- Arsenal Women – Champions League Round1 Mini Tournament
- The Premier League in court: the shape of football to come will be decided by the outcomes.
By Tony Attwood
In the end Arsenal spent £12.7m net in the transfer window. Chelsea spent £50.4m net and Manchester United £97.7m (seven times as much as Arsenal).
Those are net figures (money spent minus money recovered in sales). The actual money spent by Manchester United was £182.6m and by Chelsea £206.7m.
If things work out ok for Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool, then Chelsea’s and Mancheseter United’s fans will get very edgy over a few poor early results and a league table that has them sitting in the middle, and the board will sack the manager and bring someone else in, who will start all over again spending more and more.
It will of course bring a smile to my face – and maybe yours as well, not just because it is all so bleedingly, obviously stupid on the part of the spend and sack clubs, but also because a large number of reporters and some Arsenal fans actually wanted Arteta to be sacked.
The problem with transfers is there is no guarantee of anything, except that rebuilding a squad takes time, and changing managers disrupts the process.
looking at the transfer window, in terms of net profit and loss Brighton and Hove made the biggest loss – just under £183m. followed in order by Ipswich, Manchester United, West Ham United and Tottenham Hots.
Six clubs actually made a profit, with Manchester C far away at the top, followed by Everton, Wolverhampton, Crystal Palace, Newcastle and Liverpool. Which just about confirms that there is no direct relation between the amount spent and the position in the league after the first few matches.
Likewise, as we have recently noted, there’s not always that much link between the position after three matches and the end of the season. The recently cited cases of Leeds going from second to relegation, and Arsenal going from bottom to fifth reveals the truth of it all.
Ipswich Town, Southampton and Leicester City together spent around £300m on players, and if they stay up they will say it is worth it. If they go down they will each, more than likely, be in a deep financial crisis.
And there is no escaping the fact that this summer the Premier League spent almost half a billion pounds less than it did in 2023. Which might mean that a sense of realism is creeping back into football, but which also certainly means that some clubs have lost a lot of money in terms of player value, in just one season.
Of course the comparatively low level of spending by Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool says a lot about the way these clubs’ managers feel about their squads, and their ability to avoid the inevitable disruption to a squad, both physically and psychologically, when the Chelsea model of total disruption (even to the point of freezing a player out).
But it is not just the more modest level of overall spending that helps a club in the days of Profit and Sustainability rules, it is the stability. Multiple new players can bring about wins at the start of a season because the opposition clubs have not fully worked out how the big-spending teams now play. But that doesn’t last long.
So spending over a period of three summer windows can bring results, but it is most certainly not guaranteed, and when it doesn’t bring results it leads to more and more spending, changes of manager and an increasing spiral.
Chelsea’s expenditure during the past three seasons has not only been the most in the league it was been more than double that of its nearest spend-spend-spend rival Manchester City (£1.11 bn for Chelsea compared with £368m). Manchester United by this measure are only half as bonkers as Chelsea but still up there with the silly people.
Of course, spending money can work, and Arsenal are fourth in the expenditure league over the last three seasons and Manchester City sixth, but it doesn’t always work, as shown by the fact that between Arsenal and Manchester City in the expenditure table come West Ham. In the last three seasons they have come seventh, 14th and ninth. They earned a fortune from selling Rice, and where did it get them? Today they are 13th.
Added to this, the financial regulations mean that Newcastle, Nottingham Forest, Chelsea Everton, Aston Villa and Leicester, together went on a selling spread and raised a third of a billion pounds from sales in the last half of June, according to the New York Times
Basically what is happening is the players in the latter part of their careers (say over 28 years old) are losing their financial value incredibly quickly simply because they have no resale potential. So spend £80m on a 28 year old, and give him a four year contract, by the time you come to sell him his value has dropped dramatically. Now of course that has always been the case, but these days it means that £80m loss in PSR terms, and the only way to make that up is by selling youngsters who came up through the ranks, and thus cost nothing but are sold for pure profit.
In short, the financial regulations have totally screwed the market. Young players who would probably benefit most by staying at the club they know under a youth set-up they know, are being sold to balance the PSR regulations while no one wants to buy old players any more – not because the money can’t be recouped which has always been the case, but because their cost will show as pure loss on the PSR accounting tables.
Thus as the NYT points out “Only five players aged 30 or over, … commanded a transfer fee.”
No one predicted this would happen with the new financial rules, and some clubs are still struggling to get it right. More points deductions could well be in sight this season.
“The problem with transfers is there is no guarantee of anything, except that rebuilding a squad takes time, and changing managers disrupts the process.”
This is certainly true. In fact MOST clubs spend lots of money on transfers, and the ‘elite’ clubs spend lots and lots and lots of money on transfers, in an attempt to do achieve the success to which you allude. Very few succeed. But why?.
As you rightly say spending bucket loads of money endlessly changing the squad rarely works. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the wrong thing to do. It doesn’t necessarily mean you are a crap manager. It doesn’t mean your team is crap. It doesn’t even mean that spending all that money was wrong. It doesn’t even mean you spent it badly. It just means that others may of spent it better than you. Have a better manager than you?
