Premier League considers salary cap, as AC Milan end 17-year run and seek to find way to beat odds under RedBird Capital

The Bottom Line takes an in-depth look at the biggest stories in the business of football from the past seven days

The Premier League are considering measures to address increasing wages (GETTY)

A SALARY CAP FIT FOR THE PREMIER LEAGUE?

The question around how to instil greater competitive balance in the Premier League has rumbled on for some time.

What was the so-called ‘Big Six’ has become a ‘Big Seven’, and all it took to extend that particular group of clubs was for a takeover by a sovereign wealth fund with close to £500bn in assets under management, controlled by a government that sees sport as a window of opportunity.

Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur and more recently Newcastle United are the clubs that will have the resources to challenge for silverware consistently in the years ahead, and while the nature of the game means that a plucky outlier might have the temerity to turn up to the party with a bottle of Jagermeister and some Red Bull and spoil the fun of the wealthy popular kids on occasion, it remains an invite only party, except nobody else is invited and there is security on the door.

Being an elite Premier League club has created assets of remarkable scarcity. In North America the valuations of major sports teams, most notably in the NFL and NBA, have skyrocketed in recent years thanks to the booming media rights deals that have been locked in over long periods of up to 10 years. That phenomenon has started to bleed into the MLS and women’s sports, with investors seeing the growth of sport as an asset class early on and wanting to take a slice of the action.

While Real Madrid and Barcelona remain behemoths of the European game, they exist in an ecosystem which doesn’t adequately support their need for revenue growth, with La Liga not nearly as strong as the Premier League in how much it receives for its media rights. The same is true for both Germany’s Bundesliga and Italy’s Serie A, where differentials of 2:1 and 3:1 exist when compared to what the Premier League gets from its £10bn deal for the domestic and international rights.

French football falls even further behind, with the LFP, the governing body of Ligue 1 and Ligue 2, unable to achieve the value they wanted for the rights for the next cycle. In Italy, the new deal that Serie A agreed was at a lower value than the last, and 7% lower than it was a decade ago, enough for Napoli owner Aurelio De Laurentiis to declare “Italian football is dead”.

The 20 member clubs in the Premier League do very well thanks to the central payments dished out on an annual basis. That’s why promotion from the Championship to English football’s top tier is coined ‘the richest game in football’.

But for the other 13 teams in the Premier League, competing is hard. Through savvy scouting and the adoption of data, the likes of Brighton & Hove Albion and Brentford have managed to become a pest to the biggest sides, while Aston Villa under the remarkable Unai Emery are threatening to be this season’s gatecrasher. It is a relentless slog, though, and the wealth disparity between the biggest clubs and the rest only grows with each passing season.