This summer English Premier league clubs spent more than ever before on player transfers, a staggering £1.47bn in total. Some spent a lot more than others, and while PSG are making the Financial Fair Play headlines globally, the EPL clubs as a group spent more than any other league.
There are lots of ways to analyse spending, and rather than write a detailed analysis or opinion piece (as I’d doubtless end up being biased), I’ve taken the opportunity to simply present the transfer activity in a few different visualisations and readers can draw their own conclusions.
The first is a card based approach, with one ‘card’ per club. For each club we can see
- Overall transfer activity (total revenue + total income),
- Net transfer activity (spending – revenue)
- A customised bullet graph showing transfer Spending : Revenue
- Bars by player, showing incoming players (spending) in red and player sales (i.e. revenue) in blue
We’ve had some internal debate, but as the focus is on spending, actual spending is shown as positive numbers (in red) and revenue is shown as negative (blue).
I initially built the view for one club, as below, and then used a new ‘Repeater’ feature being introduced to XLCubed later this year which was a big time saver.
The repeater allowed me simply to replicate that view for the other clubs as below rather than build it 20 times. More to come on that in the next few months.
Click for a larger view. (yes, it’s a chart of two halves…)
The clubs are ordered from top left to bottom right by overall Activity. Using that approach Manchester City are top as they not only bought heavily, but also had significant sales, as did Chelsea. Perhaps surprisingly Everton are third, both due to higher spending than normal and also the sale of Romelu Lukaku for an eye-watering £76m.
Note that while this view is in many ways a Small Multiple approach, the spending axes do not have a shared scale as that makes the charts difficult to read for clubs with a smaller spend.
If we had ranked by Net spend, Manchester United would actually be top as while City and Chelsea both spent more on players, United had very little sales to offset spending.
A few other points of interest are that both the North London clubs, Arsenal and Tottenham actually had a net income over this transfer window.
The club view below is ranked by net spend, and gives an easy comparison by club.
TreeMaps can also be interesting in this context. I’ve used them here to take a look at spending by club by position, and also by age band to provide a viewpoints on where clubs have been focusing on the pitch and whether on the short or long-term.
Taking playing position first, it varies significantly across clubs. Of the 3 largest spenders Manchester City have focused most heavily on defence, Chelsea on midfield and Manchester United on Forwards (albeit on 1 expensive forward).
Club Spending by Position
Looking at age band of the players purchased, as would probably be expected the 22-25 age band is the biggest spending category for most clubs. The players are established, but their expected peak years are still to come, and their market value will likely remain high if they were sold in a few years. All Liverpool’s purchases were in this age band.
Club Spending by Age band
Clubs looking for an instant fix may also invest in slightly older players already at their peak, and the 26-29 band has the second highest level of spend.
The transfer window could be charted endlessly, but in the end only time will tell if the clubs have spent wisely. Although wisely is a relative term in this context of course.
