What is SCR and why does it matter?

We hear so much about SCR, PSR and all sorts of financial rules and regulations but what does it all mean and which clubs voted for it in the first place? Host of the Price of Football podcast Kieran Maguire joins Gary and Alan to break it all down and give us his take on whether the rules are unfair on those outside the established "big six" Plus there's Kieran's view on when we'll finally hear a verdict in the Manchester City case and he has some advice for Micah with regards to investing in a non-league club. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Football with Alan Shearer and me, Gary Lineker. Mike had to rush off because he's quite friendly with David Beckham. But joining us, we've got a special guest. We've got Kieran Maguire, one of the most respected voices in football finance. He's the author of The Price of Football, host of the podcast of the same name, and has just launched Valueball, an app that puts real financial data at your fingertips with clear visuals, allowing you to explore the numbers for every single club. Talk us through that first, Kieran. Give your app a plug.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Well, I've been spending sort of 20 years messing around on a spreadsheet. I'm very old school. But then a guy called Jason got in contact with me and said, can I have all of the work that you've done? And I said, I don't mind. But what are you going to do with it? And he said, I've got this idea for an app. And it is good in the sense that it's got every single club in England. We're working on France and Scotland as well. If you want to know how much money they made, how much they spent on transfers, how much money they borrowed, how much the wage bill is, how much they're even paying in interest, it's all there. So it's a nerd's delight. I wouldn't recommend it as a Christmas present.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  You're not selling it well here, Kieran. Come on, you can be better than... I mean, does it go down to League One and Leicester? Because I don't know. I just don't want to read about it anymore. It's too depressing.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  It does. Yeah. If you've got £200 million spare, I'll show you how Leicester is worth that amount of money. So we do valuations as well.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Well, let's hope somebody does think it's worth that amount of money. Thank you for doing this for us. Because I mean, I think like most people involved in football, Alan and myself, we're sometimes kind of gobsmacked by the whole situation around football, football's finances, PSR and SCR. Can we start by explaining, please, the difference between PSR and SCR?

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Okay. PSR, the profitability and sustainability rules, it's effectively you looking in the rear view mirror of the club and say, what's it done over the last three years? So if you're in the Premier League, you're allowed to lose £105 million over three years. If you're in the Championship, you're allowed to lose £39 million. And if you're being promoted or relegated, they got sort of messing around with that. And under PSR, if you spent money on infrastructure, so if you built a new stand, if you built a new stadium, if you built new training facilities, that will be excluded. They're trying to encourage women's football. So if you're losing money on the women's game, that's excluded. We want to encourage kids coming into the game and to have a pathway. So your academy costs

• 2:55Speaker 01

  were excluded and so on. So there were various ways of increasing those losses. And then what we found is that there were a bunch of accountants and a bunch of lawyers whose job it is to find loopholes. And they found some quite spectacular loopholes. So therefore we had Chelsea selling the women's team to itself. We had a lot of clubs selling the stadium to itself. So the rules became sort of discredited. So they decided they're going to choose something else. And UEFA, a couple of years ago, said, what's football about? It's all about players. It's all about squads. So SCR stands for your squad cost ratio. And broadly, if you are playing in Europe, for every £100 you make through your ticket

• 3:37Speaker 01

  sales, through the broadcasting, through the commercial deals, you can spend £70 of that on your player costs. That will be player wages, transfer fees, agent fees. And if you're playing in the Premier League, because you've not got the benefit of that extra money coming in through European participation, you can spend £85 on player costs for every £100. So that's sort of more forward looking. And you've got to give budgets. And it's all the stuff none of us are interested in, apart from me, in the sense that the focus is on trying to ensure that you don't have a new owner comes in and replicates what we saw with Roman Abramovich, where the Chelsea wage bill doubled in a year. It was

• 4:21Speaker 01

  the similar at Manchester City. It was the similar with PSG in Paris. It's really there to sort of preserve the status quo.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. Is that fair, though, in the sense that the elite are kind of, the big six, as we like to call them, are protected because they've already done all that? And then the newbies, Alan would cite Newcastle, other people would cite someone like Aston Villa, who were doing particularly well. Is it possible now for someone to compete with the clubs that are already there?

