Jonathan Wilson: Premier League dominated by wealthy international owners, 10 October 2026
Jonathan Wilson wrote on 10 October 2026 in the Guardian that the Premier League in England has become dominated by wealthy international owners and that there is little prospect of the model changing. He argued the difficulties of regulating such powerful interests were exposed by recent high-profile cases and legal contests.
Wilson noted that football’s laws were drawn up in London in 1863 and described the Premier League as the UK’s greatest soft power export. He listed current club owners as including a deputy prime minister of Abu Dhabi, the public investment fund of Saudi Arabia, and a billionaire based in Monaco for tax reasons, alongside a “disappointing assortment of investors and private equity funds.” He wrote that, while clubs remain broadly representative of their communities, that relationship has been strained by the pressures of a globalised entertainment economy and pointed to Arsenal’s celebrations at ending a 22-year wait for the league title last season as an expression of local pride.
On regulation, Wilson cited the Manchester City case to illustrate how hard it is to challenge some of the richest and most powerful bodies, saying the wait for a verdict was frustrating but perhaps unavoidable given the possibility of legal objection at every turn. He reproduced a leaked email from City’s in-house lawyer during Uefa’s action against the club that had threatened to “spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next 10 years”. He added: “You didn’t get that with Albert Alexander Sr or Peter Swales.”
Chelsea’s recent ownership upheavals were used to show the international volatility of club ownership: a Russian oligarch was forced to sell the club after falling under UK government sanctions, and a subsequent American co-owner was forced to sell his minority stake after his insurance business came under federal investigation in the US. Wilson contrasted that with earlier eras when local businessmen — the owners of mines, shipyards and factories, hauliers and scrap-metal dealers — were the norm. He wrote some of those local owners invested to give back to their communities, others invested for less altruistic reasons, and none should be idealised.
He warned against romanticising a purported golden age, noting the decrepitude of English stadiums in the 1980s as a caution. Wilson argued that the contradiction at the heart of English football has been that clubs represent communities while fans have almost never owned their clubs. He discussed the German 50+1 model as an example of formal fan influence and wrote that it “has not prevented Bayern Munich from winning 13 of the past 14 Bundesliga titles.”
Wilson quoted Richard Scudamore, the former chief executive of the Premier League, who “always spoke of being ‘neutral about ownership models’,” and explained that neutrality essentially meant taking the money without worrying too much about where it came from. He also referred to arguments made by Miguel Delaney and Jack Pitt-Brooke on the Libero podcast and to Oliver Bullough’s Butler to the World, quoting Bullough’s phrase “allowing something, making money from it and attempting to solve the problems it causes after they’ve occurred.” He said that regulation — including the profitability and sustainability rules and the squad cost ratio that has replaced them — can help, and that there may at least now be a sense that there can be enforcement.
Wilson concluded that those measures can only go so far and that, short of a financial crash in football that would force the game to be rebuilt, the sport is likely to remain tied to the wider society that produced it. He closed by asking, “How, after all, could football ever escape the society that produced it?”