The Political Economy of Football V2

It is early November 2019, a brisk day on the banks of the River Wear, and Gillingham are in town for an FA Cup first-round game. Nearing the end of a dour 1-1 draw, a lame effort from the visitors bounces into the Stadium of Light’s Roker End. Only one side of Sunderland’s 49,000-seater ground is open to home supporters on a day when attendance was just 7,892, and it isn’t that side. Beyond the FA Cup, this was just 15 months into a League One stint which ultimately spanned four years.  Seven years on, no seat remains vacant. From atop the same stand, under a darkened sky, amid a swell of anticipation and almost a lifetime of it not happening here, the first two-tier ‘tifo’ (banner) in English football unfurls. “New shores to conquer” bellows in bold typeface, abutting a depiction of ships on a wave of blue flags. Above and behind, a lighthouse, akin to the one found two miles away, not far from the now-demolished Roker Park home that last hosted a game like this, backdrops pr...

Premier League football club Sunderland is targeting major US cities that identify with its industrial heritage as tougher financial rules push England’s leading clubs to seek out fresh sources of revenue. Tom Burwell, the club’s chief executive, said he wanted to tap into Sunderland’s history of mining and shipbuilding, as well as its regeneration this century, as a way to drive interest in the team beyond its home in north-east England.   “Our opportunity is to build on an identity and a business that’s deeply rooted in the 30km radius of Sunderland,” he told the FT. “It’s our responsibility to land that story in markets that we’re able to, then grow fan bases and ultimately grow revenues.” Burwell singled out Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Detroit as big post-industrial cities where Sunderland’s story had struck a chord during their recent pre-season tour of the US. “Our view on North America is to be highly targeted alongside partners and distribution platforms, and wrap our ve...

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...

A top football finance writer has Sunderland to sell a player at a big profit to stay the right side of domestic and European football finance rules:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/c2ey8v8pekeo

Before the season started, everyone expected the Black Cats to go straight back down, but Régis Le Bris’ side defied the odds to reach Europe for the first time since 1973.   From Zurich the Swiss Ramble reviews their remarkable progress.   Here are some highlights. The return to the Premier League did not come easy, as both promotions were only achieved via the play-offs, including a nail biting victory over Sheffield United to get out of the Championship, when the winning goal was scored in the fifth minute of injury time. Ownership There has been a distinct improvement in Sunderland’s fortunes since Kyril Louis-Dreyfus (KLD) became controlling shareholder in February 2021, when he bought 41% of the club, though the previous ownership group retained 59%: Stewart Donald 34%, Juan Sartori 20% and Charlie Methven 5%. Even though it was only a minority stake, this gave Louis-Dreyfus full control of the board. This transaction made Louis-Dreyfus the youngest perso...

Chelsea’s underachievement this season has been highlighted by a financial analysis that says only Wolverhampton Wanderers have performed worse in the Premier League compared to money splashed out by the top flight’s biggest spenders.  One Chelsea fan described it as ‘epic mismanagement.’ Despite spending £637 million on wages, transfers and agents fees, Chelsea finished tenth — 33 points behind champions Arsenal — and missed out on the European places. Sunderland’s achievement in qualifying for the Europa League spot secured them billing as the best value for money along with Arsenal, followed by Brentford, Bournemouth and Brighton & Hove Albion. After Wolves and Chelsea, Burnley were the next worst-performing, followed by Tottenham Hotspur. Omar Chaudhuri, the chief intelligence officer at the sports intelligence agency Twenty First Group, which carried out the analysis for The Times, said: “Chelsea are in the top two spenders but have failed to qualify for th...

It would seem that Arsenal are not particularly popular champions this season because of their style of play.  To me it seems that if set plays win you matches, that's fair enough.  In any event the Gooners are laughing all the way to the bank. Arsenal’s first Premier League title for over two decades is expected to generate almost £200million ($269m) in domestic prize money as payouts to England’s top clubs hit new heights this season.   That is before we talk about the Champions League. Arsenal are expected to earn £198.7 million in broadcast revenues from the Premier League this season, a £27.2m increase on 2024-25 and £23.8m more than Liverpool received for winning the competition a year ago.  Arsenal’s takings are expected to be over £20 million higher than the previous single-season record: Manchester City’s £176.2m in 2022-23. The New York Times estimates that five clubs — Arsenal, City, Manchester United, Aston Villa and Liverpool — have all cleared ...

