By Tony Attwood
Gone is the 3pm saturday kickoff. These days kick off times spread all over the place – in order to accommodate TV. We have kick offs as 12.30, 3.00, and 5.30 and then tomorrow at 2.00 and 5.30 and all before we play at 8pm on monday. It’s enough to make one want to buy a watch.
It’s done for the benefit of the TV companies wanting an audience and the clubs wanting money, to sit alongside the cash poured in by the very rich and we pay more each season to go and watch our teams whenever they are told to play. And at the heart of this is always that ever changing group of individuals who think that they can make money for a club where others have failed.
Meanwhile clubs selling off their ground or maybe just the training ground, separating the women’s club from the men’s club etc etc. But in the end there comes a point where clubs will run out of bits to hive off. And what then?
And that is the question. All these financial manipulations are just that. Overall, if we exclude clubs using interesting one-off tactics to amend their accounts, the number of clubs making a profit each year is tiny. Maybe three or four. The rest make losses year after year, safe in the knowledge that the media don’t really think it is a story.
Arsenal made a pre-tax loss of £1.4 million for the 2024/25 financial year. That was the seventh year running that they made a loss. In 2023/24 the loss was £17.7m and the income was £616m. So they are getting closer to a profit, but with Arteta buying players each summer, the prices will have to go up to cover this. Expect ticket prices to rise, food prices to rise, all prices to rise. And go on rising.
Meanwhile clubs not making this journey toward profit survive through the writing off of past loans and selling other businesses or even ancillary parts of the club while losing a billion pounds or more in a season just on buying and selling players. And each deal is a gamble.
But the problem is that all the Premier League clubs are playing the same game, and end up trying to convince each other that this particular player is THE great catch they need, and the merry-go-round continues.
Of course there is money coming in from TV and radio, but it isn’t going up enough to compensate for the rise of transfer fees. Likewise most PL grounds are full most of the time and clubs have been putting up prices for years. Once all the seat are sold, and the price of alcohol has reach eye watering heights, fans complain.
Some clubs think building new grounds helps like Everton’s Hill Dickinson stadium, and Tottenham’s famously unsponsored stadium but the debts keep growing. Tottenham have found one new approach – a stadium that can hold a multiplicity of sports – but few can afford the investment, and few want to take the risk.
Meanwhile TV stations know exactly what they make from advertising around football matches and so know what their limit is on payment for both club games and internationals. Broadcast revenue also seems to be near its limit,
This is worrying because most clubs hve seen TV money as their key to future growth so we have this season with more games than ever on TV. But we all know that all that extra money pouring in is just going to pay off the growing debts most clubs have. The league exists on with just four clubs making a profit each season and in the long term that is no viable.
English clubs doing well in Europe helps, because it generates more games that get big audiences, which in turn generates more advertising, but even through that route there is a limit. Meanwhile clubs spend more on transfer fees to buy their place in Europe.
Generall in business, the companies that survive make a profit, so they have somet cash available when things go downhill. Except football clubs don’t. Few make a profit but virtually all spend every penny they get. And lurking on the horizon is the ManC situation – and no one knows how that is going to pan out.
85% of club income comes from sources other than people paying to get in to watch a game. Which might sound like good diversity but actually means that clubs have explored almost every possible source of income. There is no where else to turn, other than the ManC model of a country sponsoring a club, and that got a bad name because the country and the club took it all too far.
Worse clubs like Tottenham can spend huge amounts each year on internet on the money they have borrowed, gambling that they won’t be 17th again this season but will soon shoot to the top of the league.
And if that is not a worry, try this. Chelsea owe £1.4 bn. Arsenal FC owe their owners over a third of a billion pounds. That’s only a third of what Tottenham owe but it is still a lot.
To cope with this clubs are buying players on credit so a lot of club debts are owned to other clubs. So if suddenly a club defaults, the club it owes money to, then defaults, and the whole system goes down. Meanwhile clubs are spending millions of pounds each year on interest.
So two points emerge. One is that clubs owe vast amounts of money and don’t have any way of paying it off other than selling off a lot of their players. But they can only sell to each other, so what helps one club harms another. Worse, given that clubs owe ech other money, if one goes down, so does another and another…. When anyone raises a concern the statement “it’s worked ok until now” is often used. And maybe it will be ok, somehow. In the next few years we shall see. But just imagine what would happen if the TV audiences for football dropped…
