On the day the European Championship was kicking off in Germany, with Scotland taking a 5-1 spanking from the competition’s hosts in its opening match, the starting gun on another Premier League summer transfer window was quietly fired.
Ten weeks of player trading in the English top flight formally began last Friday, offering the chance for squads to be tweaked, transformed and everything in between.
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There will be no shortage of business done before this year’s deadline of 11pm (UK time, 6pm ET) on Friday, August 30. West Ham United, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Crystal Palace have already signed off deals worth north of £10million ($12.7m), and Aston Villa have agreed to sign Chelsea left-back Ian Maatsen for a fee believed to be just over £35m, yet there are question marks over just how big this summer’s spending will be.
Even allowing for the hesitancy that inevitably comes in a major-tournament summer, the first in three years with the World Cup 18 months ago happening in the northern hemisphere’s winter to avoid the worst of the Gulf’s heat in host nation Qatar, the transfer market across much of Europe is currently short of liquidity.
The cogs will start to whirr once we get into July, be sure of that, but the early expectation is for approaches in this window to be more circumspect. The fireworks of last summer, shown below, bringing an eventual record spend of £2.36billion by the 20 Premier League teams, are unlikely to be rivalled.
A need to sell has been the running theme to this point and will remain a consideration. Ambitious clubs, such as Chelsea, Villa and Newcastle United, have sailed close to the wind on the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability Rules (PSR), leading to limitations on what they can spend this summer. Others, including Manchester United and Arsenal, wish to move players out to help fund fresh recruitment. Either way, there is not the financial freedom of 12 months ago for many.
“A lot of what clubs do this summer will be PSR-driven,” says a senior football figure at a Premier League club, who spoke to The Athletic anonymously to protect working relations. “A club like Newcastle United will be looking to get players out before they bring anyone in, but there’s many more clubs like that.
“It feels like people are probably that little bit more nervous than they were before, with the points deductions given out last season. Clubs are nervous, but that’ll probably only last for the next couple of weeks and then they’ll try their hand again.
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“I still think there’s plenty of Premier League clubs with the ability to spend. The market just needs that first big Premier League player to move. If Conor Gallagher was to move away from Chelsea, as an example, then Chelsea (will) spend and there’ll be a shift elsewhere. Then things start moving.”
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The unofficial June 30 deadline, now looming on the horizon and a little over a week away, carries increased significance in an era of spending constraints. No club will admit it, to avoid weakening their hand, but some are facing pressure to sell before that date, which is the end of football’s financial year, to avoid breaching PSR rules. That, as well as the ongoing Euros impacting business, has kept activity on a low heat.
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It is in stark contrast to this time last year, where enormous deals were being negotiated across Europe.
Jude Bellingham had already joined Real Madrid from Borussia Dortmund for £88million, while Arsenal and Manchester City were jostling for the signature of West Ham’s Declan Rice. Arsenal would eventually win that race, for £105m, in the middle of July.
Harry Kane’s £80million move from Tottenham Hotspur to Bayern Munich in early August was another in the pipeline, along with the biggest of the lot, Moises Caicedo’s £115m move from Brighton & Hove Albion to Chelsea a few days later. The summer would end with 19 players moving for more than £50m across the global market.
There is unlikely to be a bigger transfer this summer than Kylian Mbappe joining Real Madrid on a free transfer following the expiry of his contract at Paris Saint-Germain, but the flood of money transferred ahead of last season — £4.8billion across Europe’s big five leagues (Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, the Bundesliga in Germany, Italy’s Serie A and Ligue 1 in France) — will not be easily replicated. Michael Olise, expected to leave Palace for a fee in the region of £60m, is the biggest deal currently being worked on.
“I’m not sure I see anyone moving for that huge money this summer,” adds the same Premier League figure, who is well-versed in the mechanisms of the market.
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“You might get players in the £60million to £80m bracket — players like Conor Gallagher, (Brentford striker) Ivan Toney and Victor Osimhen (of Napoli in Italy) — who could move. There’s always the potential for something unexpected to happen, but there’s nothing obvious right now.
“PSG are probably going to be the big hitters now Mbappe has gone. They’ve got a lot of (financial) space. There’s a lot of players ready to go in the bracket between £40million and £80m, but I don’t currently see a £100m player moving in this market.”
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If French champions PSG are primed to go big to secure their replacement for Mbappe, recent history leaves no question over where the greatest collective spend will come. Last season, 10 of the 20 biggest transfer outlays came from Premier League clubs. A year before it was 12 of the 20, and in 2021-22 it was 11.
That pattern is not going to be altered in 2024-25, but prudency will have its place after the Premier League’s ‘Big Six’ (Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham) — driven by Chelsea’s excesses — last summer spent a combined £1.36billion.
Chelsea will not go again at the levels of 2023, and intend to be offloading as they go, while United plan to keep to a net spend of £50million in this window. Pursuits of Bologna striker Joshua Zirkzee and Everton centre-back Jarrad Branthwaite show a willingness at Old Trafford to spend, but not to the levels of previous summers.
