven’t seen their prices rise as much in 2025 money.
Liverpool’s Most Expensive EPL-Era Players in 2025 Money
22. Carroll A, 2010-11, £137,080,348, 7.51x
27. Isak A, 2025-26, £125,000,000, 5.21x
36. Cisse D, 2004-05, £117,645,193, 6.44x
40. Heskey E, 1999-00, £113,081,890, 6.19x
The basic fact is that the more expensive a player was relative to the overall average that season, the more relatively expensive they will remain once inflation is applied in future.
(Note: I’m generally only working in 2024/25 money, because we can’t fully apply 2025/26 money until at least February 2026 to 6,000+ players in the database. Obviously all summer 2025 signings will be in 2025/26 money, or ‘2026 money’, but they also don’t have any inflation applied until 2027. Similarly, seasons are sometimes listed as 2025/26 or 2025-26, and I hope you can cope with the inconsistency.)
Two decades ago, Chelsea were spending OVER TEN TIMES the average price of a Premier League player, as were Man United. Between them they did this six times (Chelsea four, Man United twice), with five of the six between 2002 and 2007.
Yet Alexander Isak cost Liverpool ‘just’ 5.2x the average of a 2025/26 player, after what feels like a general rise in cheap, medium and expensive players across the league, soon to be known as The Dango Ouattara Effect.
(But Brentford might have spotted some brilliance in a lad who is still only 23, as is Brentford’s way. His data on FBRef looks surprisingly strong and well-rounded, for someone I’ve never really noticed.)
At £125m, Isak goes into 27th on the list of the most expensive Premier League players in 2025 money, with the costliest deals coming at a time when there was less financial parity across the division (2003-2011, mainly).
However, he is the first entrant in the top 40 since 2016/17, and only the second since 2015/16, ten years ago, the other being:
16. Pogba P, 2016-17, £149,577,154, 8.19x
(That said, I’ve just noticed that Florian Wirtz would creep in at no.39, if all his clauses are met, at £116m. However, if 2025/26 inflation is added to the other 38 players, excluding Isak and Wirtz whose figures are already in ‘2026’ money, Wirtz would fall out of the top 40, and Isak would slip further down, and maybe out of the top 40 – as 5.21x is lower than anyone else in the top 40. As such, Isak and Wirtz’s positions are false until the season is complete.)
In total:
21 of the 40 most expensive players were signed between just 2003-04 and 2010-11
So, 52.5% of the most relatively expensive transfers happened in just eight years (23.5% of the Premier League era).
As FFP came in around this time (the early 2010s), I have argued that FFP made the market more sensible, and overall, fairer to more clubs; within the Premier League, at least.
After all, Leicester City 5,000-1 happened within the first half-decade of the FFP era, and while almost impossible at any time, could not have happened in the 2000s when at least one of Chelsea, Man United, Liverpool and Arsenal were always too strong to see off such an event.
Greater Parity
I’ve also shown that the gap between the very richest and the rest of the league has shrunk in recent times. Bar one season, the gap between the most expensive team and the least expensive team has narrowed ten years in a row.
This is based on £XI: the term I created to describe the average cost of the XI, over 38 games (or a smaller number of games, as it’s still an average) when adjusted to current day money.
The gap last season was £346.4m, down from a peak of £1.1billion in Chelsea’s wildest-spending days.
This was much, much closer to the way the Premier League started, and thus my argument on competitive balance is clear, even if no solution is going to be ideal for everyone, and every season, most clubs will be not succeed in overall terms (but plenty of teams can still have great seasons relative to their histories).
This week has seen several stories critical of the Big Six raiding the middle tiers, but this is how football has always worked; you have to get your players from somewhere, and smaller clubs have always had to sell to survive, or sell to improve.
(I don’t recall a lot of Jack Walkers, either. Just Jack Walker.)
Liverpool have also had to wait a long time to see the league return to its pre-Abramovich ‘fairness’. In the mid-1990s, Liverpool had a lot of money, but were lacking in other areas.
Again, you can see a closer clustering of £XIs in recent seasons, and if that helps make the league fairer, I’m all for it. If this seems unfair to others, then that confuses me. To me, irrespective of my biases, it looks healthy. (Apologies for greyness, as idea was originally just to highlight Liverpool against rivals in a general sense. Biggest peak is Chelsea, latest peak – 2021 – is Man City.)
