Trent set to sign?
©TM/IMAGO
When it comes to success in European football, no club can match the length and breadth of Real Madrid’s dominance of the Champions League. Although the Spanish giants won’t take part in this season’s final, Los Blancos have taken to Europe’s most dazzling stage no less than 18 times since the continental competition first started in 1955. In that time the LaLiga side have won the tournament 15 times – more than twice as many as second-placed AC Milan and three times more than Spanish rivals Barcelona.
Many assume that the Madrid side do this by simply outspending their rivals. And while that may have certainly been the case 20 years ago, during the club’s “Galacticos” era, the Spanish club have become far more savvy in the transfer market to compete with old and new rivals with deeper pockets. So much so that over the course of the last 10 seasons, Real Madrid’s net spend in the transfer market stands at just €232 million – the 27th highest net spend in the world in that period of time, behind the likes of Nottingham Forest, Fulham and Bournemouth. Much of that is down to the club’s ability to sell players for large fees – Madrid rank 16th in terms of income from player sales after earning €768m in transfer fees in that period of time – but an even larger factor in the club’s austere approach to the transfer window is their ability to sign world class players for very little money at all, or in many case entirely for free.
Real Madrid’s ability to sign world class players for free
A perfect example of Madrid’s ability to coax the best players to the club for relatively little money in terms of transfer fees will likely come this summer, with Trent Alexander-Arnold expected to make the move to the Spanish capital following the end of his contract with Liverpool. With a market value of €75m, the England international will become the third most valuable free transfer in the history of the sport. At which point, Madrid will be able to lay claim to three of the top five, with David Alaba’s free transfer from Bayern Munich in 2021 with a market value of €55m sitting fifth and, of course, Kylian Mbappé’s move to the club last summer from Paris Saint-Germain when his market value stood at €180m. Antonio Rüdiger’s free transfer from Chelsea in 2022 also makes it into the top 20, placing him 14th due to his market value at the time standing at €40m.
Indeed, when we look through the last 10 years of Madrid’s transfer activity we can see a number of examples of the club enticing star players to the club either at the end of their contracts or within the final year of their deals. As we can see in the graphic above, perhaps the first example of this came in the summer of 2014, when Toni Kroos refused to sign a new contract with Bayern Munich and more or less forced the German giants to sell him for a cut-down fee of just €25m. Four years later they bagged world class goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois from Chelsea for just €35m, one year before his contract at Stamford Bridge expired. And as if that wasn’t impressive enough, the Spanish giants also picked Takefusa Kubo from FC Tokyo for free in 2019 and Eduardo Camavinga in 2021 for just €31m, one year before his contract at Stade Rennais expired.
When we couple these signings together with the aforementioned free transfers in this period of time, it means Real Madrid have signed the seven players in question for a total of just €91m. And not only have most of those players gone on to become integral parts of the club’s first team and helped them win multiple titles both domestically and in the Champions League, but when we tally up all of their highest market values while playing for the club, it comes to a total of €550m. That means the difference between what these players cost Madrid in transfer fees and what they went on to be worth for the club stands at a remarkable €459m. And that figure will naturally tick over the half-a-billion-Euro mark when Alexander-Arnold finally signs on the dotted line and is unveiled at the Santiago Bernabéu in the coming weeks.
