The Political Economy of Football V2

I don’t know which UK TV channels the Swiss Ramble can watch in his Zurich fastness but in any event, he may not have seen a recent edition of Have I Got News For You in which it was joked that Manchester City would be deducted 45 points which would put them two points ahead of Tottenham Hotspur. I should hasten to add that I have two good friends who are Spurs fans and I feel their pain. The Swiss Ramble knows how to read a set of accounts and has an unrivaled data set on football finances.   He admits that this analysis of Spurs is ‘very detailed’ which is saying something for him.   Subscribe to his Substack page to get some fascinating detail.    But here are some highlights. Tottenham splashed out a hefty £312m this summer, the major signings being Sandro Tonali from Newcastle United for £92.5m, Mateus Fernandes from West Ham for £85m, Savio from Manchester City for £75m and Jan Paul van Hecke from Brighton for £52m, as well as Tosin Adarabioyo from Chelse...

Tottenham Hotspur, who epitomise the trend, have staged 29 concerts at their plush home in the last two years, with Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Jay Z among those to take over a stadium opened in 2019. Liverpool have also shown an increasing willingness to repurpose Anfield. The last two summers have seen concerts staged over eight nights, hosting Bruce Springsteen, Dua Lipa and the Foo Fighters. None of this is new to Manchester City, either. Aside from the years that have brought redevelopment work to the Etihad Stadium, concert season has become part of the club’s development strategy, with artists such as Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and One Direction among their guests. Arsenal are another to have dipped their toe into those waters, along with Newcastle United, Aston Villa, Sunderland and Ipswich Town. Almost half of the Premier League’s 20 clubs have staged at least one concert in the last three years. “The clubs have to sweat this capital asset,” Ian Nuttall, sports and enter...

As rival fans celebrate the potential humiliation of Manchester City, and the Premier League slaps itself on the back for standing up to one of its strongest clubs, be careful what you wish for.   The real winners may be the sports lawyers. City are clearly in a defiant mood and they have some of the best lawyers available.   I am not a lawyer, but I can see one way in which the whole governance structure of the Premier League and indeed football more generally could be challenged in the domestic courts. The Premier League, it is at risk of full-blown warfare. If City are guilty of systematic cheating, their rivals will argue they have been denied hundreds of millions in earning potential through unfair means. Already, the New York Times has reported that Manchester United have conducted internal analyses to assess the extent of the losses they incurred due to Manchester City’s success, including three second-placed Premier League finishes behind City and one occasi...

Daniel Levy was paid £27 million ($36.08m) when sacked by Tottenham Hotspur last year.  The former executive chairman’s tenure was suddenly ended in September 2025 when he was dismissed, after 24 years running Spurs. When Levy was dismissed he received a payout taking into account his salary, bonus for the year and the club’s long-term incentive plan, according to sources with knowledge of the terms, speaking on the condition of anonymity. That sum of £27m, one of the largest pay-outs ever made to a football executive, represented his contractual fulfilment in event of termination, rather than an agreed settlement package. No further settlement has been reached. The figure is comparative to the payouts received by former Chelsea executives following the end of the sanctioned Roman Abramovich’s tenure in 2022. Chelsea accounts, from April 2023, showed a total of £49.75 million ($66.47m at current rates) was given to former directors in connection to the sale of the club to BlueC...

The Lewis family have injected a further £120 million into Tottenham Hotspur.  The injection is the third in the last year and the largest one so far, as the majority shareholders continue their investment into the club. The injection comes in the form of purchasing new shares in ENIC, the company that owns 88.30 per cent of Tottenham Hotspur Limited. The Lewis family injected £100m by the same mechanism in October 2025 and then another £100m in June 2026. While the money is for working capital, rather than specifically for transfers, both matters are related. Spurs spent heavily in the summer transfer window on fees and salaries, including a deal worth a potential £100m for Sandro Tonali from Newcastle United and £85m for Mateus Fernandes from West Ham United, adding to transfer debts that were already among the highest in football. The release of Spurs’ 2024-25 accounts earlier this year revealed that even before this summer’s splurge. Despite improvements in player sales...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

While our attention has been focused on the World Cup, the Premier League transfer market has been heating up with plenty of cash to splash. Tottenham Hotspur are tired of fighting relegation. The Lewis family has injected cash. Spurs have spent €267mn on players so far this window, higher than any other club, according to data tracker Transfermarkt. Manchester City haven’t won the league for two seasons straight. That won’t do for Khaldoon Al Mubarak, who chairs the club and leads UAE sovereign investor Mubadala. City has a new manager, Enzo Maresca, who joined after a messy exit from Chelsea. The club has spent €175.20 mn, including the signing of England midfielder Elliott Anderson from Nottingham Forest for £116mn (€136mn). Spurs have recouped almost €70mn from selling players, City around €23mn, but neither has sold quite like Newcastle and Chelsea, who have moved on €188mn and €132mn of players respectively. Having missed out on the Champions League, private equity-ow...