City and Arsenal, last season’s Premier League champions and runners-up, are both in the market for key additions, but at (comparatively) sensible prices, while Liverpool and Spurs typically stay closer to self-sustainable models. Neither of those two could be considered gamblers in the market.
Then there are those playing catch-up.
Villa, a European Cup/Champions League club again for the first time in over 40 years next season after finishing fourth, cannot spend as freely as they wish in a window where their summer 2021 sale of Jack Grealish to City for £100million falls off their accounting periods. Newcastle find themselves in much the same boat after huge investments in the immediate aftermath of their Saudi-led takeover in October 2021.
It has brought an initial caution to the transfer market, but the vast revenues that are guaranteed to every Premier League club through domestic and international broadcast deals negate the need for lasting austerity.
“I don’t see clubs being unable to buy, and the reason for that is even if I sign a player in June, you amortise them on a monthly basis,” says Kieran Maguire, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool and host of the Price Of Football podcast. “Even if you sign a player for £20million on a five-year contract, that’s £4million a year — £300,000 or so a month. That’s not going to move the dial as far as your FFP (adhering to financial fair play rules) is concerned.
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“Buying players isn’t the issue for many clubs, it’s more a case of getting a sale in before June 30 in order to book a profit, which hits the accounts immediately.
“The selling clubs know it’s an issue, and the buying clubs know too. It means they tend to low-ball with the offers, as we’ve probably seen with Manchester United and Everton, trying to make them accept a low-ball price for Branthwaite. It’s a bit of chess, bluff and counter-bluff, with everybody looking after number one.”
A financial crutch for clubs in the Premier League and across Europe last summer was the arrival of the Saudi Pro League as a spending force. It collectively spent more than Germany’s Bundesliga, with Al Hilal, Al Ahli and Al Nassr between them committing to an outlay of £650million.
And plenty of clubs benefitted. Almost half of the total transfer fees received by Premier League teams from overseas (£540million) came from the Saudi Pro League. Big-earning players in or nearing their thirties, such as Riyad Mahrez, Edouard Mendy, Fabinho and Kalidou Koulibaly, made moves to suit all parties among England’s elite, while moves for Ruben Neves (Wolves) and Aleksandar Mitrovic (Fulham) gave mid-table Premier League clubs cash for their own needs.
So the great disruptors were also enablers, injecting new cash into the market. It was the grease that helped wheels to turn. That avenue is open again in this window but Saudi spending is not expected to be as lavish. Last summer was a point when squads were being built and marquee players, none bigger than Brazilian superstar Neymar, were being recruited.
Foundations, quickly built by necessity, are now in place and slots for further overseas players are limited. The path is now mapped for others to follow but few in the industry foresee the same all-out aggression of summer 2023. Money is not the object, but squad spaces are finite.
“There’ll be less, but there’ll still be Saudi money in the market,” says the Premier League recruitment figure we spoke to. “It’s settled down there now. They’re a bit more established as a league and they’ve worked out they can get some very good players either on frees or with just a year left on contracts.”
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The Saudi Pro League brought buoyancy to last summer’s market but the majority of continental European clubs still have the same limitations. As mentioned above, PSG are expected to show ambition in the hunt for an Mbappe replacement but Real Madrid, the reigning Spanish and European champions, might have already completed their major business after bringing in both France’s captain and Brazilian wonderkid Endrick, who was signed in 2022 but could not join until his 18th birthday next month.
Madrid’s big domestic rivals Barcelona remain in a financial straitjacket of their own making, and that leaves only a select few clubs from Germany and Italy as big hitters in the market. The Bundesliga and Serie A, it is worth remembering, did not record a net transfer spend last summer, meaning their clubs collectively received more in fees than they spent.
Those leagues will always have their exceptions, such as Bayern, who signed Japan international defender Hiroki Ito from fellow German side Stuttgart for €30million (£25.3m; $32.2m) last week, but it is the financial muscle of the 20 Premier League clubs that will shape just how big this summer’s market will be.
“You need something to prime the pump. And that’s what we don’t have at present,” Maguire says. “Two years ago, the Saudi Pro League came into the equation and that acted as the pump primer.
“It allowed clubs to sell players that nobody else was prepared to match on wages. That was great for clubs, but since then we’ve probably seen a bit of a drawback from the Saudi Pro League, which has meant we need a Jack Grealish-type of transaction to get the ball moving.
“When City bought Grealish from Villa, it meant that Villa could go into the market and sign players. From those players bought, other clubs were able to buy. It’s this ripple effect within the market, and it’s currently difficult to see where that’s going to be this summer.
“It could be that a couple of big deals go through and we start to crank the engine, things start to get fluid, but if you’ve got five or six clubs that are quite constrained, it does have a significant impact on the market as a whole.”
The money is still there. The eagerness to spend it, though, might not be quite the same.
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(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)