How do you tackle football’s financial inequality? Start with smaller benches

Robbie Jay Barratt/ Getty Images 

Imbalance of power: Bigger benches and more substitutions 

favour those clubs with the money to build deep squads.

Competitive balance comes not from capping losses, but reversing the great shifts of the Nineties: stricter homegrown quotas, a limit on loan deals and, yes, reducing number of substitutions that managers can make

It’s not possible to even out how much money teams have... 

far better to alter how they can use it

18 Oct 2026 - THE OBSERVER / Sport

Rory Smith

The problem then, as it is now, was the power of a Big Six. In the mid-1980s, Britain’s pubs were dominated by half-adozen breweries. Between them, the six – Allied, Bass, Courage, Whitbread, Grand Metropolitan and Whitbread – ran 34,000 pubs. They were all, in the argot, ‘tied’: compelled to sell only drinks from their rentier-brewer. As a result, the Malt Cartel held the beer trade in its grip. A three-year investigation by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission found that those six breweries accounted for the overwhelming majority of beer sold in the country, exerting what they determined was a “complex monopoly” over the industry.

Margaret Thatcher’s government, in its dying embers, set about attempting to break it, hoping to give smaller brewers a better chance to compete in the market. In 1989, they passed the Beer Orders: legislation that capped the number of pubs the Big Six could own and forced tied pubs to offer at least one – this is weirdly specific – caskconditioned guest ale on draught.

The parallel with football, obviously, is not perfect. Brewing is an actual business, not the cash-soaked soft-power project for bored princes and anxious oligarchs that the Premier League has become. But it does run at least a little deeper than a single numerical coincidence.

In the three weeks since Manchester City received the damning verdict of an independent panel – the club is appealing – it has become clear that there are plenty of fans out there who regard the Premier League’s version of the Big Six as a similarly complex monopoly.

It does not seem to matter that the evidence for this is quite flimsy. The three teams supposedly at the centre of this nefarious scheme, the fabled Red Cartel of Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United, have won three of the past 13 Premier League titles. Eight different English teams have qualified for the Champions League in recent years. West Ham, Crystal Palace, Tottenham and Aston Villa have all won European trophies. This all feels quite, well, competitive.

Still, the idea that the financial regulations that City have been found guilty of systematically circumventing are designed to prevent competition has widespread support: concentrated not just in Manchester, but Newcastle, Birmingham and blue areas of Liverpool, too. At least a sizeable minority believe City to be victims as much as they are villains.

Within that group there are, broadly, two camps. One might be thought of as moderates, though Thatcher would have called them Wets: fans who accept the need for some financial control but feel the system is tilted too heavily towards the establishment. Revenue, after all, is the decisive factor, and as the Independent Football Regulator’s State of the Game report found this week, the Big Six generate more than half of the Premier League’s total revenue.

And then there are those who are significantly more blue in tooth and claw, those who regard any limitations on owners putting money into their own clubs as antithetical to the idea of competition, those who would abolish the regulations altogether, those who maintain that the fairest thing to do is to let the market rip.

The shortcoming of both is that they do not engender competitive balance any more than the current system. They simply change the identity of the clubs that stand to benefit: instead of those with the largest revenues, it is those with the richest owners. It is less a revolution, and more of a coup.

That is, in a sense, inevitable. The Premier League’s economic landscape is uneven, whichever way it is sliced; attempting to flatten it through financial engineering is quixotic. It is not possible, at this stage, to even out how much money teams have. It would be far more effective to alter how they can use it.

Just as most of modern football on the field can be traced to the introduction of the backpass rule in 1992, so the trends that have shaped the game off it have their roots in the seven-hour meeting held by UEFA at a Heathrow hotel in 1996 that brought about the end of foreign-player limits in most domestic competitions. Combined with the Bosman Ruling a year earlier, that laid the foundations for the constructions of the superclubs that now dominate the game. Prior to that point, the regulations of the game of football, not the business, had prevented the richest teams stockpiling the best players.

Football, then, knows the route to competitive balance, which is to undo the great shifts of the 1990s: institute stricter quotas for the number of homegrown players; cap the number of professional contracts a club can register; limit the number of players they can send on loan to stop the hoarding of talent. Or, more extreme still: reduce the number of substitutes managers can name in a matchday squad.

There would be drawbacks, of course: even more of a premium on the price of young players, an area of the game that is already so toxic it is radioactive; the potential weakening of the Premier League; greater risks of fatigue. Football, like brewing, is governed by the law of unintended consequences.

The Beer Orders eventually produced “pubcos”, companies that owned pubs but did not make beer. Within 20 years they owned roughly as many pubs as the Big Six had in the first place. Many now feel the situation is no better. The great always squeeze out the small. But that is not an excuse not to try.