Ten years of Serie A transfers

In the past decade, Juventus, Napoli and Fiorentina spent the most money on transfers in Italy. Inter and AC Milan invested a lot too, but also received much. Udinese even made significant profits on transfers, but is nonetheless on the second place (!) in Serie A’s current campaign, which is really exceptional.

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Is Cavani looking towards a transfer?

Kelvin van de Vegte gathered data for this website about all transfers of Italian Serie-A clubs. We compared transfer fees by Serie A-clubs of the past ten years to see how much each side has spent and received and therefor how big their profit or loss on transfers was (just like we did for English top clubs before).

As in the English Premier League, ambitious clubs usually make big losses on transfer fees, while smaller clubs sometimes make modest profits. For ambitious clubs, transfers are important to improve the squad to get higher up. They use money from prizes, ticket sales, merchandise, tv rights and of course investors for buying better players. Smaller clubs though, make their living out of the scouting, training and selling players. An earlier overview of transfers between European leagues (Dutch) showed there also are certain leagues which in which clubs on average make profits (like the smaller Dutch and Belgian league) and leagues in which clubs of average lose money on transfers (like the ambitious and expensive Premier League).

In the graph below, the transfer balance is shown of the most important Italian clubs over the past ten years. The balance (which is cumulative) exists out of the total expenditures minus the total income from transfer fees. The graph shows that both Udinese and Parma do extraordinary well, as they make big profits on transfers compared to the rest that seem to most often lose money. Still, the losses in Italy aren’t that impressive as compared to England. The total loss of 466 million euro made by Serie A clubs in the past ten years is still less than the loss Chelsea (612 million) and Manchester City (564) have just on their own.

Click for enlargement

Want to get deeper into the data? Compare any club of te Serie A yourself here.

The Udinese mercantilism

What is most striking is the brilliant mercantilism of Udinese Calcio. The club of sharpshooter Antonio Di Natale is making profits every year. Especially in the last years they did brilliant. This summer millions were made by selling Alexis Sanchéz(€ 26 million > Barcelona), Gökhan Inler (17,5 > Napoli), Simone Pepe (7,5 > Juventus) and Cristian Zapata (9 > Villareal). Together these players yield Udinese 60 million euro, although they were once bought for only seven million euro in total.

Udinese though is mostly making high profits because they don’t spent too much on new players (the least of all the big clubs). Although the club sold for almost 70 million euro this summer, they stuck to this efficient transfer policy. Only twenty million euro was spend on new players, of which Gabriël Torje was the most expensive (he costed five million euro). Still Udinese is doing fine in the Serie A, sharing the second place with AC Milan, which is better than ever before. It seems like Udinese’s on-pitch performances actually improve by spending less on transfer fees.

Parma also deserves a mention here. The club had very high incomes in the first half of the decennium by selling expensive players like Marco di Vaio, Fabio Cannavaro, Matías Almeyda, Adriano and Adrian Mutu for millions of euros.

Big turn-overs: the clubs from Milan

The biggest clubs in Italy, AC Milan and Inter, are also the clubs with the biggest turn-over on the transfer market. They are simply prepared to pay a lot for players, but also to sell worthy players themselves. Per saldo they lost just 53 (AC) and 63 (Inter) million euro spread over ten years, which is much less than most of the English top clubs (except Arsenal) that lost between 200 and 600 million.

The Expensive Lady

Juventus is a special case. The Old Lady could just as well be called The Expensive Lady : Juve has always been a buying club. Almost every year the club made significant losses, until this was abruptly ended by their forced relegation to the Serie B after the famous bribery scandal. The club had to hand in some of their prizes won. Most of the stars of the first team were sold for millions of euros, which we can clearly see in the graph as in 2006 for the first time profit is made on transfer fees.

Stars sold after relegation

One season later, after Juventus became the convincing champion although they started with nine points less and returned in the Serie A. The loyal stars, like Nedved, Camoranesi, Buffon, Trezeguet and of course Del Piero brought the club back in no time. This was a sign for the club to start spending like the old days. That year the club lost 35 million on transfers. After all, the ambitious Juve has spent most of all Serie A clubs, which might be rewarded this year as they are now in pole position for the league.

The ambitious Napoli

If we start looking at the graph at 2006, we see that Napoli makes a similar development as Juve. In the past five years both clubs spend approximately the same amount of money. Also the results got better every year, with the third place and Champions League last year as a reward. Still, Udinese could roughly to the same, spending 285 million euro on transfers less along the way.
To conclude, here is a grap which shows the total expenditures (red), income (green) and balance (blue) for each club. The horizontal lines show the league average.

The source for the transfer fees is transfermarkt.de

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