Comments on: The Premiership: Now Frugal.

By: torrit

torrit — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:34:38 +0000

Here are the numbers:
Country Top rate of income tax
UK (from April 2010) 50%
France 40%
UK (current rules) 40%
Italy 43%
Germany 45%
Spain (Spanish residents)43%
Spain (non-residents) 24%

So your guesses were quite accurate.

Honestly I don’t think that the powers will shift radically.
Financially La Liga has become very attractive for players but for sports reason England is still attractive. I mean, how many Premier League clubs have made it to the CL semifinals in the last few seasons?
Barcelona or Real winning the Champions League and more spanish clubs finishing in late stages is what would really break the domination of english clubs. Prospect of winning trophies is (I hope) still very attractive for players. Now it looks like only Barca and Real can win domestic trophies and/or CL, so players who can’t make it to those two clubs might still choose EPL over La Liga unless rest of the spanish sides start spending big money on new players (which means buying stars from Latin America Leagues – spanish clubs other than those two mentioned earlier probably can’t compete with EPL top clubs yet unless the player is not EU country citizen) and become more competitive which won’t happen soon because many of them are in big debts and some even at the edge of bankruptcy.

@Rob
United have been spending big money on players for seasons. They had to start making money on transfers at some point. Glazer took a large credit when buying the club and he wants it to pay up.
You just can’t keep on buying expensive players and hope that revenues from ads, tickets and TV rights will pay for all this.

By: Luka

Luka — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:49:35 +0000

By Spain is the new powerhouse, you mean Real Madrid and Barca, right? Take away Spain’s top 2 and take out 2 of the EPL’s top 4 (say Chelsea and United) and then compare things. In stats they’re called outliers – data which causes results to be biased as they do not represent the population (in this case being Real & Barca).

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 22:51:38 +0000

What is shocking is how little of the money that Real spent on players was spent by anyone else. Man United spent a pretty small percentage of the Ronaldo money on Valencia and Owen.

By: Marcus

Marcus — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 22:01:17 +0000

I wonder how many of those delayed payments occur in transfer deals, if they are regular then the payments for previous transfers outside the UK will have also increased. This factor would also diminishing transfer budgets even further, particularly for the big clubs who tend to buy more foreign players and would have had more of these retrospective agreements in place.

Although I’m sure a clever accountant could find a way around this!