The Political Economy of Football V2

Controversial Charlton Athletic owner Roland Duchatelet has demanded that the English Football League buy the club: Owner's demand Among the reasons he cites to justify this extraordinary and unprecedented request are changes in financial fair play rules, 'sometimes criminal' fan protests and fake news.

Manchester City has signed the biggest commercial deal in its history, a shirt sponsorship deal with Puma worth £600m over 10 years. It's a marked increase from City's current six year deal with Nike worth roughly £20m a year. In the Premier League City Football Group's deal is behind only Manchester United's £75m a year with Adidas, while broadly matching Chelsea's £60m a year deal with Nike. Puma is spending big as it seeks to break the dominance of Nike and Adidas in the global sportswear market. Football club deals are particularly valuable because sportswear brands typically keep the lion's share of retail sales. The contract covers all the clubs in City Football Group except New York City as Major League Soccer has a deal with Adidas covering all the top tier clubs in the States.

A BBC correspondent has undertaken a research based analysis in an attempt to answer this question: Taxing issue The analysis focuses on corporation tax and does not take account of the tax that players pay on their often considerable incomes. Premier League players paid £1.1bn in tax in 2016/17: Tax bill. As far as the Premier League is concerned, it was found that 'The amount Premier League clubs paid represented an effective payment rate ranging from 9%-15% over the four years, below the level in force across the UK of 19-21%.'

Having secured an extended lease on the City Ground Nottingham Forest plan to redevelop the stadium and the surrounding area. The resultant stadium would be the largest in the East Midlands with a capacity of 38,000. The current capacity is 30,445: New City Ground Work will be undertaken on all four stands. The last time any major work was done on the ground was in 1994.

The authoritative Swiss Ramble has taken an in depth look at Middlesbrough's recently published accounts. Here are some of his key findings. Following relegation the club moved from a pre-tax £6.9m profit to a £6.4m loss, as revenue halved from £121m to £62m, though profit on player sales was up £4m to £15m. After tax, the decline was even steeper (from £11.5m profit to £6.6m loss), due to prior year’s £4.6m tax credit. Boro have only made a profit once in the last 10 years (£7m in the 2016/17 Premier League). In that time they have accumulated £125m of losses. Last season’s £6m loss was significantly lower than the £32m record deficit of two years ago, though this included promotion bonuses. Although the £6m loss is obviously not great, it’s not that bad if you consider that four of the Championship clubs that have published 2017/18 accounts had losses of £25m or higher. For a long time they did not make much from player sales, but they were boosted by £15m profit on player s...

In an extraordinary interview with Talksport, unpopular Charlton Athletic owner Roland Duchatelet has said that foreign investors should stay away from English football. He also said that protesters should stay away from him after properties belonging to him in Belgium were vandalised: Interview transcript

Rotherham United made loss of £27,000 a week in 2017/18 pre player trading. Profit of £790k on player sales (possible sell on clause?) helped offset these losses. Income was down 24% in 2017/18 following relegation to League One. It would have been a bigger drop except owners increased sponsorship from £1m to £3m. Relegation saw a reduction of £4.8m in funding from the EFL and solidarity funding. Match day receipts were more or less steady. Total income was just under £10m. Average league attendance was 13 per cent down on the previous year but this was largely due to a 64 per cent fall in away fans in League One. There were nearly 6,000 season ticket holders and this year there are over 6,000. Biggest costs for Rotherham were wages of £6.3m which fell by over a quarter after relegation and rent of £1m to owners which fell by 18%. Kieran Maguire of the Priceof Football notes, 'Rotherham seem to have good control over wages as only spent £64 on wages for every £100 of income. ...