![]() It is hard to argue against proper control when owner debt still spirals in a league that pays its 20th placed member more than £100 million. The competition has to come first because the competition is what pays for everything. It is the same when PIF claims indivisibility from the Saudi Arabian state in a US court but tells the Premier League the two are separate entities. The Premier League charges against Manchester City are, in the long term, a move against what the league alleges are the kind of practices that would ultimately erode the value of the competition. The robustness of financial controls should exist to protect that above all. That is, after all, why they are here in the first place. It should be in the interests of everyone, from Saudi’s Public Investment Fund, to Abu Dhabi, to American private equity and whoever ends up owning Manchester United to preserve that. The chief point is that the Premier League’s great wellspring of wealth – its broadcast contracts – flows from its competitiveness. Fail to do so, and the whole system collapses. Yet for English football, or indeed its new government regulator, a system that preserves competitiveness through some control of spending increasingly feels like an existential issue. Perhaps those who were part of the Super League breakaway have themselves to blame for that mood of distrust. The problem is that spending control is now so closely-allied to the notion of the elite protecting a favourable status quo that the debate quickly turns in on itself. The private equity ownership model pursued by Henry makes FSG natural allies of strong financial controls –coming from US sport where it is a fundamental. It provoked the usual responses – and Eddie Howe, at Newcastle, the state-owned club with the currently the greatest incentive to spend, protested that the Premier League’s current rules on permitted losses have already thwarted his club’s growth. It did not sound like an attempt to lock in the hegemony of the heritage clubs – just acknowledgement that if the problem runs unchecked then the pace will be too hot for most. It was, he said, specifically to prevent the problem in other European leagues “where one or two clubs annually have little competition”. When John W Henry, of Liverpool owners’ Fenway Sports Group, mentioned “limits on spending” this week he did so only in passing. ![]() But all of them ultimately will want saving from the forever war of fees and wages, spiralling endlessly into the future. It can feel at times that there are no limits to what Manchester City and Paris St-Germain might spend if they could, or indeed Newcastle United under Saudi Arabian ownership. Roman Abramovich, or at least the Chelsea he owned, eventually signalled an accordance with the development of Uefa financial fair play – even though it was specifically designed in response to their spending. Every football club owner in the game, no matter how vast their resources, or how soaring their ambition, eventually come around to the idea that there has to be some limit on spending or that, quite frankly, the arms race will destroy them all.
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