The Political Economy of Football V2

Everton Football Club’s billionaire owners are seeking new investors less than two years after buying the club, following a summer transfer window in which Premier League rivals drove spending to new records in an arms race for talent. The Friedkin Group, the US conglomerate that also owns Italian football club AS Roma, is working with advisers on the Everton stake sale process, according to three people familiar with the matter. The process, which is still at an early stage, could result in new investors buying a significant stake in the Premier League club, though it is possible that a deal does not materialise. The Friedkin Group and Everton declined to comment. Any deal would follow John Henry’s Fenway Sports Group selling more than a third of crosstown rival Liverpool Football Club to a consortium including Amit Bhatia, the son-in-law of steel tycoon and billionaire Lakshmi Mittal, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos at a $7bn valuation. The Friedkin Group paid about £330mn to tak...

On the basis of this summer, it is the belief that by signing players from the Premier League, a club is operating with the least jeopardy and is most likely to produce immediate and substantial results.  The evidence is overwhelming in the summer spend by the 20 current Premier League teams on players registered last season to Premier League clubs, therefore including purchases from relegated West Ham, Wolves and Burnley. By the time the window closed at 11pm local time last night, Premier League clubs had spent £3.6billion ($4.9bn), according to an analysis by  The Athletic , and £1.7bn ($2.3bn) of this was spent on those in last season’s Premier League,   in a spend that shatters all previous windows for spending within the division.  In the six summer windows between 2017 and the 2022 seasons, the average Premier League spend on players registered to Premier League clubs in the previous season was £418.2m, which means we have seen a comparative fourfold incre...

Everton succeeded in achieving the one thing no club wants from a transfer window. On many different levels, they have ended up weaker than when the window opened.   Squad numbers alone indicate that is the case with manager David Moyes having 22 outfield players last season only to find himself left with just 18 now. Thierno Barry is his only recognised striker.  The Friedkin Group (TFG), who have inflicted immeasurable damage on themselves by presiding over the entire farce which started with them pushing for the sale of homegrown midfielder Harrison Armstrong to Nottingham Forest for £35million only to then pull-out amid the prospect of a supporter uprising.  Certainly, this is not how matters were supposed to play out in January when club officials stressed that funds were being stockpiled for the summer when phase two of Everton’s rebuild would be implemented.  TFG’s entire ambition for the club is being scrutinised 20 months into its reign and Everto...

Another summer gone, another record broken. The rest of Europe will once more have gazed with envious eyes (or scarcely contained fury) as Premier League clubs indulged in another year of lavish spending. It had seemed at one point that last year’s figure of £3.1billion gross spending during the summer transfer window, which obliterated the previous record of £2.4billion, would not be reached. But as the end of the transfer window neared, clubs embarked on a spree that to some looked more akin to panic buying, perhaps for fear of being left behind by their rivals. Even before Manchester City had set a joint British transfer record by signing Enzo Fernández from Chelsea for £125million, the summer 2025 figure had been passed but once that move was confirmed, a new £3.3billion mark of gross spending had been set. There are some significant differences compared with last summer, however. Chelsea are once again among the biggest spenders with £349million splashed out, but they are ac...

The message was clear, loud and passionate from Everton fans at Bournemouth.   “Don’t sell Armstrong! Don’t sell Armstrong! I just don’t think you understand,” the away end sang at Bournemouth. “If you sell Armstrong, Harrison Armstrong, you’re gonna have a riot on your hands.” The news that prompted this outpouring was that 19-year-old midfielder Armstrong, the finest player produced by Everton’s youth academy in years, was likely to move to Nottingham Forest. Wary of breaching squad cost ratio rules (SCR), the club’s leadership were reluctantly willing to sanction the England youth international’s exit for some £40million. Had the Bournemouth game not taken place, giving Everton supporters the platform to vent their frustrations, Armstrong would likely be posing for photos holding a Garibaldi-red Forest shirt now. Instead, he will remain in the royal blue of Everton. For all of the owners’ billions, the episode shows that fan power remains in the Premier League — ...

Work on redeveloping Elland Road should give Leeds United a stadium more befitting of a vibrant regional capital and its team.  Construction projects are very reliant on materials and specialists turning up on time, and often they don’t, but the Leeds work has a special plus (see below). My stepdaughter undertook design work on the new Tottenham Hotspur stadium and upgrading a stadium in situ is no easy task.   She more usually works on venues such as airports and they present challenges, but of a different kind.   There are not that many people who specialise in football stadiums. On May 17th, hours after full time in the final home game of last season, the builders moved in at Elland Road. The redevelopment of the John Charles Stand, which will take its capacity from around 8,000 to more than 17,500 seats, was underway, and the clock has been ticking.    The overall capacity will be 53,000 when the work is finished. The Bremner Suite has been b...

Recently I have suggested sports lawyer as a good career for an ambitious youngster, but there are other off the pitch options.  Professional football clubs’ share of UK hiring has tripled over the past five years, with a jump in demand for data experts as Britain’s top teams use their growing financial strength to expand their off-field operations. The clubs have emerged as a bright spot in an otherwise sluggish British jobs market, now accounting for more than seven in every 10,000 roles advertised, up from 2.4 per 10,000 in 2020, according to data from recruitment website Indeed. Data and analytics make up five per cent of the roles advertised by Premier League teams this year, according to job analytics firm Lightcast. This is double the share two years ago. The hiring boom has been fuelled by the deep pockets of Premier League clubs, which have seen revenues soar off the back of strong performances in European competitions and lucrative new commercial deals. “Data and anal...

