Regulation series

The history of financial rules in football, Part 4: the anchor that was voted down

Part 4 of the Orange Ledger's series on football's financial rules. When the Premier League's clubs voted in the squad cost ratio in November 2025, they also voted on a cap that would have tied the richest clubs' spending to the income of the club finishing bottom. Sixteen clubs had voted to explore it; only seven voted to adopt it. This is what anchoring was, what it would have changed for the biggest clubs, why support fell away, and the question it leaves behind.

By Arthur van de Laak3 October 2026Updated 3 November 2026 · View updates23 min read

Figures as of 3 November 2026, Orange Engine release V2CM · What the engine does not capture

Parts 1 to 3 were about one question: how to stop clubs spending money they do not have. This part is about a different one. Should financial rules only stop clubs becoming insolvent, or should they also stop the most successful clubs becoming so rich that nobody else can realistically catch them?

The squad cost ratio answers the first question. It ties each club’s spending to its own revenue, so a club earning £800m a year can spend far more on its squad than a club earning £150m, and owner money cannot close the gap. The Premier League had a proposal for the second question too. It was called top-to-bottom anchoring, and the clubs rejected it.

What anchoring was

Anchoring would have set a single spending ceiling for every club, sitting on top of the squad cost ratio:

• No club could spend more on its squad than a set multiple, reported to be five times, of the central payments received by the club at the bottom of the Premier League.
• Squad costs meant the same as under the squad cost ratio: wages, transfer fees spread over each contract, and agents’ fees.
• Central payments are the broadcasting and prize money the League shares out.

Each club would have faced whichever limit was lower: its own squad cost ratio, or the anchor.

When the League first put anchoring forward for trial in June 2024, it described it as a league-level anchor based on a multiple of the forecast lowest central payment, and as a pre-emptive measure to protect competitive balance. It said the protection was intended to have no effect unless the revenues of clubs diverged significantly.

An anchor, not a fixed salary cap

The way the ceiling was built matters. It was not a fixed number like the salary caps in American sports. Because the anchor is a multiple of what the bottom club receives, anything that raises the bottom club’s central payments raises the ceiling for everyone:

• A bigger television deal lifts the equal share paid to every club, and so lifts the anchor.
• More money distributed to the bottom of the league also gives the top of the league more room.

The anchor would therefore have grown with the Premier League’s collective earning power, while stopping the top clubs growing much faster than the league as a whole.

What the anchor might have been in 2026/27

On 2023/24 figures, when Sheffield United finished bottom, the cap was reported to be about £550m.

The Orange Ledger has estimated an illustrative figure for 2026/27, using the League’s published payments for 2025/26:

The £553m is an illustration built on the minimum facility fees, not the confirmed anchor. The League’s trial in 2024 described a multiple of the forecast lowest central payment for the season tested; reports of the final proposal in November 2025 described five times the bottom club’s central income, without saying which season. The exact definition was not published. On the bottom club’s actual payment in 2025/26, estimated from club sources at about £117.7m for Wolves, the anchor would be about £588m: Manchester City would still be above it, Liverpool’s squad costs would not, and the same four clubs would lose room at the 85% line, by less. Leaving facility fees out would give about £519m. This article works with £553m.

Who it would have limited

Two numbers matter for each club: what it spends on its squad now, and the most it could spend under the squad cost ratio. On the Orange Ledger’s estimates for the first test in March 2027:

• Manchester City and Liverpool are already above the anchor. City’s squad costs about £633m, about £80m over; Liverpool’s about £569m, about £16m over.
• Four clubs would have lost room they have under the squad cost ratio. At the 85% line, and against an anchor of £553m, the room removed each year would have been:

• At the 85% line, every other club would have been unaffected. For Chelsea, Tottenham, Villa, Newcastle and the rest, 85% already sets a lower limit than the anchor. A club can go above 85%, paying a levy and using its allowance up to the red line, 115% at the start, so the anchor could also have limited clubs that planned to spend into that allowance.

That makes the purpose of anchoring clear. It was not a lower spending limit for the Premier League. It was a second ceiling aimed almost entirely at the clubs with the highest revenues.

Room removed is not the same as transfer spending removed. Squad costs include wages and agents’ fees as well as transfer fees spread over each contract. A club facing the anchor could respond in several ways: lower wages, cheaper signings, selling before buying, or longer contracts that spread transfer fees more thinly within the five-year limit on spreading a fee, which applies to contracts signed or extended on or after 12 December 2023.

The League’s backstop may already have been reached. The League said anchoring should matter only if clubs’ revenues diverged significantly. On these estimates, that point had arrived by 2026/27: four clubs would face a lower ceiling under anchoring than under the squad cost ratio, and two are already spending above the anchor.

How the clubs voted

Anchoring was put to the clubs twice.

• April 2024: a vote to explore it. Sixteen clubs voted to continue the legal and economic analysis of anchoring. Manchester City, Manchester United and Aston Villa voted against, and Chelsea abstained. Manchester United was reported to object that anchoring would penalise clubs for revenues built over decades of success, and weaken English clubs against their European rivals. At the League’s annual meeting in June 2024, the clubs agreed to trial anchoring and the squad cost ratio behind the scenes, without sanctions.

