Arsenal unfairly criticised after Premier League rules leave Aston Villa and Newcastle fuming

Both UEFA and the Premier League have financial fair play restrictions in place which prevent clubs from simply buying their way to trophies

This is a sensitive topic. It sparks a lot of emotion and backlash.

It also draws battle lines and infers bias, and coming from the perspective of someone who witnessed Arsenal win the league last season, that admission in itself is enough to get some supporters of other clubs to not even consider my opinion on the topic.

Both UEFA and the Premier League have financial fair play restrictions in place which prevent clubs from simply buying their way to trophies. Unfortunately, especially from an Arsenal point of view, these rules were not in place soon enough to curtail the monumentally rapid rise of Chelsea and, subsequently, Manchester City, to their Europe-conquering, multiple Premier League-winning achievements.

The last time Arsenal won the league, 22 years before their success under Mikel Arteta, the league was changing. Chelsea had just come into money but had not yet invested enough to overcome an Arsenal side built from smart acquisitions, clever management, in-house development and brilliant footballing philosophy.

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The famous Arsenal XI that won the league without losing a game, we all know the eleven players that ironically featured together just a handful of times that season, cost just north of £40million. It was a different time…

But a year later the ‘best Chelsea XI’ which won the league in 2004/05 (Cech, Ferreira, Terry, Carvalho, Gallas; Makelele, Lampard, Tiago, Duff, Drogba, Robben – some arguments in there for Bridge, Gudjonsson and Cole) cost in excess of £140million.

Compare the ‘best Arsenal XI’ of 2004 that won the Premier League last season, (Raya, Timber, Saliba, Gabriel, Calafiori, Zubimendi, Rice, Odegaard, Saka, Gyokeres, Trossard) and the team cost around ten times the same outlay. But that also forgets expensive depth options like Eberechi Eze, Kai Havertz, Piero Hincapie, Ben White and Noni Madueke.

Soon, Chelsea and City, however, would dominate alongside Manchester United, whose financial power persisted with Sir Alex Ferguson at the helm, but as soon as he left, it was clear the Scotsman had been propping the club up for some time, and to this day they have never recovered, unlike Arsenal.

Arsenal’s stadium move in 2006 put them into hundreds of millions of pounds worth of debt and restricted their spending. Arsene Wenger often referred to this as his greatest achievement: keeping Arsenal competitive and in the UEFA Champions League despite not having the resources of his rivals.

Liverpool too fell away, spending the years from 2010 to 2016 outside of the top four besides their 2013/14 second-place finish. But smart decision-making and precision in the transfer market saw Jurgen Klopp turn them into one of the most successful sides the league has ever seen – it was just a shame for them Pep Guardiola was a thing at the same time.

So where’s the conflict? That brings to the fold clubs such as Aston Villa and Newcastle United who have been the only clubs to threaten the traditional ‘Big Six’ and qualify for the UEFA Champions League (outside of Leicester City of course – who said mythical footballing stories were dead?).

Both clubs have this year been fined by UEFA for breaches of their Squad Cost Ratio regulations. Alongside Chelsea and Nottingham Forest.

It is a complaint of many of their supporters that the rules in place restricts their respective clubs from ever realistically competing with the likes of Arsenal. Restrictions were introduced in 2010 by UEFA and in 2013 Premier League clubs agreed to introduce enhanced financial regulations.

Teams were not allowed to make a loss of more than £105m over a three-season timeframe, and had to limit their player wage bills. These would become known as the Profit and Sustainability regulations which have this year been scrapped in favour of adopting a model like UEFA’s, the squad cost ratio model (SCR).

This is a ruling which limits clubs’ on-pitch spending to 85% of their football-related revenue and net profit/loss from player sales. However the limit for clubs in UEFA competitions is 70%.

This ‘green threshold’ can be exceeded, but can incur punishments and a stricter SCR for the following year. The argument is that these rules benefit clubs like Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham, etc, because their revenues far outstrip that of Aston Villa, Newcastle, etc.

Spurs, for example, finished 17th in back-to-back seasons but have since gone on to spend well over £200million this summer. It’s worth noting Spurs have sold around £70million worth of players this summer too and had the benefit of Champions League revenue from the prior campaign on top of what is made from their state-of-the-art sub-63,000-seater stadium.

Within the last 10 years, Spurs have been to a Champions League final, while within the same timeframe, both Newcastle and Aston Villa have been Championship clubs, needing to fight back to the English top flight.

Villa spent three seasons between 2016 and 2019 in the second tier, while Newcastle were relegated in 2016 and came immediately back up in 2017.

I have my issues with some of the rules. For example, UEFA’s 70% threshold for participating clubs is the same across all three European competitions.

Sunderland, who produced an amazing campaign after promotion, find themselves in next season’s Europa League. But despite the dramatically lower revenue compared to Arsenal’s Champions League benefits, they must operate to the same threshold.

That is definitely an area of the rules that needs to be looked at, if the aim is to have a less restrictive threshold for clubs outside of Europe next season, like Chelsea and Newcastle, to make things ‘fairer’.

I think this argument boils more down to what Chelsea and City’s influence on the Premier League has done. The frustration with that, and that Arsenal were never able to truly make their project and aims from the early 00s into something more.

It’s taken 22 years to get back to the top, and they’ve done it in a self-sufficient way, something which they want to continue doing. The idea of Newcastle’s Saudi-based owners spending huge sums to turn them into a competitive force like City and Chelsea relative to Arsenal and Liverpool is not something I want to see again.

And it is broken, because the horse has already bolted, well, both horses. The gate has tried to be closed since but the damage is done.

I empathise that if you’re on the side of the fence where your club has owners with money that could turn you into a side much more competitive than you have been, but cannot do so, it’s frustrating. But I’d argue that what is more frustrating is that for a club that has not done such things, and grown to the size they are without such interference, that should garner benefit.

Legacy matters. In 100 years’ time, a club in the lower leagues might have become a bigger club than many current Premier League sides, and if so, I hope it was because of smart growth on and off the pitch, clever decision making and not simply they were bought out and spent and spent and spent.