English clubs top Euro debt league

English Premier League clubs’ debts exceed those of the rest of Europe’s top divisions put together, according to a new report from UEFA.

The European governing body’s report, The European Club Footballing Landscape, looks at the 2007/08 accounts, the latest available, of all 732 clubs licensed by UEFA.

It shows the total debt of the Premier League clubs as being worth 3.4 billion pounds (3.8 billion euros) — 56 percent of the European club total.

But it also reveals that the Premier League’s 3.8 billion pounds (4.3 billion euros) worth of assets constitute 48 percent of football club wealth across the continent.

UEFA’s report comes at a time when Premier League strugglers Portsmouth are on the verge of administration and highlights a problem for English clubs whose debts are so close to the total value of their assets.

It calculates the combined debts of 18 Premier League clubs at just under 3.5 billion pounds (four billion euros), around four times the figure for the next most indebted top flight, Spain’s La Liga.

The report did not include the debts of Portsmouth and West Ham because they had not been granted UEFA licences that year due to their financial problems.

It adds much of the debt is linked to the takeovers of English champions Manchester United by the US-based Glazer family and American businessmen George Gillett and Tom Hicks’s purchase of Liverpool.

“Some of the long-term debt is linked to new stadia such as Arsenal’s, and in other cases already-built assets provide security for commercial lenders,” said the report, adding that leveraged buy-outs have been “so far acting principally as a burden rather than to support investment or spending”.