By Tony Attwood
- Is it really possible to predict football results on a super computer?
- Does religion have a place in football? The answer seems to be yes
Here’s a simple fact: by and large very rich people are not very stupid. Yes some are, but mostly they are not. Especially when it comes to money. And yet, when we look at football clubs, quite a few of them seem to be incredibly stupid. I mean, they spend sums that most of us can’t imagine, in buying and supporting clubs which lose money, and then they spend more sacking the managers. So what’s going on?
If we added together all the losses of Premier League clubs for 2024/25 they would total £948 million. Yet when clubs are sold, they are still sold for mega amounts of money. So the rich spend money to buy something that is going to lose them money!!
Of course it is not quite like that because there is another factor involved, as big clubs are engaged in plans that will bring them vast profits in the future or at least that’s what the buyers believe.
But this is not just a bit of an opportunity for us to laugh at silly rich people who haven’t done their research. For they could very well be right. Because the rich guys who buy football clubs are actually primarily interested in what they see as multi-purpose stadiums which host football as just one of many events.
Now there are clubs out there that just lose money all the time. PSG for example regularly lose win the French league each year and lose over 100 million euros each year. Quite what they are up to I can’t work out – so I will focus instead on England.
Some 16 years ago Liverpool FC was sold for around £300m. Now we hear that Fenway Sports Group has sold a minority stake in Liverpool to Jeff Bezos and his cronies for over over £520 billion. And yet the club is still losing money!
Deloitte’s last review suggested that the pre-tax losses for the 20 Premier League clubs was getting close to £1bn for 2024/25. The 2025/26 figure could be higher, when it is released, not least because the number of clubs making a loss is increasing year by year. But the very rich seem to think our clubs are still undervalued. So why is that?
First, as we all know, there can only be 20 clubs in the PL – so supply is limited. Second the PL remains the most watched league in the world. And third, clubs are finding things beyond league and cup games that they can put on in their venues. That was most certainly a prime driving force that allowed Tottenham to bring in over £2m in 2022. Although that’s still peanuts when we note that the ground cost £1.2bn to build! For all its music events and he American football, it’s not yet eating into that debt.
But perhaps misunderstanding the Tottenham adventure, ManU are planning a 100,000 stadium along the same lines, spending £2bn. “Diversified cash flows” sounds great for these big stadia, but they still need to liaise with local councils and find events people want to go to.
So the investment in new super stadia, and upgraded existing stadia continues – Barcelona is another prime example – but all without real proof that the idea can work. After all, just how many events can you put on before the neighbours complain, or you run out of rock bands sporting events that people will come to?
Thus it might all work with 19 league games, maybe seven or eight European and domestic cup games plus a dozen non-footballing events. But at most that still means paying back all the development costs out of the profit on at most 40 events a year.
And here is the problem. Last season, and the season before that, Tottenham Hotspur came 17th in the league. That means they don’t have any European games in their shiny new stadium. So yes, they can put on other events, but it is going to be tough to make much dent in the debts.
And yes they won the Europa in 2025. But otherwise their trophies were limited to the League cup in 2008, (unless I missed something). Now of course they do like to say that Arsenal are just as bad, except that if we are looking back across this century, Arsenal have three league titles, seven league runners’ up places (not titles I admit, but they keep the crowds coming in), seven FA Cup victories plus lots of runners up spots in the various cups.
Now I may have miscounted something there, and I know that Tottenham supporters love to laugh at the number of “runners up” there are in that list – like for example the three consecutive Premier League second places before we won the league this time, but the fact is that all those runners up position brought in money, the likes of which Tottenham can’t even dream about.
I don’t know – maybe I have got this wrong, but I can’t quite see how Tottenham are going to pay back the borrowings that were made in order to build their new stadium. At last not until they start getting at least to the semi=finals of the Champions League year after year – and for that they have to get back into the top four or five of the Premier League, rather than coming 17th. If not, I think some investors might look the other way.
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