- Multiple congratulations to Patrick Vieira appointed as head coach of Senegal, the country of his birth
- In the summer transfer window, who is actually kidding whom?
By Tony Attwood
It’s all a bit of a problem for Fifa these days because when someone in the organisation criticises Infantino it is now laid down by precedent that he or she has to go. The latest such leaver is Fifa chief operating officer, Kevin Lamour, and those in the media bothering to cover the issue have said he has been “sacked after openly criticising Gianni Infantino” (that according to the Guardian). In other words Fifa is having a clear-out of anyone who expressed an opinion.
But that is a bit of a problem for Fifa since Lamour has been in his job for less than two years and his removal proclaims a very clear message that absolutely no criticism of the glorious leader is going to be tolerated. Which in effect means no debate. It’s all good, so if you are not an Infantino lover, don’t apply, or if already there, don’t hang around.
Lamour in fact, is not some sort of newcomer boosting the Fifa numbers. He previously worked with Uefa and knows his way around the world of football. But he did lay his objections on the line, saying Fifa had been deceived by a President who believes he has absolute power.
But it seems Fifa is having a clear-out of nay-sayers, which means that there will quite soon not be anyone left to argue against Infantino within the organisation – and that raises the question of what sort of organisation it will then be. Most certainly it suggests that the UK members will be a lot better off outside the organisation than within it.
But of course this is not the only crisis facing football at this time, for as we regularly point out, the on-going scandal of the lack of a verdict in the Manchester City case is itself a scandal. As the Telegraph points out in this case, “Eight eclipses and three Prime Ministers have come and gone since Premier League hit the club with 115 charges over alleged financial breaches.”
And the question arises, is anyone sorting out anything in the upper reaches of English football, or is it all, as we have suspected for some time, just being made up and muddled through as it goes along?
Now one reason to think that “muddling through” is the order of the day comes from an unexpected source, for in the last ten years of the 30 clubs that have been promoted from the Championship to the Premier League, 14 of them have since then been relegated. Which suggests the Premier League is easing its way away from the rest of football as the gap between the two leagues is getting bigger by the season. Indeed in the last three seasons just two of the nine promoted clubs have stayed up at the end of their first season in the top flight.
In fact, at one time, going up from the Championship to the Premier League was thought of as a way of collecting some money from extra gate receipts. But even that has now gone as clubs desperately buy in new players and pay extra wages in order to try (mostly unsuccessfully) to stay up. Some make it to two or three seasons, but the threat of going down remains.
Mostly such thoughts are met with a shrug – that is just how it is. But there is more to it than this. For most teams that go up immediately spend a lot of money they don’t have (money they estimate they will make from being in the Premier League) to buy in new players to help them stay up. Plus those who achieved the promotion also get higher salaries as part of their reward for getting promoted.
So promotion to the Premier League means, for most clubs, not a profit but an enhanced debt burden, as they struggle to stay in the Premier League. And where that fails, it leaves the club back in the Championship with higher debts, higher wage bills, and generally speaking, lower income. Promotion from the Championship to the Premier League, in fact, has become a virtually guaranteed route to greater debt.
In 2024/25, just eight PL clubs reported an operating profit. The previous year it was 13. Worse, the 2024/25 pre-tax losses were £948m, compared with £135m the year before. I’m estimating that only five clubs in 2025/26 made a profit.
So clubs are spending fortunes which they don’t have in order to make more losses! And early results suggest even greater losses in 2025/6. Which raises the question of why clubs do this.
Now I have pointed out before that clubs that are doing badly in the league often see, as a way out, the notion of changing managers – and that can be very costly, both in terms of paying off the last manager, and in terms of buying the players that the new manager insists are essential, while selling off the last manager’s now unwanted squad members.
But as we have also seen, most clubs that go down this route end up losing even more money and ultimately get sold to some other rich guy who thinks he knows better.
Eventually we are going to run out of very rich men who are foolish enough to think they can do better. And when that happens, clubs that are not doing well will start to sink. For let us not forget that what binds Huddersfield, Luton Town, Sheffield Wednesday, Leyton Orient, Bradford City, Oxford United, Leicester City, Blackpool, Notts County: they have all been in the top division at some stage.
I suspect that for a growing number of clubs, grim times sare ahead..
