The Political Economy of Football V2

Bruno Guimaraes’ £75million move from Newcastle United to Arsenal gives more supporting evidence to several recent themes. At 28 years old, the sizeable outlay on the Brazilian midfielder continues Arsenal’s ploy of spending big money on players who can immediately improve their first team. A year ago, their roughly £185million in fees on players aged over 24 was the most ever spent on that cohort by an English club in a single season. A first Premier League title in 22 years comprised proof of concept. In the 12 years to the end of June 2025, Newcastle generated £352million from player sales. A reasonable estimate, even after sell-on clauses and solidarity payments to former clubs, has them matching that figure inside the past 12 months. Such statistics say lots about where Arsenal and Newcastle are as clubs, but the Guimaraes deal also underscores what is fast becoming a Premier League motif: the richest teams are ever more frequently plucking the best players from the rest of ...

Not for the first time recently, a wind of change blows around St James’ Park, not in terms of ownership or purpose, but in approach, delivery and personnel. Almost five years on from the Saudi-led takeover, an era has ended with the departure of Eddie Howe, the transformative head coach who lifted a team and its city to new heights, and a new one is already taking shape. The club’s chief executive David Hopkinson calls it “Newcastle United 2.0”. Over the course of an hour-long interview with  The Athletic  in his office at St James’, Hopkinson addressed a range of subjects, including: Howe’s “extraordinary” record and his “admirable” decision to remain in post while Newcastle sourced his successor “Born winner” and “rock star” Jaissle, whose career has “no ceiling” Newcastle’s ambition “to be consistently and credibly competing for the top prizes” The continued commitment of Saudi’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), the club’s majority ow...

Listening to Radio 5 I heard a Newcastle fan seeing the departure of Eddie Howe as a positive move.  My thought was ‘be careful what you wish for.’ Howe may well have run out of steam, but as Alan Shearer pointed out, the timing was odd.   More fundamentally, the strategy of the owners may be changing. The departure of Eddie Howe is the clearest sign yet that the Newcastle United of the near future is not the one many hoped for five years ago.     Newcastle’s strategy has shifted. Even as PIF remain in situ, the goal of quickly becoming a sustained, dominant force in the Premier League is fading with each day of this transfer window. Newcastle’s net spend across 2021-22 to 2023-24 was £408m, the fifth-highest in England and ahead of Liverpool and Manchester City. On a gross basis, they were the sixth-highest spenders on players. The wage bill jumped from 12th-highest in the division to eighth. A fallow year followed before spending ramped up again last s...

Rumours abound that Newcastle United’s captain, Bruno Guimarães, will be the next big name player to leave St James’ Park. The Swiss Ramble has produced an in depth and highly informative analysis of the related financial position.    Unavoidably it requires making a series of assumptions about the club ‘s future finances.   The full analysis is available on his Substack page. It is evident that clubs like Newcastle face big challenges from financial rules despite their sincere efforts to comply with them.    Many of us believe that the rules are designed to protect existing elite clubs from insurgents.   [WG] The club’s supporters will be somewhat perplexed about losing another one of their stars, given that Anthony Gordon and Sandro Tonali have already been sold this summer, especially after they would have thought that any financial concerns should have been addressed by the record sale of Alexander Isak to Liverpool last September. It was not me...

The Premier League’s ‘Big Six’ are on the hunt again.  After last summer’s transfer window was characterised by the league’s financial powerhouses harvesting talent from their domestic competitors, the biggest moves of this window so far suggest that trend is set to continue. All the mooted deals involve the Premier League’s traditional powerhouses attempting to poach from their domestic competitors — and in all cases, the would-be sellers insist their stars are not going anywhere, or that it will take an enormous sum to persuade them otherwise. How long can they hold out? Many think that the financial fair play rules are designed to protect the existing elite and disadvantage aspirational clubs. Aston Villa As ever, much depends on finances. Close examination of Villa’s situation reveals why they are determined to secure a huge fee for Rogers if he departs and why they might face pressure A UEFA settlement agreement will see them banned from Europe for a year if they breac...

Newcastle United have been fined a combined €6million (£5.2m, $6.8m) by UEFA and have entered into a stringent future compliance agreement after breaching the governing body’s Financial Sustainability Regulations (FSR). For the three-year period ending June 2025, Newcastle overspent relative to UEFA’s football earnings threshold, while they also exceeded their 70 per cent squad-cost ratio (SCR) across the calendar year of 2025, with their expenditure reaching closer to the 75-per-cent mark. UEFA has fined Newcastle €3m for the football-earnings overspend, plus a further €7m which is suspended pending future compliance, and another €3m for their SCR violation. While Newcastle appear pleased with the settlement, insisting they “worked closely and constructively” with UEFA’s Club Financial Control Body (CFCB) to “swiftly resolve the matter” — which involved senior figures, led by David Hopkinson, the chief executive, and Simon Capper, the chief financial officer, spending months in ...

