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By Tony Attwood
At the moment that I write this (early September 2026), I have just had it put to me that a Premier League club might be being used as a means of money laundering. Not, I stress, that this is happening, or that I have any evidence, but that it is a possibility.
Now to be absolutely clear about this I have no evidence in this regard at all, and indeed I don’t move in circles within which I am likely to come across anyone engaged in such an activity or with any evidence. But Facebook in particular has carried quite a few such allegations of late.
Normally when a totally wild accusation is made without any evidence to support it, I let it pass – but this one is interesting to me because once or twice I have openly asked the question: why are clubs seemingly happy to go on losing vast amounts of money year by year? And why then do they seemingly use the same approaches to football going forward?
I don’t know the answer, but the money laundering notion – although it seems utterly outlandish to me, does provide a possible starting point for an explanation. But before I proceed let me double stress: I’ve got no evidence, and I am just writing this because I am fascinated by the notion that something as big as English football could have within it, something as dubious as money laundering. So, count this as a work of fiction – a bit of relief to a day when the weather is not very good.
First, the issue. Some clubs, year on year, spend a fortune on players, and (quite often) bring in a new manager for the club. The club doesn’t rise up the league so the manager is sacked, a new man comes in and more players are bought. That’s the tale, highly simplified.
Second the argument against this approach. The explanation for this way of working is that the club owners feel that eventually they must hit on a manager who buys the right players and will take the club up the league. Meanwhile they have lots of money to spend so they carry on using this approach and spending large amounts of money while taking the club nowhere. Not really very good business.
Third the alternative explanation, and again I stress I have no evidence for this but have had it put to me. The club, it is alleged (without evidence) is engaged in money laundering. Which means the club has received money which has come from dubious sources, and needs to spend it. So it does this by buying players. Later it will sell the players at a much lower price, but the money it then receives comes from legitimate sources, and so there is no sign of dubious money.
Now I don’t know anything about criminal activity and money laundering to know if this works – and I have to say it all looks a bit too risky to me. I mean if someone like me who writes a blog can be told about it then surely the authorities that monitor such things know about it, so they can trace the transfers and the money and take action.
The only argument against that I can see is that it might be politically unwise for the authorities to start taking legal action against a football club for handling stolen money… although personally I would hope that the authorities would not be put off by such a concern. If football club X is suspected of receiving stolen money and using it to buy players it doesn’t want, in order to sell them later at a loss for clean money, I’d like the police to be in there sorting it out. Although to be clear no one has said to me that this or that club is specifically dealing in this way.
But there is another point, and I think this is the main issue. I have written before that I can’t understand what clubs are doing losing vast amounts of money each year on transfers while not pushing upwards to the top of the league. So far I can only put it down to incompetence. What other explanation is there? (But then again, I have just typed a question about this into Google, and it seems there are all sorts of explanations – my search was “Why football clubs are losing so much money”.)
Consider Arsenal. Arteta came into the club and starting sorting out the players he didn’t want. Slowly he built a new team, which came 8th, 8th, 5th, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd. 1st. There’s clear progress there, and the money spent on players clearly had a purpose. It is just the clubs that keep changing managers but go nowhere that I can’t understand. Which is NOT to say that I accuse them of anything illegal, it is just that I have not been able to understand what they are doing.
Of course they are most likely just not be any good at this football club management business and the club isn’t very good at picking the right manager to lift it out of the doldrums. That certainly is a valid explanation for Tottenham coming 17th, 17th and currently being 19th.
I want to repeat, this is speculation. I have no evidence against anyone doing anything illegal in football. Rather I am trying to understand why some clubs seem to go on and on losing money year after year. It just seems a bit strange.
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