Real Madrid are only the 25th highest spending club in all of Europe since the start of the 2020-21 season, according to Transfermarkt.
This metric strictly includes just includes transfer fees, and not signing bonuses or contracts.
Real Madrid quite regularly get called a club that spends a lot of money to sign players. This has been true in the past - maybe in the previous decade - but they aren't that club anymore. At least, they aren't in these last few years.
Real Madrid, for their size, don't spend nearly as much as people expect
Real Madrid have spent money this summer, but so far, the Yan Diomande transfer has not been made official, which is why they are a bit lower than they should be when it comes to the ranking. Despite that, it does still mean they would be among the lowest teams in terms of transfer value, because apart from the last couple of years, Real Madrid really have not spent too much.
Even if you add 120 million euros for Diomande's signing, Real Madrid are still only 19th in the world in this timespan. If Rodri gets signed for 60 million, it is two places above that.
They have only spent 80 million euros officially this season on Denzel Dumfries and Marc Cucurella. In 2020-21, they spent nothing. In 2021-22, they only signed David Alaba on a free transfer, and spent some money on Eduardo Camavinga.
In 2022-23, it was Antonio Rudiger and Aurelien Tchouameni, the former being another free move. The season after saw the club spend money on Jude Bellingham, Fran Garcia and Arda Guler, while bringing in Kepa Arizzabalaga and Joselu on loan. After that, it was Endrick and Kylian Mbappe - the latter being free.
Generally speaking, Real Madrid have not spent a lot of money apart from these last couple of years. And, the best part is, they have also made a lot of it back through sales. They are behind only nine teams in the least net expenditure / revenue of the top 25 spenders in Europe, which is huge for a big club.
The nine clubs that are ahead of them are teams like Rennes, Aston Villa, Napoli, Wolves - which are forced to be more focused on making profits on sales than Real Madrid have to be due to FFP regulations.
Point of the matter is, Real Madrid are extremely well ran, especially this decade, through COVID-19 and beyond that, and remains the team with the highest revenue in football for a very specific reason - they are brilliant at managing their money.
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