The UK government might change the Premier League forever

And not everyone will like it

English football is, famously, not supposed to make money.

Football clubs were community assets and, like many older community assets, were supposedly run by local wealthy businesspeople out of the interest of the town or city, as an aside to whatever industry they actually made a profit from. I don’t know how noble the intentions really were, but that’s baked into the mythology of the country. No one ever really thought about it in terms of actually trying to get rich. The whole thing was so poorly run that hardly anyone even noticed the huge sums they were leaving on the table.

Then the Premier League happened.

Jack Walker was the first to seriously test how far money could get you in the Premier League. After selling the bulk of his business empire – steel processing company Walkersteel – for £300 million (£760m today, about $1.3 billion based on historical exchange rates I just googled), he decided to have fun in semi-retirement and bought his local football club, Blackburn Rovers. He bought some of the best players in the land, most notably a young Alan Shearer for a then English record transfer fee of £3.6m (about £7.6m today, or $15m). He hired Kenny Dalglish, winner of three English top-flight titles as manager with Liverpool, to coach these players. It worked. Blackburn Rovers, a club that last won the title in 1914 and spent all of the 1970s and 80s outside the top flight, from a working-class town that never recovered from the postcolonial decline of the British cotton industry, won the Premier League in 1995. Money could buy success.

Of course, Blackburn didn’t go on to build a dynasty, which is why almost none of you outside the town are Rovers fans. The club was badly mismanaged in the years after the title win, but even if it hadn’t been, the money in the game was increasing too fast for Walker to spend his way to more trophies. Four years after breaking the English transfer record to sign Shearer, they sold him to Newcastle United for a then-world record fee of £15m (£29m today, or about $46m). Five years after that, Manchester United would sign Juan Sebastián Verón for an English record fee of £28m (£50m today or $69m, don’t say it). And then two years after that, Roman Abramovich would buy Chelsea, changing English football forever.

Even if they said they didn’t, almost every football fan in England wanted an “Abramovich-style” owner at their club. Some teams spent big without the material wealth to back it up, like Leeds United or Portsmouth, and paid a heavy price for that. But if you really did have the money, it was all good. Of course, Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group went the biggest when they bought Manchester City and turned the club into the powerhouse it is today. Fans of “smaller” clubs dreamed of the day when a Mansour-like figure would buy their club and turn history on its head.

Football did make some attempt to rein this in, both for reasons of competition (or, as some will tell you, to help the old guard keep their leg up) and, arguably more importantly, to stop clubs spending money they don’t have and getting into debt problems, most obviously with UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules. But those were always going to be at least a little soft. As Stefan Szymanski and Simon Kuper observed in Soccernomics, FFP did not bring down the share of revenue that football clubs spend on wages, still the large bulk of their spending. As Szymanski and Kuper go on to explain,

“The FFP rules haven’t stopped the sugar daddies, because the rules are largely unenforceable. Big clubs like Manchester City have fought UEFA through the courts. You may or may not like Sheikh Mansour, but since he owns the club and wants to spend his own money on it, you can’t stop him. Under European law, you cannot prohibit business owners from investing in their own business, as FFP tried to do. City and PSG were quite happy to defy UEFA and drag it through the courts, knowing that they could not lose. Some fans complain that UEFA was too slack in enforcing their rules, but the fact is that the rules were always on shaky legal grounds. After UEFA tried to stop PSG buying Kylian Mbappé and Neymar simultaneously for about €400 million in 2017, the Parisians triumphed in court.

I’m admittedly not an expert on European law, but this seems like an unavoidable problem. “The challenge to the FFP rules”, barrister Samuel Okoronkwo explained in 2015, “relies on its alleged incompatibility with EU competition provisions as well as several of the EU Single Market core freedoms”. This is not a minor issue in the EU. The four “core freedoms”, allowing unrestricted movement of goods, services, capital and people, are at the very centre of the European project. UEFA does not want serious legal challenges to FFP because they know the strictest form of it probably doesn’t hold up to EU law. So they take a soft touch.

*Adam Curtis voice* But then something else happened, something nobody saw coming, not the experts or the politicians or journalists or even the people who campaigned for it. The United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union.