The Problem
While I have felt that football was out of control for a long time, I finally decided to write about it after hearing of the latest big-money transfer of Wesley Fofana to Chelsea for £75m.
No offence to the talented young French defender but he spent most of last season out with a broken leg and his previous season was also dotted with injuries. So I have to wonder how Chelsea feels he is worth a fee that could have bought them, Erling Braut Haaland, who may turn out to be the most talented striker of his generation.
Chelsea, or any other team, has every right under the current rules to spend as much money on as many players as they want. However, this is having an adverse effect on football in general.
For every astronomical sum paid and for each new player signed, the knock-on effect is very real for clubs like Bournemouth, Fulham, Brentford and other teams new to the Premier League who struggle to compete with this crazy wealth. This, in turn, knocks on into the Championship and along the whole pyramid structure.
This post is not designed to knock Chelsea, nor any other club that spends hundreds of millions of pounds on new talent. Rather, I am pointing out that maybe, just maybe, it’s time to introduce some kind of spending controls. I’m not talking about Financial Fair Play here either, because that is anything but ‘fair’, especially when you look at parachute payments in the Championship.
The very fact that parachute payments are deemed necessary tells you everything you need to know about the disparity between the Premier League and the Championship. The financial gulf is wider than any other between two adjacent leagues and it needs addressing by the football authorities.
Ramifications For Fans
As a Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham etc. fan, you shouldn’t feel proud of your club for throwing insane amounts of cash around. You should be horrified!
The amount of money spent on players and wages has a direct correlation to the amount you are charged for season tickets, matchday tickets, programmes, catering, replica shirts and other merchandise. All of these things have rocketed in cost since the sport became a business with the introduction of the Premier League and Sky TV pumping astonishing amounts of money into the game.
Let us also not forget that the greed of these businesses (for that is what football clubs now are) almost led to some of them going against their fanbase’s wishes and joining a breakaway European Super League. A league that would have become incredibly boring, incredibly quickly with no promotion or relegation. The backlash they received, gave us an indicator of just how powerful supporters’ voices can be when rivalries are put aside and we speak as one voice.
Reasons Change is Resisted
I feel that measures need to be taken to help bring the game back to the supporters and there is nothing revolutionary about any of the suggestions I propose. All of these things have been spoken of in the past but there are two major reasons they haven’t been implemented in my opinion
A – The media.
Bad news sells! This means the media are happy to report on clubs struggling financially, going into administration etc.
B – The bigger football clubs.
Money rules the current set-up and those that have it in abundance will be dead set against any changes. They have a huge influence on the media and have large fanbases that tend to toe the partisan line of the club rhetoric, even if it’s wrong.
Between them the media and big clubs have a huge impact on how people view these propositions, meaning they are often scorned or brushed aside when brought to the table.
For the sake of the sport we all love, we need to speak as one voice and break the monopoly of a select few clubs that are breaking lower league clubs and competing at an unfair advantage over their peers.
Suggested Solutions
1 – Transfer Budget Limit
My proposals would mean each club in every league, would start with the same working budget as their peers. For example, in the Premier League a club would start with a maximum spend of £100m and a Championship club, a maximum of £20m. (Arbitrary figures that are used just for the purpose of this article)
This would include agent fees and signing-on bonuses to prevent clubs from surreptitiously circumventing the rules by giving huge signing-on bonuses.
2 – Wage Budget Limit
In a similar vein, every club in each league should have a maximum wage budget allowed to be spent on their squad.
Again to prevent clubs from circumventing these regulations, this should include players of any age, including their U21 and youth teams. Without this extra rule, clubs would spend big on signing all the top youngsters from smaller clubs and hoard them in the youth teams, or loan them out to other clubs.
This brings me to the next point.
3 – Maximum Squad Size
With every club having a limited budget and a limited wage structure, the final piece of the puzzle would be to limit the squad size.
A maximum of 22 players for each youth team and 25 for the first team. These are just suggested figures for the purpose of this article and could be adjusted with logical debate.
This would prevent clubs from hoarding talent in large youth squads and in turn, would allow more youngsters to get valuable organic first-team growth at lower league clubs, rather than be loaned out to a different team for each season.
The loan system would still be there to bridge the gap between the youth/U21 teams and the first team, but clubs would have to be much more careful about who and how many they let out because their squad size means they need to retain enough players to compete.
Again, this discourages hoarding talent.
How Would it Work? – Transfer Budget
I would suggest the average spend for each division over the last five years be taken as the new ceiling limit.
The 2022/23 transfer window still has another day to go but if you look at the last four years plus this summer, only one club in the Premier League has turned a profit. That club is Brentford and three of those four and a bit years were spent in the Championship. Selling players like Saïd Benrahma, Ollie Watkins and Neal Maupay to Premier League clubs, while simultaneously spending the proceeds wisely has served them well.
The current twenty Premier League teams, between them, have a staggering £-4,162.45m net loss on transfers. (Source: Transfermarkt)
Of course, this doesn’t include agent fees, signing-on bonuses and wages. All of these add up to another sizeable sum to add to the net losses and take the overall figure to well over half a billion pounds, in all probability.
How Would it Work? – Wage Budget
For wages, the same system should work too. Take the average Premier League player’s wage over the last two years and multiply it by the maximum squad size of twenty-five (number subject to debate). This would give clubs a wage budget to handle in any way they see fit.
They could pay one player half of it if that’s what they chose to do but this would encourage a much wiser financial culture in football because teams that manage their transfer and wage structure badly, will soon suffer, while teams that manage it well, will gain advantages.
UEFA and FIFA Regulation
These financial headaches are not limited to England.
Clubs like Real Madrid, Barcelona, Celtic, Rangers, Juventus, Inter Milan, Bayern Munich, Ajax and PSG, regularly dominate their own domestic leagues through financial dominance.
Therefore it would make sense to bring in these regulations not just for England but for all clubs playing under UEFA and possibly FIFA regulations. When clubs like Barcelona are so heavily in debt that they can’t even register their new signings, but are still signing top, top players, then something has gone terribly wrong.
I realise that some of this opinion is controversial but my intentions are to prevent the game we love from spiralling further out of control and becoming so beholden to rich owners that when the money dries up and a new owner can’t be found, clubs will no longer be viable and administration will beckon.
This may sound like a fantasy for supporters of the bigger teams but again, I draw Chelsea to your attention. When Roman Abramovich was placed under sanctions following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Chelsea was in real danger for a while without the backing of his money. Luckily, a new owner was found and the club is thriving again but it certainly should serve as a warning that it isn’t just clubs like Macclesfield Town and Bury that can collapse because of financial problems.
I would much appreciate your thoughts on this, my first ever ‘Opinion’ article and as ever, your comments are very welcome. Thank you!
Ian, Hoppers Guide