Serie A is trying to close the financial gap on the Premier League.   It may be possible to narrow it, but a range of structural forces underpin the dominance of the EPL, Italian commentators admit:  https://football-italia.net/how-serie-a-close-1-billion-gap-premier-league/  

So much was different at Selhurst Park for this opening home game of the season. Some of it has been enforced, but it begs the question of how much change Palace can withstand and, perhaps more pertinently, how quickly that can shift to familiarity again asks the New York Times ? From kick-off, the atmosphere was different. Gone were the Holmesdale Fanatics and the familiar, repetitive beat of the drum and their repertoire of orchestrated songs, after the group announced it would “stop all organised activity”. Gone are most of the modern add-ons to the Main Stand, a temporary hospitality suite built while the redevelopment of the stadium is ongoing, Selhurst didn’t just look different, but it felt different. The atmosphere ebbed and flowed more naturally but in the difficult moments it missed that orchestrated HF presence when it mattered most. By the fourth City goal, the visible empty seats told their own story. It was impossible for the process of following on from Glasner to...

This is very technical high finance stuff, but scroll down to the section on 'relevance to football finance'. It's quite scary from the perspective of the average fan, but helps us to understand why high rollers are investing in loss making football clubs:  https://theesk.org/2026/08/23/the-analysis-series-private-credit-governance-and-relevance-to-football-financing/

It is now nearly a year since Daniel Levy was dismissed as Tottenham Hotspur chairman by the Lewis family.  It has been 12 months of dramatic twists and turns, with Spurs avoiding relegation on the final day of the Premier League season, and then spending unprecedented sums this summer to try to make sure such a scare never happens again. But while most fans focus on the football — and a dubbing by Brentford   — another set of issues have been bubbling away separately. These relate to Levy’s continued position as a minority shareholder in the club. This has been in the news for much of this summer, even as we approach the first anniversary of Levy’s dismissal, and specifically this month, after he missed the opportunity last week to participate in the Lewis family’s latest equity injection into the club. On Thursday morning the club confirmed that his shareholding has been diluted, down by roughly two per cent, after the creation of new ENIC shares. Levy’s dism...

The authoritative Swiss Ramble provides an overview of Premier League finances.  Much more Information and analysis is available on his Substack page. The Premier League has now lost money seven years in a row. Obviously, this was adversely impacted by the pandemic, which led to the huge losses reported during the COVID seasons with £992m in 2019/20 and £689m in 2020/2.   However, it has not been much better since then, losing a hefty £2.3 bln in the last four seasons, leading to an annual average loss of £564m.   That represents a dramatic worsening compared to the performance before the pandemic, e.g. it generated £786m profit in the four seasons up to 2018/19. ‘ Creative accounting; The Premier League’s losses in recent years would have been even higher without the inclusion of exceptional gains from selling assets to other group companies.   This amounted to a record £293m in 2024/25, including Newcastle United £133m, largely from the sale of St James’ Park...

Europe’s top spenders in the summer transfer window include some familiar names. Chelsea lead the way with a net spend of €245mn, followed by Arsenal and Real Madrid, according to Transfermarkt data. More surprising is the presence of Ipswich Town and Coventry City, sides newly promoted to the Premier League, in fourth and fifth place.  Ipswich have spent a net €159mn on the likes of attacking midfielder Julio Enciso as they seek to retain their place after a second promotion to the Premier League in three years, while Coventry’s owners have authorised a net spend of €138mn for the club’s return to the top division for a quarter of a century. The net spend of both exceeds that of Liverpool, the two Manchester clubs and reigning European champions Paris Saint-Germain, although this could change by the time the window closes on September 1. It is conventional wisdom that promoted clubs must spend big to have any hope of competing against the established sides ...

Finance and tech companies have piled into Premier League club sponsorship this season after a ban on gambling operators appearing on the front of shirts opened up some of football’s most valuable advertising space to new bidders. Betting firms have featured on the front of more than half of Premier League shirts over the past two seasons, but a ban agreed by clubs in 2023 came into effect this summer, prompting teams to find new deals. L Lynsey Pennie-Douglas, head of UK client strategy for Nielsen Sports, told the Financial Times that the changes amounted to “a genuine reset” for the sponsorship market. “Over the past decade, the value of that real estate has risen dramatically,” she added. For clubs outside of the league’s so-called big six — Arsenal, Manchester City, Liverpool, Manchester United, Chelsea and Tottenham — the average value of front-of-shirt deals has grown from £3.4mn in 2016-17 to around £9mn a year for the new season, according to Nielsen. Crystal Palace have s...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

The buy out of the minority owners at Chelsea should enable the club to be run more smoothly.   Long-term challenges remain, notably whether to redevelop or replace Stamford Bridge to boost matchday revenue. No agreement is expected imminently, but the sale would provide a form of resolution to long-standing tensions among Chelsea’s owners while also potentially easing the regulatory pressure that Walter is facing in the United States. None of the principal parties are commenting, but it is very difficult to view this development as unrelated to Mark Walter’s unexpected sale of the LA Lakers to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger in a deal that valued the NBA franchise at $12.5billion (£9.2bn) last week.  That news — just 14 months after Walter had bought a controlling interest in the Lakers from the Buss family at a then-record $10billion valuation — broke against the backdrop of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice into the 66-year-old billionaire’s bu...