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Top 20 revealed
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Although the growing demands of the modern football season now means that the European game is essentially on for most of the year, success and failure are still defined by the fine margins between one season and the next. A club can go from abject failure in May to renewed hope just a few months later, depending on how they do in the summer transfer window and whether or not fans are convinced by the business done off the pitch.
However, due to the footballing and yearly calendar never quite lining up, it can also mask how much money clubs spend in a relatively short period of time. Most football fans can quickly guess or indeed find out how much their club has spent on new players in any given season, but what about since the start of 2025? Today Transfermarkt has run the numbers to see which clubs have outspent all others. For the purposes of this article, we have ignored money earned from player sales. These figures are not each club’s net spend in the transfer market, but rather the total amount spent on new players. So let’s take a look.
When we calculate how much money each club has spent in the January transfer window and the summer transfer window and rank the top 20 clubs in the world, we get a list like the one above. And while there are certainly some familiar names at the top of the list, there are also a number of surprising entries that are worth touching upon today. In total there are 11 Premier League clubs, two Serie A clubs, two clubs from the Bundesliga, two from LaLiga and then one from Turkiye and one from Saudi Arabia.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing to note is the prominence of clubs that would be considered teams that are either fighting relegation or striving to avoid it entirely. This includes Wolves in 13th place having spent €190m this year, with newly-promoted Sunderland (€194m spent) in 11th, then Nottingham Forest (€237m spent) in 8th. Bournemouth (€161m) also just squeezed into the top 20. And each of these clubs showcase how much money must now be spent just to stay in the English top-flight in the modern era.
Elsewhere, there is one other club that may also surprise readers: Galatasaray in 16th place having spent €176. The Turkish giants have undoubtedly been on a spending spree in 2025, having not only spent €148m in the summer transfer window alone but also broke their own transfer record three times this year, signing Uğurcan Çakır for €27.5m, Wilfried Singo for €31m and most notably Victor Osimhen for a sizable sum of €75m. This year’s spending is almost twice what the club spent last year (€96m) and certainly suggests that the Istanbul giants have grand ambitions of making big waves in the Champions League this season.
To no great surprise, the top spots on this list are made up by the English big-hitters. In fifth place are Manchester United, having spent €283m since the start of the year, with Arsenal (€294m spent) in fourth, Chelsea (€354m spent) in third and Manchester City (€425m spent) in second place. But no other club in the world has spent more money than Liverpool, with the Anfield club forking over almost half a billion Euros to sign new players for Arne Slot’s side. A truly remarkable sum of money when we consider that the Anfield club only spent €214m over the course of 2024.