The crux of the problem is only one team can win the PL and one the CL, the only 2 things that count apparently. How do I know this? Because I keep reading that Arteta has been a failure on the basis he hasn’t won either the PL or the CL and if he ‘fails’ again this season he should be sacked.
But that being said, with the CL open to the whole of Europe, and only 4 PL teams in it in any one season, realistically we have a multitude of clubs chasing ONE, yes one trophy. But hey, lets not be picky and lets say it’s 1 of 2 trophies you HAVE to win to of been a success. So on that basis lets see who has been and who hasn’t been a success.
So talking just about what could arguably be called the current top 8 we have a five year Net spend of:
Chelsea £832M
Man Utd £547M
Arsenal £469M
Spurs £458M
Newcastle £370M
Liverpool £253M
Villa £215M
Man City £139
Out of all them Chelsea last won a trophy of note (CL) in 20/21, Liverpool in 19/20 (PL) and Man Utd in 12/13 (PL)
So all that money for what? 3 Trophies. in over 10 years
Arsenal, Spurs, Newcastle, Villa have had a zero return on their outlay.
And the reason for all this is because Man City have been hoovering everything up. 6 of 7 premierships in the last 8 seasons.
And all for a measly £139 Million Nett spend. Even Liverpool won theirs’s on a poultry £253 Million Nett spend.
So on the face of it spending enormous amounts of money is a complete waste of time. Just look at City and Liverpool.
But honestly, does anyone really believe that? Really?
Does anyone believe that for one second if Arsenal, Man Utd and Chelsea suddenly spent nothing for 5 years they would win the PL? Not a hope.
So not spending is not an option, and lets not kid ourselves, neither Man city nor Liverpool achieved a thing without spending enormous amounts of money.
Liverpools Gross spend for example is enormous but the thing with them is they bought and sold extremely well, and credit to them. Outside of Man City they are the club with probably the best pound for pound return on their spend over the last 10 years. And part of that was getting one of the best managers around in the shape of Klopp.
Man City’s recent Gross spend is also vast, but they are keeping their Nett spend down on the basis they are buying and selling Rolls Royces. But if you go back a little further when they were playing CATCH UP, like Arsenal have been doing for the last 5 or 6 years, their nett spend was ONE BILLION over 10 years, and it is the legacy of that enormous initial Nett spend that they are now trading on, and of course they are doing it with a genius of a manager which helps.
So Man City are not winning titles on a shoe string at all. They are winning them on an enormous spending legacy, one which incidentally may of been illegal, but that’s a whole different subject?
So yes, spending enormous amounts of money is no guarantee of ‘success’, simply because there isn’t enough trophies to go round.
One things for certain though, not spending enormous amounts of money is a guarantee of failure.
That is the reality of football today.
A foot note about Arsenal.
Yes, our Nett spend has been high, not as high as Chelsea and Man Utd, but high none the less. And it is true under the parameters set we have not won anything, yet.
But I would argue, that since the arrival of Arteta, and again outside of Man City, over the last 5 years it is Arsenal that have got the best return on their spend, especially when you consider where we came from when he arrived.
Don’t forget that the excessive spending by the blue clubs between 2004-18 caused massive inflation in the transfer and wages market, which had the knock-on effect of forcing other teams to pay much higher prices/salaries (if they were able to afford them).
seismic
Exactly.
And that is why Arsenal, Man Utd and anyone else who wants to get anywhere near winning the PL have to now spend these exorbitant, and I do mean exorbitant, amounts of money. And not only that, when they do you get the fans of those 2 clubs screaming about how much we are spending!!!
It is those 2 clubs financially doping their way to the top that has effectively lead to the financial issues that face most clubs within the Premier league and beyond.
As I see it, FFP and the latest financial rules are simply tools to ensure that being bankrolled by Nation States is not the only way to challenge.
I don’t think anyone is against or trying to stop some outside investment. I don’t remember too much outrage when ‘Littlewoods’ backed Liverpool to the hilt, or when Jack Walker heavily invested into Blackburn Rovers, or when Peter Ridsdale was pumping enormous loans into Leeds united, although we all knowhow that ended.
And nobody was that bothered because despite these financial investors clearly helping their benefactors to ‘success’, it didn’t endanger the fundamental financial stability of everyone and everything else. Other clubs just carried on within their individual financial models and succeeded or failed within that model, based on how well or poorly they ‘ran’ the club.
Yes, teams could rise up and win on the back of some external financial investment, even in Liverpool’s case, dominate the league, but it didn’t adversely affect any other club.
What those 2 clubs did was throw a financial bomb into the entire structure of English football, and the ramifications of that are still being felt to this day.
Sorry, for benefactors read beneficiaries.
Thailand has permanently closed duty-free shops at international airport arrivals recently. I’m not sure whether this will affect Leicester City’s financial arrangements.