The Premier League likes to sell itself as the most competitive and exciting football competition in the world. It’s great attraction is supposedly its unpredictability: the idea that any club, with the right manager, intelligent recruitment and ambitious ownership, can upset the established order.
But that idea is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
The financial regulations imposed on Premier League clubs – first through Profitability and Sustainability Rules and now through the new Squad Cost Ratio system – are not protecting competition. They are protecting the clubs already at the top.
Financial Fair Play is no longer simply a mechanism to prevent reckless owners from bankrupting football clubs. It has become a glass ceiling that restricts ambitious challengers while allowing the wealthiest clubs to enjoy the enormous commercial advantages accumulated during decades of success.
In other words, the ladder has been pulled up.
The old rules allowed Premier League clubs to record adjusted losses of up to £105 million over three years. From the beginning of the 2026/27 season, those regulations are being replaced by a Squad Cost Ratio limiting spending on players, wages and agents to 85 per cent of a club’s football-related revenue and profits from player sales. That might sound sensible. But the fundamental problem remains.
If the amount a club can spend is determined largely by the income it already generates, the biggest clubs will always be able to spend considerably more than the clubs trying to catch them.
Manchester United can underperform on the pitch for several seasons and still benefit from one of the largest commercial operations in world football. Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City and Tottenham have revenues, sponsorship portfolios and global audiences built up through years of Champions League participation, televised success and international exposure.
Their historic advantages become their future spending power.
A club such as Newcastle United may have extraordinarily wealthy owners, a fanatical support, a packed stadium and huge potential. Aston Villa can qualify for the Champions League and demonstrate that they can compete with
Europe’s elite. Everton can move into a magnificent new stadium and possess one of the richest histories and strongest fan bases in English football.
But none of that gives these clubs the freedom to invest at the same level as the established elite.
Under a revenue-based system, Newcastle are not allowed to spend according to the resources of their owners or the scale of their ambition. They can spend according to revenues largely inherited from the period before those owners arrived.
How, precisely, are they supposed to bridge the gap?
Aston Villa provides another illustration. Villa can recruit brilliantly, appoint an outstanding manager and break into the Champions League places. But reaching the top four is one thing; staying there is quite another.
Success brings additional matches, greater expectations and the need for a deeper, more expensive squad. Yet the financial rules restrict the investment required to consolidate that success. Players’ wages increase. Rivals attempt to sign the club’s best performers. The demands of domestic and European football intensify.
The challenger is expected to compete with the elite without being permitted to invest like the elite.
A club can occasionally crash the party. What it cannot easily do is remain in the room. That is not competitive balance. It is the regulation of ambition.
Supporters of financial controls will point, reasonably enough, to clubs that have suffered because of reckless ownership and unsustainable spending. Football needs rules that prevent owners loading debt onto clubs, gambling with their futures and walking away when the money runs out.
Nobody wants another Portsmouth. Nobody wants to see a proud institution threatened with extinction because an owner has behaved irresponsibly.
But there is a vast difference between preventing financial recklessness and stopping a wealthy owner from making transparent, guaranteed equity investment into a club.
If an owner is prepared to put money into a club without creating dangerous debt, that investment should be permitted within sensible safeguards. Owners could be required to deposit funds in advance, provide binding guarantees and
demonstrate that spending would remain sustainable if they subsequently departed. That would protect clubs without freezing the existing hierarchy.
Instead, our current system effectively tells ambitious clubs: you may grow, but only slowly; you may challenge, but not too aggressively; and you may dream, provided those dreams do not disturb the established order.
The consequences will eventually be felt beyond boardrooms and accountancy departments. Football is built on hope.
Everton supporters do not fill their new stadium simply to celebrate finishing tenth. Newcastle fans do not turn St James’ Park into one of the most passionate arenas in Europe because they aspire to qualify occasionally for the Europa League. Aston Villa supporters do not follow one of England’s great historic clubs merely to act as colourful supporting characters in somebody else’s title race. These supporters want to believe that their clubs can become champions again.
They will tolerate difficult seasons. They will endure poor managers, disappointing transfers and occasional relegation battles. What they will not accept indefinitely is a competition in which their club is structurally prevented from reaching the summit.
If the same small group of clubs continues to dominate because the financial rules reinforce their commercial power, frustration will turn into resignation. Resignation will become indifference. And indifference is fatal to any sporting competition.
The Premier League should reflect on what made Leicester City’s 2015/16 title victory so extraordinary. It was not merely an uplifting story for Leicester supporters. It captivated the world because it demonstrated that the impossible could still happen.
A club that had narrowly escaped relegation the previous season became champion of England.
That triumph remains one of the greatest achievements in sporting history. It also provided the Premier League with something money could not buy: proof that its competition was genuinely alive.
Today, the chances of another Leicester story are, in practical terms, non-existent.
An unfancied club might enjoy one extraordinary season. It might qualify for Europe or briefly challenge near the top of the table. But even if it achieved the miraculous, the modern financial system would make sustaining that success almost impossible.
Its best players would be targeted by wealthier rivals. Its wages would rise. Its squad would need strengthening. And its ability to respond would be constrained by revenues that could not possibly grow as quickly as its sporting ambitions.
The irony is painful. Rules introduced in the name of sustainability are creating an unsustainable sporting product.
The Premier League’s success has never rested solely on the quality of Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal or Manchester City. Its appeal comes from the intensity of the entire competition: packed stadiums, historic rivalries and the belief that established reputations count for nothing once the match begins.
Destroy that belief and the Premier League eventually becomes a procession.
Financial regulation should protect clubs from irresponsible ownership. It should ensure debts are manageable, wages are paid and institutions are not placed at risk. It should not guarantee that yesterday’s winners remain tomorrow’s richest clubs and therefore the only credible champions.
A better system would permit ambitious owner investment through equity rather than debt, backed by guarantees that protect the club’s long-term future. It would impose strong controls on leveraged ownership and related-party transactions while giving well-run clubs a realistic route to accelerate their growth.
Most importantly, it would judge financial sustainability on whether spending threatens the existence of a club – not on whether that spending threatens the position of its competitors.
The Premier League must decide what it wants to be.
Is it a genuine sporting competition in which every club can aspire to reach the top? Or is it an exclusive commercial club in which newcomers are allowed to visit the penthouse but never permitted to move in?
Because once supporters conclude that the outcome has been shaped by balance sheets before a ball is kicked, the Premier League will have lost the quality that made it the greatest league in the world.
Hope. And without hope, football is just content.