• 4:53Speaker 01

  It's very, very difficult because the clubs, which are the global brands who have already established fanbases in Asia, in Africa, in South America, wherever that's going to be, on the back of success over the course of the last 20, 25 years. So we're looking at Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, and so on. They've already got their extra money coming in because they can have those additional sponsorship deals and so on. They've already got the big stadium. I think it's really challenging. So if we take Alan's case in terms of Newcastle United, what's the problem that they've got there? Well, yes, St James's Park is a fantastic stadium, and it's right in the centre of town. But if you take a look at the amount of money they're making from ticket sales,

• 5:36Speaker 01

  it's probably around about a third of that of Manchester United or Spurs. So we know that they want to build a new stadium to take it up to 60, 65,000. But that's going to take time. And until you do that, you don't have the additional money coming in from the boxes, from the sponsorship and so on. So it sort of creates a vicious circle because in the next three to four years, you'd expect the usual suspects to be qualifying for Europe. You get a minimum of £40 million from being in the Champions League. If you win it, you could be talking 150 to 200. You qualify for the FIFA Club World Cup. And that Chelsea made 80 million. And it's very difficult to play catch up. It's a bit like

• 6:18Speaker 01

  doing a 400 metre race, where you've got to go and start 100 metres behind everybody. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's going to be a very, very slow process. And it does feel that clubs such as Newcastle, Villa, perhaps you could say Forest, Everton, have got new owners. Leeds are very ambitious as well. But there's a case for saying they're on the wrong side of history because they can't do what Roman Abramovich did. They can't do what Sheikh Mansour and just say, I lose £200 million this year. So what? It's small change for me. So it has made it far more difficult. And on that point of view, you would say that it's unfair in the sense that you can't have an even playing field. If they said, we have a wage cap which is 200 million, 300 million, 400 million

• 7:01Speaker 01

  for every club, then if the owners want to to cover those losses, then they should be free to do so. That's the counter argument.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  I think it is a bit anti-competitive. You can have a challenge for two years, three years, maybe. But you can't have a sustained challenge. You can't stay in their big house, if you like, and outstay your welcome, unfortunately. You have a little look in and then you have to go back in your little house and go back where you belong, such as... Kieran, you know what you said about the rules? They want to promote academies and that doesn't go on to building an academy or spending on the academy. That's not part of the laws. But then, once you build that academy and you bring in a brilliant academy player through, it seems wrong that the best way is then you have to sell that academy player. I mean, it's just backward, isn't it?

• 7:44Speaker 01

  It is. And because player sale profits, and profit is the difference between the sale price of the player's registration compared to what it costs you to buy the player. Because an academy player, by definition, they come through from the ages of seven, eight, nine. Therefore, there's no physical cost for when they sign that first contract. You get 100% profit. So when Newcastle sold Elliot Anderson, it was £30 million in the bank. If they'd sold another player for £30 million, who they bought for 40, and his accounting value might be 20, you've got a lower profit. So it has created these ripples. And clearly, that has caused a lot of bad feeling. And we saw the descent at

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Everton a week ago, when they were thinking about selling one of their academy players. I work in the city of Liverpool. Such was the ferocity of feedback from the fans that they didn't do that. But that's why that particular rule exists. And it does seem wrong because there's that extra close bond between the fanbase and the local players, as you know yourself, in representing the city or the town with which you've grown up in, which was your academy. It's part of your identity and history and heritage. And it's part of the fans as well.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  You know, you said the clubs have hired these huge lawyers to find a way around it. They're spending this summer between Premier League clubs. Am I right in thinking that they might be, the clubs have already might be have found a way around and selling between, for huge fees between each Premier League club? Because the vast majority of big deals has happened in the Premier League this season and stayed in the Premier League.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  I think there's two issues here. There's a case for saying that we now have the best recruiting in world football, which is going through, perhaps four or five Premier League clubs who are acting as a petri dish, as a sort of development area for the big six clubs. So if you take Bournemouth, Palace, Brighton, Brentford, and so on, they are sort of the smart kids who use the mummy ball approach, who use the algorithms. And they're recruiting the players from South America and Africa and elsewhere, who then play a couple of years in the Premier League and then move on to bigger clubs. Now, they've got the software, they've got the designs, the algorithms that work for that. So I think

• 10:02Speaker 01

  that's been a factor. But yes, I think there have been one or two eyebrows raised. They're not player swaps, because player swaps, you don't tend to make a profit. But where players have been moving in opposite directions. And we certainly saw that in 2024, when the rules were a bit more relaxed. In the sense, yeah, we go back to the Elliot Anderson transfer and Forest sold their third choice keeper to Newcastle, made a big profit on that. And we saw other swaps between, I think it was between Villa and Chelsea and Everton and Leicester and so on. And this did cause eyebrows to be raised. UEFA have said that we're not going to allow that. But the Premier League do allow that. So...

