Riddled with self-interest, the Premier League is tearing itself apart

When leading football figures met at the European Club Association congress in Athens last week, many English-based executives were bristling at the Manchester City developments. The email from the club’s general counsel, Simon Cliff, was still causing agitation.

That made it slightly awkward when they had to greet ECA board member Ferran Soriano, who is also City’s chief executive officer, but meetings were cordial. A theme of these sorts of stories is executives speaking most candidly in private. Those from other leagues, however, were enjoying the tension. Some spoke about “getting out the popcorn”.

Many of those same figures have long watched the Premier League with envy, especially the sense of spectacle that brings in billions more in revenue than any other domestic competition. LaLiga president Javier Tebas told this writer’s new book, States of Play, that it is uncatchable.

And yet here it is, unravelling. As one senior official wondered this week: “What does it say about modern football when the Premier League, with its golden goose formula, is tearing itself apart?”

That formula, however, was always going to produce something like this. There are too many competing interests, on a scale far greater than football can handle.

That’s what this really says about modern football. The sport is at a point where it is a “mature” market with little remaining room for “growth”, and its biggest powers are fighting over who owns the game. The City case is just another battle in that war. It is currently split between capitalist interests on the one side and state/political interests on the other, but it isn’t always so clear-cut. Private equity-owned Chelsea acting as a witness for City is proof of that, even as the outcome of shareholder loans may affect the London club negatively.

A core problem is that not enough influential stakeholders are thinking about what the game should look like. Fifa and Uefa have become just more competing interests; their inexplicably powerful presidents too interested in their own ambitions.

Within that, other stakeholders are infuriated about the narratives people are trying to tell. “Spin” has been a feature, as could be seen on the day when both City and the Premier League declared victory in the Associated Party Transaction [APT] case. It was the same with Fifa and players’ representatives in the Lassana Diarra judgment.

A narrative has permeated that City are some kind of liberal force, fighting for a free market so anyone can excel. Phrases like “the red cartel” have spread online, in reference to the traditional – and undeniably influential – powers of Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal. This comes as rather rich to those who remember when City were all too willing to join up with the rest of the so-called “big six” in pursuit of a European Super League. They were so strong a lobbying group that they influenced the decision of a “diplomat” like former Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore to resign.

That came after a period when Soriano was one of the leading voices in trying to change the competition’s Founder Member Agreement so the wealthiest clubs got more money. When Soriano appeared in photographs taken of a Super League meeting in 2016 – and before Tottenham Hotspur were involved – Football Leaks revealed that an Abu Dhabi adviser emailed how City needed to be “very careful” to “avoid at all costs the perception of a cartel”.

It remains worth stating this crisis only arose from the difficulty in regulating state ownership, perpetuated by the unlimited means that state ownership has. City, as revealed in Football Leaks, are willing to spend whatever is required on legal warfare.

Some senior figures have long told the Premier League that the very idea of APTs is “nonsense”. The argument is that it is all just owners’ money anyway, albeit with another company in the middle, so it should be treated as such: equity. This is all the more relevant when it comes to state ownership, given that all such money comes from the same pot. In this case, it is also money derived from being in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec), an actual cartel.

At the same time, even executives critical of state ownership stress you can’t have rules that impose £100m of PSR impact on just two clubs while deciding not to have rules on shareholder loans which could save a £400m impact on the rest. “That is just awful governance,” was one description.

Within all of this, though, some senior Premier League executives are frustrated the competition doesn’t make more of a public argument for sustainability.

That’s why it is worth spelling out what would happen if regulations were loosened. If the game was left freer for owners to invest in the way many desire, it would simply worsen the problem of competitiveness, not improve it. This is because not every owner has the same aims, or even wealth. The Premier League table would become a rich list to a much greater degree. Even anchoring rules wouldn’t close gaps, since everyone else would be forced to overextend to compete.

This was precisely why financial fair play (FFP) was introduced in the first place. Mid-2000s European clubs desperate to compete were spending so much without checks that wages and transfer instalments went unpaid, forcing intervention. Sport’s competitiveness inherently requires control.

This is why the answer is more regulation, not less. It is for much more of the game’s immense wealth to be redistributed. Football doesn’t need all this external “investment”. It generates enough money as the world’s most popular sport. That is why all of these greater powers were attracted to it.

That is also exactly why football needs the strongest regulation, with actual institutional support. Instead, the issues most exercising Uefa and Fifa right now are all of these legal cases as well as what they consider “state interference”. That’s ironic, given the context. Aside from the questions over England’s independent regulator, there has been tension in Spain over the federation’s interim president, the French senate has taken note of the crisis in selling Ligue 1 TV rights, while there has been conflict between the Italian minister of sport and the football authorities.

A major reason why all of this is happening, however, is because modern football is proving itself “ungovernable”. The only solace in such ugly scenes is that a series of court cases – most based around competition law – have been scathing of regulators, ruling more towards demands for responsible governance rather than in favour of the greater powers bringing the cases. Fifa’s failure to beat the agent industry in a tribunal last year should have set off alarms, since it broke the hold of Fifa and Uefa deciding how the game is run.

The true impact will only be seen in the long term. For now, the Premier League meets on Thursday, for the first discussions on the City case. It needs to strike an agreement on the APT rules so a vote can go through, albeit under more legal threats from City. There is the possibility that the champions can rally six to their side.

The rest of the game will be waiting to hear how it goes.