Premier League Sets New Highs: $3.2B Spent, Record U.S. Viewership

With 10 days still to go in the Premier League’s summer transfer window and several major deals still expected, England’s top flight of men’s pro soccer has set a spending record.

As of Wednesday, the Premier League has allocated more than $3.2 billion in transfer fees, edging just past the record set two years ago. Within the overall total, six clubs have also set individual records for their respective spending, including defending champion Liverpool, which committed as much as $157.2 million in June for German midfielder Florian Wirtz. 

The Premier League transfer figure is set to spike much further with additional expected deals, such as the sale of Eberechi Eze from Crystal Palace to Arsenal. Notably, the Premier League summer transfer total is higher than the combined total for the other four major European leagues—France’s Ligue 1, Germany’s Bundesliga, Italy’s Serie A, and Spain’s LaLiga.

Helping fuel the unprecedented spending in the U.K. is a new domestic media-rights deal starting this season, worth $9 billion over four years and representing the largest sports-rights deal in the country’s history. Within that, legislators recently rejected a move to place more Premier League matches on free-to-air television.

The accelerating spending in the transfer window is also one of many considerations for the U.S.-based Major League Soccer, should it decide to shift to a fall-to-spring schedule. That format, under serious consideration by the league, is the current standard across much of the sport, and making the switch would expose MLS more to the summer transfer window.

More U.S. Eyeballs

The start of the 2025–26 Premier League season, meanwhile, generated historic audiences in the U.S. Comcast-owned NBC Sports said that featured coverage of a Manchester United–Arsenal match averaged 2 million viewers, a record-setting figure for a season-opening match. The figure also just trailed its most-watched match in the U.S., a March 2024 clash between Manchester City and Arsenal that averaged 2.1 million viewers.

For the entire Premier League opening weekend, the network averaged 850,000 viewers for coverage of six matches across broadcast and cable television and digital platforms, including the Peacock streaming service. That overall figure is also a network record and beats the prior high-water mark, set last year, by 4%.

The network will attempt to maintain that momentum with coverage of the league’s second weekend, highlighted by a match between Arsenal and Leeds United, the 49ers-controlled club newly promoted back to the Premier League.