Back
A few weeks ago, when the Premier League announced that Manchester City were guilty of 114 different violations that added up to them illegally spending an extra $1 billion, everyone realized that the Premier League isn’t actually fair.
How do we look back on that decade of soccer? What does it mean for Pep Guardiola’s legacy? Or Jurgen Klopp’s? Or any of the hundreds of other people who were affected in some direct or indirect way?
One team cheated, and that team has won six of the past nine Premier League titles. Oh, and they’re currently in first place this season. Sports require some version of arbitrary integrity for them to make sense — we currently don’t have that.
Perhaps, more importantly, we don’t even have the illusion of integrity right now.
Manchester City look like the best team in the league but we all expect some big punishment to be thrown at them any day now. But as I wrote about last week, the idea that the Premier League was fair before Manchester City were bought by Abu Dhabi United Group — or that everyone else is still operating across an equal playing field — was itself an illusion.
Last season, Arsenal won the Premier League with an estimated payroll of about €219.3 million, while Brentford had the league’s smallest estimated payroll at €62.9 million. Outside of Leicester City’s magical run in 2015-16, the team that wins the Premier League is always one of the richest teams in the Premier League.
So, as we continue to grapple with the meaning of what we’ve watched over the past decade, I wanted to look back on everything we’ve seen in a slightly different way: Who got the most out of what they spent? If everyone had roughly the same resources, who would’ve dominated the Premier League and who would’ve sunk to the bottom of the standings?
For this list, I looked at the last 10 full Premier League seasons, and I chose the 20 teams that played the most matches. Then, I gathered spending data from FBref, which has estimated wage data for every club, and Transfermarkt, which is the best public source for transfer spending data.
From there, I calculated the average total spending for every club in the seasons they competed in the Premier League. That total is just a combination of their average annual roster payroll and their average annual net transfer spending.
Finally, I took the total spending for each team and divided it by the number of points won in the Premier League standings — a win being worth three points, a draw worth two.
That gives us the final metric to sort this list: millions of Euros spent per point won.
We’ll start with the most efficient teams topping the list — the teams that could shoot up the table if they were allowed to spend more money — and, we’ll continue down until we find the most wasteful teams that spent the most for the points they got.
We’ll start with a graph that shows the relationship between average spend and points:
As you can see, there have been basically two Premier Leagues: one filled with teams that spend somewhere between €60 and €160 million on player costs, and then another with the teams that spend more than €200 million.
Brentford are the absolute bottom for total spending, but they’re ninth in points won. If you look at the trend line, you can see that we’d expect a team with Brentford’s spending to win something like 41 points per season but they’ve won about 51 points per season — a 24% increase on expectation.
That, my friends, is what a willingness to embrace a new approach can get you. Brentford are the Premier League’s “Moneyball” club.
They’re run by a professional sports bettor who established proof of concept when he first bought floundering FC Midtjylland in Denmark and turned them into a Champions League team. Then he took over his boyhood club and got them promoted to the Premier League, where they finished ninth last season and currently sit sixth.
How best to describe what makes Brentford such a great club? They understand risk better than anyone else in the world: with how they hire managers, how they make tactical decisions, and how they acquire new players and depart from old ones.
This chart sums it up:
They know that most shots aren’t going in, so what do they do to move the odds in their favor? They take higher-quality shots than everyone else, and they concede lower quality shots than everyone else.
Lastly, this isn’t a case — at least, not yet — of an owner using data to spend less money on his team. Per Deloitte’s most recent accounting, Brentford put 75% of their revenue back into wages. The average among the Premier League’s so-called Big Six? 56%.
So, this is what it all comes down to: If Brentford had been allowed to spend as much money as, say, Manchester City, they’d be Premier League champions by now.
Bournemouth, too, are unafraid to do things differently.
In 2022-23, they fired manager Scott Parker with the club sitting in last place. Gary O’Neil came in and guided the Cherries to a comfortable 15th-place finish. But rather than stick with him for the following campaign, they realized that they were lucky to be where they were — they finished the season with the worst expected-goal differential in the league.
