- What steps can Arsenal take to win the League next season?
- The Premier League is wallowing in incompetence and illegality
By Tony Attwood
What is the link between PSG and Arsenal? Easy: they both have “Visit Rwanda” on their shirt sleeves. Otherwise, well, we know that there is something dodgy about PSG and the recent Swiss Ramble’s report for subscribers on the issue has given us quite a few insights.
And that financial mess has been combined with a declining ability to raise money by thinking of a big figure and demanding others pay it for things like shirt sponsorship, entry to the ground, and TV rights. In fact, when they last came to the Arsenal Stadium at the start of this campaign they looked like shadows of their former selves – a team that included Mbappé, Messi and Neymar.
But for 14 years PSG have been owned by Qatar, and so we know what that means. They have won the league year after year and now fewer and fewer people care. Their TV viewing figures (as with all TV football figures in France) have collapsed, and so has the club’s TV income.
However, PSG’s spending pattern continues and slowly the way they have got around the Uefa Profitability and Sustainability rules has been questioned. They made losses of over €160m in the last two years alone and have what appears to be a pretty static revenue figure. In the face of growing public disinterest, TV revenues have collapsed.
In response, PSG started selling their superstars, but by then it was too late. A league that one club almost always wins is not interesting especially when to do it the league winner just goes on making ever-bigger losses. So they started losing fans as well.
True, Marseille have had a bash at losing money on a similar scale to that of PSG, but they just couldn’t keep up. In the end, Marseille had to settle for losing just two-thirds of the amount PSG lost, while Monaco, (if not in a world of its own, is it least, almost in a country of its own), managed to lose only a quarter of what PSG lost. They came second in the league too.
While in England no one seemed to blink when Aston Villa made a loss of around £80m, (because our media always tell us that ManC’s losses are perfectly ok), in France there is a different morality arising, and PSG are finding themselves on the wrong side of the fence. Although, of course, Villa are minnows compared to ManU who managed to lose £125m while coming eighth. Chelsea’s loss is still being argued about because it was largely covered up by selling its women’s team to itself which some people find a bit “off”, even for Chelsea. Given that the league has still not announced the result of ManCs money enquiries, that one could run and run.
But back in France PSG went a different way and sold their galacticos and then sold their sub-galacticos (often to Saudi and Qatar). Which worked but now they don’t have much more to sell. Lionel Messi is long gone (although interestingly his departure hasn’t actually reduced the club’s wages bill) and he’s now in Miami, and sales like that helped stave off their League’s enquiries, and as a result PSG showed that they don’t need such players to beat the enfeebled French league, because if they do need to buy they always have money.
According to Swiss Ramble they have lost getting on for €1bn in the last five years alone. TV audiences in France seem to have got bored with the same league winner each year and income from broadcasting has fallen off the cliff. Swiss Ramble says PSG have lost over a billion eurosin the last five years.
Meanwhile Uefa have suggested they are finally actually questioning the values put on certain sponsorship deal (shades of the official tractor sponsor of ManC – who’d have thought it?)
Worse, French football has a major issue with its TV rights, which given that the same club wins everything all the time, have now collapsed. Even DAZN and BeIN Sports are losing interest, while Canal+ and Amazon Prime have long wandered over the horizon. Clubs now get a fraction of what they used to get and it remains possible that there will be no TV deal at all next season other than for the Champions League.
What this shows is that while one dominant club such as PSG or ManC can keep broadcasting companies enthralled for a while, in the end the public get fed up with broadcasters raving over the same team all the time, and so stop watching. Advertisers stop funding the event interesting, and all the projections fall over. PSG have been earning as much from TV as everyone else put together, and it is not the rest of the league that has stopped this. It is the fans of other clubs who have simply turned off.
But PSG think they have a financial answer in the Fifa Club World Cup. What no one yet knows however is what the TV audiences will be like. “All eggs” and “one basket” come to mind.
But PSG have milked just about every other source of cash they can find. They now proclaim a higher matchday income than Arsenal and are second only to Real Mad. But as Swiss Ramble suggests, the PSG ticket prices are incredibly high, and there are rumblings among the masses.
Despite the stadium (which is owned by the council) being only two-thirds of the size of Arsenal’s ground PSG earn a third more per match than Arsenal, entirely because of these higher prices. But the club still loses money, because of their insanely high wages. So PSG are now looking at building another ground to bring in yet more money. Will anyone want to buy the existing stadium? No probably not. So they’ll just let it rot. After all the owners have all the money in the world.
But to be fair, PSG have managed to get their salary bill down to less than their total income – it is now 82%. The French League don’t seem to mind too much – after all this is not as bad as Aston Villa where the ratio is 94%. But the English media don’t like to mention that, as it seems a bit, well, churlish. And anyway, it’s not Arsenal.