• 21 November 2025: the vote to adopt it. Seven clubs voted for, 12 against, with one abstention. On the same day, the squad cost ratio passed by 14 votes to six, the minimum needed, and the resilience rules passed unanimously.

The League did not publish how each club voted in November 2025. Manchester City and Manchester United were consistently reported to oppose anchoring, and Aston Villa had opposed it in 2024. The six clubs reported to have voted against the squad cost ratio itself, the rule sometimes said to favour the biggest clubs, were Bournemouth, Brentford, Brighton, Crystal Palace, Fulham and Leeds United.

How 16 became seven

The fall in support is the most revealing part of the story. Anchoring did not fail only because the biggest clubs opposed it. City, United and Villa were against it from the start, and three votes could never block it alone. Two of the 16 clubs that voted to explore it, Luton Town and Sheffield United, had left the league by November 2025, so 14 remained; with only seven votes in favour, at least seven of them did not vote to adopt it. The individual votes were not published.

The reasons behind individual votes were not published, but four things changed between the two votes.

• The first vote was only permission to explore. Voting to study an idea costs nothing. Voting to bind the club to it is different.
• The idea became a number. During the trials, clubs could see what the anchor would mean in practice, and by November 2025 it was a concrete ceiling at five times the bottom club’s payments.
• The legal risk grew. The players’ union prepared a legal challenge, and three of the largest agencies warned of a claim under the Competition Act. The League had already spent years in arbitration over its rules on owner-linked deals, described in Part 2.
• The precedent worried people beyond the top clubs. The players’ union feared that a cap in the Premier League would encourage the English Football League to follow with its own.

The case against

Competing in Europe

The strongest economic argument against anchoring came from the biggest clubs. Manchester United’s co-owner, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, argued publicly that it would hold back the Premier League’s top clubs and leave them unable to compete with Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain, calling that outcome “absurd”.

The arithmetic behind the argument is simple. Take two clubs with the same £1bn of revenue and no profit or loss on player sales, both playing in the Champions League:

• A European club faces UEFA’s own squad cost rule, which limits clubs in its competitions to 70% of revenue, so it can carry up to £700m of squad costs.
• A Premier League club also faces UEFA’s 70%, but the anchor would have held it to about £553m.

A club in Spain or Germany would have been able to outspend an English club with the same income by about £150m a year. That does not prove Ratcliffe right, but it shows what his argument was.

The counter-argument is about the league as a whole. The Premier League’s value to broadcasters rests partly on its competitiveness, and supporters of anchoring argued that the collective product gains more from a closer domestic competition than individual clubs lose in European spending power.

Players and agents

The players’ union called anchoring a salary cap by another name. The anchor did not limit any individual player’s wages. But by fixing a ceiling on what each club could spend on wages, transfer fees and agents combined, it limited the total money available in the market for players, and so, in effect, what players could earn. The union retained the barrister Nick De Marco and said it could pursue legal action if anchoring was introduced. It had done so before: after a legal challenge in 2021, the union stopped the English Football League introducing salary caps in League One and League Two. The agencies CAA Stellar, CAA Base and Wasserman warned of a challenge under competition law for similar reasons.

The case for

Supporters argued that the squad cost ratio on its own lets the richest clubs pull further ahead, especially as extra income arrives from the expanded Champions League and FIFA’s Club World Cup, and that a ceiling linked to the bottom club would keep the league competitive and attractive to broadcasters.

The deeper argument is that a rule linked to revenue can create a loop. European qualification brings more revenue. More revenue raises the squad budget the rule allows. A bigger squad budget improves the chances of qualifying for Europe again, which brings still more revenue. Supporters saw anchoring as a way of limiting that compounding advantage at the top, without stopping successful clubs from spending more than the rest.

The Independent’s chief football writer, Miguel Delaney, makes a related argument: that the established clubs’ real advantage comes from decades of broadcasting and European prize money flowing to them, and that the financial rules should have been paired with a fairer distribution of money from the start. In his view, the squad cost ratio arrived without the anchoring mechanism that would have spread talent more widely.

What the vote tells us

• The rule that would have limited the biggest spenders was rejected. On the Orange Ledger’s estimates, anchoring would have constrained four clubs at the squad cost ratio’s 85% line: Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester City and Manchester United.
• A simple “red cartel” explanation is hard to sustain. Manchester United openly opposed a rule that would have constrained its own spending, alongside Manchester City. Arsenal and Liverpool supported exploring anchoring in 2024, and the individual votes of 2025 were not published.
• Support fell across the league, not only at the top. At least seven of the clubs that voted to explore it did not vote to adopt it, many of them clubs the anchor would not have constrained at the 85% line on the Orange Ledger’s estimates.
• The problem anchoring was meant to solve remains. Under the squad cost ratio alone, a club’s limit is a share of its own revenue, and the clubs with the most revenue have the most room.

That leaves the question this part began with. If financial rules should also protect competition, there are several ways to do it: hold back the top, strengthen the bottom, change the percentage, or combine them. Part 5 argues for one of them: keep the link between spending and each club’s own income, make the limit tighter, and adjust it by where a club stands, in the way Formula 1 gives its strongest teams the least development time.

Next in the seriesPart 5: a better rule for the Premier League→