The top 10 biggest net spends in the last five years of the Premier League elite’s £4 billion spree

Ah… net spend. We’re supposed to get our Premier League entertainment on the pitch but somehow so many of us just can’t resist playing mental games of Fantasy Director of Football and poring over our teams’ ledgers to determine who did the best business. Net spend has become the connoisseur’s way to do that.

Does net spend win you titles? No. Does it factor in a club’s many other revenue streams? Definitely not. But it’s a wonderful source of arguments and bragging rights - and who doesn’t love to ‘win’ a transfer window? For most clubs, it’s just about the only joy left to us in a world where only a select few ever win actual trophies.

Here, then, are the ten biggest net spenders in the Premier League over the last five years for you to get your teeth stuck into and, if they haven’t won much in that time, mock. I say Premier League, but if we included all the clubs in the Big Five leagues alongside them, only Juventus would make it in. There really is a lot of money in the English top tier. Anyway, these are the clubs with the deepest pockets and the greatest magpie tendencies in the English game, all thanks to the numbers crunched from the data wizards over at the CIES Football Observatory.

10. Fulham - £240m

Fulham’s £133m spending spree during the 2018-19 season accounts for a hefty chunk of the red in their ledgers. That was the season they splashed out in the hope of staying in the Premier League, only to thud right back down to the Championship after the expensive likes of Jean Michel Seri, Frank Zambo Anguissa and Alfie Mawson couldn’t turn them into a tough enough team to beat. That was also the year that they bought Aleksandar Mitrovic, mind you, so we can safely say they got a solid return on that one – at least when he isn’t busy shoving referees about.

9. Liverpool - £277m

You’d expect a club the size of Liverpool’s stature to be a bit higher up these sorts of standings, but FSG are a positively parsimonious by the standards of billionaire Premier League owners. Their biggest-spending window was 2018-19 as well, the year they signed Alisson, Fabinho and Naby Keita for hefty fees, while the €80m transfer swoop for Darwin Nunez means they’ve splashed out a bit this year as well. In between, they were tighter than a gnat’s wallet – well, by Premier League standards, anyway. They even turned a profit in 2019-20, largely because the sale of Danny Ings outweighed all of the rather low-profile players they brought in. All four of them.

8. Wolverhampton Wanderers - £314m

It’s a funny thing, but if you employ a superagent to help sort out your club’s transfer dealings, you will often find that you’re spending very large amounts of money on the players he represents. 19 of them so far, and big splashes for players like Matheus Nunes and Goncalo Guedes mean that the money has flowed freely into carefully selected Portuguese pockets. Not that they didn’t make a healthy profit on Diogo Jota, mind you – just not quite enough to balance the books and keep them out of articles like this.

7. Aston Villa - £327m

It doesn’t feel like Aston Villa have splashed the cash all that much compared to some of their rivals, but while none of their buys between 2019 and 2021 were all that colossal – Ollie Watkins at £30m was comfortably the largest – they bought so many players that they ended up a whopping £255m in the red from those two years alone. The purse strings have been held a little tighter since then, but Unai Emery’s side was still assembled at a pretty steep price. Mid-table mediocrity doesn’t come cheap these days, does it?

6. Newcastle United - £373m

Let’s be honest, this is mostly pretty recent activity. Getting cash out of Mike Ashley was harder than getting an honest statement to parliament out of Boris Johnson, but since the Saudi PIF took over the reigns at St. James’ Park, the cash has been flowing freely, and most of it in one direction. Only two clubs have had an overall spend higher than the appropriately-nicknamed Magpies in the last two years, and if you can’t guess who those might be… well, just read on until the bottom of this article. A combined £120m spent on Alexander Isak and Anthony Gordon suggests that if we do this piece again in a few years, the Toon might just be a little further up the table. The Premier League table too, come to that.

5. West Ham United - £384m

I’ll be perfectly honest – I wouldn’t have expected West Ham to be spending quite that much, but their colossally expensive season so far has pushed them right up towards the top of the big spenders league. Unfortunately it hasn’t had the effect of pushing them up the actual league and the total spend of nearly £200m this season – headlined by big splashes on Nayef Aguerd, Gianluca Scamacca and Lucas Paqueta – may represent one of the worst pounds-for-points exchanges in recent Premier League history. Still, there’s some time for David Moyes to right the expensive, gold-plated apple cart he’s currently in charge of.

4. Tottenham Hotspur - £421m

It’s the megabucks spending afforded to Antonio Conte that’s sent Spurs surging up the net spend charts this season, with the better part of £100m thrown in the direction of Richarlison and Christian Romero – although Tanguy Ndombele, who cost a cool £55m, was the biggest outlay of the lot in the last five years. Still, while a few of their big buys may have struggled to impress in their fancy new stadium (thank god the price of that isn’t included in this), at least they’ve had a few Champions League campaigns to keep the accountants happy. Missing out on the top four this season, however, may cause a few beads of sweat to drop onto a few calculators in their plush North London headquarters.

3. Arsenal - £481m

Regular Champions League campaigns means regular Champions League money – and that means some pretty huge net spends. To be fair, Arsenal only started dropping more than £100m per year in the last two seasons, but the recent £45m purchase of Gabriel Jesus added on to more than £60m combined for Oleksandr Zinchenko and Fabio Vieira means that the boat is getting pushed out further and further – but if they win the Premier League this season, it will all have been worth it. They could still have done without losing about €20m on Lucas Torreira, of course – it hasn’t all been great business for The Gunners.

2. Manchester United - £589m

Here we go – Manchester United come along and we get to the really stratospheric numbers. It’s a mystery as to quite how the Glazers manage to be publicly perceived as extremely stingy whilst laying out more than all but one other team on the face of the planet, but it’s probably got to do with nobody bothering to fix Old Trafford’s leaky roof for so long. Still, they’re the only club in the entire world with outgoings on this kind of scale every single season, with the £210m net spend this term the biggest of the lot – Lisandro Martinez, Casemiro and Antony all cost more than £50m, and one can only imagine how much Ajax must be laughing at getting €95m for the Brazilian winger. If Manchester United can start challenging for the league soon, of course, they’ll be having a good old chuckle themselves.

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1. Chelsea - £659m

It’s a funny thing, but while Chelsea spent a heck of a lot of money in the Abramovich era, they tended to do a pretty solid job of selling players too, keeping the net spend down to some acceptable levels. Now Clearlake Capital are in the building and demonstrating a different transfer tack – chucking colossal quantities of cash into the stratosphere and seeing what happens. The £545m outlayed this year is by far – by miles – the most ever spent by a club on transfers in a single season in the sport’s history. They’ve made PSG, Manchester City, Man Utd and all the other megabucks clubs of Europe look miserly – and they’re in mid-table. If they don’t start getting things right fairly soon, we might be looking at one of the worst investments in financial history, never mind the history of football. No pressure, eh Graham Potter?