Liverpool's Player Trading Highlights Transfer Strategy

CIES shared data on clubs' profit and losses from players who were bought and later sold. It reveals a lot about Liverpool's transfer strategy.

We are accustomed to seeing transfer business defined by net spend. It’s better than looking purely at gross outlay, less accurate than accounting for inflation as per Paul Tomkins and Graeme Riley’s Transfer Price Index (TPI). It provides a reasonable snapshot of what a club has invested over a certain period.

As has been discussed on this site in the past, any measure of transfers doesn’t tell even half of the financial story anyway. Liverpool have a net spend of €298.4M since 2020, little more than a third of the €830.3M that has been shelled out on salaries in that period. The club’s owners FSG are routinely criticised for not investing more in the transfer market yet it’s the much larger wage bill which keeps the elite players in red once they’re on board.

There remain interesting ways of assessing net spend. CIES Football Observatory recently published data which looked at how clubs have performed in terms of player trading since 2015. They took the outlay and income relating only to footballers who both joined and left a club in the previous nine years. In theory, it highlights who operates best at what is the aim for the vast majority of teams: buy low, sell high. Did anyone mention Moneyball yet?

While CIES did not publish the data for all teams across the world, they gave us the top and bottom 50 clubs for this brand of net spend. The statistics highlight the money in English football, not that anyone needs reminding, as there are 20 teams from the country in the 100 shared, with Italy (13) and France (12) next in line. Most notable is that 17 of the 20 were on the deficit side of the ledger, with only three in the profit sample.

This chart beautifully highlights the difficulty of competing in the Premier League. The data also tells an interesting story about Liverpool.