I imagine that a lot of very rich people have the idea that running a Premier League club is fun (what with hobnobbing with the rich and famous and being worshipped by the fans for doing such a great job) and easy (after all, the owners are billionaires and football is just another business, so how tough can it be to make a profit?)
And as for the fact that in the last round of accounts, only four out of the 20 teams in the PL actually did make a profit, that is the sort of thing that fantasies ignore. Those 16 that made a loss are probably run by turnips who don’t understand the game.
There is, of course, the thought that Arsenal are indeed edging closer to a profit (although expanding the ground by another 10,000 is going to cost a few bob*) and there is something rather delightful about the curve of results which saw us rise from 8th to 1st across the years while also reducing the losses along the way.
In fact, it is rather interesting that just four teams turned a post-tax profit last season owing to the incredibly high cost of bankrolling a competitive outfit. Adding further headaches are the medieval rules that Europe is famed for when it comes to a) football and b) accounting.
Besides these rules are rules in name only. I mean, look at Chelsea – it does what it wants and doesn’t break the rules even when it has mega losses so huge the newspapers can’t find space to put all the zeros in. But then suddenly one season they don’t and everyone celebrates, and I am not quite sure why, but there you are.
And then if we ask about this season and next season, when 85% of income can be spent on players and agents, and the point is whispered, “but who is to say what the income is if we sell a player to another club we own, and they loan him back….” And suddenly the whole point of the Chelsea scheme becomes slightly clearer, although there are still one or two details….
But of course sometimes clubs can get it a bit wrong like Newcastle did, and it can get messy, but then they suddenly found some extra retail operations, and their income went up by almost half again, and there’s a profit without even being in Europe! OK, the ground was sold, but they can always go and buy another when the worry about profit and loss dies down.
Meanwhile, Aston Villa did what is now becoming known as the “old trick” of selling their women’s club so that they could make a profit – and they sold the Warehouse venue. It all looked great until Uefa said they’d cheated with the money somewhere (probably adding a 0 where they shouldn’t or something like that), so they got fined anyway.
Bournemouth turned a £66m loss into a £14m profit, which is quite something remembering the tininess of their ground, but they did it by going up the league and selling players at a profit at the same time. That’s a clever trick if you can do it. But now they need a new and bigger stadium, and like so many clubs, they probably can’t pull the same trick off again.
4. Liverpool won the league in their last financial year and so made a profit from that, and the Champions League and the publicity brought in new sponsors… but since then their on-pitch performance has sunk, but their expenditure has risen. That doesn’t seem to work.
5. Crystal Palace turned the previous year’s loss into a profit, mostly coming from player sales. Their FA Cup run also added to the gate receipts.
6. Arsenal have been edging toward profit year on year, not as a straight line, but that is the tendency. And of course the rise in their position (8th, 8th, 5th, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd, 1st) means even the Tottenham supporting media had to recognise things were getting better. More Champions League, more TV, all that sort of thing. And Adidas upped the money too. Plus, so did finding players from their youth programme, which most clubs seem to have given up on.
Sunderland lost money by being in the Championship, but fans like seeing winning teams, so they turned up en masse, and sponsorship went up. The trouble is the players would have to go and win the league, which meant an awful lot of player bonuses, and so they made a loss.
Everton have been making losses forever, and they did so again, even though they pulled the regular trick of selling their women’s team. And their old stadium went to another company owned by the same people who own the club now, and the League agreed that was a jolly good wheeze. But the problem is, with all these stadium selling plans, you can only do it once. So mostly it was player sales that really helped them. They didn’t make a profit, but it was less bad than it could have been.
9. Manchester City
So weird is the Manc financial regime is that ManC turned a £73m profit from 2023/24 into an almost £10m loss, and no one blinked, largely because through one means or another they have been making a book profit year after year. They did have problems – like leaving the Champions League early and finishing lower down the Premier League, which was careless. But they made profits at least on paper, for years so no one minded too much. But with the legal cases againsts them now three years old I doubt that even their accountants think they have to set money aside for a guilty verdict.
10. Wolverhampton Wanderers
Wolves always make a loss, but it was less than before because they sold so many players at a profit. I wonder if doing that might affect their subsequent footballing achievements … oh yes it did. Bit of a bugger that. Still, they made a profit of almost £300,m on player sales, which helped their financial position, but of course left them without much of a team, and so they then went and finished bottom. But here’s the problem 0 they have been losing money for quite a few of the recent years, and now they have sold the players who might have helped them rise back to the Premier League. A spell in the Championship won’t bring in that much cash
*old English slang for a shilling, now 5p and thus pretty much worthless.
