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Last season’s Champions League final was a sign. The outcome of European football’s summer trading window, which closed earlier this week, was another. The old guard of the continent is retreating and they are replaced by a new all-cash-rich elite.
In a market battered by the lingering effects of the coronavirus pandemic, only teams backed by the world’s super-rich have been able to trade freely this year, bloating their already plump roster with the cream of the game’s talent. In contrast, many of the game’s traditional heavyweights struggled to sell off to offset the books weighing in on losses and ballooning debt.
Chelsea, which won the Champions League back by a Russian oligarch, spent $135 million to acquire last season’s Italian champion Romelu Lukaku from Inter Milan. Other Champions League finalists, Manchester City, belong to the brother of the family that rules the United Arab Emirates. He was easily able to find the British record of £100 million ($138 million) to recruit Jack Grealish, a very talented offensive midfielder from Aston Villa, not because he particularly needed him but because he could. City could have broken that record again weeks later if Tottenham hadn’t resisted their bid for England captain Harry Kane.
Paris St.-Germain, owned by Qatari executives, made the most remarkable transfers in France. After Real Madrid told their captain Sergio Ramos that they were unable to meet new contract demands, PSG said they could definitely do it. Other elite players have also been priced in because of their new contracts with their former clubs – Gianluigi Donnarumma, Italy’s European Championship-winning goalkeeper, Dutch captain Georginio Wijnaldum – came aboard before PSG made the biggest statement of them all: taking Lionel Messi from Barcelona is the biggest highlight of how far the game has come. great expression.
PSG later underscored its strength in a deal that didn’t happen. Real Madrid, the most successful team in European history and accustomed to charting its own path for a very long time, learned the hard way that PSG plays by different rules. Real Madrid made two official bids, the latter of which would amount to the second-highest ever paid for a player as it seeks to kick 22-year-old French forward Kylian Mbappé from PSG. reply. This challenged football orthodoxy, where clubs typically try to cash out players entering the final year of their contracts, rather than losing players like Mbappé for free within a year.
“It’s not a smart move, but it’s a show of strength,” said Rodri Baster, founder of Promoesport, one of Spain’s biggest player agencies. “PSG has made it clear that money is not an issue for them. I would do the same if I were the PSG owner. If I had enough money and didn’t need more, I would bang my fist on the table like him and say no.”
As a result, PSG have one of the scariest strikers ever assembled, adding Messi and keeping Mbappé and pairing up with Neymar, who was the world’s most expensive signing when PSG hired him for 263 million euros ($312 million) in 2017. .
As for Barcelona, it spent months putting together the biggest fire sale in its history. Injured by a financial crisis and losses exceeding $500 million this year, team management tried to evacuate players as if they were salvaging water from a sinking ocean liner. The most stark example of the chaos engulfing the club came on the last day: Barcelona allowed Antoine Griezmann to rejoin his former club Atletico Madrid on loan. Just two years ago, he had paid $140 million for Griezmann to Atletico, which was competing for the Spanish title.
Italy’s most successful team, Juventus, needed interesting ways to recruit Manuel Locatelli, a midfielder who signaled his debut on the global stage with a series of impressive performances at Euro 2020. Juventus have paid nothing to their former club Sassuolo in their first two years. and in just the third year, it will begin paying a portion of the fee, which can be up to $44 million.
The biggest sign that Juventus should tighten their belt came in the final days of the transfer market with the arrival of Portuguese star forward Cristiano Ronaldo, who for most of the past decade replaced the award for world’s best player with Messi. He was transferred to his former club Manchester United for 15 million euros ($ 18 million). Juventus paid 100 million euros for him three years ago.
“I think this has been a market where the priority is solving financial issues rather than sports criteria,” Representative Baster said.
Manchester United has weathered the impact of the pandemic better than most. Thanks to the size of the Premier League’s television contract and its own highly profitable commercial operation, the team owned by the billionaire Glazer family spent freely: Ronaldo culminated in a summer spending of more than $170 million. Arsenal, another Premier League team with wealthy Los Angeles Rams and Denver Nuggets owner Stan Kroenke, has committed more than $200 million largely to young talent in recent efforts to overhaul an underperforming roster.
Spending in England was greater than anyone could have accomplished except for a handful of clubs in other leagues. According to accounting firm Deloitte, the $776 million net spend by Premier League teams this year was 10 times higher than in Italy and Spain, where the focus is heavily on sales – whatever the price.
Perhaps the best underlined of the Premier League’s strength was that the three teams that had just emerged from the second-tier Championship – Brentford, Norwich and Watford – spent more than La Liga’s three biggest clubs Real Madrid, Barcelona and Atletico.
“All indications show a trend towards concentration of spending by the wealthiest clubs, particularly the wealthiest Premier League clubs,” said the CIES Football Observatory, a football think tank, in a report released after the trading window closed on Monday.
“The dependence of an increasing number of clubs on transfer revenues, even in the wealthiest leagues, demonstrates the weakness of the current professional football economic system.”
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