Bad Spending, Not FFP, Held Villa Back
I also keep reading that FFP/PSR holds back clubs like Aston Villa, Newcastle and Nottingham Forest – yet from 2nd-tier football not too long ago, all three could have been in this year’s Champions League.
What do they want? Even more than that? All three to be champions at the same time?
Is the idea that you rich owners mean you’re entitled to success?
These are “ambitious” clubs, I am told.
But I’m also ambitious about dating Natalie Portman, and so far my ambitions have not been met. (I even lowered my ambitions to Rachel Stevens of S-Club Seven, and despite her recent breakup, she’s still yet to contact me.)
We can all be ambitious, but we can’t have it all. I’ve spent a lot of the past 35 years watching too many rubbish Liverpool teams to think that, especially between 1990 and 2020, ambitions are always met, and that life is fair.
I once watched a Liverpool game in which Sean Dundee played for the Reds.
In those 30 title-less years were some sensational teams and achievements (or even some just merely very good teams and achievements) – 2001, 2005, 2009, 2014, 2019 – but like Steve Coogan at the pool, in 1991 Liverpool did not win the league, and in 1992 Liverpool did not win the league, and in 1993 Liverpool did not win the league (and so on).
Forest, Villa and Newcastle have leapt back into the top flight in the last decade, with Newcastle in the relegation zone and heading back down when they were taken over in 2021.
They have all leap-frogged more established Premier League clubs or smaller but ‘smarter’ Premier League clubs, some of whom don’t have insanely wealthy backers.
If this is a glass ceiling, it’s still seen those three clubs improve massively.
And at the ‘expense’ of clubs like Brighton, Bournemouth and Brentford, who they overtook and squeezed away from the European places. (And Crystal Palace, too, in an indirect way.)
As well as overpaying on wages well beyond what is considered sustainable, Villa have on average bought really poorly for a few years now – and why is it so bad that there’s a sporting punishment if you spend badly?
Why should clubs just be able to write off a ton of mistakes and spend, spend, spend? If football had salary caps, Villa would be screwed. (Nothing against Villa, as my granddad was on the books there briefly, after he returned from three years in the trenches at WWI.)
All three of these clubs are miles ahead of where they were, and in Villa’s case, the overspending has been extreme in many senses, in an era where everyone knew the rules.
That there is now greater financial parity in England can be seen in the closer league tables (promoted teams aside), and yet again, the current Elo rankings.
Crystal Palace are up to 12th, ahead of all but five non-English giants in Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern, PSG and Inter.
Newcastle are 11th, and again, like Palace, won a trophy last season (albeit, ahem, the one that the biggest clubs don’t take seriously).
Yet in 2015, when Jürgen Klopp arrived, Liverpool were ranked 33rd (vidiprinter: THIRTY-THIRD).
A lot of hard work and losing/selling some big-name players led the rise to top of the tree, first achieved by 2019 and 2020, achieved again in 2022, and now again under Arne Slot.
I don’t know how football solves its wider financial distribution issues.
The Premier League is a financial juggernaut, but while the Big Six may be buying from the Smaller 14, the Smaller 14 are then raiding Europe, including Europe’s bigger clubs.
It’s also helping, as one example, to prop up French football, where clubs are collapsing along with the TV deal; even if a global interest in the Premier League is taking interest away from other leagues. But French football also contributed to its own issues.
This was something we had to live with when Serie A took English football’s best players in the 1980s and 1990s (when we tuned in to see Gazza at Lazio, the league by far the best around), and when La Liga was dominant in the 20 years after, doing the same.
(Whereas now, only Real Madrid can do so, and they tend to ‘get to’ players from two years out to run their contracts down, so clubs like Liverpool receive nothing, which is shitty, but such is life. There’s no £125m compensation on that one, and only strange timing meant £8.4m.)
Maybe there are downsides to the Premier League being so popular, but let’s also appreciate why it’s so popular, and how good it can be. It’s becoming a quasi Super League, but it didn’t happen overnight.
Bayern’s Uli Hoeneß is moaning about the Premier League making it unfair for the rest of Europe, yet his club has made the Bundesliga something I avoided watching between Jürgen Klopp leaving and Xabi Alonso’s Leverkusen briefly rising, and which bores me again.
Bayern signed all Klopp’s best players, and now they’re signing from Leverkusen and other rivals, as usual. No wonder the Bundesliga are giving the TV rights to YouTubers. Bayern have helped ruin the Bundesliga, just as PSG have helped ruin Ligue Une, but obviously they want to be strong in Europe, and no one wants to give up their own relative wealth if they can help it.
