Stuart Carroll is Chair of the Conservative Health Policy Forum and a former cabinet member for adult social care, health, and children’s services. He is also a diehard Newcastle United fan and footballing enthusiast.
I should declare an interest at the outset. I am “black and white”: a lifelong Newcastle United supporter.
I have watched my club emerge from years of managed decline with owners who now possess both the resources and ambition to challenge at the highest level. I have then watched football’s financial regulations place extraordinary restrictions on their ability to do so. This argument is much bigger than my beloved Toon. It is about competition, fairness and, increasingly, the UK economy.
Indeed, there is something profoundly unconservative about the financial regime English football has created. Competition is one of the fundamental principles of conservatism. Competitive markets work because challengers are allowed to challenge incumbents. Capital moves towards opportunity. Investment drives improvement. Successful businesses cannot simply write rules preventing ambitious competitors from investing enough money to catch them. Yet football has managed to construct something remarkably close to precisely that system.
Under the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) and the financial regime succeeding them, spending power is substantially connected to the revenues clubs generate. That sounds sensible until you consider what it actually means. The biggest clubs have the biggest revenues because they accumulated decades of success, supporters, sponsorship agreements, broadcasting exposure and European income. They built enormous financial moats around themselves.
Then football introduced regulations effectively saying that because those clubs have enormous revenues, they can sustain enormous expenditure, while ambitious challengers with wealthy owners cannot deploy equivalent amounts of fresh capital to catch them. Yesterday’s success therefore becomes tomorrow’s spending advantage.
That isn’t free competition. It begins to look remarkably like a cartel. Imagine Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda designing regulations stipulating that a new supermarket entrant could invest only in proportion to its existing turnover. Competition authorities might have something to say about it. Yet in football we somehow call the equivalent “fair play”. Where, precisely, is the fairness?
There should certainly be rules protecting football clubs. Owners should not be permitted to mortgage the future of historic institutions through unsustainable borrowing. We don’t want a Leeds United of the past or more recent version of Sheffield Wednesday. Wages, taxes and transfer instalments must be paid. Owners should demonstrate funds and provide guarantees against contractual commitments. Yet that is entirely different from telling somebody they cannot invest their own equity into improving a football club.
This matters far beyond football. Sadly, Britain is skint. You need an abacus to count our national debt. The public finances are extraordinarily constrained. Government borrowing is historically elevated, economic growth remains inadequate and demands upon the Exchequer are multiplying. Most importantly, Britain urgently needs to spend substantially more on defence. The world has become considerably more dangerous. Rebuilding military capability cannot indefinitely be financed through accounting manoeuvres and optimistic future growth assumptions. Choices have to be made now.
This inevitably requires dramatic reform and reduction of Britain’s welfare bill rather than continually increasing taxation on productive activity. Yet whichever political view one takes on where spending should fall, one conclusion should surely unite Left and Right: Britain desperately needs growth.
Thankfully, sitting directly before us is one of the greatest growth assets this country possesses: the Premier League. Britain has surprisingly few genuinely unique global products. The English language is one. British music is emphatically another. The monarchy another. And the Premier League – our beautiful game transformed into the most compelling domestic sporting competition on earth – is unquestionably another.
Indeed, if anybody needed reminding of Britain’s extraordinary ability to turn culture into both emotion and economic activity, look at Oasis. God, we needed that reunion. We needed it for reasons that cannot be entered neatly into a Treasury spreadsheet. Britain has endured years of political rancour, economic gloom and a pervasive sense that the country had somehow forgotten how to enjoy itself. Then Noel and Liam Gallagher acquiesce, walk back onto a stage together and hundreds of thousands of people remembered simultaneously what it felt like to belt out the same song with their arms around complete strangers. Supersonic scenes.
There is an economic lesson in there too. The Oasis reunion wasn’t merely nostalgia. It meant packed stadiums, hotels, pubs, restaurants, trains, taxis, merchandise, employment and international visitors flying into Britain to experience something authentically British. In other words, the Gallagher brothers didn’t merely put Wonderwall back into our lives. They whacked a substantial amount of money back into the British economy even when they were Half the World Away. Good for them. And if they fancy doing again in 2027, even better. Definitely more than maybe.
Because this is precisely what Britain should understand about the few global cultural assets where we possess something genuinely difficult for another country to reproduce. Don’t constrain them. Amplify them. Grow them. Export them. You cannot AI Oasis. The Premier League is the sporting equivalent. Its economic footprint is extraordinary: billions in economic activity, billions in taxation and more than 100,000 jobs. It’s matches are consumed obsessively across almost every corner of the planet.
Think about the absurdity. Britain has created one of the world’s great entertainment products – and our response is to restrict people from investing more money into it. It is economic madness. Foreign investment in English football doesn’t simply enrich footballers. It builds stadiums and training grounds. It employs construction workers, hospitality staff, coaches, analysts, administrators and technology specialists. It fills hotels, restaurants and pubs. It regenerates parts of cities. It attracts international tourists. It generates income tax, National Insurance, VAT and corporation tax. And unlike government spending, the capital is voluntarily provided by investors who actively want to bring it here.
