The transfer window has only now officially opened, but the biggest move of the summer happened a month or so ago: Paris Saint-Germain is no longer Kylian Mbappé's employer. The French giant held onto Mbappe's services for a couple of years longer than anyone thought, but his long-expected move to Real Madrid was made official just after the Champions League final.
PSG now have quite a bit of money burning a hole in their figurative pocket, and that's usually a pretty dangerous thing. But the club's rebuild actually began a year ago. Lionel Messi (Inter Miami) and Sergio Ramos (Sevilla) left on free transfers, Mauro Icardi left for a €10 million fee to become a Champions League hero at Galatasaray, and other veterans like Neymar (Al Hilal), Marco Verratti (Al Arabi), Abou Diallo (Al Arabi), Julian Draxler (Al-Ahli) and Georginio Wijnaldum (Al Ettifaq) left for clubs in the Middle East for a combined €167m in transfer fees.
It's rare that a club so well-monied makes more than €200m in transfer fees in a single offseason, but fear not: PSG spent more than double that in return. They remodeled their attack by spending nearly a combined €300m to acquire Randal Kolo Muani, Gonçalo Ramos, Ousmane Dembélé, Bradley Barcola, Hugo Ekitike and Kang-In Lee. They tried to sturdy both their present and future defense by spending nearly €150m for defenders Lucas Hernández and Lucas Beraldo and defensive midfielders Manuel Ugarte and Gabriel Moscardo.
In all, PSG's balance in the 2023-24 transfer windows -- the transfer fees gained minutes the transfer fees spent -- was, per Transfermarkt, minus-€247m, the largest in Europe. Chelsea (-€202.3m) was the only other club past -€200m, while eight other Premier League teams and Real Madrid passed -€100m.
And for all that effort, PSG went from averaging 2.24 points per game in Ligue 1 play in 2022-23 (85 points in 38 matches) to averaging ... 2.24 in 2023-24 (76 in 34). They did advance two rounds further in the Champions League, but a knockout competition isn't as reliable a barometer of success as league play is. By that metric, PSG did a lot of work and had lot of turnover just to stay exactly the same.
For other teams in Europe, though, their offseason moves actually did something. For better or worse, they saw their fortunes actually rise or fall in 2023-24, following execution of their transfer strategies of choice. With teams preparing to whip out the checkbook as the window opens once more, let's take a final look back at which teams spent big or thriftily (in terms of transfer fee balance), and which were either rewarded or punished for their efforts.
Oh, and it should go without saying that the transfer fee is only one of two numbers that matter -- the other being the salaries teams are paying -- and some moves are made with the future in mind, not the present. But we tend to focus a lot of our energy on immediate returns, so now that the transfer window fully opened across Europe on Monday, let's see who got their returns and who very much did not.
(Note: All transfer figures come from Transfermarkt.)