Premier League chief sends clear spending message to Arsenal, Chelsea and rivals
The Premier League have no intention of moving away from their current rules.
A premier League chief has sent a clear message to big-spending clubs like Arsenal and Chelsea. Top flight clubs are bound by the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability rules, limiting how much clubs can spend in the transfer market to ensure there is competitive balance, or at least some.
Clubs are capped to a loss of £105million across a three-year period, meaning each club can only spent what it earns in profit plus an average of just over £30million per season. The rules effectively stop clubs from gambling money they don’t have to achieve success, and in cases like that of Newcastle United, it stops a billionaire owner from taking over a club and spending huge amounts of their own money to transform the club.
While on one hand, some may think that is unfair, there have been plenty of examples in the past of owners doing that and registering the spending as club debt to that owner, and that is a path to possible extinction for some clubs. Arsenal and Chelsea are not in that situation, but they do still have to abide by Profit and Sustainability rules, especially after big spending over recent years.
And Premier League CEO Richard Masters has made it clear that the league are not considering giving up on the rules. “In the Premier League, we have a financial system that has been built up over time with some very clear objectives,” he told Sky Sports. “Not just the PSR system, but the way revenue and costs are distributed and the parachute system. They’re all designed to create a fantastic football competition that preserves aspiration.
“If you’re a fan of a newly promoted club, you know the parachute system will protect investment going forward. You have the ability to rise up and challenge for European competition and maybe, if you stay there, one day challenge for the league. If you have a third party coming in and regulating from the side, looking at clubs’ business plans and constraining their ability to invest, that worries us. We’ve always been pro-investment within measured risk. The Premier League is not a pension fund. It’s a place where capital is at risk. There is no certainty of outcome. We worry that a new regulatory function might be risk-averse and inhibit clubs’ ability to invest.”