It is the final morning of the January transfer window and among all the breathless, overwrought boasting about how much English clubs are spending on new players, the elephant has grown too big for the room.
While the focus is trained on whether Arsenal can convince Brighton to sell Moises Caicedo or if Chelsea will cough up the asking price for Benfica’s Enzo Fernandez, across Europe they are looking on with increasing anguish.
Because this window has offered the most conclusive evidence yet that the Premier League is operating on an entirely different financial plane. It is already a de facto Super League.
Chelsea alone have spent £184 million, which is more than the Bundesliga, Serie A, La Liga, Ligue 1, the Eredivisie and Primeira Liga combined. That is before knowing if they can finalise a £105m deal for Argentina midfielder Fernandez by 11pm tonight.
Many player representatives now describe the Premier League as football’s Hollywood and there is a begrudging acknowledgment that historically big teams on the continent are resigned to losing their best cast members to smaller English productions with deeper pockets.
Sascha Empacher, who is credited with first spotting Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah, says that the Bundesliga’s ownership rules, which keeps supporters’ interests at heart, is holding that league back financially to the extent that English clubs battling to stay in the top flight can offer significantly more lucrative packages than his home country’s big names.
“It’s very hard to predict the future but the Premier League at the moment is Hollywood,” Empacher tells MirrorFootball. “It’s where the biggest and most expensive movies are produced. Sometimes you need actors from other countries so the Premier League is taking the best from other countries. The league itself runs faster than the rest. "
But he also points out that other countries, including Germany, are still fighting against the pandemic’s impact where the loss of income has been harder to make up in regions where the broadcasting revenue is a fraction of the Premier League.
The most recent available estimates, from last summer, suggests that the Premier League’s total broadcast income is €3.5bn, with La Liga next on €2bn, the Bundesliga on €1.5bn, Serie A on a little more than €1bn and Ligue 1 making €700m.
Naturally that is filtering down to the transfer market.
"In Germany it has something to do with the 50+1 rule. You can’t expect someone to invest hundreds of millions into a club where he doesn’t have control of who the sporting director is or the coach or which players to sign. So we see in Germany that the Bundesliga is declining after Covid.
“The last third of the Bundesliga doesn’t have a budget anymore. It’s all loan with an option to buy and the salaries are getting lower. Compare the top of the Bundesliga - Bayern, Dortmund, Leipzig, Leverkusen and maybe Gladbach and Frankfurt - to the rest and there is still some spending. But there’s a big gap.
“If you compare the likes of Schalke, Stuttgart or Hertha with West Ham, Southampton and Everton - who are equally placed in the table - then the difference is incredibly high. If I’m rightly informed, Nottingham Forest have spent £150m in two transfer windows while Schalke can only do loans. We have fantastic stadiums here but we don’t have the content. Content sells as you say in the media.”
The imbalance is also a key argument behind the renewed Super League proposals, a competition which would initially be viewed by participants as a competitor for England according to its backers.
As Barcelona president Joan Laporta said recently: “In a first step, what we will have is a European competition that will compete with the Premier League. I don’t think the English teams are going to enter in the first step.”
Earlier this month Deloitte said in their annual report that 16 of the world’s 30 biggest clubs in terms of revenue were English.
And while the most obvious on-pitch metric of success, the Champions League roll of honour, suggests the financial dominance has not yet translated into guaranteed silverware a zoomed out view makes it obvious that there is a risk of domination translating into the European Cup.
To put it all down to the bank balance of owners such as Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital is overly simplistic. They would not have bought Chelsea last year if the environment was not one ripe for investment
That a comparatively small team like Bournemouth, recently taken over by their own American group featuring the Hollywood actor Michael B Jordan, can spend almost 50% more than the entire Italian top tier on two players in a January window underlines the chasm.
Some will argue that there is an element of trickle down economics at play. The fees received by, say, Shakhtar Donetsk for Mykhaylo Mudryk are imperative to protecting that club’s future. Benfica are not going to sell Fernandez for much less than his £105m release clause because they are on a sounder financial footing in comparison to their domestic competition - yet such a fee would also bankroll their operation for some time.
But when that happens continuously it is leading the sport down a dangerous path. The Premier League is, to dip into baseball parlance, unquestionably The Show.
For its financial model, built largely on broadcast income that is only protected in the short-term, to sustain leagues in other countries is a dangerous game.
So instead of celebrating the head-spinning level of spending today, perhaps the overriding emotion should be one of concern.
