The Premier League spent more than £3.5 billion this summer, a record by some distance, and according to a detailed report in The Independent this week, a worrying amount of it was not really spent at all. Chief football writer Miguel Delaney laid out how a growing number of clubs are structuring deals so the buying club pays little or nothing up front, spreading the actual cost over several years while the selling club still books the fee in full straight away. It is a system built increasingly on credit rather than income, and several senior figures in the game told him plainly that they are worried about where it leads.
The specific concerns in that piece are worth setting out, because they say a lot about the state of the wider league. Aston Villa and Chelsea did business with each other over Alejandro Garnacho with payments deferred rather than settled. Tottenham have run up an outlay approaching £400 million under Roberto De Zerbi. Liverpool paid a nine figure sum for Bradley Barcola, with Enzo Fernandez standing as the single biggest fee of the whole window. The worry among executives Delaney spoke to is that Squad Cost Ratio, the rule meant to keep spending tied to actual revenue, is being satisfied on paper simply by moving money around constantly rather than by any real restraint. One source went as far as comparing it to the conditions that led to the 2008 financial crash, clubs treated as little more than pools of money rather than football institutions with a balance sheet to respect.
Brentford get a mention in the piece too, and we also spoke about this situation on the Beesotted Pride of West London Podcast. Mamadou Sangaré’s club record fee, more than £40 million after his season in Ligue 1, is used as one example of how high prices have climbed even for clubs outside the usual big spenders. That is fair enough. It was a significant fee for Brentford by any measure. But there is an important difference between appearing in the same sentence as this summer’s £3.5 billion total and being part of the problem the article is actually describing, and on that score Brentford sit a long way from the clubs under scrutiny.
Go back to what director of football Phil Giles said when the window closed. Last summer Brentford sold more than they bought, a ‘deliberate’ net seller in a market where the club felt it made sense to cash in… although Wissa’s sale wasn’t ‘planned’ as such. This summer the situation was reversed on purpose, keeping the core of the squad together and adding five players – Callum Wilson, Jaidon Anthony, Jannik Schuster, Sangaré and El Hadji Malick Diouf – funded by money the club had already brought in rather than promises about money it might bring in later. Giles described the new arrivals as ready to contribute from day one rather than long term projects, and there was no late scramble, no deadline day drama, and certainly no sign of the kind of deferred payment arrangements that worried the executives Delaney spoke to. And no private jets parked up on random European runways while Matthew Benham begged a player to sign for us.
That contrast matters more than it might first appear. The Independent’s report is not really about transfer fees being too high in isolation. It is about clubs spending money they do not actually have yet, betting that the credit will keep flowing and that another buyer will always be along to take a player off their hands at an even higher price later. Brentford’s approach, built on selling well, buying carefully and paying for what they need out of income already earned, is close to the exact opposite of that. It is the sort of discipline several of the executives quoted in the piece say the whole division badly needs, and it is exactly what Brentford have been doing quietly for years while other clubs chase headlines.
There is no guarantee that discipline gets rewarded with silverware, and nobody at Brentford would pretend otherwise. But if the credit driven bubble Delaney describes ever does burst, and enough serious people in the game now think it might, the clubs left exposed will be the ones who built their squads on debt rather than income. Brentford will not be among them. That is worth remembering next time somebody suggests we should be spending like our rivals. We are already doing this the right way, and we ARE spending big, but on the evidence of this summer, the right way is working.
Listen to the full discussion on this week’s Beesotted podcast by clicking the links above.
Dave Lane
