The Political Economy of Football V2

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Coventry's roller coaster ride

For years, Coventry had lived a charmed life in the top flight, pulling off a few dramatic escapes either side of a glorious FA Cup success in 1987. I knew someone who spent a season with the club writing a book in the anticipation of relegation: they stayed up. But by May 2001, making the short trip to Aston Villa for their penultimate game, they needed a minor miracle. It didn’t happen, but fans hoped they would soon return. Those next 25 years saw three relegations, one administration and, worst of all, two periods of exile from their own city, forced to play their home matches in Northampton and Birmingham due to a bitter rent dispute between Coventry City Council, which part-owned the stadium, and SISU Capital, the hedge fund that bought the club in 2007. Sky Blues fans had more than their fair share of setbacks For a time, Coventry became the ultimate illustration of English football’s need for governance reform: playing in front of meagre crowds 35 miles away in N...

The threat to the Premier League as a competitive spectacle

Although the team I support Is not in the top flight, I enjoy the quality of the Premier League. My wife takes a probably common position when she insists that football is limited to the Premier League, La Liga and the Champions League. Yet this successful global product is in danger of devouring itself by becoming less competitive. In 18 of the 33 Premier League seasons to the end of 2024-25, the club with the largest wage bill won the division (including six years out of the last eight); the second-highest payer has won it nine times, the third-highest four times and the fourth-highest on one occasion. Only once, with Leicester City’s title in 2016, has a club outside of the top four payers won England’s top tier since 1992. At their core, the different (financial) SCR rules (Premier League and Uefa) do have one through-line: they limit club spending on the above costs to a set percentage of relevant income, which in the Premier League’s case amounts to annual turnover plu...

The billionaires move in on football

By pushing boundaries in commerce and technology, Jeff Bezos has become the third-richest person on the planet — as of Wednesday, Forbes’ real-time online calculator estimated his fortune to be $267.4billion. Bezos has lost $1.6bn since the markets closed on Tuesday. An astronomical sum, but loose change to Bezos, and ultimately typical of the way water flows in the extreme world he inhabits. The volatility of the markets helps explain why Bezos has targeted Liverpool for investment. He needed to analyse only the profits the club’s owner has made from selling a chunk of its assets to him to realise that high-end English football is a safe place to spread a small proportion of your money if you can afford to stick around over a long time. Fenway Sports Group bought Liverpool in 2011 for around $470m. Fifteen years later, it has sawn off around 38 per cent of the club to the consortium that includes Bezos for around $2.7bn. With a new television rights deal t...

Premier League clubs splash the cash

Premier League clubs are on course to break the record for transfer spending this summer as they hire and fire managers at an unprecedented rate, underscoring the increasingly cut-throat economics of the world’s richest football league. With 12 days before the transfer window closes, the 20 clubs in English football’s top flight have spent a combined €2.7bn on transfers ahead of the new season, which kicks off this Friday evening. Spending is running ahead of the rate of last year’s record summer transfer window, when Premier League clubs had spent €2.6bn at the equivalent point, according to data from Transfermarkt. The outlay also exceeds the €2.3bn cumulatively spent by all of the clubs in Italy’s Serie A, the German Bundesliga and La Liga in Spain this summer. This summer’s biggest deals include Chelsea’s €138mn purchase of Morgan Rogers from Aston Villa and Manchester City’s €135mn deal to sign fellow England international Elliot Anderson from Nottingham Forest. Chelsea ha...

Former Ipswich chairman's optimism

David Sheepshanks’s beloved club used to be run by those colourful bon viveurs John and Patrick Cobbold, the brothers who said their idea of a crisis was running out of white wine in the boardroom. Sheepshanks has shared his memories with The Times as he publishes his autobiography. He has survived bowel cancer. When Sheepshanks took over as chairman in 1995 he ended decades of the Cobbolds’ benign dynasty. He tells a story of a game against Arsenal when the Portman Road boardroom was stocked with six bottles of gin, six bottles of whisky, six bottles of white wine, six bottles of red wine, and six sausage rolls. By the end of the day most of the booze was long gone but there were still five untouched sausage rolls. “And Patrick Cobbold held an inquest as to who the hell had eaten the one sausage roll.” “Ipswich was a beautifully run club. But if I draw an analogy in the nicest possible way, it was sort of like a golf club. It was all quite staid and traditional. I...

Value of top clubs spirals

The value of English football’s biggest clubs is spiralling. The new investment attaches a valuation of around £5.5bn to Liverpool, eclipsing the 2024 arrival of Sir Jim Ratcliffe into Manchester United, where a 25 per cent stake had valued the club at £4.3bn. The figures are stretching beyond what most industry experts — such as Forbes and Sportico — consider to be the value of these clubs. International advisory firm Football Benchmark, another to compile annual assessments of Europe’s biggest clubs, valued Liverpool at between £3.9bn and £4.2bn in its 2026 rankings, with Chelsea listed at between £2.5bn and £2.7bn. More than £3.1bn was distributed centrally among the Premier League’s 20 clubs last season, almost double the £1.63bn handed out in the 2015-16 campaign. It means the biggest clubs, including Liverpool, can now expect to generate annual revenues north of £700m, with aspirations to eventually follow Real Madrid beyond the £1bn mark in the years to come. Matchday r...