Analysis

The window that bought itself

Premier League clubs spent a record £3.46bn this summer, and forty per cent of it went to other Premier League clubs. Six summers of transfer data on where the money goes, whether English clubs pay each other a premium, and what a market that increasingly trades with itself on deferred terms looks like from the outside.

By Arthur van de Laak8 September 2026Updated 25 October 2026 · View updates12 min read

Every September the same paragraph gets written: record spending, this time £3.46bn, more than the other four big leagues combined. What is rarely written is where the money went. The question here is which clubs were paid. This summer 40% of the money went to other Premier League clubs, up from 27% in 2022, and if a growing share of a record window is Premier League clubs paying each other, the headline measures something different from what it seems to.

I built the dataset to find out. Every incoming transfer for every Premier League club, from Transfermarkt’s league pages, for the six summer windows from 2021 to 2026: 1,693 registrations, 643 of them with a fee. For each deal I recorded the selling club, its country, the fee, and Transfermarkt’s market value for the player at the time. On my comparison, the totals come within a few per cent of the sterling figures published for each window, which is close enough to trust the shape.

Where the money goes

Transfermarkt records fees in euros, so the table below is in euros. Its total for 2026, €4.10bn, is within a few per cent of the £3.46bn headline once converted; the two are separate counts of the same window, not one figure in two currencies.

The share of summer spending that went to other Premier League clubs:

Gross spending more than tripled from 2021 to 2026, and rose by almost 80% from 2022. Within it, spending on players bought from other Premier League clubs rose from €614m in 2022 to €1.64bn in 2026, an increase of more than €1bn, which accounts for a large part of the growth in gross activity.

Spending on players from outside the Premier League rose by almost half over the same period, from €1.68bn to €2.46bn. So the domestic share climbed from 27% to 40%, and it climbed fastest at the top: sixteen of this summer’s twenty-six deals above €50m were between Premier League clubs, against five of twelve four years ago.

Count every English seller, relegated and Championship clubs included, and half the money this summer stayed in England.

That matters for reading the headline. A £100m deal between two Premier League clubs is £100m of “spending” and £100m of “sales” in the same league in the same window. The buyer records a £100m player registration and, for any part of the fee not yet paid, a debt to the seller. The seller removes the player from its books, books a profit or loss against what was left of his cost, and, for any part not yet received, records a sum owed to it. Nothing comes into the league from outside.

Do they pay each other more?

If the market is increasingly internal, the next question is whether it sets its own prices. The test is the fee paid divided by the market value Transfermarkt assigned the player at the time, split by where he came from.

The data is consistent with a recurring domestic premium, but not with one that is widening. English clubs paid more over market value when buying from each other than from abroad in five of six summers, by between 0.04x and 0.49x of market value; 2023 reverses it, and by 2026 the gap had narrowed to 0.04x, with both ratios at about 1.3x. Both groups were paying above Transfermarkt valuations, but these comparisons cannot establish whether domestic transfers were becoming more expensive for otherwise comparable players, or whether prices across the market were rising.

This is descriptive evidence, not a clean test. Nothing here controls for the things that differ systematically between a domestic purchase and an import: the player’s age and remaining contract, whether he’s homegrown, whether he’s already proven in this league, whether the seller is a rich club or a pressured one. Any of those could produce a premium without any pricing effect at all. And Transfermarkt’s values are themselves updated toward recent fees, increasingly Premier League-to-Premier League ones, so a stable ratio could be hiding a premium the valuations have absorbed. On this evidence, a domestic premium is plausible and recurring, that it isn’t growing, and that the price data alone doesn’t establish an internal pricing mechanism.

What the network is made of

What the data supports is a volume and credit story rather than a price story, and it has five steps.

1. Volume. Gross transfer activity has grown much faster than the business underneath it. The twenty clubs’ combined turnover rose by a quarter, from £5,460.0m in 2021/22 to £6,830.1m in 2024/25, the latest filed season, on the Orange Ledger’s own accounts data; summer transfer commitments roughly tripled, from €1,336m in 2021 to €4,101m in 2026.
2. Internal concentration. A rising share of that activity, 40% of the money and 60% of the largest deals this summer, takes place between the same twenty clubs.
3. Deferred settlement. Clubs buy on instalments. A club agreeing a £100m transfer over four annual instalments recognises a player registration asset of roughly £100m while paying perhaps £25m of cash up front; the cost reaches its income statement through amortisation over the contract, not as a £100m expense. The seller recognises its profit on the sale in its accounts immediately, whatever the cash timing, while the cash may arrive over several years. Under the squad cost rule, the seller’s profit is also spread across three seasons through a three-year average. So one transaction runs on three clocks: the seller’s accounting for the sale, the buyer’s amortisation, and the cash settlement that both live with, on a timetable of its own.
4. Bilateral exposure. Deferred settlement leaves obligations behind. On Paul Quinn’s aggregation of the audited accounts, Premier League clubs’ gross transfer payables stood at £3.50bn at 30 June 2025, up from about £3.1bn a year earlier, against £1.25bn of receivables. His modelled figures, and they are models rather than balance-sheet numbers, put payables at around £4.7bn before this window and £5.5bn by June 2027, with net transfer debt of about £3.3bn. Quinn’s point is that a club owed £200m while owing £250m is not in the same position as a club that simply owes £50m, because if its debtors fail the netting doesn’t happen. Exposure is gross.
5. Counterparty dependency. Because 40% of this summer’s spending went to other Premier League clubs, there is greater potential for deferred obligations between clubs in the same division. How much of that spending remains unpaid, and who ultimately owes whom, cannot be established from the public transfer data, and the stock of payables built up over earlier windows also includes debts to clubs abroad. What the data does show is that more of the market’s activity now runs between clubs whose ability to pay may depend in part on the others continuing to buy, sell and pay on schedule.

Put together: a market whose recorded activity is growing far faster than its revenue, where an increasing share of that activity takes place among the same twenty balance sheets, and where that internal activity can leave obligations between the participants. Premier League clubs remain large net exporters of transfer money to the rest of Europe, and about half of this summer’s spending went abroad. The market is turning inward, with growing scope for credit between its own clubs.

Why it matters, and to whom

For a selling club, another Premier League club now represents an unusually large share of potential demand: around 40% of the division’s 2026 spending went to other Premier League clubs, and those buyers are on the same rulebook, the same deferred-payment habits and the same allowance under the squad cost rule. For anyone owed instalments by a Premier League buyer, that buyer is more likely than before to be trading with, and perhaps owing, other clubs in the same league.

The data does not prove a Premier League transfer bubble. It shows a transfer market turning inward, with credit connections between its clubs that are growing in potential faster than anyone outside the clubs can map.

The question is how dependent each club has become on the other participants continuing to buy, sell, lend and settle on schedule. The next test is what happens when the credit financing that network becomes more expensive or less available.