The reported $49 million China’s Guangzhou Evergrande shelled out for Colombian strikerJackson Martinez — $24.5 million for each goal he scored since joining Atletico Madrid — was Tuesday’s attention-grabber, but it overshadowed news of some other crazy figures on the wintertransfer market.
Late big-money deals took January transfer window spending by English Premier League clubs to a five-year high of $252 million. Spending for the 2015-16 EPL season topped$1.5 billion.
But Deloitte’s Sports Business Group, as it does each transfer window, dug into the numbers and found this nugget: More than half the spending in the January window wasdone by teams in the bottom six in the EPL.
“This January’s spending has been driven in large part by clubs in the bottom half of the table,” said Deloitte’s Dan Jones. “Thepromise of the new broadcast deal for Premier League clubs from next season onwards and the threat of missing out through relegation is contributing to clubs investing in an attempt to stay in theleague.”
The new agreement with Sky and BT reached with the EPL for the three seasons beginning in 2016 -17 calls for the league to receive $2.6 billion a year — an increase of 71percent from the current agreement — and that’s only for domestic live broadcast rights. It doesn’t include domestic highlight rights or international rights.
The only club that did notspent any money on transfers was Aston Villa — and for good reason. It is all but doomed, sitting 10 points in the relegation zone with two wins in 24 games.
The Mirror
Newcastle United and Sunderland, the Tyne-Wear rivals with huge followingsin the north of England, are the other two clubs in the relegation zone. Stoke City, in ninth place after Tuesday’s league action, has spent the last seven seasons in the EPL after falling as low asthe Third Division in the early 1990s, and 10th-place Watford and 15th-place Bournemouth were both promoted this season.
There are any number of factors that determine whether a team inthe relegation zone in January go down. The Mirror did a study of the 30 teams in the relegation zone overthe last 10 years, and it was an even split — 15 stayed up and 15 went down.
But spending — or lack thereof — did have an impact. Of the 10 teams that spent more than 6 millionpounds ($8.4 million) — just three went down, and of the 10 teams that spent less than 2 million pounds ($2.9 million) — just three stayed up.
There was one big exception. QPR spent themost of any relegation-threatened team in the previous 10 years — $30.9 million — and it finished last in 2013.