Making money is generally either about one of three things: doing something new, doing something better, or making something cheaper.
But when you work in a restricted market, such as a football league with a set number of clubs, there is a problem. Every time you take a step forward, one of your rivals can endeavour to do the same, either copying your ideas or coming up with some variation. You can’t easily go off and do something new, so you have to improve some more.
Thus, if you are a house builder, you can go and find another location, or maybe build a different type of house, or add different features to your houses. There are some restrictions, but if you have the imagination, you can come up with something.
But with English football, there are only 20 places in the Premier League, and you can’t change what you do: you play football. So some clever thinking is needed.
Generally, ambitious football clubs tend to do the same thing: spend money on better players. And so to stop this getting out of hand, some Leagues have financial rules. And as a result, in February 2023, Sky Sports ran the story How Chelsea have avoided Financial Fair Play.
True, Everton were deducted 10 points (reduced to six) and then another couple of points for breaking Premier League sustainability rules. And Nottingham Forest were deducted four points. But it was all small-scale staff, particularly as we all noted that ManC were found guilty of over 100 rule breaches but still never punished.
Thus it was that on as long as ManC remained untouched, it appeared big clubs with money really could do anything, and the regulators had no power over them – and that is not a very attractive story.
The Chelsea alleged rule breaches were different, however, since they concerned agents, intermediaries and third-party investments in players. But the fine in football terms was peanuts: Chelsea were fined £8.6m by Uefa for “submitting incomplete financial information.” As one insider said to me, “£8m might buy you a left shoulder, not much more.”
The problem is, however, that those clubs that do obey the rules are getting annoyed and fed up with the current situation. Chelsea were then fined £27m and Aston Villa £9.5m by Uefa for breaching financial rules. And of course, we have other cases like Everton and Nottingham Forest with minor points deductions.
But then we had Chelsea, who were charged by the Football Association with 74 alleged rule breaches. And yet for the media, these are just passing stories. Clubs hire a manager, let him spend, sack him, get charged with breaking regulations, pay up, blame the now long-gone ex-manager, do it again.
Most clubs believe that all the fans care about is the position in the league, so they continue to take risks until eventually the negative publicity about rule-breaking and the decline in the club’s position start to affect the brand’s value. But that takes a while because getting fined for a misdemeanour or the sacking of a manager seems to have no impact on the club’s value, and there is every chance that whatever rule-breaking has been indulged it, could well have taken the club up the league or won a cup.
The fact is that the only thing that reduces the brand value of a club is a lower league position. Negative publicity of any other kind has no effect, because fans generally don’t care. All they want is success on the pitch, and with that, the club can do everything, from putting up the price of a ticket and getting itself exposed on TV and radio more often, to increasing the price of everything for sale in the club’s bars and shops.
And so the money earned by the top clubs is rising rapidly and takes them further and further away from the rest of the clubs in their league, which rely on ticket sales and media money.
But now that money has reached a plateau, for there are hints that broadcast revenue could be getting close to its upper limit. After all, no TV station is going to pay a club more for the rights to a televised game if as a result, they don’t sell enough advertising and/or subscriptions to pay for the programming.
So we are reaching a crisis point. Supporters are objecting to yet another price rise for their tickets, programmes, burgers and pints. TV companies are saying that they have just about reached the limit of what they are going to pay. Unemployment is rising (it reached 5.2% in the three months up to December 2025 – and is still growing), and the unemployed generally can’t afford season tickets, or indeed TV sport subscriptions.
And behind all this, there is another problem. European football market revenues rose by 8% to a record high of €38 billion in 2023/24 season, while players’ agents and the mega-rich who buy clubs are behaving as if that is going to continue.
So here’s a simple thought: football revenues won’t keep rising simply because nothing in the marketplace goes up in price forever. There is always a limit. It might not be evident immediately, but there really is always a limit somewhere.