• 10:45Speaker 01

  The number of transfers, I think, has taken people by surprise over the course of the summer. At the same time, you look at the justification from the club's point of view, we've got a record number of clubs in Europe. And you know, as professionals, Sunday, Thursday, Sunday, Thursday or Saturday, Wednesday is means you can't play sixty five, seventy games in a season. So you need bigger squads. You're getting extra money from Europe. So you've got more clubs who are playing in Europe. You've got more clubs with a manager who is in his first window. And that manager might want a slightly different philosophy, a slightly different style of player. So you've got nine new managers. They will be putting pressure onto the club, onto the recruitment

• 11:29Speaker 01

  team. So I think there are a series of factors. And on the net basis, the spending this year is no greater than it was in twenty twenty five, because we're seeing a greater proportion, as you highlighted, there's a greater proportion of club transfers going from Premier League to Premier League, because the Premier League is now the super league of Europe. A club such as Bournemouth can outspend everybody with the exception of Real, Barcelona and clubs of that nature.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  How is that possible? How has Premier League become this wealthy in terms of the amount of money that they can spend against other leagues? I mean, obviously, the TV rights are much bigger in this country and different countries have different rules. And I'll ask a question on behalf of Mike here as well. I know he's not here, but I know what he'd ask, because he always talks about, he says, I presume the Premier League clubs determined this and decided that they go with these rules, because normally they have that fourteen club. Is that actually the case? And why do we differ so much from European, the big European leagues outside of the Premier League?

• 12:34Speaker 01

  First of all, you're absolutely right. These rules have been voted for by the Premier League clubs. And what was unusual for this, the introduction of the rules which have just come in, is that normally it's a unanimous vote. Occasionally, it used to be a shock when it was nineteen to one. This one just scraped through. You need a two thirds majority. This was fourteen to six in favour.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Do you know which six voted against it? Do you know?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Well, it was. It was Bournemouth, Brighton, Palace, Brentford, Leeds and West Ham, I think. And those are the clubs who say, we want to spend more of our activities on player sales. And under the new rules, the player sales, you take the average profit over three years. So it's reduced the impact of the benefits for those clubs. It could also be argued that those clubs are also, they're always a little bit nervous at the start of the season about being relegated. And the new rules certainly benefit the clubs which have just been promoted from the Championship compared to the rules that they replaced. So I think there was two

• 13:38Speaker 01

  factors in there. As to why the Premier League is so successful, I think you've got to give the Premier League, and I think this was Rick Parry and his team in nineteen ninety two, when it started, they went out to Indonesia, they went to Nigeria, they went to the United States and Australia and said, we've got this new competition. We're old enough to remember when English football was was not popular, when we know the reasons why.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  I am. I certainly am.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  We've got this new competition. We're going to give it to you for nothing for five years. And this was at the start, this was at the birth of satellite television. And all of a sudden, the broadcasters found they were getting fantastic viewing figures. And then five years later, the Premier League says, do you want to renew? And the broadcasters said, yeah, we love this. They said, well, this time, we're going to charge for it. And the broadcasters knew it was so valuable that they got in there. And by the time La Liga and the Bundesliga and Serie A and so on, by the time those leagues realised, actually, there's loads of money to be made from outside of our domestic environment, the Premier League had already got its talents. It had that first mover advantage. And the thing about being

• 14:46Speaker 01

  a football fan, it's a lifelong commitment. So Manchester United already had a huge fan base in Asia. Liverpool had one as well. And therefore, it was that much more difficult to try to persuade people, you know, it's Brescia versus Udinese. Well, you know, if I'm a Hong Kong football fan, I've already chosen my preferred football team, and it's a Premier League team. And that's why today, the Premier League makes more money from the international TV deals than it does from the ones with Sky and TNT and the BBC and so on. And that's that's unique in European football. Germany, they might get ten percent of the money. So it's the globalisation of the Premier League. It's one of our biggest and most successful exports.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Do you see that carrying on? Because I reckon for the last twenty or twenty five years, people have been saying, it can't keep getting bigger. The signing on fees, the salaries, the transfers, it can't keep on. But every year, it keeps on going and going and gets bigger and bigger. Can it sustain and go on and carry on?

