English diluted with French – Newspaper Kommersant No. 164 (7365) of 09/07/2022

The research company CIES Football Observatory has published a rating of the cost of European football clubs. The owner of the most expensive squad, like a year ago, was Manchester City. Only at this club, the value of players exceeded €1 billion. But something else is noteworthy – the first three places went to the English teams. This is further confirmation that the English Premier League (EPL) in terms of financial opportunities, is increasingly separated from the rest of the football world.

On Tuesday, the well-known research company CIES Football Observatory made public rating of European football clubs, ranked by the value of their squads. The data in the ranking is fresh, taking into account the results of the summer transfer window that closed on September 1 in the leading European championships. It is also worth paying attention to the fact that CIES, unlike, say, Transfermarkt, which, based on its own algorithms, determines exactly the potential value of players (because of this, for example, Lionel Messi as part of PSG “costs” € 50 million, although the Parisians got it for free), evaluates the squads based on how much their clubs paid for them. Hence the discrepancies in the CIES and Transfermarkt figures.

Although they agree on one thing – the most expensive team, like a year ago, at Manchester City. According to CIES estimates, it is worth €1.013 billion, according to Transfermarkt – €1.04 billion. By the way, Manchester City is the only football club in the world with a squad of more than €1 billion. giant – “Manchester United” and Chelsea. The Manchester squad is estimated at €852 million (€750 million according to Transfermarkt), Londoners at €812 million (€798 million). In fourth place is PSGwhose composition is worth €772 million (€912 million), closes the top five “Liverpool” — €662 million (€883 million). As you can see, there is only one non-England club in the top 5.

Meanwhile, a year ago, the picture was somewhat different.

True, even then two Manchester teams were in the lead, but PSG were third, Chelsea were in fourth place, and Real Madrid were in fifth place. That is, non-English clubs had twice the representation in the top 5. Now Real Madrid is only sixth (€637 million), followed by Barcelona (€493 million), which is now at the level of Arsenal (€487 million), Atlético (€472 million) ) and Bayern Munich (€439m), finishing eighth to tenth.

However, it is not surprising that it is the Premier League clubs spend more than others to buy players, no. They simply have the biggest opportunity, mostly thanks to the revenue from television contracts. In the 2022-2025 cycle, they will bring about £11bn to the Premier League. It is not surprising that during the summer pre-registration campaign, the English top division teams accounted for almost half (€2.2bn of €4.5bn) of funds spent on player purchases. teams from the Big Five countries (England, Spain, Italy, Germany, France). For the Premier League, by the way, this was an absolute record for spending on transfers, not even for a single summer, but for the entire season. Other big leagues have not yet managed to reach pre-pandemic levels.

Alexander Petrov