The club shocked everyone by firing O’Neil and replacing him with Andoni Iraola, a young Spaniard with no experience coaching in England. And when they went winless across their first nine league matches under Iraola, they didn’t panic. The result? An eventual 12th-place finish, then a ninth-place finish, and then a sixth-place finish.
Fittingly, the three best-run clubs in the league are the only three clubs that stayed under the €2 million per point barrier.
There are two reasons why Brighton sit third. OK, there are three. We’re working with estimates here so the 0.1-million gap with Bournemouth isn’t enough for us to say that Bournemouth are better than Brighton in any way.
As for the other two reasons: their first four seasons in the Premier League after gaining promotion in 2016-17 were rough. They never finished higher than 15th, but they’ve now not finished lower than ninth since, and they’re currently third, with the best goal differential in the league.
The other: their spending in the transfer market hasn’t been as good as you might expect. I mean, it’s been incredible, quite often. They continue to unearth players you’ve never heard of, and those players continue to become Premier League starters and occasionally stars.
But they’ve also begun to spend big on some other players, and we haven’t seen an uptick in performance — at least, until this season. If we only look at transfer spending, the Seagulls rank just 10th in cost per point.
While it seems like clubwide philosophies and commitments toward finding objective, consistent ways of assessing player and team performance might be the uniting factors between the three teams atop this list, allow me to propose another reason for their success: cute nicknames.
The Bees, the Cherries and the Seagulls. Has anyone at Manchester United considered replacing the Red Devils with the “Red Pandas”?
Maybe this should just say “Sean Dyche” instead of “Burnley”? In the Premier League, Dyche’s Burnley teams averaged about 42 points per season. In their last two first-division tries without him: 24 and then 22 points.
Massive caveat here: the club’s connections with Portuguese super-agent Jorge Mendes mean that any financial numbers — especially transfer fees — should be viewed skeptically.
“Market value” rarely applied to any of what Wolves were doing. This team was promoted to the Premier League with a roster that included Diogo Jota and Rúben Neves. And that’s not because they identified two star talents before anyone else did.
Both Villa and Newcastle have run into the same problems. They’ve been better-than-average with their spending, and they’ve tried to spend as much as they can — it was enough to get them both multiple top-four finishes over the past couple years.
But the league’s new financial rules mean that they’re unable to consistently spend anywhere near any of the Big Six clubs, so they’ve both had to dismantle their recently successful squads and cash in on the profits.
It’s been a little over 10 years since Leicester won the Premier League, and well, let’s just consider what has happened to this team over the past decade.
First, they seemed dead-to-rights for relegation in 2014-15 before an unlikely second-half-of-the-season charge up the table. Then they … won the freaking Premier League the next season.
Then they flirted with relegation the next year, fired their manager, and finished 12th. After a couple of seasons of midtable mediocrity, they sent Riyad Mahrez to Manchester City. Later, their owner died in a helicopter crash outside of their stadium.
And then they became top-four challengers with a nearly completely new team from the one that won the league. They finished fifth two seasons in a row, and it only ended up being fifth because of late-season, last-day-of-the-year collapses.
Two years later, they were actually relegated. Then they got promoted right back up, then they got relegated — two years in a row.
As of right now, they’re sitting 13th in England’s third division.
This is about as high as a big club can finish in an exercise like this. The further you go up the table, the more each extra point costs. That makes sense if you think about how much each point is worth.
The more points you accrue, the more likely you are to qualify for the Champions League or win the league and get all the financial benefits that come with that level of performance. Going from 55 to 56 points matters way less than going from 82 to 83, so it makes sense that those higher-up points would cost more.
Plus, there’s a cap on the number of points you can actually win in a season — 114 — so it’s not like you can just keep spending and keep increasing your expected point total. It eventually hits a wall.
So, how did Liverpool turn themselves around during the decade we’re looking at?
