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Top 20 revealed
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Football is ultimately a meritocracy, where the very best players with the most notable talent tend to get signed by the biggest clubs. But in some instances, a player’s passport can certainly come in handy to help him stand out among the crowd. Not only can the right passport help with a player moving from one country to the next without big queues at customs, but it can also be seen as something of a stamp of approval based on the compatriots that have come before him.
Seasoned fans of the sport will know exactly what we mean by this. While football is a global sport, there are undoubtedly certain countries that are not only typically better than the rest at winning international tournaments, but also thrive in developing top-tier players by the dozen and in some cases by the hundreds. Football is a trillion-Euro business and as such the development of football players is a thriving industry. So which countries have become the very best at producing sellable assets on the transfer market? Today Transfermarkt went through the data from the summer transfer window to find out.
To no great surprise, most of the €10.2 billion spent this summer was for players from European nations, with 13 of the top 20 nationalities by total transfer fees paid residing within Europe. The next most sought-after continent was Africa, with four nationalities from the continent making the top 20, followed by three from South America. And as we can see in the table below, it’s the usual suspect at the top of the list.
In fifth place is Germany, where €482 million worth of talent with a German passport swapped clubs this summer, narrowly beating the Netherlands (€480m) and Italy (€472m). In fourth place with a considerable jump in transfer fees paid is Spain, which can lay claim to €619m in transfer fees this summer. Sitting comfortably in third place is England with €784m worth of transfer fees paid for players from the home of the Premier League, with Brazil claiming second place with €846m in transfer fees. Then, out in first place by a considerable distance is France, with €1.02b in transfer fees paid for players from the home of Kylian Mbappé and Hugo Ekitiké.
Curiously, despite being so far in front, France could lay claim to only one of the top 25 transfers of the summer window in the form of the aforementioned Liverpool striker, who made the move from Eintracht Frankfurt for €95m. Which suggests that France is perhaps producing an unrivalled quantity of sellable players each season, even if the quality doesn’t lead to many making the top 25 in terms of the biggest transfer fees. Sweden, interestingly enough, had no less than three players make the top 25 in Alexander Isak, Viktor Gyökeres and Anthony Elanga, but as we can see Sweden only sat ninth on the list. In stark contrast to France, these three players alone made up 76% of all the money spent on Swedish players this summer.
