Football Manager 26: What are the transfers budgets for every club in the top five leagues?

Martin Macdonald

• 24 Oct 2025 10:00 CDT
• 5 min read

Analysis

We've waited two years, but Football Manager 26 has finally been released in its Beta Version ahead of the official release in November.

Sports Interactive made the decision to postpone last year's FM which means players have been using the 2024 version up until now.

Due to the delays and subsequent cancellation to FM25, there's pressure on the new version for the 2025/26 campaign to succeed in terms of sales and user experience.

Over the past decade, a major focus has been put on recruitment, with FM introducing a widescale scouting system for the manager in charge.

Part of the beauty of playing FM is building your own squad, with your own players. That could be potentially scouting the next world-beating wonderkid, or attempting big-money deals for the best players in the world.

Here are the transfer budgets for every team in the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1 and the German Bundesliga.

As always, transfer budgets can be increased or decreased if the accompanying wage budget is amended, should there be excess cash.

The Premier League team with the highest transfer budget in FM26 is wheeler-dealers, Brighton, who have a cool £100 million to spend on new stars.

From the summer of 2025, the Seagulls are in the green when it comes to transfer spend and we as FM user will reap the benefits.

Liverpool may have spent over £400m million in the summer on the likes of Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz, but they still have another £41m in the budget. Perhaps you can solve their centre-back problems?

Man Utd's splurge on forwards in the summer has left their minimal budget at £13m so users will have to be creative if they want to sign that new central midfielder that Ruben Amorim desires so much.

The lowest budget is newly-promoted Burnley who only have £1m to spend.

Brentford, Newcastle, Tottenham and Crystal Palace all have healthy starting budgets.

Despite their obvious financial issues in the real world, Barcelona remarkably still have the biggest transfer budget in Spain in FM26.

To be fair, the Blaugrana only signed goalkeeper Joan Garcia and youngster Ronny Bardghji on permanent deals in the summer.

If you want to take over Xabi Alonso's Real Madrid revolution, you'll have £43 million to spend. Maybe you fancy selling Vinicius Junior to Saudi Arabia for hundreds of millions.

For Athletic Club, you have over £20m - but remember, you can only purchase players with a Basque heritage.

The rest of the budgets within the league are fairly humble.

The Italian side with the biggest budget in FM26 is Juventus, who have £23.5m to start at the spend of the game.

Milan finished the 2024/25 season without qualifying for Europe, so could you be the man to get the club back to the big time?

There's an interesting budget for Como who have a number of high-profile backers so perhaps you can take over from Cesc Fabregas and take the club to the next level?

Napoli have £22.5m aid their title defence.

If you are looking to spend, spend spend in France there's only one club for you - PSG.

To reflect the real-life competitive imbalance in Ligue 1, PSG have four-time the budget of the club in second place on the list.

French football isn't in a good place financially at the moment and that is reflected in most of the budgets, with some clubs with zero to spend.

Though the financial disparity isn't as clear as in France, Bayern Munich have the biggest budget in Germany with £30m left to spend despite spending big in the summer.

The likes of Leverkusen and Eintracht Frankfurt made massive money from the sales of players to the Premier League, but their budgets don't reflect that.