A new report has revealed the sheer scale of the Premier League Big Six raids on their ‘rivals’ in the English top tier.
The last 14 months have seen an astonishing £1.2billion spent by that half dozen on transfer fees when buying from the other (non-big six) Premier League clubs.
In total, 23 of these transfers has happened in only 14 months.
Arsena signing Bruno Guimaraes from Newcastle United for £75m is the latest of these.
Bruno heading to the Gunners takes the Premier League Big Six spend on players from the other EPL clubs to that £1.2billion figure in the space of just over a year.
The report on The Athletic declares: ‘…in what amounts to a mass transfer of the best talent from the lesser-offs to the richest in England.’
Chris Weatherspoon is the football finance expert at The Athletic and he explains: ‘What’s more, the averaging-out, under the Premier League’s squad cost ratio, of player profits over three years, while worthwhile from a sustainability point of view, as it discourages one-off sales to dig clubs out of a hole, means spending limits are further restrained unless teams can consistently sell players for big profits. Where the largest earners can afford to spend heavily year-on-year, the rest are beholden to peaks and troughs. The need to sell, allied with the allure inherent at clubs who regularly compete for honours and pay their players in accordance with those aims, results in the increased flow of talent up the chain that we’re now seeing. That’s true even of those teams, heavily backed by their owners, trying to push their way into the elite; it is no coincidence that, at the time of writing, the three largest net sellers this summer are Newcastle, Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest.’
The man from The Athletic goes on to detail how one club in particular has now been negatively impacted…‘An optimist may see this as a cycle, whereby there’s rotation at the top and the status quo will shift. Indeed, the team most vulnerable to the vultures now were once the ones doing most of the preying. Across six Premier League seasons in the 1990s, Newcastle pried 12 different players from poorer sides, more than anyone else in that period.’
He points out what has happened across these past 20 or so years…‘The six highest-earning clubs in England have remained the same for almost two decades and continue to enjoy far greater matchday and commercial revenues than the rest.’
The first 15 seasons of these last two decades saw Newcastle United and their fans suffer under Mike Ashley.
Now there is the lasting legacy of that whereby the rules effectively make it all but impossible for the new Newcastle United owners to regain that lost ground under a decade and a half of Mike Ashley.
The man from The Athletic pointing out: ‘The richest are so rich they can simply allow others to do the hard work, then stroll in and buy the players who have already proven they can cut it in the world’s highest quality league…In a fair sporting world, clubs with inefficient recruitment operations would be overtaken by smarter efforts, like those showcased at Brighton. In the world we actually live in, the richer teams take their best players off them year after year, reinforcing a glass ceiling which dictates that, for most clubs, finishing sixth or seventh is about as good as it will now get. Finishing fourth is a borderline miracle. Actually winning the title is a fantasy.’
Chris Weatherspoon signing off with this: ‘All of it means the Premier League has a problem. One that is unlikely to be widely acknowledged.’]