The CIES football observatory has released its latest tranche of stats, this time focusing on the cost of assembling the teams in Europe’s top 5 leagues.
Way out in front, as you’d expect, is Manchester City. They have spent over a billion on their players, with Real Madrid and PSG close behind in the 900s.
After that things begin to fall away steeply, and by the time you reach Chelsea in 8th you’re down to €561m. Not a trifling fee by anyone’s standards, but only just over half what Man City spent.
In fact Liverpool and Man U are also ahead of us, and Arsenal close behind. Despite that, and despite Marina’s much pointed out errors, thanks to the youth academy we can say that our team is not far off our rivals. In fact, give us the €200m we are lagging behind Man U and spend it on a a world class striker and a world class centre back, and we’d consider ourselves significantly better.
