Hearts and Hibs broke transfer records this summer but success isn't dictated by big buys
Scotland's 12 top-flight clubs spent £50m collectively om players this summer. England's best clubs spent £3bn. A deep dive into what the transfer activity means
This piece was commissioned for the new Nutmeg Substack and I’m writing for them once a month. Those pieces will appear here, and over there. More about Nutmeg, the Scottish Football Quarterly, later.
As I detailed early last month, the 20 clubs in England’s Premier League spent more than £3bn, gross, on transfers this summer, obliterating the previous record in a splurge where each club, on average, spent slightly more than £150m.
Liverpool alone spent £442m and at the other end of the scale, Fulham spent “only” £34.9m.
The 12 clubs in Scotland’s Premiership collectively spent £49.5m gross, for an average outlay of around £4m per club, but they also sold players for a total of £59.89m, meaning they made a profit, collectively, of £10.38m.
It will come as a surprise to nobody at all that the Old Firm - Celtic and Rangers - spent almost 75% of all the transfer money between them in the summer, or £37m, give or take, of the total gross spend of £49.5m.
Nine of the other 10 clubs spent £2m or less each, and the 10th club, Hearts, spent £3.27m gross, which became £1.27m net with the sale of left-back James Penrice, 26, to AEK Athens for £2m.
What does the massive difference in spending tell us about England’s top division (£3bn+) and Scotland’s (£49.5m)?
That there’s a chasm in terms of quality? (Maybe, or maybe not). Or that you tend to spend what you can afford, so the English clubs spend extreme amounts because they can, and the Scottish clubs spend not much at all, because they can’t afford to do otherwise.
Burnley are currently the lowest ranked team in the Premier League. According to OPTA’s Power Rankings they are ranked No61 in the world. We can quibble over different ranking methodologies but it says much about the Premier League that one of their smallest and poorest clubs is that high, and they spent £114.9m, gross, on new players this summer.
That is twice as much - and more - than all 12 of Scottish Premiership clubs combined.
By contrast, Scotland’s reigning champions, Celtic, spent £13.45m on new players while selling £26.3m of talent, including Nicolas Kühn to Como, Adam Idah to Swansea and Gustaf Lagerbielke to Braga.
Celtic made a profit of £12.85m on their summer trading and it’s easy to see why certain sections of their fanbase think their club’s board lack ambition and a cohesive transfer policy.
They actually banked money in the same summer they burned their chances of lucrative Champions League group-stage football by losing to the mighty FC Kairat of Kazakhstan in the CL play-off round.
Celtic are not ranked far behind Burnley by OPTA’s logic: they are currently No78 in the world (with a “score” of 84.1 out of 100), to Burnley’s No61 (on 85 out of 100).
So what precisely does the spending, or lack thereof, by Scotland’s elite clubs this summer tell us about the state of the game, north and south of the border?
Today’s piece will tell you:
The precise sums spent and received by each of the Scottish Premiership’s 12 clubs this summer, and also the net spend by club.
The total number of new players arriving at Scotland’s top-flight clubs, and how more than half of them have arrived for free, either on free transfers or as loans.
How Hearts and Hibs signed players (below) who both broke their clubs’ all-time transfer records, Hearts beating their previous record set in 2006 and Hibs breaking their previous record set in 2001.
The clubs that have actually utilised their new players most in the early stages of this season (Dundee United), and least (Celtic).
How the relationship between transfer spending and performance at this early stage of the season is negligible. A club’s wage bill will generally be the best single indicator of how they will perform across a season.