Newcastle United have struck a three-year front-of-shirt sponsorship deal with KNOX Hydration worth around £60million ($80.6m).   The South African sports drinks company are already paying £6m a season for three years from July 1 to rename the training ground ‘The Knox’, and have now committed to succeeding Sela as the main kit partner. Unlike Sela, which is owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), Newcastle’s majority stakeholders, KNOX is not affiliated with the sovereign wealth fund. For 2026-27, KNOX will pay up to £10m, given Newcastle’s new — and controversial — home kit went on sale last week without a sponsor. But for the following two seasons, that will increase to up to £25m annually, depending on bonuses being met, with the £6m training-ground naming rights fee on top in each of those three years. Newcastle will also work with KNOX to launch a unique club-linked drinks brand, which they hope will bring in additional revenue to aid their ...

The chief UK financial regulator has warned Premier League football clubs they could face legal action over “questionable sponsorship deals” with crypto companies that are not authorised to operate in Britain. The Financial Conduct Authority has written a letter to Premier League men’s clubs stating they risk enforcement action by taking sponsorship money from crypto and trading companies that are not permitted to offer services in the UK. Crypto companies have become prolific sponsors of top-tier teams in recent years as they seek to tap into the millions of football supporters and encourage them to trade digital tokens.  The FCA said it had seen “an increase in football club partnerships with unauthorised firms, some of which appear to be operating unlawfully”. In the letter, Fiona Mackinnon-Miller, head of the FCA department overseeing scams, promotions and consumer investments, warned that such deals “risk conferring legitimacy on these firms and may expose UK consumers to ...

Newcastle United’s owners are open to selling a minority stake in the club in order to help fund significant infrastructure projects, including a potential replacement for St James’ Park and a purpose-built training ground. People familiar with the matter have told  The Athletic  that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) retain a long-term commitment to Newcastle, the club they bought from Mike Ashley for £305million in 2021.  Nevertheless, they are willing to dilute their current 85 per cent shareholding and have been approached by possible investors. The British Reuben family own the other 15 per cent of Newcastle. David Hopkinson, Newcastle’s chief executive, has been pushing to end the sense of stasis regarding the club’s stadium plans and training facilities, both of which have become a source of frustration. St James’ is routinely sold-out but is in need of refurbishment, while Eddie Howe’s first-team squad continue to train in an environment which is mor...

Yasir Al-Rumayyan will lead a 25-strong delegation of PIF officials flying in for Newcastle United’s board-level meetings in Northumberland this week. The club’s chairman and governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), Newcastle’s 85 per cent owners, will hear from senior figures throughout the club, including Eddie Howe, the head coach, and David Hopkinson, the CEO, during an annual ‘off-siting’ conference at Matfen Hall, the luxury country hotel 16 miles west of Newcastle, on Wednesday and Thursday. Hopkinson has confirmed that Newcastle’s plans for their stadium — with a decision to be made on whether to expand St James’ Park or build a new ground nearby — and their training ground, with a site identified at Woolsington near Newcastle International Airport, will be on the agenda, as will his already approved plan to turn the club into one of the world’s best by 2030. Around 25 PIF officials, according to Hopkinson, will be joined by Jamie Reuben, the minority owne...

It’s a long way from Zurich to Newcastle but the Swiss Ramble provides his usual forensic analysis of the club’s 2024/25 accounts.  More depth and detail is available on his Substack page, but here are some highlights. This was Newcastle’s third full set of accounts under the ownership of the consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) after Mike Ashley’s long reign came to an end. In the period since that acquisition in October 2021, there has been much progress both on and off the pitch, as the club has benefited from significant investment from the new owners. Newcastle reported a £35m pre-tax profit, compared to an £11m loss the previous year, though this owed a great deal to a £133m gain on exceptional asset sales to other group companies, primarily their famous St James’ Park stadium. If these were excluded, the club would have posted a substantial £98m loss. Revenue rose £15m (5%) from £320m to a club record £335m, though this was more than offset b...

Newcastle United have agreed a £6 million-a-year deal for their first-ever training ground and training-kit sleeve sponsor in a major boost to their revenues. KNOX Hydration — a South African sports drinks company, not affiliated with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), the club’s 85 per cent majority owners — has bought the three-year naming rights to Newcastle’s Darsley Park training ground in Benton from July 1. Despite identifying land for a state of the art   training centre in Woolsington, near Newcastle International Airport, such a substantial infrastructure project is still multiple years away, given it requires planning permission and then needs to be constructed. Naming rights for what Hopkinson insists will be a “10-out-of-10” facility would be substantially more lucrative in the future. In the meantime, Newcastle are expanding and refurbishing their current site, having already invested heavily in Darsley Park since the Saudi-financed takeover of Oc...

At Aston Villa and Newcastle United, the internal restructuring of assets by club owners generated combined paper profits of £247million. At Everton, who still posted a loss, similar moves generated £49m. Strip those out and Premier League losses topped a billion pounds. In essence, the moving around of companies or assets within the wider group controlled by each club’s owners created accounting profits. Those profits improved the bottom lines of teams who would otherwise have each posted pre-tax deficits beyond £50million. On Tuesday, it was revealed Newcastle turned an otherwise record loss into a £34.7million profit by ‘selling’ their home stadium St James’ Park and adjacent land to a new company three days before the club’s accounting year-end date last June. The company was set up by Newcastle’s ownership group, headed by Saudi Arabia’s state Public Investment Fund (PIF). The latter point was seemingly enough to obscure, for some, what the actions of last June now mean: New...