• 15:51Speaker 01

  It can certainly carry on. The rate of growth can't be maintained. And if you take a look at the the deal between the Premier League and Sky, which is sort of our main deal, the Premier League is getting four percent more money in twenty twenty nine compared to twenty seventeen. And it's had to give an extra hundred games a season. So I think the domestic growth is limited, but we're still seeing the Premier League announcing deals in, whether that's Thailand or the United States or wherever, where the fascination with the Premier League continues. So I think there will be growth, but not the extent of growth. But the levels are so, so high. I've got every single wage bill from every single

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Premier League club going back to nineteen ninety two. And if you compare that to domestic inflation, domestic inflation's up a hundred and thirty percent since nineteen ninety two. The revenue of the Premier League is up three thousand one hundred, which is absolutely brilliant. The wage bill is up three thousand five hundred. The transfer bill is up four thousand five hundred. So I'd expect there to be a little bit of cutback, because you can't continue at those rates. But we're already at very high levels compared to the rest of European football.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Is there any danger, Kieran, of the whole thing imploding? The bubble could burst.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  I think unlikely, because Carlo Ancelotti says that football is the most important of the unimportant things in life. And what does that mean? It means that if times are tough at home, what am I going to give up? I go to the pub once a week instead of twice. We'll downgrade the holiday this year. Will I give up my season ticket? That's my birthright. You know, I'm a Newcastle fan, I'm a Leicester fan, I'm a Manchester United. I've had that for thirty or forty years. And as my wife says to me, the thing about football with you, you've been doing it for fifty years, it's the same pub with the same table, with the same blokes, they're talking the same nonsense. And that's part of your identity. And that's something which you will be loathe to give up. You cut a football fan and they

• 17:57Speaker 01

  bleed the colours of their club. And as such, it's the most addictive product in the world. If I've got an iPhone, and I'm stick, stick to my iPhone, and if Samsung come along and say, we'll give you an iPhone, we'll give you one of our phones for nothing, I'll say, I'll take it. If another football club comes to me, if Steve Parry from from Crystal Palace says, give up your Brighton season ticket and come to Selhurst Park, and you can watch Palace for nothing for the next ten years, I'm not going to do it. You know, a Newcastle fan wouldn't do that to Sunderland. So it is this most addictive product in our life. And that's why I think it's the last thing that we will sacrifice as football fans.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  How many clubs are in danger in terms of breaking the rules now?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  We've crunched the sums. And we reckon that most of them are okay. Remember, the Premier League voted for these rules, so they're not going to vote for rules, which is going to make it difficult for them to satisfy them. Because if you spend between eighty five percent and a hundred and fifteen percent of the money coming in on your player costs, you effectively pay us a tax. You pay a fine. If it goes above a hundred and fifteen percent, you get an immediate six point deduction. So the clubs aren't going to to vote to punch themselves in the face. And whilst the clubs are losing money, the owners are sufficiently wealthy to absorb those losses. And the owners, they've got

• 19:25Speaker 01

  big egos. They want the related success that comes with being a successful club. So therefore, we are seeing the owners treating the clubs as sort of trophy assets as opposed to businesses a lot of the time.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Let's take a little break there. There's plenty more to discuss when we come back.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Welcome back to the Rest is Football special episode with Kieran Maguire talking about the finances of the game. Gives a few examples of the loopholes that they will always find, these clever people.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Well, the one I think which caused a lot of concern at the time was Chelsea's approach. When you sign a player, you spread the cost of the player's transfer fee over the life of the contract. So if I sign a player for £100 million on a five-year contract, 100 divided by five, that's costing me £20 million. That was going into my PSR calculations. What Chelsea did was said, well, let's sign him on an eight-year contract. 100 divided by eight is 12 and a half. And immediately, I've saved myself £7.5 million. If I do that for half a dozen players, I've just sold myself, you know, £45, £50 million. And that allows the clubs to spend