At a time when Britain desperately needs private investment, economic growth and additional tax revenues to finance everything from defence to essential public services, why are we telling international investors that they may invest in our football clubs – but only up to a regulatorily determined limit? It is difficult to imagine a more self-defeating growth policy.
There is a political irony here too. Keir Starmer made much of being a genuine football enthusiast. His support for Arsenal and love of the game were well-documented. Yet he never properly grasped this contradiction. Andy Burnham should. The self-proclaimed King of the North is a season-ticket-holding Toffee. More importantly, fairness has been central to his political vocabulary throughout his career. Football is way more useful than Tik-Tocking the cost of a Freddo PM.
So here is an opportunity to apply fairness to football. Not equality of outcome. Equality of opportunity. Let Newcastle try to catch Arsenal. Let Aston Villa try to catch Liverpool. Let Burnham’s Everton dream of turning their magnificent new stadium into the foundation of another great era. Let Nottingham Forest aspire to become a European power again. Let Sunderland be great for once! And if those clubs invest intelligently, let them succeed. If they invest badly, let them fail. That is competition. That is sport. A UK economic Masterplan.
Incidentally, that is capitalism. The alternative is a system in which established clubs retain enormous advantages because they happened to become globally powerful before the drawbridge was raised. That stinks of socialism. That cannot seriously be described as sporting fairness. Football needs financial regulation, but its objective should be solvency, not enforced competitive hierarchy.
Require owners to inject equity rather than dangerous debt. Demand proof of funds. Require guarantees. Stress-test clubs against revenue falls. Punish unpaid creditors severely. Then get out of the way. Britain needs investment. Britain needs growth. Britain needs tax revenues. Britain needs to finance its defence and essential public services. And Britain happens to possess one of the most successful entertainment products ever created.
Oasis reminded us of something important. When Britain produces something the world loves, people will cross continents and spend fortunes to experience it. Our musicians understand that. Our football supporters understand that. Perhaps it is time our politicians and regulators did too.
So let Noel and Liam fill the stadiums. Let ambitious owners fill the transfer market. Let Newcastle, Everton, Villa, Forest and whoever comes next have a genuine crack at the established order. Protect football clubs from bankruptcy. Protect supporters from reckless owners. Protect the heritage of our national game. But stop protecting the incumbents from competition. We must not let it Slide Away.
Britain has extraordinary cultural intellectual property, but an oddly British tendency to regulate, apologise for or undersell it rather than fervently export it. Tear down the financial drawbridge. Set English football free.
And Oasis? Bring It On Down for 2027 and howay the lads!
Stuart Carroll is Chair of the Conservative Health Policy Forum and a former cabinet member for adult social care, health, and children’s services. He is also a diehard Newcastle United fan and footballing enthusiast.
I should declare an interest at the outset. I am “black and white”: a lifelong Newcastle United supporter.
I have watched my club emerge from years of managed decline with owners who now possess both the resources and ambition to challenge at the highest level. I have then watched football’s financial regulations place extraordinary restrictions on their ability to do so. This argument is much bigger than my beloved Toon. It is about competition, fairness and, increasingly, the UK economy.
Indeed, there is something profoundly unconservative about the financial regime English football has created. Competition is one of the fundamental principles of conservatism. Competitive markets work because challengers are allowed to challenge incumbents. Capital moves towards opportunity. Investment drives improvement. Successful businesses cannot simply write rules preventing ambitious competitors from investing enough money to catch them. Yet football has managed to construct something remarkably close to precisely that system.
Under the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) and the financial regime succeeding them, spending power is substantially connected to the revenues clubs generate. That sounds sensible until you consider what it actually means. The biggest clubs have the biggest revenues because they accumulated decades of success, supporters, sponsorship agreements, broadcasting exposure and European income. They built enormous financial moats around themselves.
Then football introduced regulations effectively saying that because those clubs have enormous revenues, they can sustain enormous expenditure, while ambitious challengers with wealthy owners cannot deploy equivalent amounts of fresh capital to catch them. Yesterday’s success therefore becomes tomorrow’s spending advantage.
That isn’t free competition. It begins to look remarkably like a cartel. Imagine Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda designing regulations stipulating that a new supermarket entrant could invest only in proportion to its existing turnover. Competition authorities might have something to say about it. Yet in football we somehow call the equivalent “fair play”. Where, precisely, is the fairness?
There should certainly be rules protecting football clubs. Owners should not be permitted to mortgage the future of historic institutions through unsustainable borrowing. We don’t want a Leeds United of the past or more recent version of Sheffield Wednesday. Wages, taxes and transfer instalments must be paid. Owners should demonstrate funds and provide guarantees against contractual commitments. Yet that is entirely different from telling somebody they cannot invest their own equity into improving a football club.
This matters far beyond football. Sadly, Britain is skint. You need an abacus to count our national debt. The public finances are extraordinarily constrained. Government borrowing is historically elevated, economic growth remains inadequate and demands upon the Exchequer are multiplying. Most importantly, Britain urgently needs to spend substantially more on defence. The world has become considerably more dangerous. Rebuilding military capability cannot indefinitely be financed through accounting manoeuvres and optimistic future growth assumptions. Choices have to be made now.
