Cost per point won 

©TM/IMAGO

When it comes to fans bickering over which of Europe’s top leagues is the “best”, it often comes down to subjective points of view. Some will point to the Premier League’s financial might and state that little else needs to be said, while others will suggest that Spanish football’s dominance of European competitions points to LaLiga as the home of top-tier talent. Elsewhere, Serie A, Bundesliga and Ligue 1 fans will have a long list of features and unique characteristics about their top-flight that leave the English and Spanish top-flights wanting. Perhaps this season’s Champions League final between Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain will be a handy guide for most fans. Ultimately, it’s impossible to really say for certain.

However, when it comes to the ferocity and competitiveness of each league, we can apply some simple maths to the discussion. Using Transfermarkt’s extensive database, we can take the total transfer cost – i.e., the cumulative sum of every transfer fee paid for each squad – and divide it by the points won this season. This gives us an intriguing “cost per point” metric, which is often a good indicator of how much money any given club has spent to put points on the league table each season. And, when it comes to that figure, we can quickly see that one European top-flight vastly outweighs the others this season.

Indeed, as the table above shows, the average cost per point for a Premier League club this season stands at a staggering €11.05 million. That means, on average, each English top-flight club has had to spend that amount of money on buying players for their squad just to put one point on the league leader board. As we can see in the table above, that figure is over three times higher than the next-highest average, which is Serie A’s €3.26m per point won this season. The Italian top-flight is followed by the Bundesliga (€2.61m), Ligue 1 (€2.25m) and then, curiously, LaLiga in last place with €2.05m per point won this season on average.

So what does that actually mean? Well, to put it into some context, let’s use the Premier League and Serie A figures. So far this season, Juventus and AC Milan have averaged €7.69m and €5.73m in total transfer fees per point won in the Spanish top-flight. That may seem like a lot, but if we compare both clubs to the Premier League, those figures would place Juventus twelfth in the Premier League, behind West Ham and Nottingham Forrest, while Milan would be sitting third bottom, with only Leeds and Sunderland having averaged less money spent on transfer fees in return for their points tally this season.

The same can be said for many of Europe’s biggest clubs. Real Madrid and Barcelona’s averages for this season are €9.22m and €4.39m, which would place them twelfth and second last, respectively. PSG (€11.27m per point won) would rank ninth in the Premier League, while Borussia Dortmund (€5.04m) and Bayern Munich (€4.9m) would occupy eighteenth and nineteenth spots in the English top-flight. In many cases, the average Premier League club simply spends far more money on player transfers than Europe’s biggest clubs, with far less success on the pitch to show for it.

While the discussion over which of Europe’s top clubs is the best across the continent often boils down to who challenges and ultimately wins the Champions League each season, when it comes to the debate over which top-flight outranks all others in terms of sheer money spent to build squads and the corresponding strength in depth, the Premier League is simply unrivalled this season, with Serie A currently ranking as the best of the rest. Whether that answers any questions or puts to bed any tedious debates on social media is another matter entirely.