Matt Maher: Scale of Premier League spending continues to confound

What would Doug Ellis think?

Certainly for the final years of his reign, the former Villa chairman’s strategy was largely based on a theory the Sky Sports-backed Premier League bubble would eventually burst.

When it did, he reasoned, Villa would be in position to take advantage as those clubs who had overreached and overspent imploded.

Now 20 years on from Ellis selling his majority shareholding to Randy Lerner, the bubble is still expanding.

This summer transfer window was another record-breaker, with the Premier League surpassing its previous top total spend of £3.14billion (set 12 months ago) by another £350m or so.

More than 20 players were signed for fees of more than £50m, while the British transfer record was equalled with the £125m sale of Enzo Fernandez from Chelsea to Manchester City in the final hours before deadline.

More than half of top-flight clubs broke their own transfer record, including Chelsea, who made Morgan Rogers the most expensive-ever English player when they agreed to pay Villa £117m for his services. That surpassed the £116m deal struck by City for Nottingham Forest’s Elliot Anderson just a few days before. City, incidentally, have now spent more than £1billion on players in the last four windows alone. What would Doug think, indeed!

To be fair to Ellis, he was hardly alone in predicting things would go bump.

Back in 1999, less than a decade after the big money had begun rolling in, the then Lincoln City chairman John Reames was warning the sport had already gone past the point of “TV saturation”.

Meanwhile, Mark Longden, of the Independent Manchester United Supporters Association, was telling the Guardian: "The Premier League is about to be swallowed up by a commercial tidal wave. I believe the game will self-destruct within the next five years."

It would be easy to look back on such words and smile. But the truth is for some clubs the ship did hit the rocks - just ask fans of Leeds United - and there is a good chance the whole thing would have come crashing down were it not for the introduction of those increasingly maligned financial fair play rules.

No question, they have had some unintended consequences in restricting the ambitions of upwardly mobile clubs, while helping preserve the hegemony of those who made hay during an unregulated era.

Yet if there was ever an example of why such regulation is necessary, it has surely been the past few months. Just imagine how much Premier League clubs would have spent without restrictions? Even then, it has been noted how many view the new 85 per cent squad cost ratio rule as a target, rather than a limit.

The numbers have become so large, so impossible for the average fan to comprehend, they are in some regards almost meaningless, each new record-shattering deal met with a chuckle and shrug of the shoulders.

In many ways, it is the only way to remain sane. Only when you sit down and really think about it does the scale of it start to sink in. Only then do you realise how preposterous it is for people to sympathise with the desire of Ollie Watkins, already on a contract worth more than most earn in a lifetime, to treble his money by moving to Saudi Arabia. How much more money do you actually need?

Villa’s sale of Watkins, for a fee of more than £50m, was significant for being one of the few big money deals heading out of the Premier League.

For the most part, England’s top-flight was trading with itself and that is an increasing problem which you suspect, at some point, will force clubs into using more common sense.

In short, with most of European football’s money concentrated in one division, there are few other places for players to go.

Those seeking an exit, or clubs looking to offload, are finding far fewer routes than before. Witness the case of Leon Bailey, eventually sold in a post-English deadline day deal to Olympiacos for a fee more than £15m cheaper than the one agreed with Roma as part of a conditional loan deal 12 months before.

Or Ladislav Krejci, for whom once no Premier League suitor was willing to meet Wolves’ valuation, was never going to find one overseas. Wolves’ quieter window than expected can be put partly down to the fact that, even in the Championship, their wage bill is still significantly higher than many clubs in foreign leagues.

There is another, much more serious reason Premier League clubs may soon be forced to temper their largesse.

A report in The Independent this week noted how several deals this summer featured deferred payments.

On the surface, that’s nothing new. It’s common practice for the payment of transfer fees to be staggered across the length of a player’s contract.

Except these deals would see the buying club pay nothing for the first year. Essentially, they were done on credit. In a world potentially heading for more financial uncertainty, that’s a risky place to be. Not even the Premier League is immune to the impact of global events.

But then to return to the original point and the prediction of Mr Ellis, we’ve been here so many times before.

Logic dictates one day the bubble will, surely, burst. Experience tells you not to bet on it being anytime soon.