Control the English bubble

The English soccer bubble continues to grow and in many administrative, sporting and political sectors it is creating alarms. The Government of the English Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has just slipped that a ‘white paper’ to control financial movements in the Premier is quite advanced. This is one of the goals of the former Minister of Sports, the conservative parliamentarian Tracey Crouch, whose report included the main recommendations of an English football law for the 2024-25 season. It is a matter of creating an independent regulator by law with financial redistribution powers and thus avoiding the growing inequality caused by the ownership of private capital funds associated with those club-State.

In the midst of this legislative movement, it is no coincidence that the Premier League who along with the big English clubs opposed this government regulation from the beginning, have now announced threats of punishment for City of Manchester, for violating financial ‘fair play’ between the 2009-10 and 2017-18 seasons. Exactly what the Premier is investigating and now accusing City managers for not providing accurate financial information, and for suspicious billing in Abu Dhabi United Groupthe City holding company, headed by the owner sheikh Sheikh Mansour.

The decision is unprecedented, surprising and a potentially transformative step in the current English football landscape. This is a sudden turn of the Premier League when it comes to allowing the systematic violations of some clubs in the state, whose income and accounting movements in the Premier cause suspicion. Until now, there are no measures in the sense of sanctioning any of the big clubs for not clarifying the source of the money they use in their operations. Nor in trying to come to an agreement with the English Football League (EFL), which governs the other second category of English football, to avoid financial imbalances, which is one of the objectives of the ‘white paper’ being studied by the Government . .

When the majority of Premier League clubs are under private foreign ownership, and some of their profits go elsewhere, if the Premier League does not demonstrate that it exercises real control over money invested in the UK, the financial gap between these powerful clubs and the rest is increasingly irreversible. The only thing that is up in the air right now is how far they are willing to go, in this case to cityto prevent the Government from statutorily appointing an independent regulator.