Todd Boehly has come in for some indirect criticism following his world record transfer spend at Chelsea.
The new owner was the leading figure behind a £273million spending spree this summer at Stamford Bridge, a total which was more than half of the entire Spanish league's transfer spend. Meanwhile the net spend of La Liga clubs, just £45million, was dwarfed by a staggering total over £1.1billion by Premier League sides.
It comes as the Premier League's ever-increasing transfer costs continue to spiral as premium prices are put on players with English clubs involved, and the spending is having a knock-on effect.
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The president of La Liga, Javier Tebas, has prepared a report that will go to UEFA, criticising the spending in England, calling for change and more regulation.
La Liga has much tighter restrictions in place to control the spending and that saw only Barcelona rank inside the top 20 European sides for summer spending whereas 13 Premier League sides were present on the list.
Speaking in a public presentation of La Liga Squad Spending Limits, Tebas said, "Premier League revenues are 1.8 times more than La Liga or Bundesliga but this negative amount is 20 times more than the Spanish league which has very good financial control.
"Something doesn’t make sense there, so what’s happening? There’s a lot of chequebooks coming out from clubs like Manchester City that sign a certain amount of players. Even the Championship lost €3billion (£2.6billion) over five years. The contributions of capital from club owners from Premier League clubs to compensate losses compared to La Liga.
"There were €277million (£242.6million) in capital increases in La Liga. €2.38billion (£2.08billion) in Premier League which are contributions and loans provided. In the Championship it was €1.39billion (£1.21billion). It would be normal if they signed twice as many players but they have spent much more than even that. This can only be possible if the owners get out their chequebooks and these are different models."
Chelsea's spending was highlighted by three key in-league moves. Marc Cucurella from Brighton costing an inflated £55million with further add-ons and a massive £69.5million for Leicester City centre-back Wesley Fofana. Raheem Sterling's modest £45million looks like an even more impressive deal given hindsight, whilst Boehly and co at Chelsea also invested heavily in their youth set-up, spending more than £40million on teenagers.
With very little money coming through the doors, Chelsea decided against selling on their academy assets - in general - this summer as opposed to sanctioning sales to help fund Romelu Lukaku last summer. The final two years of spending under Roman Abramovich was over £300million; Boehly nearly equalled that in his first window.
Although this was seen as necessary to revamp the squad quickly and effectively after years of poor choices created a backlog of senior players on large wages, the money involved is still staggering and, without the wavered £1.5billion of debt that Abramovich put into the club to fund most of the deals, Chelsea would not be in a financially stable position.
Boehly and Clearlake have already taken out an £800million loan in order to put money towards restructuring the club as a whole and the American group have so far put their money where their mouth is, but that still doesn't impress Tebas, who went on to say: "I know the Premier League has a model to limit losses to £108million, do we want unsustainable models? What happens if the owners stop spending the money? We could let the sheiks and big companies come in here to buy out clubs. PSG can get more gas whenever they need to buy more players or use a related business.
"The football industry has changed and there’s much more money. If there’s no control then we could endanger the industry itself. The two competitions that are the most sustainable are La Liga and the Bundesliga and we have to really fight for sustainability.
"10 years ago we weren’t like the Bundesliga but we are now. We’re going to put all this to UEFA and it is important for all the other European leagues as we want sustainable European football.
"We’ve had a pandemic so it is impossible for them to do that if they didn’t have contributions from the owner’s chequebooks," he added. "If in Spain we did that, let everything go and let rich people buy our clubs then that’s an option but we would rather have a sustainable league like the Bundesliga.
"We know what our football is about. We don’t want our clubs getting high debts so they can buy players. In our league, this is not allowed. This is the model we defend."
There will be little sympathy from club's in Europe with Barcelona, who facilitated their own financial turmoil due to their own long-term internal economic neglect, and they still managed to pull off moves for the likes of Raphinha, Jules Kounde and Robert Lewandowski.
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