Newcastle United face Aston Villa on Sunday as two teams who have come closest to breaking the dominance of the so-called ‘Big Six’.
This term has been used to refer to Arsenal, Chelsea,
Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur, who have
regularly finished in those places in the Premier League and therefore received
the benefits of European football that come with it. Though some of those clubs
have fallen down the division regularly in recent years, the financial aspect
of their advantage largely remains.
Undoubtedly the single-biggest impediment to
Newcastle’s growth has been financial regulations. The idea that they would
become the “richest club in the world” was also a fallacy — yet even if they
wanted to call upon the full resources of their mega-wealthy owners, they would
be unable to do so.
While Chelsea and Manchester City could keep spending
following their respective takeovers in 2003 and 2008, Newcastle were forced to
sell players against their wishes in June 2024 to comply with PSR. Those same
rules, alongside UEFA’s, have also limited Newcastle’s ability to greatly
expand their wage bill or continue to invest in the market.
The Premier League’s new squad cost rules (SCR) which are
being introduced next season, will aid Newcastle to an extent — they voted for
them, although they also wanted top-to-bottom anchoring and will continue to
push for its introduction — but they will not be truly transformative.
Newcastle have not followed Villa or Chelsea in using
apparent loopholes to circumvent PSR. Newcastle have not sold any of their own
assets to themselves, while they have also yet to really exploit their
relationship with PIF. In 2023-24, only £22.6m of their commercial revenue came
from PIF-related companies, which represents just 27 per cent of the total.
Villa sit in the exact same boat. It is not lost on
senior figures at the club that a fundamental reason why clubs like Chelsea and
Manchester City made such rapid growth was because they made hay while the sun
shone — that is, when there were not many, if any, regulations.
Villa have been at the forefront of wanting to change the
PSR threshold for how much a club can lose over three years and were big
proponents of the SCR rule being introduced to the Premier League, even though
their wage-to-turnover ratio stood at 91 per cent last season.
Although that has since decreased, missing out on Champions
League football — as they did last season — makes a huge difference. Senior
figures believe it left a £70million hole in their finances last summer,
impacting revenue and with wage-to-turnover ratio rising once more.
To navigate these rules, Villa relied on selling homegrown
talents in the summer of 2023, performing separate player transactions with
clubs in a similar predicament last season — there were player swaps with
Juventus, Chelsea and Everton in 2024. Last summer, Villa sold their women’s
team to their ownership, V Sports, assisting with meeting PSR.
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