Fees paid to agents by men’s teams in England’s top four divisions raced past the half-billion-pound barrier for the first time this season, according to data disclosed by the Football Association (FA) on Wednesday afternoon. Chelsea spent £65.1million on agent fees, topping the club list for the third season running under the ownership of BlueCo, a consortium led by Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly. In BlueCo’s other season at the helm, Chelsea were the second-highest spenders on agents. In 2025-26, Chelsea accounted for 12 per cent of the agent spend of the 92 clubs in the football league. In all, Chelsea have spent £272million on agent fees in four seasons under their current owners, significantly more than anyone else in that period bar Manchester City (£236.7m). The jump to the next highest spender in that time, Manchester United, at £152.6m, is significant. Indeed, only three other clubs have spent more than £100m on agents over the past four years: Liverpool, Arsenal and As...

After the visit by Reform leader Nigel Farage to Ipswich Town led to an apology from the club, many fans at Sunderland have expressed concern about a similar invitation to the Stadium of Light issued by a Sunderland director:  https://www.itv.com/news/2026-03-27/nigel-farage-offered-sunderland-stadium-of-light-visit-by-club-director Reform has substantial support in Sunderland and there have been predictions that it may make a clean sweep of the forthcoming local elections. Nevertheless, fans of any club have a range of political views and it undermines the unity of supporters if a club identifies with one political party.

An in depth and well argued look at Sunderland's latest accounts from a fan perspective which argues that football success and financial strength have finally met in the middle  with a financial model built to last:  https://rokerreport.sbnation.com/opinion/131563/sunderland-afcs-financial-rise-a-model-built-to-last

The pressing issue of newly promoted Premier League teams being relegated immediately is expected to come under the spotlight at the top-flight clubs’ first meeting of the season next week when future financial rules are discussed. Ipswich Town, Southampton and Leicester City, who were promoted from the Championship in the 2023-24 campaign, were all relegated last season, the second successive year that has happened. There is a growing feeling that promoted clubs are not being helped by Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) — and that the gap is widening. Newly promoted Sunderland and Leeds United will have maximum permitted PSR losses of £61million for this 2025-26 season as they have been in the EFL for the previous two years, while those who have been in the top flight will have a £105million limit. If the prevailing mood is to keep PSR next season — and there is unlikely to be a vote on that until the new year — then one idea doing the rounds is that promotion bonu...

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...

Alexander Isak’s £125million move from Newcastle United to Liverpool was a fitting final act that helped add a juicy full stop to the most spectacular summer of trading that English football has known. Deadline day alone saw £375m change hands, nudging the totalizer up to a figure that already ensures this coming January is not needed to make this the most lavish season on record. Never before have the Premier League’s 20 clubs spent nearly as much on players, both in gross and net figures. The total spend, in fact, was a remarkable £1.1bn more than last summer once the final agreements were struck by 7pm, representing a 55 per cent year-on-year increase. The fact a record number of deal sheets were lodged ahead of the deadline, a figure that ran into double figures for the desperate, illustrated the frenetic nature of business from start to finish. No club has ever had a higher gross spend than Liverpool, either. The £420m they committed on the deals to land Isak, Florian Wirtz, H...

The first weekend of the Premier League season was also the beginning of an end. A new campaign that kicked off with Liverpool’s 4-2 win against Bournemouth on Friday will be the last to see gambling sponsors on the front of playing shirts, closing the book on over two decades of financial support. More than half of the Premier League’s 20 clubs have a gambling firm as their primary sponsor and they soon must look elsewhere for solutions to a commercial shortfall that collectively runs to £100million ($135m). There will still be the chance to display betting firms on the sleeves of kits, advertising boards and on training wear, but it is forecast that the value of some sponsorship deals could be halved in the next 12 months. Eleven clubs — Aston Villa, Everton, West Ham United, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Nottingham Forest, Fulham, Crystal Palace, Brentford, Bournemouth, Burnley and Sunderland — are all having one last dance with a betting platform this season. It has typically be...