• 20:46Speaker 01

  more money on wages, more money on other costs and so on. So that was one. The other issue, which we saw quite regularly, was what we refer to as a related party transaction. It's where the owner of the club sets up another business. So we saw, I think it was Birmingham City, Sheffield Wednesday, Derby County, Aston Villa, Everton and other clubs, and Chelsea in particular. They said, right, we've got a car park, we've got the stadium. It cost us £20 million. You know, it was built years ago. We're going to sell it to ourselves for £100 million. That £80 million profit went into the books.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  Sell it to ourselves. I love that.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  And it's ludicrous. You know, if I take my watch off my right hand and then sell it to myself and stick it on my left hand for £100 million quid, I've not made £100 million worth of profit because overall, we're in exactly the same situation. But I think you've got to be critical of the way the rules were drafted. And I teach creative accounting and how to spot these things and how to create these things as well. And when the rules were introduced, I remember just sort of going down through them. I've not got many friends or much of a life. And when literally went through on a line by line basis, they said, they could try this, they could try this. And over the years, we've seen clubs put those into case.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  If you were put in charge by the FA and said, right, we want to find the best way to protect clubs from themselves, which is, I think, the premise originally, but also to have an element of fairness. What changes would you make to the rules that apply at the moment?

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Well, if we want a more even playing field and think that's the criticism which is levelled, that those clubs who are the established big six, it's very difficult to catch up with those. And at the same time, you want to protect the game. What I would say is that we will have a player cost cap, and that can be a combination of wages and transfer fees and agencies. We'll have that. And let's say, let's take the average of the top three clubs for the last couple of seasons. That's your limit. Now, if that's going to cause you to lose money, what the owner has to do is if the owner's serious, you put, you say, right, it's going to cost, the club's going to lose £400 million over the next two or three years. He or she has to put that money into a bank account, into

• 23:09Speaker 01

  an escrow bank account, which they cannot access. And if the club hits hard times, if the owner's circumstances change, as we saw with Roman Abramovich, if the owner loses interest in football, as we saw with Sheffield Wednesday, whatever it's going to be, you've effectively got an insurance fund. And that insurance fund, because it's got enough money in it to last that club two to three years, it gives the club the opportunity to move, you know, a bit like a parachute payment, to come to terms with new financial circumstances. And we don't run the risk of the club going into administration, jobs being lost and all of the negatives that arise under those circumstances. There's plenty of owners that

• 23:51Speaker 01

  will say, well, thanks, but no thanks. We're quite happy where we are. But if that would allow the, some of the new owners, and if you take a look at Villa, you've got Nasser Sowiris, the richest man in Egypt, you've got Wes Edens, you know, very successful US billionaire. Clearly, we've got Newcastle with a PIF fund, you've got Marinakis at Forest and so on. If they want to put that money in, they can do so. If they don't want to put that money in and run the club in exactly the same way at present, it allows those ambitious and those aspirational clubs to move forwards without distorting the whole market at the top, because they're limited to spending the average of the top two or three clubs. And it creates greater competition as well.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  And I guess the big six allegedly wouldn't vote for that because another competitor coming on to, coming in to take them on, no? And over a long period of time, not just two or three years, which was what we're seeing at the minute.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  That's right. Because, you know, as far as Champions League places are concerned, you get six into four doesn't go very well. Seven into four, eight into four makes it that much more difficult. And we saw with Super League, you know, the whole purpose of Super League was that that six into four problem was immediately removed because you didn't have to win football matches. So clubs will do what's best for them. And we all act in self-interest, and I fully understand that. My suggestion wouldn't work because those six clubs would vote against it. And those clubs who have got owners who are wealthy, but not hyper wealthy, well, why should they vote for a system which would allow the likes

• 25:25Speaker 01

  of Villa and Newcastle and perhaps Forest and so on to get bigger and to get further ahead. So yeah, it's a pie in the sky idea. But it does, in my view, address the two issues of not getting hyper costs, but allowing new owners to come in, provided they can guarantee the funds to allow their clubs to be more competitive.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. How does it work in terms, because we know that, you know, the laws of the game, for example, they're kind of defined by IFAB and it's there for the world and everything has to be the same. But in terms of the financial side of football, it seems to be different for Premier League than it would be for La Liga. And why is there not kind of a main body that decides on all of the financial side of things?

