The Premier League’s biggest spending clubs of the past five years - including Arsenal and Man Utd

With another transfer window in the rear view mirror, we can finally get our number-crunchers to update the spreadsheets and tell us which clubs have been spending the most money – and now we’ve put together a list of the ten Premier League clubs who have the biggest total spending on new players over the past five seasons.

Of course, it’s pretty routine for clubs not to reveal the exact amounts they spent on transfers, so we’ve taken our data from Transfermarkt’s estimates and used the current exchange rates to give us some indicative but necessarily imprecise figures – not that there’s too much doubt about which clubs have splashed the most cash…

Oh, and if you want to see how each Premier League club has got on by net spend, you can take a look at where every club is for the past five years right here.

10. Liverpool - £422.0m

Liverpool’s American owners don’t like to stick their hands too deeply into their pockets, so it shouldn’t come as a major shock that one of the Premier League’s more successful sides sit only in mid-table when it comes to spending power. It helps that three of their five biggest transfer outlays came a little more than five summers ago – the fees forked out for Virgil van Dijk, Alisson and Naby Keïta have all fallen off the books, although hefty recent spending on Dominik Szoboszlai and Darwin Núñez keep them in the top half of the spending table.

9. Wolverhampton Wanderers - £441.1m

When you see how much cash the Molineux side have splashed over the past few years, you begin to understand why they had to hold a fire sale this summer to get back in line with the Premier League’s FFP requirements – losing manager Julen Lopetegui in the process. Matheus Cunha, at €50m, is their biggest signing so far.

8. Newcastle United - £499.5m

Climbing the table quickly, the Saudi-backed Magpies have spent big over the past two years after some rather stingy years under the stewardship of Mike Ashley – and you’d be hard-pressed to find too many people on Tyneside who think that the big bucks thrown at players like Sandro Tonali hasn’t been money well spent.

7. Aston Villa - £510.5m

Aston Villa have shown plenty of ambition in the transfer market since they returned to the Premier League four years ago, including the acquisition of their shiny new record signing Moussa Diaby. An impressive performance under Unai Emery last season suggests that all that cash is helping to push them in the right direction, too.

6. West Ham United - £532.4m

West Ham’s recent record in the transfer market is pretty patchy, with some big-money misses such as Gianluca Scamacca and Sébastien Haller not too far behind them. Still, early indications are that the Declan Rice money seems to have been spent pretty smartly, with James Ward-Prowse and Mohammed Kudus among the new arrivals causing a stir in East London.

5. Tottenham Hotspur - £673.5m

Head a few postcodes north of the London Stadium and you’ll start to see where the really serious cash is being spent. The Harry Kane windfall has seen Daniel Levy step up the already substantial spending, with two of their five biggest-ever transfers being made this summer in the shape of Brennan Johnson and James Maddison. Micky van de Ven wasn’t far behind, either. Will all those pricy players help Spurs win a trophy at long last? We’ll find out soon enough…

4. Arsenal - £706.6m

Arsenal are separated from their north London rivals by a couple of tube stops and about £35m when it comes to spending, and one FA Cup’s worth of silverware too, at least as far as the past five years are concerned. The Gunners made their most expensive signing of all time in Rice this year, and their third most expensive in the shape of Kai Havertz as Mikel Arteta looks to build a team that can genuinely contend with Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City.

3. Manchester City - £752.8m

Speaking of whom… Emirati largesse has seen City spend three-quarters of a billion over the last five years, money which has paid for a heck of a lot of trophies. In an age when money is necessary to buy you success, City do at least prove that you need to know how to spend it as well – a point aptly made by the relative achievements of the two biggest spenders on our list.

2. Manchester United - £784.5m

There are many complaints that can be fairly levelled at the Glazers’ stewardship of United, but unwillingness to spend isn’t one of them. The Old Trafford outfit have thrown bagloads of bucks at an attempt to return to the success of the Sir Alex Ferguson era in recent years, but their silverware count is rather more slender than that of their noisy neighbours. Quite a lot of the money looks like money blown rather than invested, as players like £82m Antony demonstrate.

1. Chelsea - £1.28b

Yes, that’s right, well over a billion pounds has been spent on this Chelsea squad, most of it in the last year since Todd Boehly’s Clearlake Capital took the reigns from Roman Abramovic. And they’ve somehow still not managed to sign a half-decent striker.

So far, the payback for the largest spending spree in the history of football (dwarfing even the year that Paris Saint-Germain bought Neymar and Kylian Mbappé) has returned one 12^th place finish. Not, thus far, the greatest return on investment known to man – but hey, there’s still time, and perhaps Mauricio Pochettino can get a tune out of the team and get them a little closer to the top of the actual Premier League, rather than just the spending tables…