Tickets for Saturday’s opening game at Sunderland all went within a day of going on sale. Season cards, too, are long gone. Kit sales have never been higher and the club shop, two floors below that share certificate, has a snaking queue of supporters wishing to add Premier League badges to the sleeves of new shirts. Eight years were spent awaiting this moment. There was the ignominy of falling into League One and then the long, arduous road back that climaxed with promotion via the Championship play-off final in May. Those dramatic victories over Coventry City and Sheffield United are already the stuff of Wearside legend. There is the very real danger of the Premier League’s formidable strength quickly putting an end to Sunderland’s rise in the coming months but this is a very different club to the one that parted with English football’s elite. The ambition now is to be sustainable and strategic after a string of wasteful, aimless years began a ruinous slide captured in the Netfl...

Sunderland are spending heavily in an attempt to ensure they last longer than a single season in the Premier League.  The club’s transfer business has raised eyebrows. Sunderland’s promotion team comprised a mix of academy graduates and low-cost acquisitions — the starting XI for May’s play-off final victory against Sheffield United required less than £10m to assemble. Two months on, Sunderland now have the most expensive squad in the club’s history. Xhaka is the club’s seventh signing in a month. Add Roefs and some assumed agent fees and transfer levies, and we land at a gross spend this summer of £130m. Sunderland are the seventh-highest-spending Premier League club this window, only trailing the traditional ‘Big Six’. On a net basis, including the Roefs deal, they’re this summer’s eighth-highest-spending club in the world. After accounting for sales, alongside fees spent on Wilson Isidor, Milan Aleksic and Ahmed Abdullahi since the start of their financial year last July,...

Teams promoted to the Premier League are hampered by PSR rules which allow established clubs to spend more.  Football finance guru Kieran Maguire assesses how this affects Sunderland and sees grounds for optimism:  https://www.sunderlandecho.com/sport/football/sunderland-afc/sunderland-face-psr-warning-expert

Sunderland’s trajectory has been upwards, though not without interruptions, dips and controversies. Johnson could not force the team past Lincoln City in a League One play-off semi-final in Covid-affected 2021; his team then lost 6-0 at Bolton Wanderers in February 2022. Alex Neil came in and took Sunderland up via a play-off win at Wembley against Wycombe Wanderers in May 2022, but walked out to Stoke City three months later. Tony Mowbray and Michael Beale followed Neil, with Mike Dodds a four-month caretaker last season. Regis Le Bris became the fifth manager of the new ownership last summer.   All the while, the club focused on reducing its age profile, buying young and, particularly under Mowbray, developing a playing style that had neutrals’ heads turning. The eight-man move finished by Jack Clarke at Reading in September 2022 epitomised this. February 2021: on a Tuesday night at Shrewsbury Town, Sunderland lost 2-1 to fall to seventh in their third season in League One. I...

Sunderland’s 2023/24 accounts cover their second season back in the Championship, when the club said that it “did not see an improvement in league position from the previous season”.   That’s an interesting way of putting it, given that they dropped to 16th place, compared to finishing 6th the year before, when they got to the play-offs, before losing to Luton Town in the semi-finals. One obvious reason for Sunderland’s slump last season was the numerous changes in manager, starting with the sacking of the popular Tony Mowbray in December 2023, when the club was sitting pretty in ninth place. The last time that Sunderland posted a profit was way back in 2005/06 – and they ended up being relegated from the Premier League that season. Since then, they have reported losses 18 years in a row, adding up to £281m.   More positively, the club has drastically reduced the size of its annual losses, averaging £7m in the last five years, compared to £20m in the preceding decade. Ky...

Sunderland posted a pre-tax loss of £8.6million ($11.12m) in their annual accounts for the year ending July 31, 2024, a figure that would have almost doubled had the club not sold striker Ross Stewart to Southampton.  It is the 18th consecutive year Sunderland have recorded a deficit, with pre-tax losses since 2006 now totalling £276.6m. Stewart’s sale on transfer deadline day in summer 2023 banked the Wearside club just under £7m once Stewart’s former side Ross County took their 15 per cent of the profit on the deal. That reduced the club’s operating loss of £16.9m, though they still lost just under £9m for the second year running, reflecting the difficulty of achieving sustainability — an aim of majority owner and chairman Kyril Louis-Dreyfus — in the EFL Championship. The operating loss was 82 per cent higher than 2023, as increased wages, transfer fee amortisation and non-staff expenses swamped the club’s £2.7m revenue increase. Even so, Sunderland’s operating loss is the 1...