Just look at all that money…sigh
When teams are making big transfers in the window and getting Jim White all excited on Transfer Deadline Day™, it’s sometimes easy to forget that there is real money being thrown around out there, and this chart gets a look at just how much both the teams in Spain and England have paid in transfers to make up their panel of players.
Roberto Bayón on Twitter went to the trouble of working out the facts and figures as published by FIFA in January of this year, and although the tweet and the table is in Spanish, you don’t need to be too handy with the aul castellano to read those fancy numbers. The first column lays out just how much the team cost, and the second column looks at the percentage of the total spend that each team has invested.
Comparativa entre España e Inglaterra
"DINERO PAGADO EN TRASPASOS PARA CONFORMAR LAS PLANTILLAS DE CADA CLUB 13/14" pic.twitter.com/w0OOVtuLVz
— Roberto Bayón (@entreraposos) 31 janeiro 2014
Here’s a slightly bigger version of the table if you’re struggling to read that.
Unsurprisingly, Manchester City and Real Madrid sit atop their respective tables, but just behind them are Manchester United and Barcelona respectively. That may surprise a few, given that Barcelona like to make so much noise about their academy and Manchester United have had a few bad transfer windows recently.
There is a huge gap in England between the traditional ‘big clubs’ and the next level down where Newcastle have spent just under €130 million less than Liverpool, while in Spain that gap is much more startling when you compare city neighbours Real and Atlético Madrid.
The other startling comparison is the difference in how quickly the spend drops off as you go down the table in Spain, with clubs near the bottom having spent under €3 million on bringing their entire team together.
These tables are also a very handy tool to analyse league position against the spend of the clubs, and see who is overperforming and who is underperforming.
Bayón had one last stat to include too, looking at the overall spend on transfers in each of the big leagues around Europe, which is again a handy one for comparisons, keeping in mind that Spanish tends not to use billion and express it as thousands of millions.
Premier League -> 2.706 Millones de euros
Serie A -> 1.207 M €
Liga ->1.134 M €
Ligue 1 -> 951 M €
Bundesliga -> 849 M €
— Roberto Bayón (@entreraposos) 31 janeiro 2014
Whatever way you slice it, those are some serious chunks of change. Anyway, we’re off to scrape together our pennies to try and afford a can of soup.
