Premier League clubs spent almost twice as much on international transfers as the second-biggest spending league Germany this summer.

Data from FIFA’s Transfer Matching System shows that teams in England, fuelled by a £2.7 billion-a-season television deal, spent £880 million in the summer transfer window.

The latest TMS report revealed that the five biggest leagues spent almost three times as much as the rest of the world this summer, with English football leading the way.

This will hardly come as a huge surprise after a summer that saw Paul Pogba join Manchester United from Juventus for a British record £89m, but the overall numbers are still staggering.

“Just as the Big 5 stand tall next to all other countries, England towers over France, Germany, Italy and Spain,” the FIFA TMS report said.

“Revenue from television deals is often indicated as one of the causes of this gap, and the most recent deal is believed to be of benefit to all English clubs, both directly and through a trickle-down effect.”

The Premier League’s new domestic and international TV deals are worth £2.7 billion a season for the next three years – a source of guaranteed income that has returned England’s top flight to profit and seen total annual incomes soaring across the league.

This huge financial advantage enabled English clubs to spend £880m – an eight per cent rise on the 2015 summer transfer window – on 470 international transfers.

English football’s net spend, the amount that actually flowed out of the country to other leagues, was a staggering £683m. German clubs were the biggest beneficiaries, earning £171m in transfer trading with England, more than 70 per cent of Germany’s total receipts.

English clubs’ outlay on overseas talent was two-and-a-half times what their counterparts in Italy and Spain spent and more than six times what French clubs could afford.

The three biggest international shoppers in England spent almost as much as all of Germany’s clubs.

As the Pogba deal would suggest, England likes French players most of all, but it also likes them young. The average age of those arriving in England was under 23, with almost a third of the new arrivals being under 21.

Italy, on the other hand, prefers veterans, with an average age of 28 for its overseas signings.

Total summer spending rose for the fourth straight year to £2.81bn on a record 7,325 transfers but with many of those deals, particularly outside the ‘Big 5’, being for out-of-contract players, the average transfer fee fell from £4.15m to £3.93m.