As the mania of Transfer Deadline Day unfolds (yes, I’m afraid it is now bestowed with capitalised initials), with its yellow-tied presenter screaming at an unnecessary volume as he cuts to a reporter camped 15 yards from a training ground who has the earnestness of a war correspondent, cast your mind back 18 months.
I know, West Ham have signed Nikola Vlasic for £25m and Emerson Royal is having a medical at Tottenham and that’s all very exciting too. But try.
The Covid-19 crisis, forcing a postponement of league matches for a period of three months and financial impacts that promised to last far longer, wiped an estimated £1.5bn off the value of Premier League squads, prompting predictions that the division’s bubble was set to burst.
Over each of the preceding summers, Premier League clubs had spent more than £1bn a year on transfer fees alone. That was, most financial experts believed, unsustainable.
The Premier League’s richest clubs almost immediately attempted to ring-fence their own positions of strength. First they alienated themselves from England’s other professional leagues.
Project Big Picture (PBP) appeared to exploit the economic dependence upon them from EFL clubs for their own gain. Failing that, they alienated clubs in their own division; the European Super League took some of the principles of PBP and supercharged them. Again they misjudged the public reaction, outside and inside their own clubs.
The evidence of this – and last – summer makes you wonder why they bothered. In the shorter break between 2019-20 and 2020-21, Premier League clubs signed 24 players for fees greater than £20m and spent £1.3bn in total. This summer, the total has already passed £1.1bn and will likely increase further. Financial crisis – what financial crisis?
If there has been a slight dip in total spend, it is overshadowed by the austerity of other high-profile leagues. The combined total spend on transfer fees of Serie A, La Liga, Bundesliga and Ligue 1 just about shades the Premier League, but pick any combination of three and it falls way short. To some extent, England’s elite clubs always existed in a bubble. Over the last 18 months, they reinforced its fragile sides with steel.
Within those mammoth totals, some striking cases. Arsenal are not participating in European competition this season but have spent more than half the total of every La Liga club combined on transfer fees. Crystal Palace’s signings of Marc Guehi and Joachim Andersen would have been the fourth and fifth most expensive signings in La Liga this summer.
The Premier League’s transfer culture has become self-fulfilling, a real-time, hyperbolic version of keeping up with the Abramovich’s. Jurgen Klopp has repeatedly insisted that Liverpool’s financial future, the retention of senior players and the glut of academy graduates is more important than adding another signing for its own sake.
The replies to the announcement of Jordan Henderson’s contract extension were predictable and vaguely depressing. We have birthed a generation of transfer market magpies excited only by the next potential shiny object.
The Premier League’s comparative financial might is no surprise. Arguments about “the best” league in the world are interminable and depend mostly on your personal preference, but it is certainly the biggest draw in world football. New broadcasting contracts were agreed for Serie A (down 11.7 per cent) and Bundesliga (down 8.8 per cent) that reflected the economic impact of Covid-19.
The collapse of MediaPro’s rights deal with Ligue 1 has decimated revenue in that league. The Premier League may well eventually suffer a similar downturn to Italy and Germany, but the high starting point largely insures against systemic decline. Its current combined broadcasting deal is 77 per cent higher than the second league on that list (La Liga).
In that context, it is easy to present Premier League clubs as vultures picking off carcasses on the continent. Romelu Lukaku and Jadon Sancho were amongst the most valuable assets in Serie A and Bundesliga respectively. Both are now back in England.
Add in Martin Odegaard, Raphael Varane, Leon Bailey, Bryan Gil, Ibrahima Konate and, of course, Cristiano Ronaldo. Four of the most expensive sales by Ligue 1 clubs this summer were to the Premier League: Andersen, Boubakary Soumare, Pape Sarr and Maxwel Cornet.
But the reality is a little more complicated than that. Rather than anthropomorphised vultures, perhaps Premier League clubs are the apex predators whose pursuit of prey leaves scraps for others. With clubs across Europe happy to survive and let the Premier League thrive, there is an acceptance that the spending of English clubs causes a trickle-down effect that arrests the deepest financial concerns.
Rayan Aït-Nouri’s move to Wolves came at a cost equating to third of Anger’s last reported revenue. Romain Perraud’s transfer fee to Southampton was 75 per cent of Brest’s last accounted revenue (albeit when they were a Ligue 2 club). Several weight divisions above, Juventus were more than happy to shed Ronaldo’s wages as they too look to rebuild on a budget.
Barcelona will gain £25.8m (plus potential add-ons) for Emerson Royal, who becomes the fourth senior right-back at Tottenham. With Barcelona peering over the edge to stare at financial oblivion, this matters.
Any of those deals could be the tagline for the Premier League’s new-found economic – and thus competitive – strength. English clubs make up four of the top six favourites for the Champions League and two of the top three favourites for the Europa League. West Ham are a shorter price than Lyon, a team that reached the Champions League semi-finals 14 months ago.
The Premier League will sell the upsides of its rampant spending: Revenue distribution, trickle-down economics, European football’s fourth emergency service.
Its detractors will interpret it entirely differently, pointing to vast wastage, the continued lack of affordable ticketing and the gross gap between English professional football’s haves and have-nots. But both camps can agree on the headline, if not the angle: While European football licks its wounds, the Premier League continues its voracious hunt of new imports.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3ju7FGM
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