Hoeneß also said the Club World Cup was essential to meet the wage demands of players, but you don’t have to keep meeting those demands. You don’t have to keep buying (nearly) 30-something Premier League players on big wages like Eric Dier, Harry Kane, Sadio Mané, Luis Díaz, João Palhinha, et al. It seems a pretty short-term outlook; albeit at least they weren’t coming from the runners-up in Germany.
It’s hardly cutting-edge recruitment, is it?
And one thing the continent benefits from massively is that the Premier League is so strong, so fast, so brutal, that English clubs are usually knackered by the spring. Michel Platini said this about English clubs decades ago (start the season like lions, end it like lambs), and it’s even more true now.
If you’re playing almost half of the best 30 clubs in Europe twice a season, plus maybe again in the two domestic cups (two!) – in addition to six, eight, ten, twelve or more Champions League games – then if you’re still standing in March or April, you’ll likely be on the floor by May.
PSG, meanwhile (another financially doped club with Qatari backing), can use the French league as a training exercise for the knockout phases of the Champions League. Great team, but cruising until February 2025.
I don’t know if you can remove all inequities; someone will always suffer.
Not everyone can get a prize. But surely it’s better to curb nation states from spending billions to distort leagues and markets and wages.
I didn’t want a nation state to buy Liverpool in 2010, or when the club may have been up for sale a couple of years ago. I want a sustainable model so that Liverpool remain a viable proposition in 15 years’ time.
Indeed, just as I said in 2010.
And I need not list the absolute shit I’ve had from certain sections of Liverpool fans in that decade and a half for my position!
So, how’s it going with those losers FSG, and the ‘lack of ambition’? Was I wrong to back patience, sensible spending, growing income, expanding Anfield, and finding advantages via data?
Liverpool’s Summer Spend In Context
Chelsea (2003) and Man City (2008) clearly got in before the emergence of FFP around 15 years ago, and are now established as proper ‘big clubs’, even if their history prior to the takeovers was of merely occasional successes.
Man United remain a huge club, and still spend fortunes on players, but also lose fortunes in debt repayments. Arsenal are spending a lot, but without recouping much at all through sales (but do have regular Champions League income for the time being).
Liverpool’s gross spend – so excluding the important factor of sales – ranks 11th when adjusted to 2025 money. It will fall lower once all other spends are converted to 2026 money, as explained above. (Gross spend is a flawed argument, as I’ve said for 20 years, but people keep using it, so I may as well put that into an inflationary context.)
Look at the years that dominate.
I always defended Rafa Benítez – one of the elite managers of 2000-2010 – as I could see what was happening with Chelsea and Man United at the time; albeit Man United spent so much by selling players to Real Madrid (and other clubs), and from their massive commercial advantage at the time, and the most powerful manager football has ever seen.
That Rafa made Liverpool as competitive as he did was a minor miracle, especially with Alex Ferguson using his LMA mates and media pals to undermine who they privately called the ‘fat Spanish waiter’.
Even the biggest gross spend of Rafa’s tenure was 1/3rd Gérard Houllier’s signing of Djibril Cissé, a proto-Darwin Núñez, only with horrific compound fractures.
And while Jürgen Klopp proved even better than Benítez, even he may have struggled had FFP not been in place, just as he struggled in Germany once Bayern (partly aided by FFP, and just by their general dominance) bought all his best players.
The Time It Takes Spending To Make An Impact
In the recent article I mentioned, I ran what were then the top 25 gross season spends, to see what followed, with success equating to a Premier League or Champions League crown.
About a third had immediate success, that season.
Another third had success the season after.
And about a third had no EPL/CL success, but Liverpool in 2001 had a famous cup treble, and Chelsea in 2025 won the Club World Cup.
The only massive disaster was Blackburn being relegated in 1999 when Roy Hodgson was the manager (albeit he left halfway through, and some of the spending occurred after he went, as he and others tried to rebuild Kenny Dalglish’s title-winning team).
And even in the seasons where the EPL/CL was not won, domestic cups were won in that two-year timespan. Meanwhile, Chelsea in 2012/13 had not won the league by the end of the following season, but did so the season after. The same is true of Man City in 2010, who won the FA Cup in 2011, but not the league until 2012.
