The Political Economy of Football V2

Nottingham Forest’s ambitious plans to redevelop their City Ground stadium took a major step forward Wednesday night, as they were granted planning approval. Seven years and seven months after the scheme was first announced, the Premier League club were given the green light by Rushcliffe Borough Council to push forward with their plans to increase the capacity of their historic home to 45,000 in an initial phase, followed by a second phase that would take it up to as much as 52,500. The club intend to redevelop three of the four stands at the stadium, but most notably the Peter Taylor Stand, which will triple in size from holding 5,000 seats to 15,000, within a structure that would stand 58 metres tall. That is only slightly shorter than the Council House in the city’s Market Square, where Forest celebrated promotion in 2022. Forest also want to fill in the corners on either side of the Trent End, joining it up with the neighbouring stands to create up to 5,000 more seats as par...

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...

Lawyers are increasingly the key actors in football clubs, but defamation actions are rare. Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis is suing Crystal Palace for defamation over a banner the London club’s fans held up in August 2025 which depicted him holding a gun to midfielder Morgan Gibbs-White which read: “Mr Marinakis is not involved in blackmail, match-fixing, drug trafficking or corruption.” The FA deemed Palace had not done enough to stop their supporters behaving in an improper, offensive, abusive or provocative way during the 1-1 draw at Selhurst Park. The governing body said in a statement: “The fact that Crystal Palace had a policy to prevent banners being smuggled into the stadium demonstrates that it was aware of the risk.”   The club was fined £50,000. Gibbs-White had come close to leaving Forest to join Tottenham last summer, but instead signed a new contract to stay at Forest. Now Marinakis is seeking damages after filing a defamation claim a...

Nottingham Forest received a further £38million ($51m) in shareholder funding across April, May and June of this year, taking total owner funding at the City Ground in 2025-26 beyond £100m. Forest, whose accounting year runs from July to June, received share injections in each of the final three months of that period: £11.5million in April, £15m in May and another £11.5m in June. In conjunction with £48.23m in September 2025 and £15.04m the following December, it means the club received £101.3m in a single year from above; Forest are 80 per cent owned by Evangelos Marinakis, who bought the club nine years ago and is its main benefactor. The latest injections, which appeared in filings at UK Companies House on Wednesday, lay bare the cost of running Forest, even in a season where they progressed to the Europa League semi-finals. Per  The Athletic’s  estimate, that run garnered around £21million in prize money, though that was mostly offset by reduced takings at home. A fall...

In the Premier League this season, heads are rolling faster than ever, as the financial pressures of under performance on the pitch push owners to take action. Since the start of the 2025-26 season, nine full-time managers of top-flight English clubs have been dismissed by their owners, averaging less than a year in the job, according to Financial Times analysis of Transfermarkt data. Managers who left this season lasted an average of 295 days in charge, the lowest tenure since the Premier League was launched 34 years ago. The previous record low was 415 days in 2008-09, excluding 1992-93 and 1995-96, when only one manager departed in each season. Alongside goals from corner kicks and the return of the long throw-in, managerial churn has been a feature of the season. Aside from Rosenior, Chelsea also sacked Maresca after 18 months in post, while Manchester United parted ways with Ruben Amorim after 14 months. Things have been even more brutal at the other end of the table. Nott...

The Swiss Ramble provides a forensic analysis of the accounts of Nottingham Forest. Much more detail and analysis is available on his Substack page. Despite the improvement on the pitch, Forest swung from a £12m pre-tax profit to a £79m loss in 2024/25, which represented a £91m decline, largely due to a significant decrease in profit from player sales, which dropped from £101m to just £7m.   Forest’s £79m loss was one of the worst in the Premier League in 2024/25, only surpassed by Chelsea £262m, Tottenham £121m and West Ham £104m. More positively, revenue rose £32m (17%) from £190m to £222m, which was a big new club record, though this was largely offset by a steep increase in operating expenses, which were up £24m (9%) from £263m to £287m, while net interest payable was up £6m (38%) from £15m to £21m. The club has been hit by the double whammy of having to spend more on facilities to meet more stringent standards in the Premier League and the impact of rising inflation on ser...

Despite record revenue, Nottingham Forest made an operating loss of nearly £65 m in 2024/25, after posting a £24 m profit the previous year:  https://www.nottinghampost.com/sport/football/football-news/nottingham-forest-finances-revealed It's not unusual for insurgent Premier League clubs to make big losses as they try to compete with the big six or seven.   Should Forest be relegated, they would face financial challenges.

