How do you build a champion? In domestic European soccer, the answer is still "spend more money than everyone else." The dominant teams over the past decade -- Manchester City, Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain, Juventus and a combination of Real Madrid and Barcelona -- are the teams that spent more than their competitors.
The only team to consistently break this rule, in the wrong direction: Manchester United. Unless you're almost actively trying to be bad at spending, having the biggest pile of money will eventually allow you to climb to the top of the table.
But the Champions League is something different for a number of reasons. First, it puts all of the big spenders against each other. And second, the knockout stages last for no longer than seven total games. Across a 34- or 38-game season, financial advantages usually win out. Over seven matches, however? There's a lot more randomness, and finishing, shot-stopping, individual performances, specific gameplans and stylistic matchups have an outsized effect on who ends up lifting the trophy.
So, with the semifinals of the European Cup kicking off next week, here's a more interesting, slightly more specific question: How do you build a Champions League champion?
When to buy?
For this exercise, we're going to look at the starting XIs of the last 10 Champions League finalists. If you reach the final, you're good enough to win the whole thing, and anything can happen in one game -- unless Real Madrid are playing. If we extend back beyond the past five years, then we're in danger of entering an era when the transfer market functioned in a different way and the lessons might end up being less useful. Ten teams isn't a huge sample, but it's big enough to at least be instructive.
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Transfer fees aren't the be-all-end-all of player valuation, either -- no, that would be a combination of fee and contract value. But we don't have trustworthy contract data for all of these teams and players, so we're going to be working off of the transfer fee data from the site Transfermarkt (listed in Euros). Taken in aggregate, there should still be plenty of information inside of that data.
One last note: For academy players, we're listing their transfer fees as zero and saying they joined the club at 16.
So, to the data!
Let's just start with the averages.
For a player starting in a Champions League final, at what age were they acquired and how much did they cost in transfer fees? They joined their teams for €30.6 million at 22.8 years of age. By that criteria, the most average Champions League-winning acquisition in this data set is Tottenham's €30m move in 2015 for 23-year-old Bayer Leverkusen winger Son Heung-Min.
Even the richest clubs in the world can't afford to acquire a team of ready-made superstars. To become one of the best teams in the world, you have to acquire players like Son -- promising pros who become superstars, guarantee elite production from at least one of the 11 spots in the lineup for at least half a decade and make it easier to focus on building out the rest of the roster.
Of course, these averages are only so useful, and they can be skewed in both directions by academy grads like Trent Alexander-Arnold and Thomas Muller, as well as record-breaking transfer fees for Neymar and Kylian Mbappe. There are 89 players -- not 110 -- in the data set because of Real Madrid's repeat and Liverpool's three-peat appearances in finals, and here's the distribution of the ages at which all 89 were acquired by the team for whom they played in the Champions League final:
Let's review. So, 11% of these players were acquired before they turned 18. If you want to win the Champions League, you probably should have at least one player who cost almost nothing to bring in. A further 14% were acquired after 18, but before they turned 21, which means that a quarter of the players who've started in Champions League finals over the past five years joined their clubs before they were old enough to order an overpriced hazy IPA at a bar in Portland.
A further 28% came from what we'll call the "pre-peak" range (21 to 23), and the biggest chunk (30%) came from the early peak years of 24 to 26. Put another way, more than 80% of the players who started the Champions League final were acquired by their clubs before their 27th birthday.
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Perhaps most interestingly from all of this is that just six players were acquired beyond what's generally considered to be a player's peak years of 24 to 28, and only two players were acquired in their 30s: Keylor Navas, who joined PSG from Real Madrid at 32, and Thiago Silva, who joined Chelsea from PSG at 35.
As teams inevitably chase around big-name stars deep into their 20s or even 30s this summer as they search for a final piece, the true difference makers at the highest level tend to be the players whose careers are just getting started.
Where to sign from?
We're gonna divide this up into six separate categories:
- Academy: Players who came up through the team's academy
- Super clubs: Bayern Munich, PSG, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus, Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea
- CL: Teams consistently in the Champions League, like Borussia Dortmund, Tottenham, the big Portuguese clubs, Ajax, etc.
- Big 5: Any other clubs from France, Italy, England, Spain and Germany
- Rest of Europe: Any other European clubs
- Americas: Any clubs from North and South America
Here's how it looks:
To start, the biggest chunk -- nearly a full third of all players -- comes from clubs across the Big Five leagues who aren't consistently in the Champions League. Then, nearly another third comes from the Champions League clubs who are consistently selling their players to bigger clubs, replenishing and then doing it all again, year after year. None of that is all too surprising, but the third-biggest group is the super clubs, which means that, on average, each Champions League final features around four players who were acquired from another team that should also consider itself rich or resourceful enough to win the Champions League.
