- According to FIFA’s study, football clubs around the globe invested a record $9.63 billion in players last year.
- With foreign signings worth $2.96 billion, English clubs were the highest spenders.
- With the sale of Harry Kane to Bayern Munich, English clubs recovered over $1 billion in foreign sales.
According to FIFA’s study, football clubs around the globe invested a record $9.63 billion in players last year through international transfer agreements handled by the organization.
According to the study, the amount spent by English and Saudi Arabian teams on player deals between foreign clubs in 2023 exceeded the previous record by $2 billion, which was set in the year before the pandemic, 2019. With foreign signings worth $2.96 billion, English clubs were the highest spenders.
International football
Because it does not include transfers between two clubs in the same nation, the study does not provide a whole picture. Because the moves included Premier League clubs, FIFA did not record the hundreds of millions of dollars that were spent on contracts for Declan Rice, Alexis Mac Allister, Moises Caicedo, and Kai Havertz.
With the sale of Harry Kane to Bayern Munich, among other transactions, English clubs recovered over $1 billion in foreign sales. After paying $110 million to Real Madrid to acquire Jude Bellingham from Borussia Dortmund, German teams collected $1.21 billion in overseas transfers, for a total of $850 million spent.
FIFA handled 3,279 paid professional player transactions between countries in men’s football last year. Over ten percent of the $1 billion or so that was spent on foreign transactions in FIFA last year came from the league’s top ten transfers.
