Clubs from Europe’s five biggest leagues spent a record £3.24 billion on international transfers this summer, with the Premier League leading the way again with an outlay of £1.11bn, FIFA has revealed.
With transfer windows open in 182 of FIFA’s 211 member associations between June 1 and September 1, the global spend on cross-border deals was a record £4.18bn.
Premier League clubs have now spent more than $1bn in each of the last five summer windows but this year the total spend fell slightly compared to 2017’s record sum, as did the total number of transfers.
In fact, English clubs cleared half a billion dollars in international sales for the first time, although their combined net spend was still more than £700 million.
Elsewhere, Italy’s Serie A and Spain’s LaLiga spent record sums.
Fuelled by blockbuster deals like Cristiano Ronaldo’s £99 million move from Real Madrid to Juventus, Italy became the second national association after England to break the billion-dollar barrier for international moves in a single window.
Clubs in France’s Ligue 1 and Germany’s Bundesliga spent about a third less in the global market this summer than they did a year ago but the combined dominance of the so-called Big Five is undeniable.
According to FIFA’s annual analysis of the summer window, transfers to the Big Five represent less than a fifth of the 8,401 international deals, most of which are for out-of-contract players and therefore command no fee.
“Yet, (the Big Five’s share of total moves) account for an impressive 77.5 per cent of all global spending on transfer fees, a tendency that has been increasing over the years,” the FIFA Transfer Matching System report said.
“Spending by the Big Five went from being 66.3 per cent more than the clubs of all other member associations combined in the summer of 2011, to being 244.9 per cent more this summer.”
Another indication of the gap between the Big Five and everywhere else can be seen in the drop-off in spending between the £300m or so that French and German clubs spent on international transfers and the £115m spent by the country in sixth place on the global list, Saudi Arabia.
Concern about this growing inequality is why UEFA is looking at a third European club competition and why many clubs are keen to tighten UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations.
Under those rules, spending is already linked to turnover but FFP 2.0 will limit clubs to a net spend of 100 million euros (£89 million) per season.