I t’s been a big few days for Atlético Madrid. Spain’s third-biggest club all but booked a place in the next round of the Champions League after dismantling an abject Tottenham Hotspur on Tuesday night. A couple of days later, the biggest-ever takeover in Spanish football closed, with Apollo completing its purchase of a majority stake in Atlético at a valuation of somewhere north of €2bn (how far north depends on who you ask). Success in Uefa competitions is one of the reasons the club made an attractive prospect for the US investment group The deal was a win for Ares Management, which sold down the 34 per cent stake it had acquired for €182mn in 2021. The firm will continue to be involved as a smaller shareholder in the club, and most likely as a lender for the ambitious €800mn real estate project that first sparked Apollo’s interest (and is probably still the key driver of the decision to buy the club itself). But another big beneficiary was Quantum Pacific, the investment firm of Is...

From his Zurich base the authoritative Swiss Ramble reviews how clubs have done so far in this season’s Uefa competitions.   Much more detail about clubs and calculations can be found on his Substack page. Eight of the top ten in money terms also featured in the top ten of the Deloitte Money League, while another one (Inter) was 11th in the so-called “Rich List”.   The only club that spoiled the strong correlation between money and success on the downside was Manchester United, which highlights the extent of the mismanagement at Old Trafford. His calculations suggest that five clubs have already received more than €90m from the Champions League, namely Bayern Munich €100m, Manchester City €97m, Liverpool €97m, Arsenal €96m and Chelsea €92m.   They are closely followed by Barcelona €89m, Tottenham €84m, Paris Saint-Germain €82m and Real Madrid €81m. Revenue available for distribution in the Europa League is less than a quarter of the Champions League, which has ...

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 again...

Eddie Howe has called on Newcastle United to end their “limbo” and show ambition by announcing plans for a new stadium in 2026 — despite being 99.9 per cent sure he will not be around to manage the team there.    The head coach wants to drive the club into the world’s elite, a target set by the new chief executive, David Hopkinson, and he says that means their 52,000-seat St James’ Park stadium in the city centre must be redeveloped or replaced along with the training ground and academy. Discussing how he can guide the club to new heights after wnining the Carabao Cup and qualifying for the Champions League in 2025, Howe told The Times “You look at the training ground, the stadium… that part of  the club is in limbo at the moment. In terms of which direction the club is going to take, that would be a big step forward to get clarity on that and take everything into the future in a really positive way. It would have a game-changing effect on everything. “I am also talking a...

The nine English clubs involved in European competition — Arsenal, Aston Villa, Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Liverpool, Manchester City, Newcastle United, Nottingham Forest and Tottenham Hotspur — must each abide by a different set of financial strictures to their remaining 11 domestic peers this season. Some fans see these rules as a mechanism to protect existing top clubs from challengers.   Financial penalties can be treated as a cost of business by wealthy clubs.   Only points deductions or exclusion from a competition would really hit them. UEFA’s football earnings rule limits clubs to €60million (£51.9m at today’s rate) in losses over a three-year period, albeit that limit can be upped by €10m per year (to a maximum total of €90m across a given assessment period) if clubs meet each of four conditions UEFA deem representative of good financial health. They are: positive equity; a quick ratio — current assets, less stock, divided by current liabilities — of one or above; a...

Now that the dust has settled from the transfer window it is worth looking at the pattern of spending courtesy of the authoritative Swiss Ramble.  These are just highlights: for comprehensive coverage subscribe to his Substack blog which covers all the European leagues including minor ones. Liverpool’s £459m spend in the transfer window was the third highest of all time, only surpassed by Chelsea’s massive spending since Boehly and co arrived (£745m in 2022/23 and £553m in 2023/24). Liverpool had the highest gross spend of £393m, followed by Chelsea £284m and Arsenal £254m, though six clubs in total spent more than £200m.   The three promoted clubs all spent a fair amount, led by Sunderland’s £163m, though Burnley £117m and Leeds United £98m did not exactly hold back either. The lowest gross spend of the Big Six was Manchester City’s £179m, though this was partly because they were very active in the previous January window. On the other hand, three clubs spent less than £5...

There is no doubting the sizeable and growing divide between London and much of the rest of England.  A recent report found London wages were 33 per cent higher than the national average and as high as 68 per cent more than in Burnley. But what about football? Do London clubs hold an advantage when it comes to signing prospective players?   Well, there has certainly been a geographical shift in where the Premier League’s clubs are based. Last season, there was a record-low number of northern clubs — just five — since the league’s rebranding in 1992. Conversely, there were seven London clubs and a further three from the south (Southampton, Bournemouth, and Brighton), meaning half the division came from London or further south. This season, the balance has been restored slightly, with three northern clubs promoted from the Championship, but the growing trend has certainly driven south in the past three decades. There were 10 northern clubs in the inaugural Premie...