Comparing Liverpool and Man City’s total net spend in the last five years

Nathan Egerton • 05 Mar 2022

Liverpool and Manchester City have established themselves as two of the best teams in Europe – but how does their net spend compare?

City are owned by Sheikh Mansour, who bought the club in 2008 and has since spent more than 1.5 billion pounds on new signings.

The Blues recently made the biggest transfer in the history of English football, signing Jack Grealish from Aston Villa for £100million.

Despite being one of the biggest clubs in the world, Liverpool have to operate on a smaller budget as their owners don’t have the same resources as City.

“There is no secret here, but our transfers have to hit the ground [running],” Jurgen Klopp said in February 2022. “We can’t make a £40million or £50million signing and say if they’re not playing it’s not important. As we say in Germany, we don’t ‘swim in money’.

“It’s a wealthy club, but the policy is clear: we spend what we earn. If we earn more, we can spend more and if we earn less, we spend less.

“So it’s very important we have to do absolutely the right thing… we have to think once about it, twice, three times, four times and if we have to think about it for a fifth time it might be that the player goes to another club and we cannot change that.”

But they’ve still made a few big-money signings in recent years, including Virgil van Dijk for £75million and Alisson Becker for £66.8million.

Courtesy of Transfermarkt, we’ve looked at City and Liverpool’s net spend since the summer of 2017 to see how the two clubs compare.

Summer 2017:

Man City – £141.43m
Liverpool – £37.62m

January 2018:

Man City – £62.1m
Liverpool – £47.18m profit

🏆 2019/20 #PL champion
🥇 2018/19 #PL Player of the Season#OnThisDay in 2018, @LFC signed @VirgilvDijk. The rest is history… pic.twitter.com/0Ms1CBMUjT

— Premier League (@premierleague) January 1, 2022

Summer 2018:

Man City – £27.53m
Liverpool – £145.87m

January 2019:

Man City – £8.64m profit
Liverpool – £19.08m profit

Summer 2019:

Man City – £81.47m
Liverpool – £38.34m profit

OH. MY. WORD.

What a screamer from @ManCity's Rodri 😱😱#PLonPrime pic.twitter.com/B8aPqxZXPQ

— Amazon Prime Video Sport (@primevideosport) December 3, 2019