Johannesburg - As the 2022 summer transfer window came to a close, the English Premier League (EPL) broke records after spending over £1.9 billion (about R37.742b) on players across the window.
Back in 2015, the Premier League spending was over £822 million, showing a spending increase of almost 140% over the last seven years. And this year, the Premier League spent more than La Liga, Bundesliga and Ligue 1 combined.
The team at Betting.com have looked at the spending of the so-called Big Five leagues (EPL, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1) across Europe since 2015, and have forecast how much money these leagues could spend in the years up to 2030 and 2050.
Betting.com’s research suggests that by 2030, Premier League spending will be in excess of £2.2 billion, with the League hitting the £2 billion mark by 2027. Meanwhile, the spending for La Liga, Spain’s top flight football league, was almost a quarter of the spending in the Premier League this year at £505m. Compared to their huge spending in 2019, over £1.5b, La Liga teams appear to have been more conservative since.
Looking at their pattern of spending from 2015 to the present, La Liga could spend even less by 2030 with the predicted spending of just £435m. This might not be the case, but it’s likely their spending will pale in comparison to the Premier League.
The Betting.com team has also calculated what spending could look like up until 2050 and the results are shocking. It found that by 2050, spending in the Premier League could be close to £4b, almost double of what we’ve had in 2022 if it continues on its current course.
The German Bundesliga is forecast to decrease its spending over the next few decades, with them set to spend nearly half of their 2022 spendings in 2050, with a similar story in Spain’s La Liga. The results from La Liga and Bundesliga spending suggest that European football could see huge changes in regards to finances over the next few decades which could change the face of football completely.
To compile the research, Betting.com looked at the total Summer Transfer Window spent by each of the Big Five leagues in Europe. They then recorded the overall spend for each league (summer transfer window only) for every year between 2015 to 2022. Betting.com used a forecasting formula to analyse the spend, and the incremental increase each year to forecast the resulting expenditure from 2023 to 2050.