They’d never been the richest team in the league — until the 2024-25 campaign, when they brought in more revenue than everyone else. Their average annual spend over this period is closer to Tottenham in sixth than Arsenal in fourth.
And if we just look at transfer balance, their annual average was €65 million — compared to the rest of the Big Six at €109 million. At least until recently, the club believed that the transfer market was an incredibly inefficient place to invest — they, instead, focused a much bigger chunk of their revenue into player wages.
The league average for spending efficiency is €2.8 million per point over the past 10 years. Liverpool were slightly better than that, and they combined it with the fifth-highest total spending. That turned them back into one of the best teams in the world.
This is how you get relegated.
This is how you find yourself in a relegation battle.
Here’s how the 20 teams stack up in total spending, with the chart divided between transfer fees and player wages:
Tottenham sit just behind Liverpool overall, but as you can see, they closed the gap with their transfer spending as opposed to their wage bill. Most of the overachieving teams on the list have the red bar taking up a bigger chunk of the chart, while the underperformers have devoted more resources to the transfer market.
There’s a question of the chicken or the egg here, but I think it’s, uh, a couple parts chicken and a few parts egg?
If you identify the right players, you don’t have to keep spending in the transfer market — you can instead give the good players you’ve identified higher salaries to keep them at the club. But trying to avoid the transfer market unless it’s absolutely necessary is also a decision that clubs can — and do, albeit rarely — make.
One of the stranger parts of this whole cheating scandal is what the cheating actually means.
There was no actual on-field cheating — no betting on games or match-fixing or performance-enhancing drug use or sign-stealing or spying or deflating of balls. No, Man City’s players and coaches really did win that many points and that many titles because they were that much better at playing soccer than any other English club we’ve ever seen.
The cheating, of course, is that they illegally spent the sums of money required to put together that collection of players and coaches. But while I think we’d be wise to even look at these financial numbers with a skeptical eye, City’s accounted-for per-point spending over the past decade went further than just three other Premier League clubs.
This number is skewed by Arsenal’s struggles across the first two-thirds of the decade in which we’re examining. But even as the Gunners have risen into title contention and title winning, they’ve spent a ton of money.
From 2023-24 through 2025-26 — from when they realized they were a title contender and onward — they lead the league in net transfer spending, while their estimated annual wage bill over those years ranked third, fourth, and second, consecutively.
Once Arsenal got through the period when they were paying off the bill from building Emirates Stadium, the club had had tons of money to spend. And like they’re doing with the Los Angeles Rams in the NFL, Arsenal’s owners are doing what they should: whatever it takes to win more trophies.
Hooray, another number we probably shouldn’t believe!
Earlier this season, Chelsea were fined for 74 different financial breaches between the period of 2009 to 2022 that were reported by the new ownership group when they took over for Roman Abramovich. So, if anything, this number should be even higher than it is.
Chelsea and Arsenal, though, serve as an interesting comparison. The reported numbers at least tell us that the two clubs have spent very similar amounts of money over the same 10-year period. But Arsenal won 726 points to Chelsea’s 670.
It added up to more major trophies for the Gunners — the 2016-17 Premier League and the 2021 Champions League — but Chelsea haven’t finished in second place in the league since 2011. Arsenal have finished second in three of the past four seasons.
I know who you’d rather be right now, but whose past 10 years would you rather have?
C’mon, who else?
If every other club were ran as exactly inefficiently as Manchester United, here’s how many points a select few would win per season:
• Arsenal: 52
• Liverpool and Tottenham: 41
• Everyone outside of the Big Six: fewer than 30
• Brighton: 16
• Brentford: 13
Man United have had six different managers over this period. And with Michael Carrick now looking like he’s on his last legs, I really believe that Manager No. 7 will be the one who finally fixes everything. Don’t you?
Back
Top
| Privacy Statement Terms of Service Contact |
Refresh
|
All the best breaking news stories from Apex Scores Lite. Optimised for feature phones and low end Android devices, Apex Scores Lite helps users with legacy devices and poor network connectivity access the latest football news and live scores. Particularly relevant for breaking football news in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.