The 2019 summer transfer window saw a whopping £1.41bn spent by English Premier League clubs, just shy of the £1.43bn record set in 2017.
Champions Manchester City were the biggest spenders, splashing out £150m on five new players during the window, including £63m on midfielder Rodri from Atletico Madrid.
Rivals Manchester United weren’t far behind, paying out £143m on just three players, including £78.3m on defender Harry Maguire from Leicester City.
At the other end of the spending scale, Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool had a quiet summer, spending just £1.7m on new players.
And newly-promoted Norwich’s outlay was a similarly modest £3.75m; the Canaries hoping their Championship-winning side can step up and make a mark in the Premier League without significant additions.
But what if Premier League clubs had chosen to invest their transfer budgets in buying up homes in their local area, rather than on footballers?
Using Zoopla house price and local area data, we crunched the numbers to produce football’s property purchasing league – which you can see below.
How we worked it out
We took each Premier League club’s gross transfer spend in the 2019 summer window (according to Transfermarkt.co.uk) and calculated how many homes they could have bought in their local postal area, based on the average price across all property types.
Winners and losers
Everton finished top of the league, able to buy the equivalent of 1,300 homes in the relatively cheap streets surrounding Goodison Park.
And bottom of the pile were low-spending Norwich, with their meagre transfer outlay enabling them to buy the equivalent of 17 homes around their Carrow Road ground.