Just €12m spent
©TM/IMAGO
When Liverpool ultimately win the Premier League title on Sunday, it undoubtedly will be one of the most unique achievements by the club in recent memory. While it will unlikely rival the club’s triumph in 2020, when Jürgen Klopp’s team won the Anfield club’s first league title since 1990, it will still go down as one of the most unlikely success stories in the Premier League era for a number of reasons. Least of all because it happened in Arne Slot’s debut season in English football and achieved with a squad that had next to no investment spent on it in the preceding summer transfer window.
While the Anfield club did technically spend €30 million to sign Valencia goalkeeper Giorgi Mamardashvili, the Georgian shot-stopper won’t actually make the move to Liverpool until next season. Which means that over the course of this title-winning league campaign Liverpool bought just one player to bolster Slot’s squad: Federico Chiesa, who joined the club from Juventus for a paltry sum of just €12m. And considering his four league appearances to date, it seems fair to suggest that the Italian winger has played a minimal part in Liverpool’s run to the top of the league title.
This austere approach to squad building is, unsurprisingly, unprecedented in the modern game. Considering the fact that Liverpool actually earned €47m from player sales this season, it means the club’s net spend on transfers stands at a cosy +€5m. That stands in stark contrast to last season’s Premier League champions, Manchester City, whose net spend on new signings stood at a mammoth -€120.8m. In fact, over the course of their unrivalled run of four back-to-back league titles, the Etihad club averaged a net spend of -€92.5m. In many ways, the perceived wisdom of the Premier League was often that the biggest spenders tended to be the ones that hoovered up all the silverware, but Slot’s Liverpool have clearly busted such a myth. So how did the Anfield club set about claiming this Premier League title by spending very little money at all?
How Liverpool outsmart rivals in the transfer market
A quick look at Liverpool’s squad would suggest that Slot’s team had no right to shoot to the top of the league table this season. The club’s purchase value – i.e the total amount of money spent on transfer fees to put the squad together – stands at €665m. While that may seem like a huge amount of money, it’s only the sixth highest figure in the Premier League, with Liverpool sitting closer to Newcastle (€604m) than table-topping Man City, whose squad cost almost twice as much as Liverpool’s to sign with a purchase value of €1.1 billion.
This clearly underlines the smart business that Liverpool tend to do in the transfer market. Since the club’s last Premier League title, the Anfield club have spent just €537.6m on new players, which places them tenth among all Premier League clubs for expenditure on transfer fees. And the secret behind the club getting the most out of that small budget comes down to Liverpool concentrated the majority of that spending on a select group of first-team players.. In total, Liverpool spent 88 percent of the aforementioned total transfer fees on just 11 first team players.
In stark contrast, Man City have spent €896.4m on 17 players that went on to play for their first team, Arsenal have spent €774.5m on 22 players that have gone on to play for their first team and, to no great surprise, Chelsea are in a league of their own having spent €1.52b on 31 players that went on to play for their first team in the last five seasons. As we can see, each of these clubs have spent far more than Liverpool but when we filter it down to an average transfer fee per first team player, Liverpool’s average of €40.3m is relatively comparable to Chelsea (€48.9m), more than Arsenal’s (€35.2m), while still some way behind Man City’s average of €52.7m. In other words, the Anfield club have been prepared to make big statement signings like their Premier League rivals, but they tend to follow the tried and tested method of quality over quantity when it comes to identifying players to improve their squad.
A strong foundation left behind by Klopp
While Liverpool have unquestionably managed to navigate the transfer market better than their domestic rivals, Slot’s success with the club wasn’t solely down to his ability to fashion miracles out of thin air. As the Dutch tactician has gone to great lengths to point out through the season, he inherited a squad that was purpose built with the clear intention of challenging at the highest level. And when we look back at Liverpool’s spending over the last 10 seasons we can see that the Anfield club were certainly gearing up for a title challenge, regardless of who happened to be calling the shots in the dugout.
As we can see in the table above, prior to this season’s title-winning run Liverpool ramped up their spending on new players and spent no less than €496m on signing new players in the four seasons prior to this one. Intriguingly, the club also followed a similar plan ahead of their last title win, when Klopp & Co. spent an impressive €563m on new players in the four seasons leading up to the 19/20 title win. In that season as well as this current one, the Anfield club spent a minuscule amount of money on signing new players. Not because the club didn’t have money to spend, but because they were content with the squad they had put together. And in both cases, the results on the pitch eventually reflected the impressive business that had been done off it in the years leading up to both fateful league campaigns.
As such, it’s perhaps a little disingenuous to say that Slot managed to win the Premier League title without spending a dime. In truth, the club had been working behind the scenes on building a squad capable of challenging for their 20th league title for the best part of four whole seasons and along the way they spent an extraordinary amount of money. However, that shouldn’t take anything away from what Slot has achieved with this group of players and the manner in which they were able to overcome a very good Arsenal team to the title. Not to mention the very clear fact that while Liverpool have spent a lot of money to build this title-winning squad, it’s still a mere fraction of what their domestic rivals have spent for nowhere near the same amount of success. Liverpool’s title triumph under Slot is not just a testament to tactical ingenuity or form over the course of one league campaign, but the result of long-term planning, intelligent recruitment, and an ability to continue outmanoeuvring their rivals.
