How America Bought the Premier League
When Malcolm Glazer completed his leveraged buyout of Manchester United in 2005, English football reacted with fury. Fans protested, supporter groups formed, and the green-and-gold scarf became a symbol of resistance. The idea that an American NFL owner would borrow against the club itself to fund his purchase felt alien — mercenary in a way that football had not encountered before.
Twenty years later, Americans own eleven of the twenty Premier League clubs. Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester United, Aston Villa, Crystal Palace, Everton, Fulham, Bournemouth, Burnley and Leeds all have significant US investment at ownership level. The fury has largely been replaced by acceptance, and in some cases, genuine gratitude. Fenway Sports Group turned Liverpool from a club in administration to Premier League and Champions League champions. Stan Kroenke kept Arsenal financially stable through years where their rivals were spending at levels that should have pushed them into oblivion.
The motivations, however, have shifted. Early American owners like the Glazers were drawn primarily by brand value — Manchester United as a global commercial property, not merely a football club. Newer entrants are thinking differently. Private equity firms like Clearlake Capital (Chelsea) and ALK Capital (Burnley) view clubs through the lens of portfolio assets. The language of NFL franchises — lockout-proof revenue streams, media rights cycles, real estate plays around stadiums — has entered Premier League boardrooms.
| Club | US Owner / Investor | Since |
|---|---|---|
| Arsenal USA | Stan Kroenke (KSE) — 100% | 2018 |
| Liverpool USA | Fenway Sports Group (FSG) | 2010 |
| Chelsea USA | Todd Boehly / Clearlake Capital | 2022 |
| Man United USA | Glazer family / Jim Ratcliffe | 2005 |
| Aston Villa USA | Wes Edens (V Sports) | 2018 |
| Crystal Palace USA | Josh Harris / David Blitzer (81%) | 2015 |
| Everton USA | Dan Friedkin (Friedkin Group, 94%) | 2024 |
| Fulham USA | Shahid Khan — 100% | 2013 |
| Bournemouth USA | Bill Foley / Michael B. Jordan | 2022 |
"The investors are looking at football as not really a sports investment, but more of an entertainment investment."
What makes this interesting from a football perspective is the multi-club ownership model that now dominates American thinking. Chelsea are not just Chelsea — they hold stakes in clubs across multiple leagues as part of a broader portfolio strategy. The same logic applies to other US-backed groups. Football clubs are becoming nodes in global entertainment networks, not standalone sporting institutions.
This has real consequences for competition and talent distribution. When clubs share ownership structures, they share scouting networks, data infrastructure, and loan pipelines. A young player signed by a parent club might spend three years cycling through affiliated clubs in Portugal, Belgium and France before surfacing in the Premier League. The traditional pathway of local talent to local club has been replaced by something that looks more like a pharmaceutical supply chain than a football academy.
American ownership has, on balance, made Premier League clubs wealthier and more professionally run. It has also accelerated the financialisation of football in ways that are harder to celebrate. The clubs are bigger businesses. Whether they are better football clubs is a different question entirely.
The Agent Economy: £1.94 Billion and Rising
There is a figure in Premier League finance that rarely makes the back pages but sits at the heart of why the transfer market has become so dysfunctional. Between February 2019 and February 2025, the twenty clubs of the Premier League paid a combined £1.94 billion in agent fees. That is not transfer fees. That is not wages. That is money paid purely to intermediaries — agents, super-agents, and their representatives — as commission for facilitating player movement.
The number has grown by 55% in six years, rising from £263 million in the 2019-20 season to £409 million by 2024-25. The most dramatic single-year jump came in 2023-24, when fees leapt by nearly 29% in a single season. The timing was not coincidental: it coincided precisely with a legal tribunal suspending FIFA's proposed cap on agent commissions, confirming that without regulation, the market corrects upward.
The concentration of this spending at the top of the table is stark. The clubs spending the most on agents are, broadly, the same clubs spending the most on transfers. This is not simply because bigger clubs move more players — it reflects the deeper structural role that agents now play in English football. The most powerful agents are not just negotiating individual contracts. They are shaping recruitment strategies, managing relationships between clubs, and increasingly positioning themselves as essential brokers in the £4 billion summer transfer market that the Premier League produced in 2025.
What agents actually do
Negotiate wages and contracts. Identify clubs for their clients. Sometimes facilitate transfers between clubs — collecting fees from both sides of a deal. Manage commercial partnerships and image rights. Act as informal advisers to clubs on which players are available.