So, approximately 80% of the players in the Champions League final come from pretty traditional scouting areas: the Big Five leagues, or the biggest clubs in the Netherlands and Portugal. Still, that leaves a further 20% for relatively unconventional acquisition methods -- whether that be academy graduates, smaller leagues in Europe, or leagues outside of Europe all together.
That 20% is honestly bigger than I expected, and it probably could be even bigger. The success of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia at Napoli, Real Madrid's reliance on the likes of Vinicius Jr, Rodrygo and Federico Valverde and Brighton's continued excellence in recruiting outside the EU (Kaoru Mitoma, Alexis Mac Allister, Julio Enciso, Moises Caicedo) suggest that there's tons of talent waiting to be unearthed beyond the traditional markets.
How much should a team pay?
Depending on how you look at it, the average transfer fee spent on starters is either skewed by A) PSG spending €402 on two players, or B) the COVID-shortened season that abbreviated the number of matches and prevented PSG from buckling under the weight of the two-leg elimination structure like they normally do.
Either way, here's what the distribution of transfer fees looks like:
A full third of players who've started in the Champions League final since 2018 cost €10m or less in transfer fees to acquire. If you're not building a significant portion of your team around "cheaply" acquired players, then you haven't won the Champions League -- heck, you've barely even made the final.
If you wanted to try to draw some kind of grand theory about why the two nation-state-owned clubs, Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City, still haven't won the Champions League, you could squint and do it here. In their final, PSG's lineup featured Juan Bernat (€5 million from Bayern Munich), Ander Herrera ("free" transfer from Manchester United) and academy product Presnel Kimpembe. Manchester City, meanwhile, only had Oleksandr Zinchenko (€2.3 million from Ufa) and academy grad Phil Foden as under €10 million players.
Without these kinds of players, you can't build up the depth necessary to consistently make runs in Europe without flagrantly violating Financial Fair Play. And these more "affordable" players also tend to be the ones who do the less glamorous things -- fill the spaces, track back, cover forward runs, move off the ball -- that create the platform for the stars to decide matches. This diagnosis certainly applies to PSG, a terribly built super team that doesn't work whenever they play a similarly talented side capable of relentlessly pushing against their structural weaknesses.
As for City, well, just take a nice deep breath -- in for four seconds, hold for six, exhale for eight -- and then go back and read that first sentence of the paragraph.
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Of the seven teams to appear in finals over the past five years, they've spent the following -- in transfer fees, on average -- on their starters:
- PSG: €57.8 million
- Manchester City: €46.1 million
- Chelsea: €31.3 million
- Liverpool: €30.1 million
- Real Madrid: €27.7 million
- Tottenham: €12.1 million
- Bayern Munich: €11 million
This isn't to say that Bayern Munich or Real Madrid or even Tottenham don't spend money. Madrid, in particular, pay their players a ton of money once they've acquired them, while Bayern also pay competitive wages.
#PSG wage bill is easily the highest of the Money League clubs at a massive £615m, followed by #RealMadrid £441m and #FCBarcelona £395m. Highest placed English club is #MUFC £385m, followed by #LFC £368m, #MCFC £353m and #CFC £342m. pic.twitter.com/mKREmtz2Fp
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Spurs have also spent big money on transfer fees in recent years, but their best team was built without playing anywhere near the top end of the market. Compared to the other super clubs, Bayern never spend big on transfer fees. And compared to the last time Florentino Perez was president of the club, Real Madrid aren't devoting as many resources on premium-price fees as they used to, either.
With club-record acquisitions not even playing half of the available minutes for their new clubs on average, the transfer market is mostly a loser's game. In short, the winners tend to be the clubs that figure out how to avoid playing it all together.
What about positions?
This all still ignores one thing: where the players play. Strikers age differently than center backs, while keepers cost less than goal-scoring wingers. So how do Champions League-winning teams acquire their keepers, fullbacks, center-backs, midfielders and forwards?
The average keeper was acquired for €26.1m at the age of 26.2. The most expensive acquisition was Liverpool's €62.5m move for Roma's Alisson, which was -- in no small part -- inspired by the least expensive move (Liverpool's €6.2m transfer to acquire Loris Karius from Mainz). Karius was also the youngest keeper (23), along with Ederson when he was brought in by City, while the only keeper acquired after the age of 28 was Keylor Navas, who moved from Real Madrid to PSG at age 32.
