Premier League is not a charity – rest of football must put away its begging bowl if it wants to attack the golden goose

EVERYONE seems to agree the Premier League has too much money, too much power and too much influence. And, apparently, it is all getting terribly unfair. Funny that. Some fans and pundits have suggested the Premier League’s influence is becoming too great Credit: Getty Elliot Anderson’s mammoth move to Manchester City is just one example of the amount of money that is flowing into the Prem Credit: Getty Because there is another way of looking at the Premier League’s wealth and power. It is the reason an awful lot of the rest of English football has any money at all. I have spent more than 30 years in football, much of that time as a Premier League executive and shareholder sitting around the table when the arguments about money, governance, distribution and the future of the game were being had. Dream Team is back, free, and there’s £100,000 up for grabs! So, I have seen the Premier League from the inside. It is not perfect but it’s close to it. Yet I do find it rather strange that we spend so much time complaining about the Premier League’s success while simultaneously asking it to pay for everyone else. You cannot have it both ways. The Premier League committed £1.6billion to the wider game and communities from 2022 to 2025. In 2024-25 alone, more than £550million went beyond the Premier League itself. More than half a billion pounds. In one season. That money reaches all 92 Premier League and EFL clubs, all 72 National League clubs, women’s and girls’ football, grassroots football and communities. SUN VEGAS WELCOME OFFER: GET UP TO £100 BONUS The Premier League’s prestige and fame brings more money to the entire football pyramid Credit: Reuters Since 2000, more than 1,000 clubs have benefited from the Premier League Stadium Fund to the tune of more than £200m. This isn’t a league sitting in a vault counting its money while the rest of football picks over the crumbs. It is the golden goose everyone appears determined to tell off for laying golden eggs. There are real arguments about how the money should be distributed.Should the EFL receive more? Almost certainly worth discussing. Are parachute payments right? Debate away. Is competitive balance perfect? Of course not. Does the Premier League have too much influence? That’s a legitimate question. But if we are going to have those arguments, let’s at least start with the inconvenient truth. The Premier League’s success is funding a huge part of the game beneath it. And this is where the comparison with Fifa comes in. A comparison cannot be made between Gianni Infantino’s Fifa and the Premier League Credit: PA I have heard the Premier League compared to Fifa — an organisation supposedly interested primarily in money, power and protecting its own interests. Really? Let’s look at what each actually does. The Premier League has to run football every week. Not a five-week tournament every four years. EVERY WEEK. Players such as Elliot Anderson need to be paid. Managers have to be paid. Coaches, doctors, analysts, academy staff, everyone else needed to put on the world’s most commercially successful domestic football competition need to be paid. And then there is the small matter of the players . . . they don’t play for free. Premier League clubs scout them, sign them, develop them, train them and pay them. They carry the enormous cost of producing the football product that everybody else wants a piece of. Even Fifa. When international football comes calling, clubs must release their players when the regulations require it. There is no polite conversation along the lines of ‘would you mind letting us borrow your £100m player for a few weeks? The answer, effectively, is: hand him over. The club keeps paying him. Fifa gets the player and Fifa compensates the club, but to what level? Let’s look at the numbers. For the 2026 World Cup, Fifa’s Club Benefits Programme has a headline value of $355million — that is about £260m. The Premier League also contributes to international competition ran by the likes of Uefa and Fifa (led respectively by Aleksandr Ceferin and Infantino pictured above) Credit: PA Some of the league’s best talents and biggest assets are willingly handed over for major tournaments despite the risks Credit: Splash Sounds enormous… until you put it beside the cost of actually running a Premier League club. Of that Fifa figure, $100million is allocated to clubs releasing players for World Cup qualifying matches while $250 million relates to clubs whose players participate in the finals. The remaining $5m is reserved for programme administration and ‘other purposes’ — which is wonderfully vague. What purposes? Your guess is probably as good as mine. That entire Fifa pot is distributed around the world’s clubs. Manchester City’s 2024-25 accounts showed that £355.4m was spent on wages and salaries alone. So Fifa’s $100m qualifying pot is less than a third of Manchester City’s annual wages. One club. One year. That puts the financial burden of producing football into perspective. Fifa does not pay the club wages of the players it uses for international football. The clubs do. And that is why the comparison is worth making. Manchester City alone burn through hundreds of millions on just wages each year Credit: Alamy Not because Fifa and the Premier League are the same — they plainly aren’t. But because it exposes how simplistic the accusation against the Premier League can be. Premier League money doesn’t just disappear into Premier League pockets. It pays for the product. And then a huge amount of it goes back into football. That is why I find the constant outrage about Premier League power slightly curious. If you want less Premier League money, fine. But understand what that means. Less money for the EFL and National League. Less money for grassroots facilities, for women’s football and the communities that benefit from Premier League funding. The Premier League is not a charity. It is a highly successful business. But its commercial success is the engine that allows it to make such a substantial contribution to the rest of the game. You cannot keep attacking the golden goose and then complain when the eggs get smaller. And you certainly cannot accuse it of being interested only in money while simultaneously putting out your begging bowl. The Premier League brings global eyes to English football Credit: EPA Of course, the Premier League is interested in money. It would be spectacularly badly run if it wasn’t. The difference is what it does with that money. After more than three decades in football, including many years sitting around the Premier League table as a shareholder, I have seen clubs fight fiercely for their own interests. Of course they do. Football is a business. But I have also watched the Premier League become the most successful football competition in the world. And its success created a financial engine that reaches far beyond the 20 clubs actually playing in it. So, by all means challenge the Premier League. But let’s stop pretending its success is somehow the problem. For a huge part of English football, it is the solution. And if you want to compare it with Fifa, do so. But just remember one thing. The Premier League doesn’t get its money from nowhere. It earns it.It pays the players. It carries the risk. It puts on the show. And then it gives away an extraordinary amount of its success. So perhaps the question shouldn’t be: Why is the Premier League so powerful? Perhaps it should be: What would English football look like without its money? I suspect a lot of the people complaining about the Premier League’s power would rather not find out.