Villa's Summer, Manchester City and the Premier League's Potential Big Short

Manchester City's Guilty Verdict and Consequences Manchester City have been found guilty of 114 charges, but can there be meaningful punishment when doing so risks undermining and tarnishing the Premier League's own product? City will probably get a fine and a transfer ban, but the rest of the league will be in damage-limitation mode over the product they're all selling.

Would the league really strip City of any titles? How would that affect the standing of the competition?

It surely wouldn't be good for business. Manchester City have undoubtedly inflated the Premier League's transfer market along the way, forcing a more sophisticated approach to deals.

Morgan Rogers ' £117m move to Chelsea this summer was a British transfer record, and in the same window Alejandro Garnacho arrived at Villa on loan from Chelsea. The two deals were never billed as connected, for good reason: doing so would have invited exactly the kind of UEFA scrutiny that governs related transactions between the same two clubs.

The loan itself is thought to carry conditional terms pointing towards a £42.5m permanent transfer next summer, and it's the structuring of exactly that kind of clause, separate on paper but timed alongside the British-record sale, that Villa and Chelsea's legal teams have had to navigate carefully within UEFA's guidelines, which havealready restricted both clubs following recent fines. American ownership now touches 11 of the 20 Premier League clubs, and if you've been paying attention, JPMorgan's name keeps coming up in the background of proposed football developments.

The largest bank in the United States by assets, JPMorgan were involved in the failed breakaway Super League project in 2021, and more recently designed the investment framework behind FIFA president Gianni Infantino's attempted privatisation and commercialisation of the World Cup. JPMorgan's refusal to go away, despite being burnt before, shows exactly what big business football has become.

JPMorgan was one of the key banks that packaged and sold the mortgage-backed securities at the centre of the 2008 financial crisis, the same crisis that inspired the 2015 film The Big Short. There are murmurings now that English football is edging towards its own Big Short moment, and it's put UEFA on alert.

English football's transfer spending, and how deals are constructed, increasingly looks like a bet the market will never turn, and UEFA's latest report into club football spells it out. Finance director Andrea Traverso wrote in his introduction to the report that English clubs are pulling further away from the rest of the continent financially, on the back of a "fragile model" built on debt that only works as long as prices keep climbing.

"Transfer values continue to rise sharply, particularly in the English market, increasing future pressure on club financial results through higher amortisation charges," Traverso wrote, per the Times. "These costs are being offset in part by significant transfer profits, but this creates a more fragile model, with clubs increasingly dependent on continued market inflation and liquidity."