Football: Premier League clubs splash the cash
The Premier League is no longer divided between “haves and have nots”, said Paul Wilson in The Guardian. This year, all 20 clubs have “loot lying around in piles”. And they have spent it in extraordinary sums: for the fourth summer in a row, they have broken the record on spending during the transfer window. By the time the window closed, on Wednesday, they were expected to have forked out more than £1bn. As usual, the biggest clubs spent the biggest money: Manchester United and Manchester City each parted with some £150m. But even relative minnows have become big spenders: Crystal Palace, who finished 15th last season, bought Christian Benteke for £27m; Watford (13th last season) spent more than £50m.
This was the transfer window that sealed the Premier League’s “financial supremacy”, said Sam Wallace in The Sunday Telegraph. The league’s new TV deal – worth £5.14bn over three seasons – has just kicked in, guaranteeing even the bottom-placed club at least £81m a season. With so much money splashing around, there’s scarcely a bargain to be had. So clubs are compelled to spend eye-watering sums – what the Germans call “stupid English money”. Man United paid a world-record £93m for French midfielder Paul Pogba, four years after he left the club for just £800,000; Man City paid £47.5m for John Stones, a defender who isn’t even an England regular. Such “rampant” spending is changing football, not necessarily for the better. Other clubs, overseas and in the lower leagues, struggle to compete, and find themselves pushed further down the “food chain”. It’s hard enough to keep up with the transfer fees, let alone the “stratospheric” fees for agents, said Rob Smyth in The Guardian. These sometimes shady figures are now among the most important people in the sport, and they are paid accordingly: the Pogba deal landed his agent, Mino Raiola, a staggering £20m.
The sums may be “mad”, said Oliver Holt in The Mail on Sunday. But that doesn’t mean they’re bad value. Signing Pogba was a coup for United, a chance to prove they are still one of the sport’s big beasts. And he brings with him huge commercial possibilities: he is expected to make the club as much as £40m in his first year alone. Besides, it’s not the massive transfers we should be worrying about, said Simon Burnton in The Guardian. It’s the ones with undisclosed fees – usually for less glamorous players, such as defender Tyler Reid, who joined Swansea in July. There were just 61 of these reported in the 1990s; last decade it went up to 195. These signings hurt fans on both sides of the transaction, as they make it harder to find out how much a club is spending. In a sport already short on transparency, the last thing we need is “secrecy for its own sake”.