West Ham’s net spend in the Premier League era has been released and the figures will come as a surprise everyone.

The inflation of money in football over the past 10/15 years has been exponential, with the average transfer fee sky rocketing. West Ham have broken their record transfer fee time and time again over the last few seasons and all these deals have added up to an incredible amount.

Our current record transfer fee is the near £50 million we paid for Lucas Paqueta from Lyon, with the likes of Haller, Scamacca and Kudus all being up there too. On the other side of things though, the club has not really sold many players for high amounts. Obviously there is Declan Rice who was sold for £105 million to Arsenal (though it feels like we should have got a lot more for him) but after that our next highest selling fee is Payet for £25 million.

Journalist Sean Whetstone has declared that “West Ham have spent over £1 billion” from the 1992/93 season up to now. You can safely assume that a large sum of that was spent more recently, but it is still an astronomical figure. That ludicrous amount of money was spent on 661 players, which includes the Academy.

He also revealed that they have made £542.32 million from player sales in that period, which leaves the club with a net loss of £468.42 million, which is roughly £15 million a season. When it is put like that, or does not seem like that high of an amount in today’s market, but in the 1990’s that would have been inconceivable. To put it into context, in 1992 the record transfer fee was £13 million; that would not even get you a decent player today.

It’s safe to say that clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea would laugh at our £1 billion – the latter have spent that since Todd Boehly purchased the club in 2022. However, it’s an impressive amount nonetheless and that number is only going to up as money takes over our beloved sport even more than it already has.