Why the Premier League has taken on the fight against domination by one club.

I’m hardly the first to say it all started with Roman Abramovich; David Dean was acutely aware what RA’s work at Chelsea meant for Arsenal, and saw exactly where it was going.   I was, I fully admit, far too excited by the unbeaten season to notice – but then so were many others.  I remember people dancing in the North Circular Road after the final game, not realising the threat that the whole league was facing.  

Wenger did understand of course, because he invariably understood.  He spoke of the dangers of clubs having “financial resources which are unlimited.”  And he used a phrase which links very much to an article I offered the other day, complaining of Chelsea under Abramovich, “For me, it’s a kind of doping because it’s not in any way linked to their resources.”

Now if you are kind enough wander through my meanderings here you’ll maybe have noticed my interest in why foreign investors keep buying into football clubs that lose money year by year.  And it is interesting that when Abramovich took over Chelsea there were even fewer rules than there are now. The Premier League had become “football’s Wild West” as the Daily Telegraph wrote, and that was before the Abu Dhabi United Group outbid Chelsea to sign Robinho.  

The problem seemed to be that the football finance rules were created by people who either weren’t in business and hadn’t been for some time.  Now I’ve never pretended to be a big time business operator and my business (before my retirement) had about 40,000 square feet of factory space and 35 staff.  But even so we seemed to know more about  profitability and sustainability rules than many football clubs even though within the company all we had was two accountants and one lawyer.   

Today’s football clubs are packed with accountants and lawyers – sometimes it seems they have more of those than they have players.

For my company, everything we did went through the company’s accounts and balance sheet.  And strangely that is not quite how it is in some football clubs where some years ago they started paying their top staff via other companies registered in other countries and paying different tax rates.  Meanwhile in one case I noticed, a significant company owned by the club was listed as a sponsor! 

Now that company’s “income” was then spent on buying players (even though the money wasn’t actually there).  Up went the transfer budget based on a non-existent income, which was presumably supplemented by funds inserted by the multi-billionaire chairman and overseas companies.  Which as you may have guessed, isn’t quite how it should be.

In 2008 Manchester City were the 20th richest club. 12 years later they were reported to have had the highest income in world football – which is quite a leap in a short space of time.  And yet the English TV, radio and newspaper media never seemed to ask why, because the reporters were rather enjoying the free champagne and didn’t really want to fly to the UAE (or maybe couldn’t get visas) to check the details.  Der Spiegel published “Football Leaks” which contained the details, but clubs and the authorities didn’t seem to spend much time reading it.   Manchester City suggested once or twice that funds came in from “His Highness,” and you can’t ask royalty where their money comes from.  Well, I don’t think I can.  It’s probably my north London accent that puts them off.

Of course there are rules about companies that were related to each other through common ownership having to charge proper prices for what they buy, but rules are no good unless they are observed by outsiders, and in some clubs that hasn’t always happened.   Besides some reports say that some documents vanished.  But then everything was legit we were told, and for news outlets, investigating football clubs was always a tentative business because a report suggesting wrong doing could immediately lose the media readership among fans.  At least until 2014 when ManC and PSG were investigated over Financial Fair Play.

Arsene Wenger made a remarkable statement which suggested that Uefa were taken by surprise, and in a trice, FFP came to an end.  Der Spiegel then published its Football Leaks documents. 

Sometime around this point Uefa started to investigate football finances, and was overwhelmed by the data it found, including some issues that pointed to everything not being quite right at Manchester City (although of course I can make no judgement on that, I have not seen the documents). 

The Court for Arbitration in Sport at this point sided with the club on the question of  how old some of the claims were but also noted that the club had not co-operated with the enquiry.  Insiders like Jürgen Klopp, José Mourinho and the like started to make statements suggesting all was not well in football, although those comments didn’t get much coverage in the English press. 

The UK government however then set up a football regulator and clubs set up legal departments the like and size of which no one had ever seen before as attention turned to Manchester City, Newcastle and others.  The Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund takeover of Newcastle was questioned and rules were tightened.  “Fair market value” issues were questioned.  Methods of assessing values, not to mention the entire financial set of rules, were also questioned.

And there is a worry about the Premier League.  As we have often mentioned, in Germany and France, you can’t bet on who will win the league next season, because we already know.  Now that doesn’t mean that those leagues are fixed but it does show the danger of allowing one club in a league to have resources way beyond those which any other club can dream of.  It is a central part of the attraction of the PRemier League, but it began to be whittled away in 2017/18. 

Leicester’s league victory for the first and only time in 2016 had been seen as a triumph of the Premier League’s diversity.  The “old firm” victories had been jettisoned as in four consecutive seasons four different teams had won the league, one for the first time in its entire history, one for the second time and one for the fourth time.   The only regular winner from years gone by was Manchester United who clocked up their 13th league title.

The Premier League could laugh at all those other leagues which had just one or two clubs who could win – in the Premier League you really never knew what was coming up next. 

The only trouble was that in six of the next seven seasons only one club – Manchester City – won the league.  And of course there was nothing wrong with that if the club wee genuinely the best in the land because of their training and skills and quality and the like.  But if they were dominating because they could spend far, far more money than everyone else, that really wasn’t the idea at all.   Maybe all those rules that had previously been introduced to try and stop the German and French model of one team winning the league year after year were needed in England.

In 2023/24 Manchester City won the league for the fourth time in a row and by this time so many questions had been asked about their finances, that it was clear that some people were getting worried.  The winners in the following two seasons (Liverpool and Arsenal) were hardly newcomers to the title, but they were neither of them, the same club winning the trophy year after year.

Now that the Premier League has tasted the repetitive footballing world of France and Germany, and decided it doesn’t like it.  Of course if a team really can become utterly dominant through perfectly normal and legal measures, fair enough, but not through the simple approach of having an awful lot more money than everyone else.

And that is now what the Premier League has decided to fight.  The domination of the entire league by one club, with more money than everyone else put together.