TV cash sees likes of Saints march to new tune

The state of the England national team, scrapping for qualification to next year’s World Cup finals in Brazil with the likes of Ukraine and Montenegro, may be a debating point among fans across the country, but what is not up for discussion is the popularity across the world of its leading club competition and the lavish riches that come with being a member of this exclusive 20-strong club.

The previous summer transfer spending record of £500m, the figure paid out in 2008, the year Manchester City were taken over by the Abu Dhabi Group, has been breached comfortably with many clubs wafting the chequebook with gusto.

It is not just the usual suspects either.

With BT having spent £738m over three years for the rights to 38 live matches a season and Sky having paid a cool £2.3bn for 116 matches a year, that cash has provided extra clout – not as if it was needed – to the moneybags outfits of Chelsea and Manchester City.

The likes of Willian, Andre Schurrle, Fernandinho and Alvaro Negredo have arrived in high-profile summer transfer moves to Stamford Bridge and the Etihad Stadium, with Arsenal belatedly coming to the party yesterday by signing Real Madrid’s Mesut Ozil in a beat-the-deadline move.

Biggest spenders of all were Spurs, whose window shopping smashed past the £100m mark, although the White Hart Lane books were substantially offset by the world record £86m fee they recouped for Gareth Bale.

A host of provincial top-flight sides such as Southampton, Cardiff City and Norwich City, given the green light to embark on considerable spending sprees, have also been caught up in the signing frenzy. That perhaps is the real story of the window.

Not too long ago, the concept of the Saints shelving out £10m-plus on a player – not once but twice – would have been laughed off with incredulity by the club’s fans.

But that is what they have done with the signings of Victor Wanyama and Pablo Daniel Osvaldo for a combined total of £27.5m, with Saints spending a total of £36m on just three players.

Likewise at Cardiff, who have also got in on the act, splashing the cash to bring in, for a club record £9.5m, Seville’s Chilean midfielder Gary Medel.

Cardiff – who as recently as 2000-01 were playing in the Football League’s bottom tier – breaking their transfer record not once but three times this summer, with Steven Caulker and Andreas Cornelius coming in for £8m and £7.5m respectively, underlines just how much reaching the top-flight represents a different ball game for Championship sides who aspire to reach the top.

Other clubs to break the £10m barrier on a player include the Bluebirds’ Welsh rivals Swansea City, who forked out £12m to sign Vitesse Arnhem striker Wilfried Bony.

As these signings all suggest, the vast majority of the transfer money has been paid out, not to rival Premier Division sides, but to foreign clubs – a worrying development for many and an indication of the paucity of genuine British-based talent.

West Ham are one of just a handful of sides to ascribe to a ‘Cool Brittania’ way of thinking, bringing in Liverpool duo Andy Carroll and Stewart Downing for a combined fee of £21.5m.

Other big-money deals involving top-flight clubs include Jonjo Shelvey’s move to Swansea for an eventual £6m fee.

Significant transfers between Premier League and Football League sides have been small beer compared to the plethora of moves involving foreign players, with little of the record summer amount filtering its way down the pyramid – the gap between the haves and have-nots is rising.

Some of the deals which have bucked that trend have ironically involved clubs still receiving parachute payments after relegation, with Wigan receiving £6m from Everton for Arouna Kone and Norwich signing Markus Olsson for £2.5m from Blackburn Rovers.

Top-flight money has at least swelled the coffers of one needy Championship club in cash-strapped Birmingham, who managed to ease their immediate plight by offloading Curtis Davies and Nathan Redmond to Hull and Norwich for seven-figures fees.

Not so long back, the boot would probably have been on the other foot with Blues, in the Premier League from 2002-06 and 2009-11, raiding the Canaries and Tigers for their best players.