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Opinion

Payments to agents costs fans £10 for every Premier League match ticket

8 years ago
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It was revealed yesterday that payments to agents accounted for almost £6m of Newcastle’s expenditure from 1 October to 30 September 2015.

The FA regulations mean that clubs have no choice but to publish these amounts, in order to show transparency on where the cash is going.

The exact figure was £5,946,031.31 paid out by NUFC and it covered the last two transfer windows, with Newcastle buying nobody in January it means the near £6m was shelled out to help smooth the way for Ivan Toney and the four more high profile signings from the continent.

All Premier League clubs published their figures at the same time and this is the ‘league table’ of payments to agents (figures rounded up/down to nearest £0.1m):

£14.3m Liverpool

£13.9m Manchester United

£12.4m Manchester City

£12.0m Chelsea

£11.9m Arsenal

£7.0m West Ham

£6.0m Tottenham

£5.9m Newcastle United

£5.4m Southampton

£5.3m Stoke

£5.0m Aston Villa

£4.7m Crystal Palace

£4.5m Everton

£4.3m Swansea

£4.1m Leicester

£3.4m Sunderland

£3.3m West Brom

£2.5m Norwich

£2.3m Bournemouth

£1.6m Watford

The overall total for all 20 Premier League clubs in that 12 month period adds up to  a colossal £129,857,560.

This near £130m figure was up £15m on the year before and with the next even more obscene TV deal kicking in next season, this figure of payments to agents will also be looking ever more obscene as we move forward.

As we all know, despite the TV cash mountain, the Premier League is the most expensive to watch, with fans in countries such as Germany staring in disbelief at the greed of English clubs and even more so, at the fact that fans quietly accept the situation.

It is ironic that these latest payments to agents figures come out at a time when the Football Supporters Federation (FSF) are trying to ramp up the campaign simply to try and get Premier League clubs to cut ticket prices for away fans to £20 (Twenty’s plenty campaign).

A great idea and good luck to the FSF in their efforts but that just sums up how bad things have got, with it not even getting to the heart of the problem which is the overall ridiculous cost of watching football in this country when there is so much cash sloshing about.

Taking that figure of £130m being paid out to agents and then comparing it to the total of 13.7m spectators who attended Premier League matches last season, you come up with an unsavoury statistic.

The money paid out to agents is roughly the equivalent of £10 for every person per match who attended a Premier League game last season, £10 of your ticket price going to agents who are just creaming money from the game.

If Premier League clubs claim they can’t afford to drop prices for away AND home fans, there is only one explanation and that is greed over and above anything we have seen in the past.

(To feature like Phil, send in your articles for our website to contribute@themag.co.uk)

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