Nobody really mentions football’s financial bubble anymore, and the apocalyptic possibility of it bursting, and this surprises given how much it used to preoccupy the realists.
As the game’s spending escalated in recent years to ever-more ludicrous heights, articles would appear with increasing regularly, each detailing the worst case scenario that potentially lay in store, and this was especially pertinent around this time of year, just post the summer transfer window.
Only this time out, there has been very little hand-wringing, or at least it requires a comprehensive googling to find it.
There has been a scant number of two-thousand word think-pieces that amount to metaphorical placards declaring that the end is nigh. There have been hardly any experts insisting that if the Premier League carries on over-extending there is a very real danger of a big bang.
All told, the radio silence has been a little odd.
Odd and genuinely disconcerting too, because really there are only two explanations for the complicit acceptance, the first of them being hardly plausible at all, that some of the sharpest, brightest minds around have arrived at a different conclusion to what they previously thought to be true.
On further reflection they now believe that the exorbitantly rewarding TV deals, and the colossal revenues brought in from various profitable streams are sufficient to sustain wild spending and wage-bills that make your eyes water.
More conceivable than this, however, it is because those who repeatedly sought to warn football of the inherent jeopardy in throwing countless fortunes at a wall and hoping some of it stuck, simply got tired of not being listened to.
They have given up and chosen to walk away, to view the inevitable implosion from a safe distance. In that respect, what we’re living through now is the calm before an approaching storm.
This summer, according to Deloitte, Premier League clubs spent a combined total of £2.36 billion on transfer fees, surpassing last year’s figure by £368m.
It is a stupendous figure, one that is hard to make sense of, and that’s the case even when we acknowledge the astonishing numbers coming the other way, from domestic and international broadcasting deals that run until 2025 and add up to £4.96 billion and £5.04 billion respectively.
Factor in also the not inconsiderable caveat of net spend - a bigger consideration than ever this summer due to the greater number of internal transfers that have taken place and the fortunes pouring in from Saudi Arabia, for players past their prime and on huge wages, purchased for over market value - and this summer’s outlay is perhaps not such a harbinger of doom after all.
It’s all going to be okay, right?
Perhaps, but take Chelsea, and their jaw-dropping spending since Todd Boehly took the reins, an expenditure that exceeds £1 billion across three transfer windows.
With each player tied down to atypically long contracts, what is essentially occurring at Stamford Bridge is a high-risk, unprecedented experiment that could have a profoundly devastating impact on a constant fixture among the favourites in the football odds. A five-time Premier League winner, no less.
Take Manchester United, still shackled to the hated Glazers, whose debts this week were revealed to have broken the £1 billion mark.
Here is a revenue-making monster and global behemoth who on transfer deadline day were reduced to scrabbling about, making loan deals for a long-standing target in Sofyan Amrabat and Tottenham’s third-choice full-back.
Hamstrung by FFP and deep in hock, at what point will it be suggested that the Glazers must go so that the club can survive, never mind thrive?
Then there’s Bournemouth, little but ambitious Bournemouth.
Benefiting from new ownership and determined to finance a new direction under incoming boss Andoni Iraola, the Cherries found themselves this summer the victims of an unavoidable trickle-down effect as the top-end of the market unmoored itself from reality once again.
A perfectly ordinary rebuild therefore, bringing in live betting disruptors Hamed Traore and Alex Scott, along with sensible recruits such as Max Aarons, cost the South Coast club £109.9m. That’s very nearly a full third of what La Liga spent in its entirety.
The huge disparity between what the Premier League brings in compared to the rest of Europe mostly explains for that, this summer seeing the English top-flight investing within their means more than the next three biggest spending leagues on the continent combined.
Yet simply put, if the vast fortunes pouring in takes care of expenditure - which in itself is a fallacy, as the TV deals are a set amount, whereas club spending continues to rise out of control on an annual basis - and revenue takes care of the wage-bills - which again, it actually doesn’t, for some clubs equating to well over 100% of its turnover - then even these two delusions don’t take into account rapacious owners making awful decisions.
And it only takes one giant to fall for the rest to suffer terribly. For evidence of that, we only need look at Bournemouth’s worrying net spend in 2023, a direct result of Chelsea and its ilk inflating the market.
It is all too easy, in short, for the house of cards to fall.
Those who have beaten this drum for a good while now have gone awfully quiet of late. As stated, nobody really mentions football’s bubble anymore, nor the risk of it bursting.
That eerie silence should worry us immensely.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to AP Photo*
