Does Money Guarantee Success In Football?

After Manchester City rose to fame by being taken over by Arab Billionaires and won the league last season with an entirely different squad to that of 10 years ago, it begs the question - Does money guarantee success?

I have compiled a table which details each club that is currently in the Premier League and it's net spend. For the less economically knowledgeable, this is basically how much a club has spent - how much a club has received. (Both of these are in terms of transfers). This table has taken into account the last 20 years and goes back all the way to the 1992/1993 season. I have filled in the clubs who have make a loss in red and those who have ended up making a profit in green. I have also ranked each club in terms of their net spend so the club with the highest net spend and the biggest loss is rank 20 (Chelsea) and the club with the biggest profit and lowest net spend is rank 1 (Norwich).

The first thing that stands out is that both Norwich and Reading have ended up receiving more money for selling players than they have spent to buy them. In this day and age I think this it quite an achievement. A special mention to Swansea who narrowly missed out and have a net spend of £0.6m.

The main focus of this article was to analyse whether by a club spending huge amounts of money on players they would be guaranteed to enjoy success.

Liverpool - What's Going On?

When Liverpool sacked club legend Kenny Dalglish and replaced him with Brendan Rodgers, many had high hopes for the Merseyside club. However, since then, success has been few and far between with Liverpool sitting in a 10th position full of mediocrity and averageness. One of the most inconsistent teams in the league have been loitering around mid-table all season - so - What is going on?

December has summed Liverpool up perfectly really, with 2 impressive wins followed by extremely disappointing defeats by both Aston Villa and Stoke. They went to East London and somewhat fortuitously came away with 3 points in a strange game that included 2 own goals. Following this they returned to Merseyside full of confidence only to be outclassed by a weak Aston Villa team who were destroyed by Chelsea a week later in an 8-0 thrashing. Liverpool never looked good in their 3-1 defeat to Villa and they weren't, baffling considering they had just got an away victory against an impressive newly promoted side the week before. 

Is The Premier League Already a 2 Horse Race?

With the 2 Manchester clubs already sitting pretty at the top of the league over Christmas and at the time of writing, the closest teams being 9 points behind, it begs the question - Is it already set up to be a two horse race between the Manchester clubs for the title this year?


In terms of quality of squad then it doesn't get much better than the stars of the Etihad. Their team is full of world class players week in week out, they're rarely affected by injuries as they have such incredible strength in depth. Players like James Milner, Javi Garcia and Scott Sinclair often find themselves left of that long Manchester City bench and this is a testament to how much quality Man City have to choose from. In my opinion, this is their biggest asset by far and they owe it to their billionaire owners.