Foreign Clubs Benefit From Summer Spending - 11/09/2005

Thanks to £56m of spending by Chelsea and £38m by an increasingly desperate Newcastle United, England's top football clubs have spent 10 per cent more on player transfers this summer compared with last year. However, unlike the 1980s and 1990s, when clubs would boost their squads with talented players from lower English leagues, the main beneficiaries this year have been foreign teams. New analysis by accountancy group Deloitte found that £140m was spent on ovreseas players over the summer. Premiership clubs have spent about £50m on players from Football League teams, with Deloitte saying more clubs have benfited from this redistribution in 2005 than in previous years. Spending by England's top clubs has outstripped rivals in other European leagues. Gross transfer spending by Premiership clubs was about double that of clubs in the Italian Serie A and Spanish Primera Liga, and about three times greater than clubs in top divisions in France and Germany. The aggregate reported spending by Premiership clubs for the January 2005 and summer 2005 transfer windows of about £286m was moderately higher than in the preceding two years. But the spending has yet to reach the peaks of 2000/2001 when Premiership clubs spent more than £320m on player acquisitions.