Far from the 3.5 billion spent by the Premier League clubs to strengthen, Ligue 1 still showed active this summer. From the arrival of Paul Pogba to Monaco for the first significant arrival, that of Benjamin Pavard in Marseille to close the summer window, the French stables mobilized from June to September to modify and improve their workforce.
This year, the French championship will have spent 661 million euros, a sum quite distant from the record of the 898 million euros invested in the summer of 2023. And it must be said that Paris Saint-Germain, a usual detonator of the French transfer window, has not done madness for this new exercise.
By debauming Lucas Chevalier and Illia Zabarnyi, – Renato Marin having arrived free -, the reigning European champion distributed a sum of 103 million euros. Or less than Côme (€ 107 million), Leeds (€ 113 million), Atalanta (€ 125m) or… Strasbourg (€ 127 million).
The Strasbourgers are soaring
Racing has indeed exclaimed during the summer window and occupies the first place of the most spending clubs in the French championship, ahead of Paris. In addition to its loan feedback, Marc Keller’s club recorded 18 arrivals in its workforce. An impressive statistic when the Alsatian team will play the league conference this season, 19 years after its last participation in a European competition.
Despite a failed start to the season, Olympique de Marseille made a very ambitious transfer window on paper at the dawn of its return to the Champions League. If the Olympians lost Adrien Rabiot, forced to go to AC Milan after his muscular altercation with Jonathan Rowe (also now in Bologna), Roberto de Zerbi can count on 12 newcomers. With notably Igor Peaceao, Facundo Medina, Timothy Weah, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Nayef Aguerd, or Benjamin Pavard. All for a nice envelope of 96.2 million euros.
OM has also done business with its first pursuer in the classification of the most expenditure, Stade Rennais, which paid 18.5 million euros for its Quentin Merlin-Valentin Rongier pair. The Bretons spent, in total, 67.8 million euros to, in addition to the two Olympians, to attach the services, the Angevin Esteban Lepaul, the Monegasque Breel Embolo, the Brestois Lilian Brassier and Mahdi Camara and the former Lensois Przemyslaw Frankowski. A transfer window that smells of Ligue 1 for the club which aims to find the European scene.
The 5th spending PFC, but without income
Finally, the Paris FC, the newcomer who does not lack pretensions in the Elite, completes the Top 5. As he had announced, the ambitious promoted did not make any madness on the transfers market, falling back on not too expensive tracks. In addition to Otavio, its major recruit arrived for 17M € from Porto, the PFC has targeted, like the Stade Rennais, players who know the championship perfectly.
Thus, Noah Shangui and Thibault de Smet (Reims) Moses Simon (Nantes), Pierre Lees-Melou (Brest), Willem Geubbels (ex-Lyon, Nantes and Monaco) Hamari Traoré (ex-Rennes and Reims), Jonathan Ikoné (ex-PSG, Montpellier, Lille) or Kevin Trapp Put their luggage in Paris this summer for a total of 57.3 million euros.
In lack of sales (0 cumulative Euro, -57.3M €), the Parisians therefore record the most deficit transfers in French football, ahead of Strasbourg (-41.8M €), PSG (-39M €), and OM (-14.5 million €). At the top of the ranking, according to the evaluations of the TransferMarkt site, AS Monaco acts as the first of the class with a positive balance of 103.5 million euros, largely in front of Nice (€ 74 million) and Lille (€ 71 million), even if the Northern managers advance the figure of € 87 million.
