Premier League sides have suffered £5 billion in losses since 1992 - which club is most in the red?

Martin Macdonald

• Updated: 20 Jan 2026 09:09 CST
• 6 min read

Analysis

Since the inception of the Premier League in 1992, the football clubs involved in the competition have suffered nearly £5 billion in accumulative losses.

While the English top-flight is a money-making behemoth and undoubtedly the biggest league in the world commercially, clubs have spent beyond their means pretty much since the first ball was kicked in the Premier League after it was rebranded from the First Division 34 years ago.

The actual accumulative loss is £4.99 billion spread across the 51 clubs that have played in the Premier League, reports football finance expert Kieran Maguire.

Remarkably, just 10 clubs are responsible for 90% of those losses - Chelsea, Aston Villa, Everton, Manchester City, Fulham, Manchester United, Sunderland, Leicester City, Bournemouth and Crystal Palace.

Chelsea are responsible for £1.256 billion of that alone. The main reason for this is expenditure on transfers as since the Premier League was established, no club has spent more on player acquisitions than the Blues.

Man City, Man Utd and Liverpool are second, third and fourth in that regard.

The Chelsea spending started with the ownership of Roman Abramovich and has continued under Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital.

Out of those 51 clubs, only 20 are in the green for profit and loss over the last 20 years. They are:

Swindon, Oldham, Barnsley, Ipswich, Birmingham, Reading, Liverpool, Blackpool, Norwich, Brentford, Huddersfield, Swansea, Sheffield United, Brighton, Luton, Hull City, West Brom, Burnley, Arsenal and Tottenham.

Arsenal are Spurs are the two biggest success stories when it comes to profit as they are up £132.4m and £183.2m, respectively and that's with both clubs building new stadiums.

While Premier League sides make more than any other clubs in the world due to broadcasting revenue, there are still spending like never before, with wage bills exceeding 90% of revenue in some cases.

Relegation, losing players on free transfers, and inflated transfer fees are other ways losses can skyrocket.

Since the Premier League started in 1992 club have lost £4.99 billion between them, and ten clubs are responsible for 90% of the losses. pic.twitter.com/t7W0NxIqiP

— Kieran Maguire (@KieranMaguire) January 20, 2026

Premier League spends, spends spends in the transfer market

At one point, the Premier League begun marketing itself as the best league in the world, and others started believing it.

How did the EPL become so dominant in the transfer market, in addition to vastly superior broadcast deals compared to other European leagues?

Small pieces make up the large whole of why it became so popular, and here’s a few quite obvious markers, but a few less so.

1. Continental players - good ones - started playing there. Dennis Bergkamp and Ruud Gullit laid down the marker, and when Thierry Henry becomes the best player in the world there, circa 2004, the quality of the league and its international standing begun to be taken seriously.

2. There’s an advantage of a shared language for most of the world - English. English is unquestionably the world’s dominant football language and it makes things easier to understand and engage with. If you want to question this, La Liga’s international TV revenue easily exceeds Serie A or Bundesliga, two leagues where their language is only utilised domestically - though La Liga still have much work to do to catch up with the EPL’s commercialisation.

3. Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal have history you simply cannot manufacture or replace; it’s not like the EPL was going to market with completely new, unconnected assets. Teams like these were already in the consciousness, had featured some of the greatest players of all time, and were an easy sell for a burgeoning audience that, for the first time, were gaining access to international competitions that they had never seen before.

4. And that marketing strategy involved the teams, thus the now-famous Asian Tour was created. Not only were fans being exposed to these teams on TV for the very first time, they appreciated the fact they had taken the time to come play in front of them. Man Utd made £8m from their Asian Tour in 2025 alone - their first trip to Indonesia was as far back as 1975. There’s a level of long-term seed planting that the EPL has done so much better than anyone else.

5. Timing truly is everything. Around 2004 is when the international TV earnings potential opened up in earnest, and around then is when Manchester United’s stranglehold over the league had ended (at least initially). United won the league by 17 points in 99/00 and 10 in 00/01, but Arsenal became not only a challenger, rather the neutral’s team of choice. The fact that they were also the most cosmopolitan team ever assembled at the time helped.

6. And then Jose Mourinho arrived at Chelsea. It’s important to never underestimate the value of the box office individual and in Ferguson, Wenger, Mourinho and Liverpool’s Rafa Benitez, the league had four immensely powerful winners and also, bad losers, each with different personalities that would challenge each and every week.

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