Man United in 2003/04 did not win the league for a few years, due to Chelsea’s spending (and Arsenal’s last hurrah), but the players bought at that time were vital to the league and European successes from 2007 to 2009, albeit less so the money spent on Dong Fangzhuo.
Man United’s big spends in 2014-15 and 2015-16 eventually led to cup successes, but I don’t think they rank as highly as Houllier’s treble of 2001, when the Reds played every possible game, winning the UEFA Cup (now the Europa League), FA Cup and League Cup, whilst qualifying for the Champions League for the first time since before it was even called the Champions League.
And of course – vitally – some of the immediate success listed above came on the back of the previous season’s spend, too.
Chelsea won the league in 2004/05 in José Mourinho’s first season, with the 2nd-biggest gross spend the game has ever seen, having inherited a squad assembled in large part in 2003/04 with what is the largest ever gross spend, at £1.12billion.
In 2003/04, Claude Makélélé, Joe Cole, Damien Duff, Juan Sebastián Verón, Glen Johnson, Wayne Bridge, Geremi, Alexey Smertin, Scott Parker and Hernán Crespo were amongst those to arrive the year before Mourinho; and even if Mourinho didn’t want all of them, the aforementioned players made a total of 256 appearances for the club in what was then a record-breaking season in 2004/25, while Crespo was sent on loan, ready to be recalled when required.
In general, I spotted many instances in the data of other clubs having relatively big spends, and the season after being the one where the impact started to show.
And many dynasties were built on big spends that only peaked, or started to peak, maybe three or four years later.
Next: some more.
Part Two
This section includes highlights of the aforementioned article, looking at the correlation between an £XI and success, how much it usually costs to win the title, and the narrowing gulf in competitive balance.
Why The 2024/25 Premier League Was the Most Equitable in Decades
In 2010 I created a heatmap that showed the relative cost of teams, that was included in the book Pay As You Play, as well as a Telegraph interview I was asked to do.
Each shade of red is the exact percentage tone, relative to team cost – with 100% the costliest £XI, and if a team’s £XI cost 17% of that, the tint was 17%, and so on.
Now that I’ve worked with Andrew Beasley to bring all the data up to 2025, I have been able to update the heatmap.
The first version has the team names, but to just get a sense of the patterns, the version below has no names. You can definitely see a trend in the three most recent seasons, with 2024/25 able to be copied and pasted anywhere into the 1990s columns, and where it would not look out of place. In between, oceans of pale competitive imbalance.
How £XI vs League Position Correlates at Over 90%
Including the six teams who finished 21st and 22nd (in the 1990s before the reduction to 20 teams), there have been a devilish 666 team seasons since 1992.
Teams will always over and underperform relative to any budget. Form can fluctuate, individually and collectively, no matter the cost.
While correlation is not causation, the arguments will hopefully remain compelling.
In the 33 seasons, the average £XI rank of the 33 champions is the most costly (at an average rank of 2.64, and would be more extreme at 2.13 but for Leicester in 2016), and the average £XI rank for those teams finishing 2nd is the 2nd highest (2.76), and the same for 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th; before some mid-table mixing and matching, before the pattern resumes and concludes with the final five: 16th = 16th, 17th = 17th, 18th = 18th, 19th = 19th and 20th = 20th.
(20th place averages the worst, at an average £XI ranking of 16.70. Teams can overperform and underperform, but no one can underperform to below 20th in the table. Similarly, it would need the most expensive team to win every single year for the average £XI rank to also equal 1.0, hence why it’s 2.64, and would be 2.13 but for Leicester.)
If you plot an r2 relationship for all positions, then over the 33-year period the £XI model ‘explains’ 90% (r2 = 0.906) of the outcome; if you remove the mid-table noise and focus on the top six and places 13th-20th, it increases to r2 = 0.9933, or 99%.
I appreciate that this last example is possibly p-hacking, but it just visually struck me on the graph how closely the top six and bottom eight tracked to the line of full correlation. And the top six and bottom eight positions are far more important than mid-table, where teams can lounge about in relative security, and where seasons peter out fastest.
This part is not intended to be a definitive statement, but is interesting (and I’m not a professional data scientist, as I studied art, not English or mathematics, while spending my youth playing football until it was dark, and often after it was dark, and I may have run into some concrete lampposts, in the pre-concussion protocol era, at my local grassy common with stray bikes and traffic cones and white dog shit; which is why I sometimes forget to ).