There was a time, not that long ago really, when Tottenham Hotspur were synonymous with frugality, on the pitch at any rate. The criticism of the club, and foremost on their erstwhile chairman Daniel Levy, was that they had money but wouldn’t spend it. Cash-rich. ‘Ambition’-poor. That is a tougher argument to square now.    Tottenham are spending big. For some time, the only player they’d ever committed a guaranteed fee in excess of £50 million for was Tanguy Ndombele, who joined from Lyon in 2019. But with these latest recruits, they will have spent over £50m on five separate transfers in a year. Even by the standards of modern English football, Tottenham’s outlay is eyebrow-raising. Inside the first three weeks of the summer window, they have committed a reported £230 million on three signings. Add unreported agent fees and the Premier League’s transfer levy of four per cent on every incoming transfer, and their splurge tops a quarter of a billion pounds. The club’s sing...

The Lewis family have injected another £100 million ($132m) into Tottenham Hotspur.  The injection, via the purchase of new shares in ENIC Group Ltd., will provide fresh working capital for the club, rather than being specifically for the summer transfer market.  The investment is the fourth such equity injection in recent years, and is a similar mechanism to the investment of £100m last year. Since May 2022, £332.5m in owner funding has flowed into the club.   That is a stark departure from the two decades prior. Then, net funding from ENIC totalled just £24.6m, with Spurs being run, to all intents and purposes, off its own back. Huge debt was taken on board to build the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, but the club was — and still is — required to service the payments. Alongside the October injection, Spurs also pulled forward a reported £90m of its Premier League distributions in a factoring arrangement, whereby they received cash upfront from a lender in exchange for ta...

Senior figures at Tottenham Hotspur insisted on Friday that they had not been informed of any deal to sell Daniel Levy’s stake in the club. A business group, Eight Sports Capital — which is said to include a billionaire Taiwanese financier — claimed that it had an agreement in place to buy a 24.99 per cent stake in ENIC, the club’s majority owners, from Levy, who owns 29.88 per cent. The Times has been told Ng Wing Fai and Brooklyn Earick form part of the group, having both been linked previously to potential takeovers of the Premier League club. The Taiwanese businessman, Richard Tsai, is also said to be part of the consortium. He is reportedly worth £7 billion.  Last year Earick, the former DJ and tech entrepreneur, was part of an attempted £4.5 billion takeover, which was “unequivocally rejected” by Spurs.  An ENIC spokesperson said: “We can confirm that neither ENIC nor THFC are aware of any sale by Daniel Levy’s Family Trust of its minority stake in ENIC, THFC’...

West Ham United’s relegation from football’s Premier League has reopened the debate about the legacy of London 2012, as ministers begin to look at whether the UK could host another Olympic Games in the 2040s. The east London club is set to pay less in rent for the stadium that was converted into a football venue after the 2012 Olympics when it starts in the English Championship next season, meaning less income for the public owners of the arena. The episode is the latest pitfall to face the London Stadium, which shone during the Olympics but has struggled to satisfy the public since. Athletes have complained that the stadium now hosts too little athletics, while football fans have criticised the distance between their seats and the pitch. The Hammers last week battled to avoid dropping into the second tier but North London side Tottenham Hotspur stayed up instead. Their tussle came 14 years after the two clubs vied to lease the Olympic Stadium, which hosted the 2012 Olympic and Par...

The Tottenham Hotspur chief executive Vinai Venkatesham has issued a withering assessment of the way the club was run under Daniel Levy, likening the state-of-the-art training centre to a five-star hotel rather than a centre of high performance.  Venkatesham was appointed to his role in April 2025, having stepped down as chief executive at Arsenal the previous summer. However, he has said that some aspects of the club were “in a significantly worse state” than he expected.  “Our training centre is amazing, one of the best, if not the best in the world,” Venkatesham told BBC Sport. “But when you look around, it looks more like a five-star hotel than it does a performance environment. That will change over the summer. I think there are many areas where the club hasn’t got the right level of expertise.”  He explained that the football side of operations was the club’s main downfall when he arrived last year. [One Spurs fan wryly observed that it was like a water company sayi...

Tottenham Hotspur’s owners, the Lewis family, broke their long silence on Wednesday,  issuing a rare statement  taking “ultimate responsibility” for the club’s struggles and promising more investment for a rebuild. The Lewis family, who have owned the club since Joe Lewis acquired a controlling stake in 2001, have promised investment in several areas, said their plans for Spurs “require investment — in our teams, the academy, our backroom functions and more — and we are fully committed to this. “We are not selling the club. We are all in. We are investing in it. You will see more of this in the coming months.” This statement is the first time the Lewis family have ever commented publicly on Tottenham matters, even though ENIC first became majority shareholders when they bought Alan Sugar’s stake at the turn of the century. Traditionally any communication was done by Daniel Levy, but he was sacked as executive chairman last September. Since, the Lewis family have starte...