In front of the keepers, the average Champions League finalist center-back was acquired at the age of 23.2 for about €26m. Given that center backs tend to peak later than all the other outfield positions, this age number is surprisingly low. The teams that have challenged for the European Cup over the past five years have acquired their center-backs significantly before they entered their peak years and, if anything, the average number is inflated by one or two outliers.
Only three of these 19 players were acquired after age 26: Thiago Silva was 27 when he moved from AC Milan to PSG, David Alaba was 29 when he moved from Bayern Munich to Real Madrid and Silva -- again -- was 35 when he switched from PSG to Chelsea. Drop Silva from the sample, and the average age drops down to 22.3.
The center-back fees pretty much run the gamut: a bunch of free transfers, one academy product, a chunk of mid-tier deals and then six players who cost €40 million or more. Virgil van Dijk's €84.7m move from Southampton to Liverpool outpaced any other deal by €13m.
Fullbacks, meanwhile, were both the cheapest players and the youngest players, brought in for an average of €16.4m at the age of 20.8. While these teams are all dotted with superstar fullbacks, their transfer fees wouldn't tell you that. City's €52.7m move to bring 27-year-old Kyle Walker in from Tottenham was the most expensive deal, and he's the only player over the age of 25. Beyond that, only three other deals -- Ben Chilwell from Leicester to Chelsea for €50.2m, Ferland Mendy from Lyon to Madrid for €48m, Thilo Kehrer from Schalke to PSG for €37m -- even cost more than €15m.
Put another way, the combined transfer fees paid for Alphonso Davies, Andy Robertson, Joshua Kimmich, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Reece James ($31.5m) were less than any of those single players. Given how rare elite fullback play is -- and therefore how expensive it would be on the open market -- most of the Champions League finalists found it on the cheap, and were then able to devote their transfer resources elsewhere...
... like, say, central midfielder.
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The only two midfielders who came from academies were Tottenham's Harry Winks and Chelsea's Mason Mount. There were three free transfers -- James Milner from City to Liverpool, Ander Herrera from United to PSG, Leon Goretzka from Schalke to Bayern Munich -- and then two sub-€10m moves: Federico Valverde from Peñarol to Real Madrid and Casemiro from Porto to Real Madrid. The other 16 central midfielders cost between €14.2m (Christian Eriksen to Tottenham from Ajax) and €76m (Kevin De Bruyne to Manchester City from Wolfsburg).
The ages among the midfielders are a little tighter, too, with no one 30 or older and just four guys (Winks, Mount, Valverde and Marquinhos, who moved from Roma to PSG) under 21.
At least over the past five years, Champions League contenders were acquiring already somewhat established midfielders for mid-tier fees. Perhaps that speaks to the difficulty of playing midfield in a top, typically attack-oriented, side, but also to the ceiling of the impact these non-scoring players can have. It's no coincidence that the most expensive one -- De Bruyne, who cost nearly €20m more than any other midfielder in the sample -- is also the one who's contributing to upwards of 30 goals in a season.
And that brings us to the most expensive and second-youngest position: the guys who score and create the goals.
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The average forward in Champions League finals cost €50.9m and was acquired at the age of 21.7. Yes, that's massively inflated by the Neymar and Mbappe moves to PSG, but even if you totally remove them, the average forward still cost €36.6m -- a full €10m more than any other position we've looked at.
Of the 23 forwards in the sample, three came from academies: Phil Foden for City, Harry Kane for Spurs, Thomas Muller for Bayern. Then there was Robert Lewandowski moving on a free from Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich -- a kind of "strange dare / transfer" between rivals for a player who would've cost a ton of transfer money had he not run down his contract. Then there was Tottenham's €6.6m move for Dele Alli from Milton Keynes and Bayern's €8m transfer for Serge Gnabry from Werder Bremen. Everyone else cost at least €21m.
The two oldest transfers were Riyad Mahrez from Leicester to Manchester City and Angel Di Maria from Manchester United to PSG -- both of whom were 27. None of the other 21 forwards to start a Champions League final over the past five years were acquired by their clubs after the age of 25.
All of the other positions have various kinds of exceptions -- free transfers, academy guys, older stars brought in at the tail end of a career -- but the story with Champions League winning forwards is pretty straight-forward. To get one, you have to pay a ton of money -- and you have to be willing to do it at an age before you're even sure the player is worth it. Wait too long, and you'll be watching the final from home.