By Tony Attwood
Most seasons, the number of Premier League football clubs that make an actual real profit (as opposed to a profit created by some clever manipulations of the accounts and which doesn’t result in the club having more money to spend) is very small. In recent seasons, clubs such as Liverpool, Bournemouth, Crystal Palace and Ipswich Town have made a profit, and that’s about it.
Clubs can of course earn money is all sorts of ways, such as selling players, having money in an account which earns interest, getting big crowds, money from TV and radio… and of course they tend to pull in money from all these sources. Unfortunately, they also tend to spend more than they earn.
Yet year after year they go on doing the same old thing, spending more than they earn, propped up by their owners who plough money into the club. And these days we tend to assume this is the only way it can be. But I am not sure that is true.
I mean, the people who own and run football clubs in England are not stupid – far from it – so they know exactly what is going on. They know the vast majority of professional clubs are losing money, and yet they go on, year after year doing the same thing, losing more and more money.
Put the accounts of the current group of clubs that make up the Premier League together, and you will find that the league as a whole is losing something around one and a half billion pounds a year.
And to be quite clear, this is not based on things like the estimation of the value of the team (player amortisation and depreciation as it is known). If that is included, the figures are worse. But as things stand, the amount lost by Premier League clubs is £1.6bn a year and getting worse year by year.
Worse, since 2018/19 the losses have shot up, and are now running at a level that is four times what it was just six years ago. The losses have gone up by 400% between 2019 and 2025!
Now a lot of people who are much more deeply engrossed in football finance than me have reported this issue, and normally I would leave such matters to the experts, but as I read the reports it strikes me that one question is rarely, if ever, asked. These clubs are run by people who know a lot about corporate finance, and yet they keep running the clubs at a loss. And my question is why?
Sometimes the losses are made worse by specific issues such as Chelsea spending £50m on legal issues including settlements and fines for hidden payments to agents, and Manchester United spending £37m on redundancies and restructuring.
But those are exceptions, as are the few do make a profit, although when one looks at these, the profit often appears to arise because the owner has written off a loan, or some other act of generosity which turns out to be essential if the club is to be kept running.
Sometimes clubs do manage to sell players on at a profit, but generally the moment they do that they spend all that money and more on buying in other players with ever higher salaries. Selling academy players (tellingly known as “academy products” by most clubs), can help but this alone doesn’t turn the clubs into profitable operations.
In 2024/25 Arsenal made £81m in player sales – but spent far more on player purchases. In fact, for all clubs, income goes up, but so does expenditure, and profit is rarely, if ever, reached.
And yet clubs do get sold and more very rich people come in to buy a club, or part of a club. And I ask, given that clubs lose money, why?
Premier League and its clubs have lost money seven years in a row. The average annual loss has been calculated at over half a billion pounds a year.
So I ask, “why do very rich people put money into football clubs when they know the clubs lose money?” And in summary, the answers I get are…
- Arrogance. A belief that although everyone else has failed, they will succeed – after all, they have succeeded elsewhere in the past
- A lack of worry. A feeling that one has so much money losing a few hundred million pounds in a year is neither here nor there.
- A feeling that there is actually profit there, but clever accountancy allows the clubs to portray themselves as losing money, and thus they pay no tax.
- A wish to be mixing with the big boys no matter what the cost. In short, owning a club is like an entry card to a very select club.
My view on reading such commentaries as I can find (and to be quite clear I don’t have the level of contacts that allows me to talk with any of the billionaires who run these clubs) is that running a top club is like being part of a very special elite group, no matter what it costs.
And besides, think of the kudos if one not only owns the majority of a club like this, and actually turns it into a profit-making concern. Plus there is another point – the mass media tends not to talk about the profit and loss of a club. It is not a debating point – the kudos comes from owning a club. That means sitting in the very best seats, flying to away games on your personal plane, being greeted with deference everywhere….
And then throw in the notion these people really do believe that they are business miracle workers….
So Premier League clubs make a phenomenal operating loss each year, but there are still some very rich people queuing up to buy such a club for all the kudos that will bring them. Besides, they have made their millions before, and they are still making millions, so there is every reason (they believe) for them to succeed where all the others fail.
Premier League clubs make a combined loss of around £1.5bn a year according to their accounts – so another way of looking at this is to recognise that some very smart operators simply don’t believe the accounts.
And so here we have a second point: they believe in their own ability to make any business work, because they have done before, and besides it simply isn’t possible for every club to be losing money on this scale. Is it possible for the PL clubs to have lost over £6bn in five years? Or is that just a trick to avoid paying any tax? Or is it that the clubs are run by financially inept people?
So in summary we have this question. Is it really that difficult to run a football club at a profit? If yes, why do so many people try. If no, then some people are fiddling the books.
