The Premier League related-party loans vote is just money getting what money wants again

Ethical and sporting considerations are so low down the priority lists of anybody involved in professional football that we might as well not call it a 'sport' any more.

There’s little doubt that this has been an embarrassing international break for the Premier League. It has been frankly comical, the extent to which leagues have started scrambling to try and demonstrate that, flying in the face of last thirty years of our collective lived experience, football actually can govern itself rather than just allowing who has the most money determine everything.

The naked self-interest of seven clubs got in the way of that. Related-party and inter-company loans and sponsorship deals of various sorts have long been considered to have the potential to upend longstanding rules over Financial Fair Play, and the vote over whether to bring in a temporary ban was widely perceived to be the Premier League showing that is has teeth and that it can be trusted to act on such matters.

But the bottom line is the bottom line. No league is anything more than the clubs who are members of it at any given time, and if Saudi Arabia demands the right to sell players to Pro League clubs for £100m and then loan them back for nothing, well, money talks and they will get what they want.

The other clubs are all in the same boat, preserving their own self-interest. Everton want to be bought by 777 partners, who already have interest in a stellar host of names in or just above the relegation places in many of Europe’s top two divisions. Manchester City already have their empire. Chelsea have already started to build theirs. Burnley were making similar noises a couple of years ago.

The owner of Nottingham Forest owns a club in Greece. The owner of Sheffield United is a member of the Saudi royal family. Wolves are still in hock to Jorge Mendes. And none of them —not one— gives a tu’penny damn about the integrity of the game. It’s all, entirely, completely and utterly about their own self-interest. And not even really the clubs themselves. It’s about politics, about soft power and sportswashing, about money, power and glory for themselves. You still think they care about you? Oh, my dear, sweet summer child.

And how can you even try to push back against the levers controlled by the Saudis? We now know that at the time of the takeover of Newcastle they had the British government going out to bat for them, regardless of what they do to LGBTQ+ people or the small matter of murdering journalists in their embassies on foreign soil and feeding them into wood-cutting machines. (If

And the Premier League had very powerful voices in their ear, going by leaked emails seen by The Athletic, who confirmed that those noted tellers of truth the current UK government had told them that they had “not had a role at any point in the takeover of Newcastle United”. From all of this came the frankly laughable justification that the Premier League eventually gave for waving the decision through that they had, “received legally binding assurances that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will not control Newcastle United Football Club”.

Nobody has ever believed line that apart from those desperate for unlimited wealth to pour into their football club, and little of the evidence that has emerged about what actually happened since has backed the Premier League’s ill-advised original statement. The plan was never… whatever the hell it was that the Premier League expected the rest of us to swallow in October 2022.

It’s difficult to believe that the Premier League even believed it themselves. After all, they’ve never bothered to explain what these “legally binding assurances” were or how they could possibly even work. Occam’s razor suggests—as well as the leaks that have emerged since then—that they flat out lied, if not literally then at least by omission.

And of course, the supporters of Newcastle United lost any sense of a moral barometer when they started wearing those headscarves in preparation for all that planet-destroying fossil fuel money. The city of Newcastle has sold its soul for that money, and there aren’t even any guarantees of silverware.

The despots are getting what they wanted all along because money usually does. Stop looking at the horrific execution rates, and keep looking at the huge shiny thing instead. The World Cup will almost certainly be going there in 2034, because FIFA has somehow managed to find a way to become even more corrupt, money-obsessed and venal over the last ten years than it even was under Sepp Blatter.

Players who’d spoken out on matters of equality found that those matters counted for substantially less when they were offered a king’s ransom to play in front of three-figure crowds in Dammam. Fans, players, and owners alike, everybody’s dipping their beak into that oil money, trying to take what they can from it, and if you think for a single solitary second that ethical considerations play any part whatsoever in decision-making processes when that’s on offer then well, I know of a bridge that you might be interested in buying.

The irony of the related clubs case is that it was largely symbolic. One of the objections raised to introducing this related-party ban was that the Premier League were seeking to change the rules of engagement part of the way through the season, and that—coupled with new clubs going up and going down—raises the question of whether the matter will find itself being put before another vote at the League’s AGM next June. Sheffield United and Burnley may well no longer be Premier League clubs again by the summer. This may only turn out to be a brief postponement of the inevitable.

But the Premier League has still been left with egg on its face. Their attempt to demonstrate that they can govern clubs who want to slide so close to cheating over FFP that it becomes indistinguishable from it was torpoedoed by a minority of clubs and their own naked self-interest. “Yes, we can govern ourselves”, they cried, in the face of literally decades of evidence to the contrary.

No you can’t, is the only rational response to all this. The longer-term aim is starting to look very much as though big fossil fuel money simply wants to buy football. And if that sounds far-fetched, well… it’s what they did with golf through their LIV vehicle. And it worked. And they’ll be cheered all the way by Premier League club supporters who would evidently cheer for Hitler if he increased the chances of Kylian Mbappe signing for their club by 5%.

Everybody’s a conspiracy theorist nowadays, when it benefits them to be. Everton supporters seem to be sinking into this now, with the assertion that there is something “corrupt” about the decision to dock them ten points for going almost £20m over their spending budget. Farhad Moshiri must be laughing his head off at the fact that protests against him are be so quickly weaponised against the body which may even have been trying to protect the club from his financial recklessness.

Again, for the hard of thinking, if you’re to claim “corruption”, you’ve got to bring some seriously convincing receipts, because that is a very serious allegation to make. Or, alternatively, you can create a graphic using the Premier League’s font, stick that on your Twitter, and then spend next few weeks caterwauling about conspiracies against your club. A conspiracy? Against Everton? Sir, if I had an agenda against Everton, I would simply allow them to continue playing football.

So here we all are, the social media armies carrying out their masters’ bidding on social media, poisoning every well, sucking so much of the life out of the room and the joy out of the game that it’s starting to become unrecognisable. And we are fast approaching the point at which it’s starting to obscure the actual football altogether. International breaks have felt increasingly like disruptive wastes of time in recent years. The hollering nonsense thrown into the void over the last couple of weeks have made a powerful case for getting rid of them altogether.

But that won’t happen, because the money always wins.