Transfer spending among Premier League teams has increased drastically since the inception of the league. Over the past decade, extremely wealthy owners have begun purchasing majority stakes in clubs and spending recklessly to accumulate as much talent as possible. This paper aims to examine whether such exorbitant spending is effective financially and whether it improves the clubs competitively. Data is gathered from Deloitte’s Annual Reviews of Football Finance. I conclude that spending at such high levels does not improve on-field performance, which is consistent among clubs in the past decade and the elite clubs across all seasons.

This paper explores the effects of managerial changes on the share prices of publicly traded football teams in England. Using data from 9 publicly traded teams during 1992- 2016, 21 managerial changes were analyzed through an event study analysis. Events were categorized as sackings or resignations, and the hypotheses for each were laid out differently. The results indicated that two of the managerial sackings generated negative abnormal returns prior to the sacking and positive abnormal returns after the change of manager. The study also identifies the difficulties in the study of football teams’ share prices due to their illiquidity and identifies improvements that can make further research in this topic more accurate.

Using data from the 2006 – 2013 English Premier League (EPL) seasons, this paper finds evidence that the Home Grown policy does not provide a differential effect. As a consequence of the ruling, however, EPL clubs have generally acquired more English players. While English players are detrimental to a club’s ability to achieve a top 4 finish in the pre-policy period, this paper finds that English players positively influence top clubs in the post-policy period. More specifically, a successful club in the pre-policy period is 18% more likely to achieve a top 4 finish in the post-policy period by acquiring more English players in response to the Home Grown ruling. Furthermore, these top clubs are able to maintain their pre-policy competitiveness by outspending their counterparts to acquire the most talented Englishmen. As such, this paper also finds that increasing club transfer expenditures favors EPL club success in the post-policy period.