The top 10 highest spending Premier League clubs after £2bn summer spree - including Aston Villa and Chelsea

Another transfer deadline day has passed into Premier League history, and an utterly staggering £1.97bn has been spent on new players around the top flight in a summer window which, if nothing else, served to explain why season tickets are so damned expensive these days.

It was a pretty controversial window, too, with clubs buying and selling within the same ownership groups, making dodgy-looking deals which coincidentally helped various clubs stay on the right side of the profit and sustainability rules, or just being Chelsea. Who arguably also fall into the first two categories, come to that. Honestly, you almost have to admire their commitment to providing talking points.

But aside from all the strangeness, which clubs splashed the cash the hardest? With the help of some numbers from the good folk at Transfermarkt, we’ve pulled together the top ten biggest spenders in the Premier League in the 2024 summer transfer window below. The totals include add-ons which may not be met and exclude pre-agreed prices for players signed on an initial loan, so they may not be exact in the final accounting, but even taking such things into account differently, there would still be several clubs made notable by their absence. No Manchester City, no Liverpool, no Newcastle United? Let’s see who’s replaced the megabucks sides at the top of the spending charts...

10. Arsenal (£91.8m)

By the standards of a title-chasing team, Arsenal kept the purse strings pretty tight this summer and there was to be no repeat of the £105m splurge on Declan Rice from last year – indeed, on net spend, they only threw a little over £20m on new players as they try to close the gap to Manchester City. In fairness, they did bag a lovely late bargain in the form of a season-long loan of Raheem Sterling, whose move didn’t include a loan fee and will only see the Gunners pay a third of his wages. Mikel Merino and Riccardo Calafiori may well prove to be fine additions and we know what the permanently-signed David Raya can do, but the question remains – why didn’t they sign themselves a striker?

9. Nottingham Forest (£94m)

Regardless of the fact that they picked up a points deduction for breaching Premier League spending regulations, Forest bought another 11 brand new players this summer, a club seemingly unable to resist the temptation to get themselves a whole new team every year. By far the biggest individual spend was the reported £34.7m dropped on Elliot Anderson, one of the aforementioned transfers that persuaded league bosses to sternly warn clubs about the kind of deals they were making which each other (not, of course, that Forest were alone on that score). As usual, we expect about half of the new arrivals to barely touch the turf at the City Ground, and indeed owner Evangelos Marinakis has already generously loaned defender David Carmo to his other club, Olympiacos, after buying him from Porto. How kind of him.

8. Southampton (£98.7m)

Staying in the Premier League is an expensive business, or at least the Saints have decided that it should be. A staggering 18 new signings rocked up at St. Mary’s over the course of the off-season, ranging from big investments in youth (Taylor Harwood-Bellis and Mateus Fernandes), potential bargain buys (Yukinari Sugawara looks a snip at under £6m) and wise old veterans (Adam Lallana, Charlie Tayloe and Ryan Fraser). Whether Russell Martin can turn the investment into enough points to survive remains to be seen, but you can’t accuse Southampton of not trying in the transfer market. The worry, of course, is that it all goes a bit Burnley 2023/24.

7. Ipswich Town (£106.6m)

Not to be outdone, fellow newly-promoted side Ipswich bought 12 players and if they had signed every striker they were linked with in the last week or two of the window, it would have been twice that. Instead they settled for a combination of battle-hardened central midfielders along with several players who can claim to be among the best Championship performers of recent seasons, like Sammie Szmodics, Jack Clarke and Dara O’Shea. Despite trying extensively, they never got hold of Armando Broja, but they found plenty of potential goalscorers elsewhere.

6. West Ham United (£121.7m)

West Ham have received a lot of praise for their transfer window, which has seen them sign a lot of high-class players such as Jean-Clair Todibo, Niclas Füllkrug and Crysencio Summerville – and even if £40m for Max Kilman felt a little bit high, one can’t say that the club haven’t backed new head coach Julen Lopetegui in the transfer market. Bagging World Cup winner Guido Rodríguez on a free transfer looks rather shrewd, too. It should be noted that they really spent a bit more than £121m – both Todibo and midfielder Carlos Soler arrive on an initial loan with deals agreed for a total of €55m (£46.3m) down the line. A hefty investment which looks, on paper, to be a good one as well.

5. Tottenham Hotspur (£125.4m)

The £54m signing of Dominic Solanke did most of the damage to the balance sheet here, but Spurs also spent big on youth this summer, dropping over £70m (when add-ons are factored in) on teenagers Archie Gray, Wilson Odobert, Lucas Bergvall and Yang Min-Hyeok – so this is a window we won’t really be able to fully evaluate for a good few years. We can, however, wonder whether they couldn’t have worked a little harder to sign the holding midfielder that Ange Postecoglou wanted so much.

4. Aston Villa (£148.5m)

Having qualified for the Champions League for the first time in 40 years, Unai Emery’s side have gone big on the spending as they look to build a team that can handle two games a week at the very top level – but like Spurs, they’ve also invested a lot in the next generation, too, with only one of their eight new signings being over the age of 23. And Ross Barkley only cost £5m. The question now is whether they’ll miss the departed Douglas Luiz too much, and whether Ian Maatsen and Amadou Onana, purchased for a combined total of over £85m, can cut the mustard.

3. Manchester United (£180.7m)

When Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Ineos took over sporting affairs at Old Trafford, a huge programme of spending was promised which would completely overhaul the squad – in the end, the Red Devils made just five signings, but all of them have the potential to be significant. 18-year-old wonderkid Leny Yoro was the most expensive acquisition at an estimated £52m, but Manuel Ugarte, Matthijs de Ligt, Joshua Zirkzee and Nouassir Mazrouai could all be important additions. Will they be enough to help Erik ten Hag turn things around after the club’s worst finish of the Premier League era?

2. Brighton & Hove Albion (£194.8m)

For years now, the Seagulls have bought cheap and sold high, making huge profits on players like Marc Cucurella and Moisés Caicedo. The question, of course, was when they’d start to throw all that money about. We now have our answer. In classic Brighton fashion, most of the new arrivals are young, with plenty of potential for them to be sold to Chelsea at a huge profit somewhere down the line, but players like Yankuba Minteh, Georgiono Rutter and Brajan Gruda could all be key first-team players right away. This is Brighton’s big gamble, a big outlay on a generation of players who can, all going well, push them into regular European contention. Give their track record so far, you wouldn’t bet against them getting it right.

1. Chelsea (£201m)

Well, of course it was going to be Chelsea who spent the most. To give the Blues a degree of credit, their net spend actually wasn’t that colossal (£53.5m, about a third of Brighton’s) but the way they conducted the sales of players like Conor Gallagher and Trevoh Chalobah leaves itself open to criticism if things go badly for the new arrivals. 11 of them, this time, although a couple of them are destined for loan spells and the reserve squad in the near future.

This amount also excludes the money promised for South American starlets Kendry Páez and Estevão Willian, who will arrive for serious money in 2025. In the meantime, have Chelsea finally spent money sensibly? Or will we be adding names like Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and João Félix to the long list of players who disappoint at Stamford Bridge? Not long until we have an answer…