EXPLAINED: The Premier League's huge legal bills are growing much faster than revenue
Strong underlying performance marred by never ending legal battles
The Premier League’s accounts for the year ended 31 July 2024 are out and once again they show record revenues with a continued and impressive growth in international revenues. Having more than 50% of revenue coming from international markets is both an endorsement of the quality of the Premier League product and an indicator of the robustness of its revenues. The Premier League is no longer dependent on Sky and the move to bring Premier League Productions in-house from the start of the 2026/27 season is another sign of the overall direction of travel and self confidence.
But not everything is rosy. Operating expenses have increased by 23% “mainly driven by the hiring of additional staff, an increase in wider football support, as well as an increase in legal fees due to Club regulatory matters.”
A deeper look in the notes shows that for the first time, administrative expenses now exceed £200m per annum. This is where in the accounts that the ever increasing legal and other advisory costs sit in the P&L. These costs for 2023/2024 rose a staggering £76.5m (61%) in the year.
Such expenses are now almost 5x the 2015/2016 spend. 2024/2025 is likely to be even higher given it will include City’s 115 “super trial”, Leicester’s ongoing PSR case and appeal, 6 months of Everton’s abandoned PSR case, APT 1, APT 2, the Independent Football Regulator debates and various investigations. Then there are various proposed rule changes to PSR being worked up. Legal costs are likely to represent more than 20% of this £200m spend. Administrative expenses for 2024 were 5.5% of revenue vs 2.2% in 2014/2015.
And remember this is all external expenditure and in addition to the cost of the internal legal and regulatory team. None of this cost covers the vast number of hours that the management team and the Board currently spend on legal and regulatory matters. Even the Non-executive Directors have been doing their bit on regulatory, APT and fair market value assessments - the APT tribunal informed us that Ms. Fyfield was even up at 4am to review important FMV documents.
At the same time, the Premier League staff has grown rapidly with now three times the salary and staff cost compared to 10 years ago. It is not just the absolute numbers that have grown. In 2015, the Premier League staff of 105 at a cost of £14.1m dealt with a league generating almost £2bn (0.7% of revenue). That is now over 300 people costing £43.2m on revenues of £3.64bn (1.19%).
Perhaps once City’s 115 case is finally out of the way, the APT cases are resolved, the long term investigation into Chelsea’s admitted “irregularities” is brought to an end, PSR cases are consigned to history, the new squad cost control rules are in place and the follow on claims from all of the above are settled, the Premier League can start to reduce such costs.
2035 should be a good year then.
The last bit was hilarious. By they way, do you agree that independent financial regulator will help the PL in terms bearing all legal burden?
You'd have thought the PL would have a little more enthusiasm for external regulation as it could be a quick way to offload some of the regulatory/administrative (and financial) burden described here.