Premier League transfer market ‘doped’ with ‘barbaric sums’ spent, League chairman

The league President Javier Tebas believes that Premier League The transfer market is “doped” and the great expenditure of its clubs threatens the sustainability of European football.

Premier League teams spent £815 million ($1 billion) in the January transfer window (per Deloitte), more than 30 times the spending of their La Liga counterparts (£25 million).

Chelsea accounted for £290 million of England’s front row spending, with Mykhailo Mudryk, Enzo Fernandez i Benoit Badiashile its outstanding additions.

Chelsea’s spending was higher than that of the other four major European leagues (La Liga, Bundesliga, a league and the combined Ligue 1, which Tebas considers problematic.

“The British market is a doped market,” said Tebas. “You can see that clearly in this winter market, where Chelsea have made almost half of their Premier League signings.

“Since the history of the last seasons, we have done some work in LaLiga, because the Premier League is a competition that loses billions of pounds in recent years. And this is financed by the contributions of patrons, in this case large American investors who finance at a loss”.

La Liga, unlike the Premier League, sets a seasonal spending cap for its clubs which affects how much they can pay in wages and transfer fees, which has proved problematic in recent years for Barcelona.

In theory, this limit promotes economic sustainability and prevents clubs from running at a loss.

“That (clubs making big losses) doesn’t happen in the Spanish league and it doesn’t happen in the German league either, especially these two,” continued Tebas.

“In our control of economic sustainability, we do not allow contributions to cover losses in these barbaric amounts that are being produced, and this is what makes the difference in the market.

“We also have to recognize that commercially they have a higher turnover than us, but not in the volume of this difference that exists.

“It is quite dangerous that the markets are doped, inflated, as has been happening in recent years in Europe, because this can endanger the sustainability of European football.”

(Top photo: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images)