Has the Premier League become everything it once despised? When the prospect of a “European Super League” reared its head in 2021, the resulting wave of anger nearly made Gary Neville prime minister. “I’m absolutely disgusted,” he said at the idea of a mega-rich competition, exclusive to the continent’s best teams, with no promotion-relegation system. The English Premier League was equally damning. Its bosses declared that a Super League “would destroy the dream” of football, and “attacks the principles of open competition and sporting merit which are at the heart of the domestic and European football pyramid”.

Amid the outcry, the idea of a European Super League was swiftly retired. But four years later, it seems the Premier League has become the super league. In the summer transfer window, which closed on Monday, the Prem demonstrated that in money and in audience, it is in a league of its own. English clubs spent in excess of £3bn, breaking the previous record it set two years ago. Put together, the German and Spanish leagues spent less than half of that. Analysts suggest that England’s competition is enjoying a “perfect storm” of a new TV rights deal, fresh kit sponsorships and prize money from clubs’ participation in European and international tournaments. 

You might expect the success to be celebrated – especially by a Prime Minister so keen to broadcast his enthusiasm for football. Seen from one angle, the Premier League might show Britain as a global leader, capable of attracting eyeballs and investment from all over the world. But the inverse perception is that the top flight is increasingly becoming a detached elite that offers no trickle-down of any sort to the rest of domestic English football. In each of the previous two seasons, the three promoted teams were immediately relegated back to the Championship, and many of the same clubs are stuck yo-yoing between the two divisions. The race at top and bottom concluded earlier than ever before last season. Rick Parry, chairman of the English Football League, an organisation that represents the second to the fourth tiers, was also the Premier League’s first chief executive. He told me the current setup is – from a financial and sporting perspective – “unsustainable”. The government has moved to create a football regulator that will have “powers to ensure money flows through the football pyramid”, in an attempt to amend the situation.

It comes from the pervasive feeling that the Premier League’s riches are too much: that the game’s earnest, working-class structures have been bulldozed and replaced by a hollow, commercially lucrative, multi-purpose product. A declining TV audience – down 14 per cent compared with the previous year – is indicative of this mourning.

In 2010, the Marxist intellectual Terry Eagleton said that “bar socialism”, “no finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism” has been dreamed up than football. In 2025, that still remains true. Our national game remains a salve, escape, outlet for millions on a weekly basis. The game’s “vivid sense of tradition”, Eagleton wrote, “contrasts with the historical amnesia of postmodern culture, for which everything that happened up to 10 minutes ago is to be junked as antique”. 

It was for its dismissal of tradition that the Super League was rubbished. But this record-breaking summer spending spree is what our top flight has (perhaps inadvertently) created. Can fans in the lower leagues genuinely “dream”, as the Premier League rhapsodised, “that their team may climb to the top and play against the best” if the only realistic way for a team to rise is to be bought by Ryan Reynolds or a Gulf State? Without money, your club may make it to the big league, but it will not survive long.

A victim of its own success? Perhaps. Either way, the idea of ingrained competitiveness that the Premier League sells across the globe is at risk, if the current arrangement continues. Maybe the biggest problem the Premier League faces is that it is not just (financially) in a league of its own – but a growing sense that it’s a whole different, elitist, ball game.

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[See also: From the archive: England endures]