This year’s Deloitte report on football finances was published last month. According to the report, football’s main problem is wage inflation.
The report which was published on football finances explained some interesting things about player’s wages. Dan Jones the editor of the report gives very interesting clues about football clubs and their managements. He acknowledeges football faces a number of issues, ranging from administration to new tax rules and above all rising wages.
When we looked at the season 2008/09 the report examines he says, “ On the revenues side, things are still very succesful and managing to grow and getting closer to that £2bn revenue mark across the Premier League. But it is the cost control side of things wher the problem lies. One of the main themes of this report is the threat to the stability of the English premier League’s clubs posed by wage inflation. It spent beyond ıts means that took Premier league club Portsmouth to the administration in this past season 2009/10.
Portsmouth Football club was managed really badly by the club’s management. So one of the main problems was mismanagement and the club collapsed because of this last year.
For every £100 which comes into Premier league Clubs, £67 goes out on the wage bill- This is very high-. All of the Premier League clubs spent 67% of their revenues for wages during the 2008/09 season and this percentage was between 58% to 63% of the past decade. Chelsea came top of the wages league with £167 m spent over the year compared with £172m the year before while Manchester City’s wage bill soared by 54% from £54m to £83m.
ManU in second place again managed to keep the wage b,ill stable at £123m, slightly up from £121m the year before, while Liverpool in third place saw a rise of 19% from £90 m to £107m. Arsenal in contrast, in fourth place, kept the rise in the wage bill down to 3% reaching £104m in the year 2008-09.
The wage bills of the Premier league clubs as a whole have recorded double digit percentage growth for three years.
In 2008/09 season wages were up by £132m, or 11%, to £1.3 bn. Total wages have grown by 55%, or 474m, in this three year period. The growth in wages is diffucult to slow down, given existing three or four year player contracts, but must nonetheless be reined back to address clubs’ declining profitability.
Deloitte’s Dan Jones also observed the problem was worse below the Premier league with a wages ratio in the football league of 86% as a whole and 90% in the Championship. In fact this ratio very high for the football clubs and this needs to be brought back under control.