England and Saudi Arabia became its main actors

The closed summer transfer window in Europe’s top football leagues was another confirmation of the growing financial hegemony of the English Premier League (EPL), whose clubs spent more than £2 billion on players for the first time. , it unexpectedly brought the championship of Saudi Arabia. Her clubs, if they had grown together with some high-profile deals, could very well not only get pretty close to the €1bn mark spent in a single transfer campaign, but also surpass it.

This transfer campaign has produced two notable outcomes. One, however, despite all its external sonority, is quite, perhaps, routine. Naturally, none of the British media resources could do without a beautiful figure when commenting on the closing of the summer window. In 2022, Premier League clubs barely, literally one single not-so-large deal, were not enough to reach the £2bn mark spent on newcomers in the summer, which seemed completely unattainable in the middle of the last decade. In 2023, they surpassed it by investing in players £ 2.36 billion – well, or, according to Transfermarkt, converting everything to continental currency, € 2.81 billion.

It seems that the indicator insists that it should be savored properly. Especially when combined with some others. For example, noting that out of the ten most expensive transfers of the summer, six were carried out by English teams, including two of the largest transfers: we are talking about the purchase of Arsenal and Chelsea from West Ham and Brighton for an amount slightly exceeding €115 million, Declan Rice and Moises Caicedo. Or that in the ranking of the most generous clubs that represent England, there are also half a dozen, and it is headed by the still unsettled Chelsea, whose new owners – a consortium that bought the Londoners a year ago from Roman Abramovich, led by the American Todd Beuly – have already invested in personnel gains of about €1 billion. Or that British summer investments account for almost half, 48%, of all investments in the Big Five, which also includes Spain, Italy, Germany and France.

But in fact, savoring especially does not work. The financial hegemony of the Premier League, its growing thanks to gigantic TV contracts (for the current, 2022-2025, they will bring the structure about £ 11 billion) and other commercial victories, the separation from the rest is too hackneyed topic to chew it.

So Deloitte sports chief Tim Bridge’s report on the transfer window is accompanied by an extremely dry and uninteresting summary that a second consecutive summer campaign with record numbers proves that Premier League clubs can return to the level of “income growth” that they had before the coronavirus pandemic. . Because of her, the football market, including the English one, dipped terribly for a couple of seasons. But now, it seems, the pandemic has turned into an unpleasant, but hardly relevant memory.

The report also indicates that 14 out of 20 Premier League clubs, two-thirds, spent more money in the summer of 2023 than in the summer of 2022. The market was stormed by everyone – both the leaders, although it seemed that Manchester City, with its status, had nowhere to grow, and failed ones, like Chelsea or Liverpool, favorites, and outsiders. Nottingham, for example, impressed everyone on the last day before closing the window, having managed to complete seven purchases at once in a few hours. And from this nuance, the conclusion was that it is not worth waiting for a decrease in appetite from English clubs. In any niche of the Premier League, there are powerful incentives to solve sporting problems with money, which again is fantastically plentiful.

The second result of this transfer campaign, of course, is much more interesting. The third position in the list of the most generous championships managed to climb the championship, which was still on the sidelines of world football life, but suddenly decided to play an important role in it of Saudi Arabia. Its clubs invested €873.5 million in recruits. And they could well have reached a chic billion-dollar milestone if they had grown together with a couple of deals, the preparation of which was constantly written by various sources, who claimed, for example, that Al-Ittihad was about to will acquire the famous striker Mohamed Salah from Liverpool, giving almost € 200 million for him.

But even so, the Saudi expansion looks shocking. Especially against the backdrop of what is happening in the four “mainland” championships of the “big five”.

Here, only Germany and France, which outperformed Saudi Arabia, showed a clear increase in spending compared to the previous summer window. But in the second case, growth is largely provoked by circumstances. Of the €900.6 million that French clubs have invested in players over three months, €349.5 million is the money of PSG, which, after another setback in the Champions League, the flight of Lionel Messi and Neymar, was forced to carry out a radical personnel restructuring. But the expenses of the Spanish championship decreased by almost €100 million. That is, it turned out that when one of the two giants (this time Barcelona) is constrained by financial difficulties and cannot afford a luxurious selection, the Spanish championship ceases to resemble a tournament with a colossal commercial potential, which several years ago threatened to throw English off the top rung of the hierarchy.

There is also a note about Saudi Arabia in the Deloitte report – very optimistic. Tim Bridge’s colleague Callum Ross believes that “the emergence of active participants in the global transfer market” can positively influence the desire of clubs to create “sustainable business models”. True, taking this opinion into account, you need to know that actually less than ten years ago, in 2016, the Chinese broke into this market about as aggressively as the Saudis. But their invasion did not save European clubs in the future – even such mighty ones as Barcelona – from the deepest crises, and Chinese football itself, once aiming for world domination, is now more dead than alive.

Alexey Dospekhov