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January Transfer Window: The Premier League’s Biggest Spenders

We dug into 15+ years of January transfer window stats to work out the Premier League’s biggest spenders ⁠— from the first window in 02/03, right up to 2019.

We’ll start with this animated timeline, which shows the 10 Premier League clubs with the highest net spend (income minus expenditure) in each January window.

 

Here’s the list of the biggest spenders each season:

SeasonClubNet Spend
02/03Newcastle£13,500,000
03/04Arsenal£17,060,000
04/05Spurs£16,340,000
05/06Arsenal£20,030,000
06/07West Ham£22,190,000
07/08Chelsea£31,050,000
08/09Man City£49,950,000
09/10Man City£7,200,000
10/11Chelsea£75,150,000
11/12Chelsea£18,630,000
12/13Liverpool£25,200,000
13/14Man Utd.£38,640,000
14/15Man City£28,870,000
15/16Newcastle£34,530,000
16/17Crystal Palace£37,530,000
17/18Man City£62,100,000
18/19Chelsea£49,190,000

Cumulative Net Spend by Club

Next, let’s take a look at total January transfer window spend.

The chart below shows accumulating net spend over the 17 years since the first window opened on January 1st 2003.

 

And here’s the full list. There are 40 clubs in total who have been in the Premier League for at least one January transfer window. We’ve included the total of number of Premier League January transfer windows (seasons) for each in the table.

note: a positive number means the club has spent more than they received (a net spend), while a negative number means the club has received more in fees than they paid out.

ClubSeasonsNet Spend
Arsenal17£93,951,000
Aston Villa14£36,504,000
Birmingham7£19,125,000
Blackburn9-£13,889,000
Blackpool1£270,000
Bolton10-£7,058,000
Bournemouth4£50,130,000
Brighton2£25,200,000
Burnley5£18,190,000
Cardiff2£21,930,000
Charlton5-£8,834,000
Chelsea17£66,530,000
Crystal Palace7£71,770,000
Derby1£779,000
Everton17£43,789,000
Fulham13£2,804,000
Huddersfield2£11,930,000
Hull5£22,250,000
Leeds2-£21,250,000
Leicester6£13,316,000
Liverpool17-£55,294,000
Man City17£184,063,000
Man Utd.17£38,330,000
Middlesborough8£26,194,000
Newcastle15£35,388,000
Norwich5£27,104,000
Portsmouth7-£22,820,000
QPR3£27,300,000
Reading3£12,260,000
Sheffield U1£4,910,000
Southampton10-£43,232,000
Spurs17£86,546,000
Stoke10£64,895,000
Sunderland12£21,680,000
Swansea7£10,370,000
Watford5£7,529,000
West Brom12£2,690,000
West Ham14-£4,851,000
Wigan8£8,520,000
Wolves5£3,443,000

Manchester City are comfortably the Premier League’s biggest historical spenders in the January transfer window. The £184m they spent over 17 windows was almost double the total of the second highest spenders Arsenal (£94m).

Did your team spend big in January?

About The January Transfer Window + Thanks

The January transfer was first introduced in the Premier League during season 02/03. This year’s January transfer window will open on Wednesday 1 January 2020 and close on Friday 31 January.

To prepare this article, we collated data from https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/

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Biggest spenders by year:

Cumulative spend:

Note: we took care to ensure the data in this article is accurate, however, if you believe we have made any errors, then please contact us for correction.

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