The Premier League’s growing wealth threatens European football with another “rupture point”, the former chief executive of Arsenal and AC Milan has warned.
The assessment from Ivan Gazidis comes after Chelsea spent more in January’s transfer window than the top-tier clubs in Italy, Spain, France and Germany combined.
“The Premier League is the Super League and it’s moving away from the other European Leagues,” said Gazidis, referring to the growing ability of the 20 clubs in England’s top flight league to spend on transfer fees and wages.
“There’s nothing to say against the Premier League, they’ve done an extraordinary job, but the rest of European football is looking forward and wondering what the future will be,” said Gazidis, who ran Arsenal for a decade before leaving for AC Milan in 2018. “Is all the money and [are] all the best players going to end up in the Premier League — and what does that mean for everybody else?”
Calling for stricter financial controls that would curb the ability of clubs to rely on wealthy owners to cover losses, Gazidis said the sport could face another “rupture point” in the coming years “if the rich continue to get richer”.
The warning comes two years after a group of 12 European clubs, including AC Milan and Arsenal, tried to set up a breakaway European Super League, in a move to increase their revenues but also impose strict limits on player salaries and transfer spending.
The plan collapsed in the face of fierce opposition from fans. The proposed ESL “was not a good step”, said Gazidis, “but the reason that something happened like that is because there are some very big underlying issues in the way the game is developing.”
The South Africa-born executive, who was raised in England, said that the “massive investments” from “the Middle East” and elsewhere in clubs had made it even harder to compete.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund led the £305mn acquisition of Premier League side Newcastle in October 2021; a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family controls English champions Manchester City; and French side Paris Saint-Germain is controlled by a Qatari state-backed group.
“Even billionaires struggle to compete,” he cautioned.
Gazidis led Arsenal for 10 years until his departure in 2018 but failed to win the Premier League title. Manchester United won the title three times from 2009-13, but the latter part of Gazidis’ time was dominated by London rivals Chelsea, then owned by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, and City’s emergence.
Gazidis joined AC Milan when Elliott acquired the club in a turnround project that culminated with the Italian team’s first Serie A title in more than a decade. Elliott sold AC Milan to investment firm RedBird Capital for €1.2bn last year,
Despite the tight race to be crowned Premier League champions this season, he noted that Manchester City had been “dominant” in recent years, winning the title in four of the past five years.
“What’s happening in European football is [that the] competitive balance in the domestic leagues has been eroded. It’s even being eroded frankly, in the Premier League.