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Wealth Gap In EPL At Its Worst This Summer

By on July 18, 2014

This summer, Arsenal have splashed £33,260,000 on signing Barcelona winger Alexis Sanchez. While it is hard to even believe a single player is worth that sum, it isn’t an uncommon sum to trade hands at the top of the Premier League these days. In fact, this summer Arsenal’s average paid transfer has been worth £23.23 million. This kind of money could rent you out the entire country of Liechtenstein for almost a third of a year. But at the top of Europe, it isn’t even record breaking. Real Madrid’s entire squad is worth over half a billion pounds. In the Premier League, though, it is critical. If you want to be a club fighting for a top four finish, you need to be spending millions and millions of pounds every summer on players. Manchester United’s average cost for a purchase this summer has also been worth over £20,000,000.

But obviously, only the top clubs with the richest of owners can pay the big bucks. That is why between the 7th and 9th position in the Premier League last season, there was a 14 point gap. That is why Manchester United can not only afford one, but two signings worth more than the entirety of Burnley FC and Leicester City’s squad values are. Liverpool recently sold Luis Suarez to Real Madrid for over £71m, a sum equal to over the worth of more than 50 players at the bottom of the Premier League, according to data from TrasnferMarkt.

This summer, Leicester City’s most expensive signing was worth just £1.67, and Burley’s most valuable player isn’t worth much more. The Premier League might be labeled as the most competitive league in the world, but it really is split into two different races – those in the top 8 or so – and everybody else. The average paid transfer in the league this summer has been worth £8.123, a sum so buoyed by the top club’s transfers that the bottom half of the table doesn’t even come close to matching that total with all of their transfer fees combined. A total of £373.68 million has been spent by Premier League clubs this summer, on 46 players, and while American Major League Soccer is extreme in limiting clubs to a salary cap to increase competitiveness, a move like this has to be done across the pond in England and elsewhere in Europe if the teams at the bottom of the Premier League and top leagues all across the continent do not want to be fighting solely for survival. Financial Fair Play from UEFA obviously isn’t cutting it.

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.