The unbridled rush of turnover in the football market, also driven by the effect of the World Cup which served as a showcase for hundreds of footballers. Here are all the numbers for summer 2026…
One record after another, the footballer market continues to break records in the area of ”expenses and investments”. The summer of 2026 marked a new upward limit in this race which sees the Premier League in the lead and which does not seem to be stopping: 8.5 billion euros is the official figure of the money put in by clubs from all over the world, with Europe at the forefront, for a total of 121,500 international transfers registered on the club’s platform FIFA.
The photograph emerges from the reading ofInternational Transfer Snapshot that FIFA publishes at the end of each session. It is the balance of three months of negotiations, deals and twists with an extra large edition of the World Cup in the middle which, according to Zurich data, has given further impetus to the market if it is true that 267 players playing in the United States, Mexico and Canada changed teams over the summer for a turnover of just under 3 billion euros.
This is no small thing, in a globalized football where everyone knows everyone, light years away from the one in which the big international cups were the only showcase in which to go fishing for talents with less visible movements. There is television, satellite, scouting platforms and a thousand other ways of following the trajectories of footballers, cataloging their characteristics, but the old World Cup continues to have an irresistible charm for market operators.
Returning to the numbers, the FIFA database also confirms that the lion’s share of current football is played by the English Premier League, which has spent a whopping 2.6 billion euros on international transfers: a mountain of money to which we must add the deals closed “internally” and which represent another nice slice of turnover. Behind England, surprisingly given the difficult times, is the Italian Serie A with 950 million euros. Then the Spanish Liga (808), the German Bundesliga (777) and the French Ligue1 (551).
After the French (1.46 billion euros), the English are also those who have sold best and most, albeit with a largely negative balance of almost one and a half billion euros, the difference between the 2.6 spent and the 1.2 collected. Unfortunately, Serie A does not appear in the Top 5 of those who have sold at a high price. A bad sign which confirms the now structural difficulty of our clubs in managing to place exploding talents (Palestra and Ahanor are two exceptions) or players considered redundant: the formula is that of loan, often taking into account a return to base in twelve months. Elsewhere they do better, but not here.
