Spurs may have splashed the cash this transfer window – but they have barely made a dent in their long-term spending deficit
It has been commonly understood that Tottenham have spent a great deal of money on transfers this window, much to the consternation of rival fans and Real Football Men™. After all, the club has added headline players such as Tonali, Fernandes, Van Hecke and now Savinho and Marmoush. And, after an inevitable opening day defeat at Brentford, trolls are asking if this supposedly ‘astronomical outlay’ will have any benefits.
Furthermore, much of the media such as Simon Jordan continue to claim that Tottenham have “always spent big”, making this summer’s splurge seem even more egregious. The ‘net spend’ figures which are frequently bandied about seem to support this – the Spurs figure of £728m compares comfortably with the average of £894m averaged by the other five clubs.
Big Six ‘net spend’ since 2015 – 2025
The reality though, is that Tottenham even now are still trying to make up for the underspend of the last decade or more. To understand exactly how much – and to gauge how much more reasonably needs to be spent, we need to peel back the layers of the figures. For these, I will stick to just the four clubs that are run properly: Arsenal, Liverpool and Man Utd as well as Tottenham (Man City and Chelsea have an entirely different business model and financial base, rendering comparisons pointless).
There are three methodological concepts needed to establish a good comparison between these clubs and I will go through each of them step by step.
Gross spend, not net spend
First, let us deal with the frequently cited concept of ‘net spend’. The reason this idea comes up is that it reflects the financial model used in computer games like Football Manager (or, if you are older, Championship Manager). In this, player purchases and sales are hard numbers coming out of a bank account, the same way that you might spend your pocket money.
However, this is not how football transfers work from a financial perspective: fees are deferred over a period of months and even years; much of it is shuffled off into working capital rather than coming out of cash (which can be funded by debt facilities); and it actually excludes cash costs such as agent fees and signing bonuses which can be substantial. More importantly, net spend is netted off against player sales, which are an entirely different business requiring different skills.
‘Net spend’ (like real GDP) is a terrible metric which has taken over as a short hand for investment. Instead, a club’s ambitions in the transfer market are really to be measured by its outgoings only (‘gross spend’) since it has far less agency over its incomings. Yes, clubs wait to offload players before signing others – but this is mainly a question of managing salaries, less about transfer fees.
Big Six gross spend since 2015-2025
Judged just on this measure, Tottenham are more clearly at the back of the pack, albeit not far behind Arsenal and Liverpool. But this is only the start of the story.
‘Big player’ spend, not overall spend
Secondly, not all player signings are the same. While from a financial perspective, a £50m player has ‘cost’ almost twice as much as two £30m players, this is not the footballing reality. Most fans will understand that the £50m player will be far more likely to important than the two £30m players combined, at least in the near term. The market suggests that they are better, they are more likely to be going straight into the first team, and they are also likely to be paid much more. Player value to the team increases exponentially as fees go up, so one simple way of looking at it is to square the transfer fee to calculate relative value: the square of two £30m is about 72% of the value of the square of one £50m player. We are into the realms of pure vibes here, but most observers would feel that this is about right. This quadratic application, re-based to a £100m transfer fee, might look like this:
The likely ‘true value’ of transfer fees
Therefore looking at spending on all players is less important than looking at spending on ‘big’, needle-moving players. One can debate what that cut-off means, but a reasonable rule of thumb is that players commanding fees of £50m or more, are generally the ones expected to play immediately and improve the first team, not just the squad. Additionally, the ‘big player’ threshold is a useful if imperfect proxy for how much a club is paying them, too.
Percentage of gross spend used on transfer fees of £50m or more, 2015-2025
The problem is clear: while Tottenham have spent a fair amount of money on transfers, its spending on ‘big players’ has been severely lacking. Instead Spurs have brought in dozens of at best squad-level players (and many probably not even that). Of all the Big Six teams, Tottenham’s portion of £50m is the most off-kilter, showing a real problem of ambition.
Today’s money
Next is the matter of football inflation, which I have dealt with previously. If we look back at, say, a decade of spending by Tottenham, we cannot treat every year the same since player prices have gone up. Tottenham did up their spending in recent years, but by then the money did not mean the same. Xavi Simons cost £52m in the summer of 2025, but the same amount spent on Aymeric Laporte by Man City in 2017 was clearly a lot more in real terms. In order to compare apples to apples, we therefore need to adjust fees for inflation.
Taking into account the £50m number as the needle-moving transfer fee, and looking back, this number reduces over the course of the last decade such as £50m in 2026 is about £41m in 2021 and £36m in 2016. Therefore, to compare real spending, we have to look at ‘big players’ in today’s money.
What £50m looked like in money of the day, since 1992
Tottenham’s spending deficit
Until this summer, then, and even with the wallet being unleashed a little under Levy’s last window in charge, Tottenham over the last decade has underspent the rest of the Big Six by some £850m on average. To even catch up with the nearest spending rival, Arsenal, Spurs needed to spend more than £400m; but to catch up to, say, Manchester City, they needed not much over £1.1bn of new players. (I leave Chelsea out of this conversation for now simply because their business model under the current ownership is not the same.)
Big Six gross spend on players worth £50+ in today’s money 2015-2025 (£m)
To do this is tricky. First, it is impossible to spend so much in one transfer window at all, let alone do so without creating artificial price inflation because everyone knows you are doing so. Secondly, the figure shifts since the other teams are themselves spending more – Tottenham’s catch up spending needs to be net of new spending from the other clubs this summer. Lastly there is the softer elements, for instance how well Tottenham’s scouting and player assessment is compared to clubs which have been better run for so much longer, and whose infrastructure has been maturing for a decade. Tottenham struggle with both value and quality in trying to make up for lost time, as any club would under these circumstances.
So yes, Tottenham are taking the requisite steps to make up for a lost decade of transfer activity. While we would all love to believe that success on the field could come from elsewhere, it is impossible to maintain a ‘Top Six’ status without spending being broadly in-line with the others. And while we can be very excited about the £300m+ invested this summer, this does not even put us top of the Big Six (Chelsea’s gross spend is almost £400m). There is still a long, long road ahead before we make up for the lost time relying on a few over-performers such as Kane and Son. Whether the Lewis family can maintain the appetite for this, is anybody’s guess.