  Cartoon copyright Private Eye Instability in leadership seems the fashion today.  We have had the greatest turnover of prime ministers in the democratic era.  An article in the Financial Times this week revealed an increase in changes in the CEOs of companies, in part driven by so-called 'active investors'. But football has some of the shortest tenures of all.  Since 2011 there have been 23 managers at Watford and 18 at Forest with Sean Dyche managing both teams. Forest are the first team since the league's formation in 1888 to have four permanent managers in one season, although Leyton Orient hold the all comers' record with five in 2016/17. Has it brought Watford or Forest success?

While many of us downed tools over the holiday period, the sports stadium building boom continued without a pause and the new year has seen things ramp up.  On Thursday, US-owned Premier League team Leeds United secured planning permission to expand Elland Road to a capacity of 53,000. Earlier in the week, Nottingham Forest — owned by Greek billionaire Evangelos Marinakis — unveiled plans to redevelop the City Ground, with a view to taking capacity there north of 50,000 one day too. Crystal Palace, which announced redevelopment plans for Selhurst Park eight years ago, may soon start putting spades in the ground.   Further down the English football pyramid, Millwall secured a new 999-year lease on its stadium, The Den, which will help clear the way for a potential expansion and upgrade there too. Work to build a new stand at Wrexham is now under way, while Birmingham City’s eye-catching designs are still fresh off the printing press. As the UK economy has sput...

Nottingham Forest are using the architects who oversaw Liverpool’s recent expansion of Anfield to help with new-look plans to turn the City Ground into a stadium with a capacity of up to 45,000. Three months after obtaining planning permission to start their home ground’s long-awaited redevelopment, Forest have now decided to shelve those designs in favour of a more ambitious overhaul of the stadium that has been their home, beside the River Trent, since 1898. The Premier League club had previously intended to demolish the Peter Taylor Stand — the oldest, and smallest, of the City Ground’s four — and replace it with an entirely new structure, increasing capacity from just over 30,000 to around 35,000. Work was due to begin next year. Among sweeping changes, however, the club have been exploring alternative proposals to remove the roof of the Peter Taylor, then build over the existing structure to turn it into one of the biggest stands in English football, tripling its number ...

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...

Once again the game's governing body has been made to look foolish. The FA will be forced to pay Nottingham Forest hundreds of thousands of pounds after losing a landmark legal battle with the Premier League club. Forest faced disciplinary proceedings after a 2-0 defeat by Everton in April last year — a game that included three disputed penalty appeals — having posting on X that they had warned referee chiefs that the VAR in the game, Stuart Attwell, was a fan of relegation rivals Luton Town. But Forest then complained that the barrister appointed to chair the disciplinary panel had been “biased” against them after the club questioned the £1million fine being sought by the FA. Graeme McPherson KC had said at that hearing that he rejected “the club’s somewhat hysterical submission”. To the embarrassment of the FA, lawyers have now found that McPherson’s comment could be viewed as an “unjustified, inappropriate, and personal attack on the club” after they were eventually f...

Apollo Global Management has lent millions of pounds to a company owned by football “super agent” Kia Joorabchian, as the private capital group continues its push into European sport. The US firm has extended £40mn to Joorabchian’s Sports Invest Holdings, charging an interest rate of 10.25 per cent, corporate filings show. The debt is secured against a number of the agent’s companies including AMO Racing, AMO Stables and Sports Invest UK, a branch of Joorabchian’s management group that works with footballers “from youth to international level”, according to documents filed with Companies House. These assets provide security to Apollo, which could potentially force a sale of them if Joorabchian, who has brokered deals including the £142mn British record transfer of Philippe Coutinho from Liverpool to Barcelona in 2018, defaults on the debt. As well as doing his own business with the private capital group, Joorabchian is actively looking for sports deals to pass to Apollo. The unor...

Football can be a strange game.  Even successful managers can be vulnerable to mercurial owners, particularly when those owners enjoy popularity with fans because of the way they have turned a club around. Some consider that the crisis at Nottingham Forest has been overblown by the media and will get settled one way or another, amicably or not.    Certainly there is a sense in which it is open season or having a go at Forest. Nevertheless, is there any way to fix this mess, given that Nuno’s working relationship with Edu, the newly appointed global head of football for Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis’ multi-club empire, has got off to such an alarmingly bad start Nuno offered a glimpse into his own mindset before the 1-1 draw away to Crystal Palace on Sunday, when he confirmed he wanted to continue as Forest’s coach — some reports had questioned whether he was trying to engineer his own sacking — but accepted the three relevant people needed to get t...