Mid-table remains less predictable, but it should be noted that the £XI differences are the least pronounced here: 9th averages £166,585,384, and 15th averages £132,859,057, while 16th and 17th average £122,735,679 and £123,393,858. All are fairly minor differences.
Then, a big drop to £98,824,102 for 18th and £79,952,931 for 20th.
This is where the sample size of 33 seasons averages out in such a way that transfer spending correlates super-strongly with equivalent success, but within each season there are outliers, like Leicester finishing 17 places better than expected, or Manchester United in 2025 finishing 15th despite the 3rd-highest £XI.
Indeed, United in 2024/25 is now the joint 2nd-worst performance against expectations (-12 places), behind the 33-year nadir of the -14 of Roy Hodgson’s Blackburn in 1998/99 (albeit Hodgson was sacked by the time they were relegated, but the team was assembled under his watch and were in the relegation zone when he was sacked), finishing 19th with the 5th-highest budget, based on a big summer spending spree.
(The other -12s were: 1997-98 Newcastle; 2008-09 Newcastle; 1994-95 Aston Villa; 1999-00 Sheffield Wednesday.)
Spending, if done well, is about buying the right tools. But sometimes it can be spent on the wrong tools. Or those tools can be broken. Or the carpenter is blind, and has already accidentally smashed his fingers to smithereens with a ball-peen hammer.
We pointed out around 15 years ago that transfer spending when adjusted for inflation can predict finishing positions pretty well, and in the 15 years since, you can see the pattern for yourself.
Cheapest Title Winners
Liverpool in 2025 won the league with an £XI of just £377,997,890, which takes us back to Man United in season one of this new era, 1992/93, and an £XI of £336,847,785.
Liverpool thus rank the 6th cheapest of the 33 champions, well below the average of £584,613,197, and the peak of £1,025,247,475 (Chelsea, 2005/06).
No £XI is cheaper than £267,238,668 ... bar one.
That’s Leicester City, £65,294,464.
Without Leicester, the average for the other 32 champions rises to £600,841,907.
Liverpool in 2019/20 ranked closer to midway, at £506,448,526, or 15th cheapest out of 33. So, still below average.
This is more remarkable as Liverpool haven’t had the number of homegrown players that helped keep £XI costs down in Man United’s early success under Alex Ferguson (and which kept the Reds’ £XI lower in the 1990s) … albeit having those homegrown players theoretically freed up more money to spend on big signings.
Few clubs now rely on homegrown talent. This is worth a brief examination.
The gap between youth, U21 and senior football is too big, especially in the Premier League. Great young talents are being produced (and getting minutes here and there), but injuries rates have rocketed amongst young players. You can be good enough if old enough, but is your body ready?
Even in the sedate Spanish game, Lamine Yamal has escaped so far, but very serious injuries have derailed Ansu Fati, Pedri and Gavi at that same club, with only Pedri back to his best. And just a year ago, “Aged 17, Marc Bernal made his La Liga debut with Barcelona ... Later that month, on 27 August, he suffered a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in his left knee.”
This almost feels reckless, and is part of an acknowledged pattern. At the same time, Real Madrid’s most promising defender, Joan Martínez, suffered the same injury training with the senior squad, only he was aged 16. And again, that’s just Spain.
The faster and more frenetic football becomes, the more risk it poses to growing bodies.
Yet not playing these players, and wrapping them in cotton wool, will hinder their development, and make them seek pathways away, so it’s catch-22 at times. So going the youth route is not the obvious solution it used to be. Yes, they are better technically than 20 or 30 years ago, but the league is brutal.
So I think selling and loaning young players, with buyback clauses, may be the best way to go. That money can go on players who are ready, as it’s almost impossible to get players ready via the first team.
Developing young players just to sell them seems cynical, and it might be, if done in bulk; but the truly special ones will eventually thrive, if they avoid serious injuries.
The Title Zone
The Title Zone, which I first noted in 2015, remained the minimum £XI to become champions bar the next season (2016) and Liverpool in 2025.
The £XIs of several sides this season could surpass the £500m mark. Liverpool could rank #1 for £XI this season, barring injuries to key players. But it won’t be by a massive gulf, if so.
Liverpool also have the additional difficulty of defending the title, while integrating new players, after a preseason delayed due to the horrific grief of losing a teammate, attending his funeral, and trying to get in the mood – and find the energy – to kick a ball about again.
Stuff like that doesn’t really show up in the data.
For that full deep-dive article, click below.
A roundup of all the summer’s transfers can be found here:
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