It’s A Rich Man’s World
It is not, I don’t believe, unfair to say that football is extremely far down the road to eating itself, just as many people feared it might.
It might not be doing the washing up just yet, but it’s definitely asking if it can have a look at the dessert menu. I think it began to accelerate when the word ‘amortisation’ starting getting used by fans as they walked to games.
Debt (lots), 64-country World Cup proposals, state-owned clubs, tournaments awarded in dubious circumstances, dodgy owners, clear breaking of financial rules, the very fact we need the financial rules in the first place, local fans priced out of going, black market sales and £14,962 for a ticket, leveraged buy outs, season ticket holders ousted from seats. And so on.
As someone said of clubs; ‘with the money in football, how can they all be losing so much?’
One of the reasons is that so much of the wealth generated leaves the game, or at least it leaves the clubs. The average wage player wage is more than £3m per year. Annual wage bills at some clubs top £300m. And if the clubs weren’t all in debt, that wouldn’t be so much of an issue. But they are.
The money continues to pour in, however.
Manchester United, despite their worst season in decades and their worst team ever according to the manager, still posted record revenues of £666.5m (they do say the devil is in the detail). The club, a few days later, also announced that their debt has now grown to £1.1bn.
Liverpool – who had a PSR war chest to spend - spent more than £400m in the transfer window, following Chelsea (who did the same thing in 2023, and also changed the football world's financial structure in 2008 when a their new owner took over). But you sense that figure now might become commonplace.
Worryingly, some of the women’s clubs are already beginning to rack up debt, albeit on a much smaller scale, but it’s there. The warning signs are too. It’s too early to tell if anyone will be brave – and strong – enough to know when to stop. When the fun stops, apparently.
In both the men’s and women’s games, transfer fees and wages continue to go up and up. But in the latter, attendances aren’t moving at the same rate, and they aren’t high enough to begin with if they are to generate the income that’s really needed.
This Time Next Year
The first million-pound transfer in the women’s game already has taken place. Will we, one day, be able to buy an Olivia Smith tracksuit from a mush in Shepard’s Bush?
I do kind of hope so.
Of course, the players aren’t to blame, any more than they are in the men’s game. But the same calamitous patterns are beginning to develop. The recent books from Miguel Delaney (States of Play) and David Goldblatt (Injury Time) both spoke of the issues that are dogging the men’s game to such a degree that several of the protagonists have decided to get out while they still can. They’ve seen the writing on the wall; how it all ends.
For men’s football, that is. The women might still have a chance to avoid it. The men have taken a century and a half to get to this point, so the fact the women are roughly a hundred years behind might work in their favour.
But let’s try to bring this around to fans.
Football is, remember, nothing without them.
Part of the problem is that the owners of clubs know this only too well, and actively exploit it. A hard-core fan of a men’s club will support them to the hilt, and even defend the indefensible in their name. So it’s easy to see why clubs will take their support for granted and ask £85 for a replica shirt. They know it’s a captive and, to a degree, willing audience. Right until the fan can no longer afford tickets because the club’s dynamic pricing makes it much easier for a wealthier fan from abroad to take their seat.
Fans want to see their clubs grow. If a huge amount of money is pumped in, that’s a kind of growth and on some level, fans are then very happy. At least for a while.
Room To Grow
The women’s game hasn’t got this issue. They’ve got plenty of room in the stadiums and ticket prices are much more affordable. The fans are less obsessed with spending and bringing star players in, and happier to see improvement and local players developing (fans of the men’s teams also like this, but those players have to be sold to either comply with PSR or help the club survive).
They want to see growth but not so the club are higher in the Deloitte’s rich list; just more generally, and on and off the field. They want to see improvement – what fan doesn’t? – but not in an all-consuming dog-eat-dog manner that leaves everyone in an arms race that just ends up with a handful of winners and many, many losers.
They want to see bigger attendances at games but mainly because that brings more interest in the game and the club that in turn will bring in more sponsors and broadcasters. And even more fans.
That will drive up revenues, and in turn the club will be able to pay higher fees for - and wages to – the players.
It’s arguably how football was always intended to be. And was for a time. Clubs spent what they had and what they could afford. They weren’t allowed to get into hundreds of millions in debt, or borrow against future earnings. It was also a time when the same few clubs didn’t win every single trophy on offer.
That is a problem for the women’s game already. Chelsea have won six WSL titles in a row and who’d bet against that number growing? They are making more money and bringing better players in all the time. Hard to argue when their turnover is more than £12m a year, but it also means that no other club goes into the season with realistic hope of winning the league, and with scant chance in the cups either.
Only Champions League winners, Arsenal, look anywhere close to mounting a challenge and they are getting crowds of almost 40,000. After Aston Villa scored a late equaliser at The Emirates on Saturday, several of the home fans called Chelsea’s title win already.
After just four games.
So it’s very hard to look beyond those two for the foreseeable.
Manchester City’s men have won six of the last eight PL titles. Only three other clubs have won the Premier League since 2013, and one – Leicester City – spooked the big boys so much that they’ve not stopped spending since. It’s even worse in France, Germany, Scotland and – as Delanely says - virtually any country east of Munich. Even La Liga has developed a duopoly that means that eighteen clubs begin a season fighting for third place at best.
All Bets Are Off
Money has taken unpredictability about of football. It’s why we got so entranced by Leicester and their 5000/1 story. Yet it used to happen all the time in the old English first division; it was the way it was until the mid-nineties, even allowing for a spell of Liverpool dominance.
How quickly we forget.
The World Club Cup prize fund has distorted some men’s leagues in their countries for the next one or two decades. Some Brazilian (Fluminense earned £50.4m) and the top Argentinean clubs are now much richer than their rivals, meaning they will probably finish higher and earn more in competitions that will turn the gap into a insurmountable gulf. The New Zealand club, Auckland City, earned £3.3m (a 676% increase in revenue) for the part-timers that will either make their rivals unable to compete, or have to spend more than they have in order to.
The warning signs aren’t hard to spot. The women’s game can fall over itself in the rush to be like the men, but they can surely see all the pitfalls along that path.
There is another path. Whether they take it is another matter.
Vive La Différence!
Swedish men’s league (the Allsvenskan) faced the choice a few years ago. They could follow the path many other European leagues had taken in desperately trying to keep up with the Premier League to keep their clubs competitive or focus on what made them different.
They chose the latter. Attendances across the league doubled. Go figure.
By focussing on sustainability, standing for something, making the match day experience a great one and creating a legacy, not just for the club but the whole community, they can grow without crippling finances. And while – for now – asking the men’s club for support is easy enough if they have it, what happens when it has eaten itself and is no longer prepared to help, or can’t (as we’ve seen at Blackburn and Reading in the last 15 months)?
The women’s game has the opportunity to be whatever it wants to be.
It should not take that decision lightly.
After all, if you were starting to create a new football model today, you’d probably not build it the way the men have.
