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Premier League summer transfer spending topped £1.1bn as clubs lavished a record £155m on deadline day.

 

For the fourth consecutive year spending hit record levels as Premier League clubs’ gross spending totalled£1.165 billion, a 34% increase on the previous record of £870m set last summer.

 

The figures compiled by Deloitte’s Sports Business Group also showed Championship gross spending reached a record level of £215m.

 

Commenting on the figures, Dan Jones, Partner in the Sports Business Group at Deloitte, said: “This is the fourth consecutive year the summer transfer spending record by Premier League clubs has been broken.

 

“At the start of the 2013/14 season, the summer transfer spending record had stood at £500m, and the fact that this record has more than doubled since then is a clear indicator of the financial growth of the league.”

 

With the 2016/17 season being the first of the new Premier League TV broadcasting cycle which is worth over £5bn in the UK alone, the figures hardly come as a surprise.

 

“As has been the case for a number of years now, the increases in broadcast revenue, with the 2016/17 season being the first of the new broadcast deal cycle, is the principal driver of this spending power.

 

“The increase in the value of these deals and the comparatively equal revenue distribution of these by the Premier League has again allowed clubs throughout the division to invest significantly in this summer’s market.

 

“For those clubs traditionally at the upper end of the table who have been investing most significantly, their commercial revenue growth has also been a critical enabler of the increases in spending.

 

“We also saw a new record level of Premier League summer deadline day spending this window, with £155m spent in the final 24 hours. This, when considered with a new overall spending record, as well as the fact this summer saw a new record for the highest fee paid for a player by any English club are further indicators of the ever increasing purchasing power of the Premier League.”

 

The Premier League’s representatives in this season’s UEFA Champions League –  Arsenal, Leicester City, Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur – had a combined gross transfer spend of c.£385m this summer transfer window, representing around a third of the aggregate gross transfer spend by Premier League clubs.

 

The average gross spend for a Premier League club in the 2016 summer window being c.£60m

 

“Membership of the Premier League has never been as lucrative as it is today and as such we have seen this have knock-on effects in terms of the spending in the Championship,” Jones added.

 

“This summer saw a record £215m gross spend by Championship clubs, more than twice the previous record, driven by the investment of recently relegated clubs seeking an immediate return to the Premier League as well as by that of ambitious Championship clubs seeking entry to the world’s richest football league.”

 

Outside of England across the other ‘big five’ top divisions of Europe, the next highest spending league was Serie A, with a gross spend of £590m. The Bundesliga was next with a gross spend of £460m, followed by La Liga with £400m and Ligue 1 with £165m.