The Political Economy of Football V2

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Uefa give Villa second highest fine in Europe

Aston Villa have been fined €22.5 million for breaching UEFA’s squad cost ratio (SCR) limit — but will only pay €7.5m with the rest only payable if their compliance with the regulations takes a downturn. UEFA, European football’s governing body, say Villa will only have to pay the remaining €15m if the club’s SCR position does not continue to show improvements, having seen a reduction in percentage between 2024 and 2025. For the 2025 calendar year, Villa’s SCR was still found to be above the tightened 70 per cent limit imposed by UEFA. The €22.5m fine is the second most expensive fine to be handed out to a European club for 2025, behind Strasbourg (€25m). Chelsea, meanwhile, were found to have breached and were fined €3m, €2m of which was conditional. UEFA said in a statement: “Regarding Aston Villa FC and Chelsea FC, which had already been sanctioned in the previous season, the CFCB First Chamber took into consideration the improving trend in their squad cost ratio between 2024 ...

Chelsea's high cost model leads to another UEFA fine

Chelsea’s ongoing struggle to comply with UEFA’s financial rules has seen the club hit with another fine, albeit one much reduced from a year ago. Europe’s football governing body announced on Tuesday the club had breached its squad cost ratio (SCR) limit in 2025, resulting in a €3million (£2.6m) fine, of which €2m (£1.7m) is conditional. The latter element will become payable if Chelsea do not continue to “significantly decrease” their SCR figure in 2026. The monetary punishment doled out for Chelsea’s 2025 transgression pales in comparison to those issued to them by UEFA last summer, when the club was found to have breached both their SCR limit and UEFA’s separate football earnings rule, which restricts overall losses at clubs competing in Europe. Chelsea’s failure to comply with the SCR limit in 2024 resulted in an €11m (£9.5m) fine. Their football earnings breach cost them a further €20m (£17.2m), alongside a threat of that increasing to a total of €80m (£69m) and the require...

Ipswich need more traction to challenge elite clubs

The Swiss Ramble investigates the 2024/25 accounts of Ipswich Town which relate to their year in the Premier League. Much more detail and analysis is available on his Substack page. Ipswich’s transformation has been driven by the new owners, who purchased the club in April 2021 for a reported £40m. As a result, Ipswich Town are now majority owned by the appropriately named Gamechanger 20 Limited, though the ultimate owner was the Arizona state pension fund, the Public Safety Personnel Retirement System (PSPRS), via its investment firm, ORG. The new ownership group has certainly put its money where its mouth is to date, investing a lot in the squad and the club’s infrastructure. They were helped by the previous owner, Marcus Evans, writing-off the vast majority of the club’s debt as part of the takeover, but it’s fair to say that the new owners provided the catalyst for Ipswich’s renaissance. There have been a few changes since the initial investment, as Bright P...

Lewis family inject cash into Spurs as they sell prestige art

The Lewis family have injected another £100 million ($132m) into Tottenham Hotspur. The injection, via the purchase of new shares in ENIC Group Ltd., will provide fresh working capital for the club, rather than being specifically for the summer transfer market. The investment is the fourth such equity injection in recent years, and is a similar mechanism to the investment of £100m last year. Since May 2022, £332.5m in owner funding has flowed into the club. That is a stark departure from the two decades prior. Then, net funding from ENIC totalled just £24.6m, with Spurs being run, to all intents and purposes, off its own back. Huge debt was taken on board to build the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, but the club was — and still is — required to service the payments. Alongside the October injection, Spurs also pulled forward a reported £90m of its Premier League distributions in a factoring arrangement, whereby they received cash upfront from a lender in exchange for ta...

The European Super League v2

Something potentially big happened on the fringes of the World Cup this week. European Football Clubs, the (unhelpfully) renamed entity previously called the European Club Association, agreed to set up a joint venture with Fifa to run the Club World Cup. EFC has a similar arrangement in place with Uefa to market media rights for the three pan-European club competitions, a partnership that has already yielded significant increases in TV revenue. The deal is likely to accelerate plans to expand the tournament from 32 teams to 48, perhaps as soon as 2029. Europe already sent 12 teams to last year’s Club World Cup, but with a cap of two teams per country. Assuming the increase is split on a pro-rata basis, Europeans would take up 18 spots in a bigger competition, and the per-country cap will surely be raised. Last year’s CWC suffered from not having several of the biggest clubs in the world involved — Barcelona, AC Milan, Manchester United and Liverpool. Raising the number of Europe...

Diaspora teams at the World Cup

The growing phenomenon of diaspora teams is discussed by Simon Kuper in the Financial Times. . In eight squads at the tournament, the majority of players were born outside the country they are representing, comprising Curaçao (25 of whose 26 players were born in the mainland Netherlands), DR Congo, Morocco, Bosnia, Algeria, Haiti, Tunisia and Cape Verde. These countries have mostly recruited from their western European diasporas. Overall, 23.6 per cent of players in this year’s tournament were born outside the country they are representing — up from 9.6 per cent in 2006, according to an Oxford university study. That is the case because western Europe excels at producing footballers. Its social democracies make amateur football widely available and affordable, enlarging the region’s talent base. And since the average player does not have the ball for about 89 minutes a game, the most basic question in football is, “Where should I be now?” Western Europeans learn to answer that fro...