Why it keeps growing
More transfer activity means more fees. The failed FIFA cap removed the only serious regulatory check. New rules under the Squad Cost Ratio will cap total player costs at 85% of revenue — but agent fees remain embedded within that calculation, not separated out.
The effect on league development is real and underappreciated. When agent fees consume an ever-larger share of transfer budgets, the clubs best placed to compete are those with the deepest pockets — not those with the sharpest recruitment. A £50 million signing with a £5 million agent fee attached is a fundamentally different proposition to a £50 million signing sourced through a club's own scouting network. The former enriches intermediaries. The latter builds institutional capacity.
The Premier League's new Squad Cost Ratio rules, coming into effect for 2026-27, will cap all player-related costs at 85% of revenue. Agent fees are included in that ceiling. Whether this genuinely restrains the market or simply reshapes how fees are structured and disclosed remains to be seen. The agents have, historically, been more creative than the regulators.
Nearly two billion pounds has left English football and entered the bank accounts of intermediaries in six years. The average Premier League fan has never heard of most of the agents collecting that money. The average Premier League club has very little power to stop it. That is the real story of modern transfer economics.
Why Centralised TV Rights Changed Everything
In 1992, when the Premier League broke away from the Football League and signed its first television deal with BSkyB, the founding clubs made a decision that seemed unremarkable at the time but would come to define the financial landscape of European football for the next three decades. They agreed to sell their broadcast rights collectively — as a league, not as individual clubs. Every club would negotiate together. Every club would share the revenue. The deal was worth £191 million over five years.
The 2025-29 cycle is worth £12 billion. That is an increase of more than 6,000%. More importantly, even the club that finishes last in the Premier League — this season that appears likely to be Wolves — will receive over £106 million in broadcast revenue. That figure is higher than what Bayern Munich received from Bundesliga TV rights last season.
The contrast with Spain is the most instructive. Until 2015, La Liga clubs sold their rights individually. Real Madrid and Barcelona took the lion's share — together accounting for roughly 48% of total La Liga revenue. Every other club negotiated from weakness. The gap between the two superpowers and the rest of the division became a structural chasm that no amount of footballing quality could bridge.
When La Liga finally moved to collective selling in 2016, the distribution improved — but the model they adopted still preserves significant inequality, with the ratio between the highest-earning and lowest-earning club sitting at 3.8 times. In the Premier League, that ratio is 1.6 times. The last-place club receives roughly 60% of what the champions receive. In Spain, the equivalent figure is closer to 26%.
"Last-place Southampton still collected £106.7 million from TV rights. More than Real Betis received for finishing 10th in La Liga."
The Bundesliga tells a different story again. German clubs benefit from the 50+1 ownership rule, which prevents any external investor from taking a controlling stake — a rule that has kept clubs financially stable but also limited the scale of outside investment. Bundesliga TV rights generate around £1.1 billion per season domestically. Strong by any normal measure, but less than a third of the Premier League's domestic deal alone. The international rights gap is even starker: the Premier League generates £1.58 billion annually from overseas broadcast deals. The Bundesliga generates £240 million.
France's situation is the cautionary tale. Ligue 1's domestic broadcaster DAZN triggered an exit clause in its contract in 2025, leaving the league without a broadcast partner at the start of the season. The league was forced to launch its own streaming service — Ligue 1+ — as an act of survival. In the same week, Premier League clubs were distributing the first payments of a four-year, £12 billion rights cycle.
Why the PL gap keeps widening
The Premier League broadcasts in English to 188 countries. English is either the primary language or widely spoken in every major growth market. That linguistic advantage compounds every rights cycle — international demand grows faster than any other league can replicate.
The competitive consequence
Even mid-table Premier League clubs can outspend the top clubs in Ligue 1 and Serie A from broadcast income alone. This is why the best players in the world's smaller leagues increasingly have only one destination in mind — regardless of project, manager or ambition.
The irony is that collective selling — the most egalitarian structural choice in English football — has produced the most unequal league ecosystem in European football history. The Premier League's internal distribution is fairer than any other top league. Its external effect has been to hoover up revenue, talent, and attention at a scale that leaves every other European competition visibly diminished. It is the best thing that ever happened to English football and, depending on your perspective, one of the worst things that ever happened to European football as a whole.
Centralised rights selling gave English football financial security, competitive balance within the league, and a platform that no rival has been able to match. It did not create the Premier League's dominance — but it created the conditions in which that dominance became structurally inevitable. The gap between the Premier League and everyone else is not a result of talent or culture. It is the result of one very good contract decision made in 1992.