You could make the argument that the Premier League’s financial rules safeguard the league’s future as football’s most revered domestic competition, the gold standard for the sport. Clubs are not allowed to spend beyond their means, keeping the English top flight the market leader for competitiveness in world football.
It helps that broadcast income is shared equally among Premier League clubs, meaning teams like Brighton and Bournemouth can spend hundreds of millions on talent to take them all the way to European qualification. That’s in stark contrast to countries like Spain, where Barcelona, Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid garner most of the TV revenues, and have a sizeable advantage as a result.
However, restricting English clubs to spending based on a maximum loss, or now 85 per cent of their footballing revenue, creates a ceiling, one Manchester City have been caught bursting through after the most seismic ruling in sporting history.
City should have the book thrown at them. An unprecedented points deduction is not enough, given the scale of their blatant disregard for the rules. But the very rules they have unscrupulously broken for years are a major part of the problem.
Yes, Brighton against Brentford can produce slicker football than El Clasico, but neither will ever win the Premier League. Nor will Newcastle, whose owners’ resources go beyond the limitless.
And that can’t be right. Those clubs who make the most revenue, and therefore can spend hundreds of millions more than their rivals on players, are the same handful of clubs who, taking City out of the equation, have won the title in all but one of the last 31 seasons.
Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal – City fans call them “the red cartel” – are the main beneficiaries of the current regulations in place.
And while there is obviously no concerted effort from the Premier League to favour top clubs, it is getting harder and harder for anyone else to break into the true elite, as the revenues at the established giants continue to dwarf their less globally recognised rivals.
Pep Guardiola’s legacy is tainted for ever.
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Despite their rival’s continued struggles on the pitch, the most ardent City supporter would probably admit that their club will never get close to United’s grandeur, even if only in secret. City are much closer now than they have ever been, but it would take generations of United failures to get anything like parity in terms of global standing.
There is no shortcut to that long history as a footballing behemoth, which is why United, Arsenal and Liverpool will always generate more revenue and thus be allowed to spend hundreds of millions more on players.
Nation states should never have been allowed to buy City and Newcastle – those rules simply must now be addressed, just as leveraged buyouts are no longer legitimate after the Glazer family saddled United with what is now over £1bn of debt.
But that is another argument.
In some regulated form, fit and proper owners – English football possesses few of such figures – should be allowed to inject their own money into a club. That is their prerogative, if it is done sustainably, and legitimate revenues grow as a result.
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For a nation whose famous exports are all but gone, the global giant the Premier League has become is one to be celebrated. Yet this latest scandal threatens the very supremacy it worked so hard to build.
Investors from overseas have propped up the Premier League in recent years. But why would you inject millions into a top-flight club – Saudi-owned Newcastle are selling their best players to avoid penalties – if there is never any chance of winning the title?
Years of legal cases are sure to follow, as clubs seek compensation from City’s cheating. That, coupled with being a much less attractive investment opportunity, risks the Premier League being dethroned as the world’s greatest sporting spectacle. Serie A’s fall from grace was spectacular after the Calciopoli scandal. The Premier League is not too big to suffer a similar fate.
City’s conduct shows, quite rightly, that there is no way to beat the system. That does not mean the system in place is the correct one. If we can learn our lessons from the Glazers’ debt-laden United takeover, we can adapt to ensure nobody feels the only way to halt the hegemony of the elite over the Premier League title is to break the rules.
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