• 26:14Speaker 01

  I mean, you're absolutely right. La Liga's rules are fascinating. In La Liga, you've got an app. And every time you try to register a player, you have to go and put in data into the app. And you get either a green light or a red light, and that would determine whether or not you can sign that player. And La Liga's rules were introduced just over a decade ago, when there were many clubs who were in financial difficulties. And at the time, each individual club used to negotiate its own TV rights. So you had Barcelona and Real, and then, you know, you would have the smaller clubs who were desperate for money. And they were getting into trouble. So the reason why we have individual rules

• 26:57Speaker 01

  is that what's, what works in England might not work necessarily in Spain. If you take a look at the TV deal in the Premier League, the club finishing top of the Premier League gets 1.6 times the amount of money that the club finishing bottom. That's actually brilliant. That does allow the smaller clubs to make progress. And I think that should be encouraged. In Spain, it used to be sort of seven or eight times. So a rule which might work in the UK wouldn't necessarily work in La Liga or Syria. And then you've got people tend to be quite protective. When I talk to people on legal, they say, well, we think our system's best. You listen to the Premier League, we think our system's best and so on.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  How pissed off do the other leagues get in Europe about the Premier League? Is there a tinge of like jealousy or actually bafflement? Or what is the view, do you think, of the countries, other strong leagues in Europe about the Premier League and certainly financial side of the Premier League?

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's a lot of envy in the sense that the Premier League have done an awful lot of things right. And there was a view initially, I think, I think the reaction of the other four major European leagues, which is what Spain, Italy, Germany and France, and they were a bit sniffy towards the Premier League's sort of rampant commercialisation of itself. And now they've become very envious. At the same time, if you take a look at what's happened over the course of the summer, there's a lot of, thanks very much, the Premier League, because we've made an absolute fortune from selling our players. Over 60% of deals were

• 28:35Speaker 01

  from European clubs to Premier League clubs. And that has meant that many of them who were themselves in financial difficulties will say, well, cheers, that 20, 30 million euro deal has rescued us and allowed us to be more competitive. I do work with, I've worked with the Dutch league, the Belgian league, Romanian league and so on. And they just tend to admire. They say, you've got it right. You've got the benefit of English being everybody's second language. So that has helped as well. But there's an acceptance that the big clubs in Spain are the ones who are most resentful because Real and Barcelona think that the Champions League should be theirs by right. But if you take a look at

• 29:20Speaker 01

  the mid-tier leagues, you know, Belgium, Portugal and so on, they just see that the Premier League is a fantastic customer for their talent.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Do you think we're seeing a different approach from Man United this summer? In terms of, I know the last I read, there were over a billion in debt and everything else. Do you think we're seeing a different approach with their lack of spending?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  On a gross basis, yes, I think the challenge with Manchester United, and again, I've got all the data on spreadsheets, it will say Manchester United has spent over 200, people forget, it spent well over 200 million pounds in the summer of 2025, you know, there were three strikers that they bought, for example. There's been less spending in this winter. Certainly, they've been interested in players. I think the problem with Manchester United to a certain extent is that so many players and so many people see Manchester United as a destination club. You know, where else in the world can you go? And they've been very poor when it comes to player sales. And quite a few players who've been very

• 30:22Speaker 01

  talented have been allowed to leave at the expiry of their contract on Bosman's and so on. We've seen Casemiro, we saw Pogba, again, all these players have left. And that's meant that the money coming into the club hasn't been great. So on a net basis, Manchester United are actually quite high in the Premier League spending table, but on a gross basis, it's their lack of ability to generate sales. And I think that this has caused lots of people to scratch their heads because Chelsea's academy, Chelsea sold 39 players in this winter, a lot of them academy players, and they're getting sort of, you know, four, five, eight, 10 million for them on an individual basis. Manchester City have been very successful

• 31:03Speaker 01

  at doing that. Manchester United, for some reason, there seems to be a blockage in their ability to sell. So it's the, it's the lack of ability to sell, combined with the fact that they owe 400 million pounds in unpaid transfer fees from previous summers and previous windows. And you, you know, it's just like a credit card. You can't spend money on your credit card when you've got an outstanding bill. So they have to deal with that first.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  Right. The other Manchester club, I know you're not the most popular amongst Manchester City fans, but where are we? I think that, I mean, people will be, they're always, everyone always asks me, what's happening with the Manchester City, all the charges, what's happening? What's happening? What's happening? Where are we, Kieran?

