October 4 – Manchester United have the most expensive squad on the planet, the most money ever spent putting a football team together. Local rivals Manchester City rank third in the big money team stakes – with Real Madrid and Barcelona either side of them.
The CIES Football Observatory has ranked all the teams in Europe’s Big 5 leagues by the total sums spent in the transfer market spent in assembling their teams.
Man Utd have spent a whopping €718 million (+€185 million compared to last season) putting their roster together.
At second and third positions in the squad cost table are Real Madrid (€634 million, + €47 million with respect to 2015/16) and Manchester City (€611 million, + €78 million).
There are nine English Premier League teams ranked in the top 25. Premier League champions Leicester City are ranked 26th. Six French teams fill the bottom 10 positions in the ranking.
There is another commonality in the stats of the top four clubs. When Barcelona and Real Madrid were throwing big money at the transfer market to assemble their teams they had as their managers Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho. Their personal duel is now being replicated in Manchester, and so is their spending.
CIES says that: “Generally speaking, the correlation between the squad cost from a transfer fee perspective and the final position in the domestic league table is very high.”
Liverpool, tenth in the ranking and often jealous and bitter rivals of the Manchester duo, will be thinking of the words of one of their city’s other great exports, the Beatles: ‘Money can’t buy me love’.
CIES would argue that it buys you trophies.
See the full ranking at http://www.football-observatory.com/IMG/sites/b5wp/2016/159/fr/
Current squad values by transfer fees paid
Source: CIES Football Observatory
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