How Premier League Squad Costs Have Finally Converged Since the Oligarch Era

The Tomkins Times, a Liverpool-flavoured analytics blog with a long memory on squad economics, has dropped a free-to-read long-form piece arguing that the Premier League's financial gap has collapsed faster than most boardroom narratives suggest. According to Paul Tomkins' adjusted-for-inflation model — the same "£XI" framework he has run since 2010 — the league is now closer to its pre-Abramovich competitive spread than at any point in the modern era.

The numbers behind the narrowing

Tomkins traces the divide back to 2003, when oligarch cash began distorting the curve, and argues that the 2003–2015 window probably contained the most expensive squads in English football history once inflation is stripped out. That gap, per his data, has since compressed under the combined weight of FFP, PSR, and now the Squad Cost Ratio — a regulatory wall that did not exist when the £XI series began. The headline takeaway: the richest clubs can no longer massively outspend the rest on an average starting XI.

He pins the sharpest shift to 2024 onward. Since then, adjusted squad costs have converged, and the Elo Club Index now places 11 of Europe's top 18-ranked clubs in England — a distribution he contrasts with the era when the title was effectively a closed auction. Brighton, he notes, now sit comfortably within the conversation about Europe's most valuable clubs, a marker of how the table has been redrawn.

Follow the money

The frame is useful, but the incentive structure has not been rewritten. Squad Cost Ratio rewards bookkeeping discipline, not lower ambition; what looks like parity at the balance-sheet level can still translate into leverage for the clubs with the deepest credit lines when the next window opens. Tomkins' own figures show 11 of the world's 30 most valuable clubs are English, and once the US franchises are stripped out, the concentration reads even more clearly.

For the boardroom, the read-through is straightforward: the regulatory floor has lifted. The ceiling, and the agents orbiting it, haven't moved. Expect the 2026 window to close with the usual top spenders separated by amortisation schedules rather than any genuine squeeze. The "fairer" label is, in accounting terms, a softer amortisation curve — not a flattening of who actually wins the league.