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Well, we are now almost two years since the Commission first sat, because it commenced in September 2024. It took around about 10 to 12 weeks to hear all of the evidence. And as one lawyer said to me, if there's 115 charges, there's 115 defences. So, so it makes it difficult. You've got three people sitting on the Commission, all of whom are very high-powered people in their own rights. So getting them into the same room at the same time, over the course of the last 18 to 20 months, has proven to be very difficult. And then, from what I understand, and you know, that has been very much a news blackout.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  You've got to give, again, the people involved, the professionals involved, a lot of credit. There's no leaks, there's no, there's no sort of WhatsApp groups with gossip. But I think there were some people where they wanted to hear evidence from them. And these people simply said, well, we're not prepared to give evidence, it's nothing to do with us. So one of the alleged charges was apparently relating to Roberto Mancini, in the sense that he was supposedly on a 2 million pound a year basic salary at Manchester City, and was getting another 2 million pounds for doing four days of coaching in Abu Dhabi, where Manchester City's owners are based. Well, he was asked to give, if he was asked to give evidence for that, and he says, oh, sorry, mate, I'm washing my hair that day,

• 33:08Speaker 01

  I've got coaching elsewhere, that he's under no legal obligation. So I think some of the key potential sources of evidence weren't given. And that makes it that much more difficult because what Manchester City are effectively being accused of is corporate fraud. Now, the threshold for proof there has to be very, very high. And the, the weight of evidence, the number of documents, and we're probably talking hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pieces of evidence, they have to be gone through with a fine-tooth comb. We saw with the Chelsea case, where Chelsea had, what, 78 charges, that the verdict was given, and then Chelsea effectively appealed, and that took another three or four months to work

• 33:51Speaker 01

  out. So we could be in a situation, and I've got no evidence to back this up, that there has been a decision made on Manchester City, and either the Premier League or Manchester City have immediately appealed. And we're now actually working our way through the appeal process to try to get a final, final answer.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  Wouldn't we know if it was an appeal?

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Well, we didn't know that in terms of Chelsea. So it's, you know, the legal position. And these charges are so serious, that it's difficult to see how the board of Manchester City could survive if they lose the case. And it would look hugely embarrassing for the Premier League if they lose the case, because the legal cost for both parties are probably in excess of 100 million pounds.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  Difficult question. What's your gut feeling? When's this gonna, when's this gonna air? When are we gonna know? What's gonna happen?

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Well, if you take a look at corporate fraud elsewhere, two to three years for a hearing to be resolved is quite the norm. My gut reaction is that Manchester City will be found guilty in terms of the non-cooperation with the Premier League charges, and they've effectively admitted that themselves. But if so, that's just gonna be a fine, because there's no on-pitch advantage for, for non-cooperation with an investigation. As for the other, it's, it's the toss of a coin. And I think that's the problem. City have got a very strong defence team, as have the Premier League. Who knows?

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Football's not just about, obviously, the Premier League. What's the state of the game financially for those clubs outside? I mean, I read something recently that possibly 30, 40 football clubs might be up for sale outside of the Premier League. What is the state of the game? And obviously, we've got the, the new regulator in now, aren't they gonna make some kind of announcement, obviously fairly soon, I believe. And I think that might concern possibly clubs outside of the Premier League, because we know football is the pyramid. What is the state of the pyramid at the moment?

• 35:52Speaker 01

  It's not healthy in terms of a normal business. And if we look at it, normal business. So, so I wrote a couple of state of the game reports with a colleague, as during Covid and as we came out of Covid. If you take a look at the Championship, the average loss is a 400,000 pounds a week. So you're relying on the owner. And there have been cases where the chief executive, the finance director, says, it's three days before payroll, we've not got enough money to cover the wages. And they're desperately trying to get hold of the owner of the club, who happens to be involved in software, or was involved in shipping, was involved in, and they tend to be overseas. So it is, it is very, very

• 36:32Speaker 01

  precarious, but it tends to muddle its way through. We've seen the losses in League One, they've gone up from an average of 2 million pounds a year to around about 6 million pounds a year over the course of the last two to three seasons, because the, the gap between the Championship and League One has, has increased. Of the 92 clubs, two-thirds of them are losing money. They are reliant on owners. And it comes back to the goodwill of owners. But if, if the owner's own business gets into trouble, and we saw that, that could be part of the issue that we got at Leicester, but it was certainly an issue

• 37:13Speaker 01

  at Sheffield Wednesday, or if the owner just decides, I'm getting abused by the fans on social media, I can't, I can't even attend the matches myself, and I'm getting asked to go and put in 300 grand a week, they move away. That can cause problems. So, so it is precarious, but there's what we sometimes refer to as the bigger fall theory. There's an awful lot of people who want to buy football clubs. The number of calls that I get, I'll go on Zoom conversations, and the first thing I always say is, why do you want to do this? You're not, you're not gonna make money during the period of ownership, it's not gonna pay you dividends. I come off social media if you lose two or three matches, because there's,

