Reigning back to back Premier League champions Manchester City, who last season became the first side to accomplish an English domestic treble, are also the first football club to exceed €1 billion spent on building their roster of players.
That’s according to the Switzerland based CIES Football Observatory, whose data sets show Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid right behind them, with each club spending north of 900 million Euro. The red side of Manchester comes in fourth, with 750 million euro invested in their current squad. Obviously, this statistic is yet another reminder of how underachieving and underperforming Ed Woodward/Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s side are.
All of the Premier League’s “big six” made the top ten, except for Tottenham Hotspur, as Liverpool registered eighth, Chelsea ninth and Arsenal 10th. The study covered Europe’s “big five” leagues, with four of them having representation within the top ten.
England placed five, Spain three, while France and Italy each had one.
Here are the top 10 biggest spending clubs
1. Manchester City (€1.014bn)
2. Paris Saint-Germain (€913m)
3. Real Madrid (€902m)
4. Manchester United (€751m)
5. Juventus (€719m)
6. Barcelona (€697m)
7. Liverpool (€639m)
8. Chelsea (€561m)
9. Atletico Madrid (€550m)
10. Arsenal (€498m)
Can anyone say FFP (Financial Fair Play)? It will be interesting to see what will happen moving forward in regards to the financial landscape of football. Is this brave new world of financial social darwinism here to stay? Can anything be done to stop it?
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” regularly appears on WGN CLTV and co-hosts the “Let’s Get Weird, Sports” podcast on SB Nation.
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