Nuno Espírito Santo has said that his relationship with mercurial Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis has broken down, claiming that there is division among those at the club. The Portuguese head coach, who signed a three-year contract extension this summer, confirmed that he was no longer speaking regularly with Marinakis and suggested that there was now an absence of trust between them. Nuno, whose Forest side face Crystal Palace on Sunday, said he was not entirely sure why his relationship with Marinakis had changed but his public complaints last week that his squad was not deep enough are unlikely to have impressed the Greek businessman, who has since spent close to £100million on four new players. “I always had a very good relationship with the owner, last season was very, very, very close, almost on a daily basis,” Nuno said. “This season, not so well, but I always believe that dialogue and what you say or your opinion, is always valid, because my concern is the s...

Common sense would suggest that confirmation of John Textor’s exit from Crystal Palace should resolve the issues around the Premier League club’s connection to French side Lyon. After all, the American investor has now both sold his Palace stake and left all positions of authority at Lyon. Palace are taking their case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), asking the so-called “supreme court” of worldwide athletic endeavour to overturn UEFA’s decision. Palace have also named Nottingham Forest and Lyon in their appeal, as their fellow Premier League side have been elevated from the Conference League to the second-tier Europa League at their expense, while their disputed stablemates from Ligue 1 have been left in the Europa League, as their higher domestic league finish of the two sides trumps winning the FA Cup.  Steve Parish, Palace’s chairman, will not mind which of those clubs CAS demotes, as long as what he views as the “terrible injustice” of his team being removed ...

More about Nottingham Forest's £80m loan from Apollo Management which we reported on Saturday. The £80million loaned from Apollo to Forest is senior debt, meaning it takes priority when it comes to repayment; in the unlikely event Forest were heading out of business, Apollo would be at the front of the resultant queue. The loan has a three-year term, due for repayment on December 20 2027, though there is provision for that to be extended a further two years. It incurs 8.75 per cent interest annually or, based on the £80m balance, £7m per year. That was around half Forest’s total matchday income in the 2023-24 season (the latest for which we have figures). £55m of the Apollo loan has been used to repay the amounts due to RMF. Based on most recent interest rates, those RMF loans were incurring £6.4m in annual interest, so this refinancing — now a common occurrence in football — works out cheaper in a sense; applying the Apollo interest rate to £55m gives an annual charge of £4.8m...

Apollo Management has lent £80mn to Nottingham Forest Football Club in expensive debt to allow it to pay off other liabilities, in the private capital firm’s first known foray into English Premier League football, reports the Financial Times. The US group in December provided a three-year term loan at an annual interest rate of 8.75 per cent, according to corporate filings. Some £55mn of the proceeds have been used to refinance an existing facility owed to Rights and Media Funding Group, a lender that has in the past provided financing to premier league club Everton, while the remaining £25mn is additional working capital. Apollo’s loan — secured on assets including Nottingham Forest’s stadium — is an example of a growing trend in which big US private capital groups offer high-interest debt to European football clubs in need of cash. Clubs including premier league peer Chelsea and France’s Olympique Lyon have also borrowed from US-based private credit lenders. Nottingham Forest’s...

UEFA’s PSR regulations are a fair bit stricter than the Premier League, as the allowable losses are much smaller, even though these have been increased over the years, while clubs also have to contend with the new squad cost control ratio. Aston Villa In contrast to Arsenal who appear to meet the criteria, the authoritative Swiss Ramble thinks that Villa have missed UEFA’s PSR target by a country mile.    By his reckoning, their adjusted PSR loss for the 2-year monitoring period was a hefty £140m, using figures provided by the club itself for allowable deductions. That would mean a €161m PSR loss, which would be a cool €100m over the allowable target, even though this was boosted by the €55m allowance for an equity contribution. It very much looks like Villa have also breached the new squad cost control limit, though the magnitude of the over-run depends on how the 13th month in their accounts is treated. This has been tacitly admitted by the club, as Villa basically i...

Nottingham Forest have written to Uefa with their concerns about Crystal Palace participating in the Europa League when they could be in breach of multi-club ownership rules. Palace met Uefa officials last week in a bid to avoid exclusion from the competition because John Textor, the American businessman who has a 43 per cent stake in the club, also owns Lyon, who have qualified for the competition too. Uefa is looking to rule on the matter by the end of this month. But The Times understands that Forest, who would be promoted from the Conference League to the Europa League should Palace be deemed non-compliant with multi-club ownership rules, have been in correspondence with Uefa on the matter. Palace’s Europa League place could yet hinge on whether Uefa decides to allow Lyon to take part in the competition next season.   Uefa’s Club Financial Control Body (CFCB) disqualified Lyon from European competitions in December but allowed them to continue after the club met certain d...