• 37:55Speaker 01

  the world is full of experts in football, even though they've got no qualifications. Why on earth are you doing this? They say, oh, well, I've been very successful in X, in my business, I think I can do this in football. You've got no idea what you're letting yourselves in for. So, but they are still coming. And there's an awful lot of very wealthy people in the United States, where the economy has been fantastically successful compared to Europe. And, and they've got spare cash, they've watched Ted Lasso, they've, they've watched Robert Ryan, and they think, they genuinely think it's reality.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  We've got one of those, Kieran, and Micah Richards, he's on about investing in a non-league club. And we both said the same thing to him, and said, are you fucking mad? You've made so much money, and now you're gonna blow all by in a non-league club?

• 38:41Speaker 00

  How much would it cost Micah to buy, let's say, a half decent non-league club and the costs going on for that?

• 38:48Speaker 02

  I was going to be listening to this, I might put him off.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Well, Wrexham cost £2 million.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Wrexham story is fantastic and I remember I was at the Fans United match at Wrexham when it was, what, 1994, 2004 and the Wrexham fans were absolutely brilliant and I wished them all the best, but even when they were in non-league, they were losing 80 to 100 grand a week and this was despite all of that extra attention that they were getting. So they are losing money on a week to week basis and that's the issue. It's not how much it's going to cost you to buy a club. You can buy a club, Scunthorpe cost £3 for one of their owners a couple of years ago, but then it's the half a million pounds a year that you got to find. So that's the issue and can you make money? Yes, the value

• 39:38Speaker 01

  of and the prices of football clubs is continuing to rise simply because there's more and more people who think that they can be the new, whoever it's going to be, the new successful owner, Matthew Benham or Tony Bloom or whoever, I've got an idea. So you can make money compared to the purchase price and the sale price, but it's a bit like owning a racehorse. During the period of ownership, it's costing you a fortune and you get a few smiles a year when it wins a race.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  The regulator is about to make an announcement. A, what do you think they'll come up with? And B, will it carry any real weight?

• 40:15Speaker 01

  I think if you've got the main issues as far as the regulator are concerned, it's A, preserving the history and the heritage of clubs. So to stop another MK Dons or similar. And we see in the United States how franchises move from city to city. Well, the regulator will stop that and they'll preserve the shirt and they'll preserve the badge and they'll preserve it. I don't ever think that was a major problem in English football, I'll be honest. Secondly, we've got the issue of owners. Football historically has had a disproportionate number of wrongs and it's, you know, it's like moths to a flame. They get attracted. I've done some work with the National Crime Agency and Interpol and so

• 40:56Speaker 01

  on and we know how money laundering and football fit together quite well in certain aspects. So I think there will be that. And then I think the final issue, and this is the one which has caused a lot of aggravation, is that the Premier League and the EFL can't agree a distribution deal. Now, if you take a look at the guy who's in charge of the regulator, he's from a TV background, he's used to negotiating deals and his job is that if Richard Masters and Rip Parry can't agree a deal, he'll knock their heads together and say, right, this is how it's going to be. So the rest of football, don't expect major changes. The government said, we want it to be light touch, it's a successful industry

• 41:41Speaker 01

  in so many ways, we don't want to interfere. So those are the areas I think it's going to concentrate on. And the State of the Game report, there are drafts of it going around already. That's due to come out in the next month or two.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  You've been very generous with your time. I've got one last question which concerns something like the regulator. I mean, you're obviously an expert in this field and did they ever come to you?

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I've written two papers for the government. I've trained the staff at DCMS and the regulator. Don't get paid for it, I'm a university lecturer, it's a public sector employee. Yeah, you talk to people, but...

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Good to hear.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  I don't want to be making decisions. Yeah, that's above my pay grade. I just want to be a teacher. And also sometimes it's better to be outside the tent lobbying on the bombs rather than inside. So I like the idea of being independent as well.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  Well, thanks very much, Kieran. Absolutely fascinating and I think it will give our listeners and viewers a real insight into some of the questions particularly that they probably ask in just like Alan and me, because it's definitely above our pay grade.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. It was brilliant.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Thank you, guys.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.

• 43:36Speaker 04

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 43:38Speaker 05

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 43:41Speaker 06

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 43:54Speaker 06

  We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today and disseminated into an operation order or frago.

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