By Tony Attwood
- Why do clubs keep falling foul of the Profit and Sustainability Rules?
- How Arsenal are changing: new team, new directors, new belief
I took a look yesterday at why clubs trip over the PSR Rules. And it is interesting how the media keep trying to push us away from that story – the latest being a bizarre piece which suggests that the Premier League as a body has reported a 30% increase in the costs of running itself over the past five years. .
What such reports often forget to add is that the UK consumer prices (the normal measure of inflation) rose by 28.2% between August 2020 and August 2025. So the cost of running a football club has risen with inflation. Only transfer fees have exploded.
So that doesn’t sound too bad, at least not until you take into account the fact that clubs’ legal bills have gone up by 325 per cent” over this period, according to the Telegraph. Also up are agents’ fees – although not by the same amount.
The media income that clubs used to rely on so heavily has only gone up 12% over three years. And interestingly, the money owed by clubs to other clubs and other organisations has risen also by 12%.
So clubs are spending ever more on transfers but their income is only rising with inflation – and that ultimately can’t be sustainable. And so clubs, particularly in England, are now bleating, but if we look at the money spent on transfers this summer we can see why.
Of the top ten spending clubs in the world, nine are Premier League clubs. Liverpool spent £428m in the last transfer round, Chelsea spent £295m, and Arsenal spent £255m. The nearest rival from outside of the Premier League was Bayer 04 Leverkusen who spent £163m. Atletico Madrid and Real Madrid didn’t even get into the top ten spending clubs. Real Madrid’s net spend on players was £146m.
Now of course, quite a bit of money was recouped by some clubs through selling players. Cheslsea for example, have been running the experiment of buying players without any thought of playing them, and then selling them on. Thus, although they spent £295m on players this summer, they sold various players for £289m, leaving them with a spend of just £6m.
Liverpool had the second-highest net spend of £228m – or put another way, Liverpool had an outflow of around a quarter of a billion pounds on transfer fees last summer alone. And yes, one can argue that as a result they are top of the league but they are being chased by Arsenal who had the highest net spend of all: £246m.
And what makes this all so bizarre is that if you read the media each day, you will see that Arsenal are reported as still chasing more and more players. Of course one doesn’t have to take these seriously (although Arsenal Make Haaland Offer from
Of course, one of the problems Arsenal continue to face is injuries. We saw how last season Arsenal’s injury list was way ahead of everyone else’s. And although the situation has improved the data is still disturbing. Here is the list of injured players for the clubs with the most players down, as given this morning by Premier Injuries
| Pos | Club | Men down |
| 1 | Chelsea | 12 |
| 2 | Tottenham Hotspur | 8 |
| 3 | Sunderland | 6 |
| 4 | Aston Villa, Manchester City, Newcastle United | 5 each |
| 7 | Arsenal, Crystal Palace, Manchester United | 4 each |
| 10 | Bournemouth, Brentford, Brighton, Burnley, Fulham, Nottingham Forest, | 3 each |
With this level of injury going on this early in the season, it is not surprising that clubs are seeking to fill their 25-man squad with players who really can turn out for the club and not look out of place.
But even now Arsenal only have 21 men in their 25 man squad list – partially explained by the cost of buying and paying these players and by the fact that Arsenal have such a strong set of players aged under 21 not included in the 25 man total.
What is clear is that Premier League clubs cannot go on spending as they have been while a) attempting to stay solvent and b) meeting the financial regulations. Of course, what is also upsetting the applecart at the moment is the continuing lack of resolution to the Manchester City 115 cases, for until clubs know if ManC will be seriously punished over these offences, they have to assume that Manchester C are able to go on spending whatever they like – and getting away with it.
It seems the club’s threat in an email from Simon Cliff, City’s legal kingpin, that suggested the club’s chair Khaldoon al-Mubarak “would rather spend £30m on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue for the next 10 years” than submit to Uefa’s financial prodding.” There was also the unrelated comment in October 2024 that the league’s plan to update its rules rather than collapsing them was “an unwise course [which] would likely to lead to further legal proceedings with further legal costs.”
So the legal case remains, a shadow cast over all of football, no longer talked about, but still there, affecting everything within the game.
