No need to think: the tricks football clubs pull to beat the financial rules

 

 

• Real Madrid face negativity but get a positive result. Arsenal get accolades and bore us stupid.
• Is it possible to tell a real Arsenal commentator from a computer?

By Tony Attwood

The fact that Arsenal’s top scorer remains Kai Havertz with nine goals, while the likely winner of the trophy for top scorers is Salah on 27 will undoubtedly renew the plaintive calls for Arsenal to sign a striker this summer.  As perhaps will the fact that Arsenal are only fourth in the league’s goal-scoring table on 57, a whacking great 17 goals behind Liverpool.

Or put it another way, Liverpool have scored one more goal than Arsenal every other game this season.

What is not discussed of course is that Arsenal got 91 goals in the league last year, and the collapse to a likely final total from 2.4 goals a game to 1.5 has come about through the loss of much of the goalscoring forward line for much of the season.   Although such a debate also forgets that Arsenal scored 88 the season before – that 91 goals last year was not a one off fluke.  And the injuries to Saka, Havertz, Odegaard, Jesus, Martinelli….

The fact is that while scoring goals gets us off our seats, (or does at least for those who sit through the game) having a top goal scorer is not the only way of scoring lots of goals, and nor is it a guaranteed way of scoring lots of goals.  In 2015/16 for example Arsenal came second scoring just 62 goals.  In the Unbeaten Season Arsenal scored 73 goals.  Fewer goals in each case than in 2017/18 when we came sixth.

So Salah will become player of the year and top scorer of the year and lots of people will demand Arsenal get a new goal scorer, and journalists will be grateful for another day with headlines written for them by angry fans and thus removing the need for any thinking in Fleet Street.

For when the media and fans start suggesting that a top player should be brought in, there is no thought given to the financial implications, nor for the need for clubs to keep their losses under control (and let us not forget Arsenal is a loss-making club).

But even so, eyes may still be turned to Chelsea who reported a £128m pre-tax profit, having reported a loss of about the same size the previous year and revenue falling.    They did this by selling players – in fact they made a record for the Premier League of £152m from sales in the last accounts.  And as you have probably heard they pulled a clever trick of selling the women’s team to another company, also owned by the group that owns Chelsea for £200m.  The League are still contemplating that trick.  The club also put up match-day prices while cutting staff.

In fact not many Premier League clubs make a profit – apart from Chelsea there was Brighton, Manchester City (obviously), West Ham (no stadium costs) and little Luton Town, whose owners seem to have given up on thoughts of success.   They currently sit 23rd out of 24 in the Championship.   The biggest loss-makers were Manchester United (now ceaselessly cutting staff – although seemingly not the salaries of the board). 

In contrast, five clubs lost more than £50m, led by Manchester United £131m, Aston Villa £86m (currently seventh) and Bournemouth £66m (who exist in the same ground as they had when in the Third Division (South) only with seats and turned around to face the other way).  

However, this picture is a little misleading, as Chelsea actually made a loss £70m if the sale of assets is discounted, which leaves them with two problems.  One is that a number of objections have been raised to the notion of selling the women’s team to themselves for a bumped-up price that no one else was willing to pay.   And the other is that even if the League don’t oppose that bit of financial shenanigans then won’t be able to do it again.  (As in you can fool most of the Premier League clubs most of the time but you can’t fool all of the Premier League clubs all of the time).

The other problem is that in the last financial year, Chelsea went on a selling spree, having previously bought player after player and put them on eight-year contracts.   They got away with that set of tricks and now used the sale of these players to get them halfway out of jail in the last set of financial results.

It remains unclear how many more tricks like this they have up their sleeves and how much longer the rest of the League will kowtow to the might of the club and let them do it.

And it should be remembered that a lot of their profit from player sales came from the sale of Mason Mount to Manchester United, and Omari Hutchinson to Ipswich Town, neither of whom got players that could get the clubs out of their respective holes.  ManU are 14th, Ipswich 18th,

As we used to say in the old days, “It makes you think”.  Or maybe not.