English football’s record year for legal spending – can it stay secret?
Before the Christmas break the Premier League published an article posing the question: what Premier League records for a calendar year can still be broken?
While fans watched the glut of fixtures over Christmas, another record had already been set: 2024 was the year that English football was dominated by legal disputes.
The Premier League has never spent more money on litigation than it has in the 2023-24 season, and UK newspapers have never reported on football’s legal wranglings as much as they did in 2024, despite these cases being as secretive as they always have been.
Management consultancy Deloitte’s annual review of football’s finances reveals year-on-year revenue growth for Premier League clubs, with a brief blip during Covid-19. Not only is the English game growing every year, projected revenues for top flight English clubs in the 2023-24 season is nearly double that of LaLiga.
Premier Legal legal costs
Missing from this report, however, is how much Premier League clubs are spending on legal bills. Fans in England will instinctively know that litigation in football is becoming all the more common, but how can we tell how much this is denting club finances?
What we do know is that for the Premier League itself, spending on legal disputes is wildly out of control. England’s top division confessed to clubs ahead of a Premier League shareholder meeting in September last year that it had spent an eye-watering £45m on litigation in the 2023-24 season.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that soaring revenues among clubs had led to a jump in the number of legal disputes. The more money there is in an industry, the more fights over it there tends to be. Even against that backdrop, the Premier League’s legal bill is shocking: it’s six times higher than its anticipated £8m legal budget before the season started.
The legal disputes involving the Premier League were varied. Two involved Manchester City: its infamous 115 charges for breaching financial rules, for which the decision is expected imminently, and its separate legal challenge against Associated Party Transactions rules, in which an arbitration tribunal ruled that aspects of the rules were unlawful.
Forking out
Beyond Manchester City, the Premier League has had to fork out for lawyers when it tussled with Chelsea over irregular payments during Roman Abramovich’s ownership, and in its various Profit and Sustainability Rules disputes with Leicester, Everton, and Nottingham Forest.
The Everton case hammered home just how out of whack the Premier League’s estimated legal budget of £8m truly was. That case alone cost the Premier League nearly £5m in lawyers’ fees, with a commission and appeal board ruled that Everton should only cover £1.7m.
Clubs have since voiced concerns that the Premier League’s legal costs in conjunction with the high-profile Manchester City proceedings, among others, will start to eat up their slice of the league’s central funds from broadcast and commercial deals.
But what do clubs spend fighting these legal cases? This question is far harder to answer. Of the five clubs in disputes with the Premier League – City, Forest, Chelsea, Leicester and Everton – only Chelsea quantified their legal bill in their latest Companies House filings.
The London club disclosed over £17m in ‘litigation costs and associated fees’ for the league’s investigation into payments during Roman Abramovich’s ownership, which were – to their credit – self-reported.
Obsession
UK newspaper reports match the newfound obsession with legal disputes in English football. Analysis by Thorndon Partners found that mentions of the Premier League’s legal proceedings and investigations hit record highs in 2024 – more than four times the number of press reports in 2022.
Rangers’ collapse into administration created thousands of Ibrox-attending economics experts, went the joke among Celtic fans. How, then, does the average fan navigate the impossibly complicated – and confidential – world of football’s legal disputes?
Football is a notoriously porous sport when it comes to information. From dressing room leaks to agents briefing the press on ongoing negotiations, details tend to find their way into the public domain. Yet the sport doesn’t disclose the full details of its increasingly influential legal proceedings, nor the presumably enormous spending of clubs on lawyers, even for huge cases like those against Manchester City.
Investigations and litigation involving Premier League clubs will have a material impact not only on club’s finances – from which its success is harder to separate in modern football – but their on-field results.
You have to wonder how long this can continue when the outcome of these costly and confidential proceedings have the power to decide who stays up and who gets relegated. The sport needs to find a way to talk publicly about their legal disputes.