Article after article this week has warned of the "insanity" of the Premier League's record spending in this summer's transfer window. Miguel Delaney went further, proclaiming that the transfer window was football's Big Short in a long Independent piece and again on the Libero podcast, suggesting that the greed of the Premier League could soon be its downfall. It is not entirely clear what it is suggested the Premier League has been greedy for aside from more revenue from fans, media companies and commercial partners. In reality, if anything, the issue is the profligacy of its spending on wages rather than its greed for revenues.
Delaney discusses a Roger Mitchell blog piece which, ironically, includes criticism that all other articles and podcasts are wrong. Apparently, Mitchell's piece is doing the rounds among football executives. I agree with much of Mitchell's general scepticism about the fundamentals of sporting investment but sometimes the bears (like both of us) can overdo the schtick.
Between Delaney and Mitchell they’ve built an alarming picture: transfer spend at record highs, a chunk of it financed on dangerous private credit rather than cash, and those providers under real strain from rising bond yields and an AI spending bubble. Mitchell’s image for it is dimes in front of a steamroller, a trader pocketing small, steady gains while a much bigger machine rolls slowly towards him, unnoticed until it flattens him. Nice image, but personally, I struggle to see how it is a description of how Premier League or other European clubs produce returns - for starters there are no dimes.
The doomsday argument is loosely but not explicitly talking about Chelsea I think. Or rather, it's about its parent, Blueco. Via Blueco, Chelsea are the only Premier League club carrying substantial exposure to high yield private credit. Nottingham Forest also gets cited alongside Chelsea by some but I don’t think Forest’s situation is comparable. They borrowed £28 million from Macquarie in 2023 which was an advance against the installments Spurs owed for Brennan Johnson. They then borrowed £80 million from Apollo in 2025 at 8.75% which is a secured loan against club assets including the City Ground, which is pretty ordinary asset-backed lending at a price that reflects the borrower’s covenant and would look no different if a bank had written the loan.
A good chunk of what gets described as dangerous deferred debt is, on closer inspection, factoring. Discounting a guaranteed, contracted receivable for cash today carries nowhere near the risk of borrowing against an outcome that hasn’t happened yet. It’s a cash flow tool clubs have used for years and is often funded by mainstream lenders.
It is worth noting that a club cannot simply fail to pay for transfers, taxes, and other important creditors. UEFA requires every licensed club to declare, three times a season, that it has no overdue payables and the Premier League runs its own version domestically.
Aside from transfer fee or media rights factoring, most of the rest of the league is either largely external debt free and funded by owner equity, or carries the conventional, long-dated institutional debt that has financed stadia and infrastructure for decades.
Delaney adds that an agent told him that private credit firms were the real winners of the window, and a Premier League executive said something similar about one deal. How credit firms are beneficiaries of the transfer window is not explained - if they provided clubs with financing, the lenders are at risk if a crisis unfolds. The clubs will have long spent the money - it is therefore the creditors not the clubs that risk losing money. In any event, the level of real external debt across the Premier League is low enough relative to club values that equity holders would be wiped out long before credit firms lost a penny.
And even taking Blueco Group as the real test case, the risks to the football club itself look overblown. 22 Holdco’s Ares facility is around £600 million, priced at SONIA plus 7.5%, paid in kind, and functions as subordinated debt sitting above the football club - in a downside scenario it would behave a lot like equity. If things went wrong, that layer is what gets wiped out first after Clearlake and Boehly’s equity. Senior to that is roughly £800 million, priced at SONIA plus 3.25%, reportedly backed by Bank of America and JP Morgan, and those senior lenders would simply take control and recognise the value that’s plainly there in the football club as a going concern even with a bearish view on football valuations. That £800 million matures in July 2027 so is likely being renegotiated right now. Manchester City’s £125m will help ease any pressure that was building in that process.
At the other end of the market, at Spurs, around £850 million was drawn at the end of June 2025, almost all of it two bonds arranged by Bank of America and secured on the stadium: £525 million with an average remaining life of eighteen and a half years at a weighted coupon of 3.17%, and £250 million with sixteen years to run at 2.83%. That is a blended cost of about 3.06% on £775 million of fixed-rate money that does not need refinancing until the 2040s. The balance is two small bank term loans maturing in 2028 and 2029 plus a £50 million HSBC revolver that was sitting undrawn. Every pound of it sits inside the stadium company, secured on the stadium, raised to build the stadium. Spurs could come under covenant pressure with their new post-Levy cost base while out of the Champions League, but it is unlikely the Lewis family would ever allow that to become existential.
777 gets wheeled out constantly as proof the system is fragile, but it proves the opposite. The Premier League’s owners’ and directors’ test is exactly what kept a questionable buyer away from Everton, and Clearlake and Boehly are nowhere near that category of owner, whatever you think of how they’ve built the club. There’s also no reason to think a forced sale of Chelsea wouldn’t find a market tomorrow. Citing 777 as evidence of systemic risk ignores the fact that the safeguards worked emphatically. Perhaps more by luck than design, the Premier League showed just enough leg to get 777 to stump up a final dose of liquidity to Everton before making it practically impossible for them to buy the club.
There is also a simple point that cuts against the doom reading. Of the 25 biggest transfers this window, 23 involved a Premier League club and 18 had a Premier League buyer, yet only six of those brought a player in from abroad, almost all from France. The money is not leaving England, it is passing from one Premier League club to another. Even relegated West Ham came out of the window as sellers with cash in the bank. On top of this, the inflation of player values (a club's most valuable asset) can also help inflate away a club's debt for those with fixed low interest rates.
None of this means the sport or Premier League clubs have nothing to worry about. Rising interest rates and geopolitical instability are real risks too, though they’d hit every industry on the planet rather than singling football out, so pointing at them proves less than the doom pieces think.
People have been calling time on the Premier League party for thirty years, usually in the week after a record transfer window, and every time the league has come out of it further ahead. Only Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern and PSG can still match its clubs pound for pound. None of their leagues can. If English football has a weakness it has never been the balance sheet. It is the wage bill, and the habit of handing every extra pound of revenue straight to players and their agents. If a credit crunch does arrive, the Premier League is the last part of the sport I would expect to find under the steamroller.
Some think it’s all over, but in fact it is one of the few things England still does better than anyone else, and it is not even close anymore.