This inevitably requires dramatic reform and reduction of Britain’s welfare bill rather than continually increasing taxation on productive activity. Yet whichever political view one takes on where spending should fall, one conclusion should surely unite Left and Right: Britain desperately needs growth.
Thankfully, sitting directly before us is one of the greatest growth assets this country possesses: the Premier League. Britain has surprisingly few genuinely unique global products. The English language is one. British music is emphatically another. The monarchy another. And the Premier League – our beautiful game transformed into the most compelling domestic sporting competition on earth – is unquestionably another.
Indeed, if anybody needed reminding of Britain’s extraordinary ability to turn culture into both emotion and economic activity, look at Oasis. God, we needed that reunion. We needed it for reasons that cannot be entered neatly into a Treasury spreadsheet. Britain has endured years of political rancour, economic gloom and a pervasive sense that the country had somehow forgotten how to enjoy itself. Then Noel and Liam Gallagher acquiesce, walk back onto a stage together and hundreds of thousands of people remembered simultaneously what it felt like to belt out the same song with their arms around complete strangers. Supersonic scenes.
There is an economic lesson in there too. The Oasis reunion wasn’t merely nostalgia. It meant packed stadiums, hotels, pubs, restaurants, trains, taxis, merchandise, employment and international visitors flying into Britain to experience something authentically British. In other words, the Gallagher brothers didn’t merely put Wonderwall back into our lives. They whacked a substantial amount of money back into the British economy even when they were Half the World Away. Good for them. And if they fancy doing again in 2027, even better. Definitely more than maybe.
Because this is precisely what Britain should understand about the few global cultural assets where we possess something genuinely difficult for another country to reproduce. Don’t constrain them. Amplify them. Grow them. Export them. You cannot AI Oasis. The Premier League is the sporting equivalent. Its economic footprint is extraordinary: billions in economic activity, billions in taxation and more than 100,000 jobs. It’s matches are consumed obsessively across almost every corner of the planet.
Think about the absurdity. Britain has created one of the world’s great entertainment products – and our response is to restrict people from investing more money into it. It is economic madness. Foreign investment in English football doesn’t simply enrich footballers. It builds stadiums and training grounds. It employs construction workers, hospitality staff, coaches, analysts, administrators and technology specialists. It fills hotels, restaurants and pubs. It regenerates parts of cities. It attracts international tourists. It generates income tax, National Insurance, VAT and corporation tax. And unlike government spending, the capital is voluntarily provided by investors who actively want to bring it here.
At a time when Britain desperately needs private investment, economic growth and additional tax revenues to finance everything from defence to essential public services, why are we telling international investors that they may invest in our football clubs – but only up to a regulatorily determined limit? It is difficult to imagine a more self-defeating growth policy.
There is a political irony here too. Keir Starmer made much of being a genuine football enthusiast. His support for Arsenal and love of the game were well-documented. Yet he never properly grasped this contradiction. Andy Burnham should. The self-proclaimed King of the North is a season-ticket-holding Toffee. More importantly, fairness has been central to his political vocabulary throughout his career. Football is way more useful than Tik-Tocking the cost of a Freddo PM.
So here is an opportunity to apply fairness to football. Not equality of outcome. Equality of opportunity. Let Newcastle try to catch Arsenal. Let Aston Villa try to catch Liverpool. Let Burnham’s Everton dream of turning their magnificent new stadium into the foundation of another great era. Let Nottingham Forest aspire to become a European power again. Let Sunderland be great for once! And if those clubs invest intelligently, let them succeed. If they invest badly, let them fail. That is competition. That is sport. A UK economic Masterplan.
Incidentally, that is capitalism. The alternative is a system in which established clubs retain enormous advantages because they happened to become globally powerful before the drawbridge was raised. That stinks of socialism. That cannot seriously be described as sporting fairness. Football needs financial regulation, but its objective should be solvency, not enforced competitive hierarchy.
Require owners to inject equity rather than dangerous debt. Demand proof of funds. Require guarantees. Stress-test clubs against revenue falls. Punish unpaid creditors severely. Then get out of the way. Britain needs investment. Britain needs growth. Britain needs tax revenues. Britain needs to finance its defence and essential public services. And Britain happens to possess one of the most successful entertainment products ever created.
Oasis reminded us of something important. When Britain produces something the world loves, people will cross continents and spend fortunes to experience it. Our musicians understand that. Our football supporters understand that. Perhaps it is time our politicians and regulators did too.
So let Noel and Liam fill the stadiums. Let ambitious owners fill the transfer market. Let Newcastle, Everton, Villa, Forest and whoever comes next have a genuine crack at the established order. Protect football clubs from bankruptcy. Protect supporters from reckless owners. Protect the heritage of our national game. But stop protecting the incumbents from competition. We must not let it Slide Away.
Britain has extraordinary cultural intellectual property, but an oddly British tendency to regulate, apologise for or undersell it rather than fervently export it. Tear down the financial drawbridge. Set English football free.
And Oasis? Bring It On Down for 2027 and howay the lads!