La Liga president Javier Tebas believes the Premier League transfer market is “doped” and the large spending of its clubs threatens the sustainability of European football.
Premier League sides spent £815million ($1bn) in the January transfer window (per Deloitte) — more than 30 times the expenditure of their La Liga counterparts (£25million).
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Chelsea accounted for £290million of the English top-flight’s spending, with Mykhailo Mudryk, Enzo Fernandez and Benoit Badiashile their standout additions.
Chelsea’s spending totalled more than that of the other four major European leagues (La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1 combined, something Tebas sees as problematic.
“The British market is a doped market,” Tebas said. “You can see it clearly in this winter market, where Chelsea have made almost half of the signings in the Premier League.
“Following the history of the last few seasons, we have done some work at LaLiga, because the Premier League is a competition that loses billions of pounds in the last few years. And this is financed with contributions from the 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 impacts how much they can pay in wages and transfer fees — something which has proved problematic in recent years for Barcelona.
In theory, that cap promotes economic sustainability and prevents clubs from operating at a loss.
“This (clubs making big losses) does not happen in the Spanish league and neither does it happen in the German league, especially those two,” Tebas continued.
“In our control of economic sustainability, we do not allow contributions to cover losses in these barbaric amounts that are occurring, and that is what makes the difference in the market.
“We also have to recognise that commercially they have a higher turnover than us, but not in the volume of this difference that there is.
“It is quite dangerous that the markets are doped, inflated, as has been happening in recent years in Europe, because that can jeopardise the sustainability of European football.”
(Top photo: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images)
