As two of their number face off at Anfield on Sunday afternoon, this would seem to be a good time to find yourself one of the so-called Red Cartel. Manchester City are facing the prospect of sanctions that would cast them out from the Premier League's inner circle, while those other big-six clubs that play in white and blue have spent half a decade retreating from the title race (as, it should be noted, have Manchester United).

If City's sanctions land this season, it could be that Liverpool are the nearest rivals to Arsenal in the title race, another domestic crown carved up by the grand old dukes of the English game. Believe City's defenders and this triopoly is just what Abu Dhabi protected the Premier League from. "A conspiracy by the Red Cartel to keep clubs like Manchester City out of sitting at the top table," was how one supporter described the finding that City had breached 114 of the Premier League's rules over a nine-season period. When their chief executive Ferran Soriano talks about a "Premier League conspiracy theory," well, no one thinks the shadowy cabal is being led by Brentford and Bournemouth.

A version of this framing has gathered pace beyond the realms of the Etihad Stadium, intermingling with burgeoning dissatisfaction over financial rules from both the Premier League and UEFA, that have resulted in sanctions for grand old clubs such as Everton, Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa. It was best articulated by ex-Chelsea midfielder Joe Cole earlier this month, who insisted that the game's financial settlement was locking out ambitious clubs in a way that his former club was not when it was bought by Roman Abramovich.

"The regulations that are in place are not doing the job they're supposed to do," he said. Of course, there is one crucial caveat to any assessment of the Premier League's profit and sustainability regulations (PSR) and the squad cost ratio that has replaced it. When one team is found to have flouted them through "sham" contracts that inflated its revenue to the tune of over $1 billion, it is quite hard to know how this sport might operate on a level playing field. Under Pep Guardiola, City's domestic achievements were unprecedented. No English side had sustained a four-year spell of domestic preeminence, won all three domestic trophies or delivered a 100-point season.

Anyone who argues that, were it not for City, this would have been a Premier League dominated by the big boys in red must accept that they are engaged in historical counterfactuals. What actually happened was a record-breaking spell of dominance by a team that, it was found, "systematically broke Premier League rules for nearly a decade."

Were City really a bulwark against the cartel?

Then again, if you were to journey through the what-ifs, maybes and never-weres of the last 18 years, you would struggle to immediately and convincingly argue that it was City and City alone who stood against the LaLiga-fication of the Premier League. Indeed, there was never really a period when all three of Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United were in the chasing pack.

The last season in which these teams all finished in the Premier League top four was 2008-09, the campaign whose defining moment was the unheralded sale of City to Sheikh Mansour on Sept. 1. Indeed, 2026-27 should be considered a banner year in the smoke-filled, oak-clad boardrooms of the cartel. For the first time since 2009-10, all three of their teams are playing in the Champions League.

The intervening 17 years had their ups and downs for all three: a pair of eighth-placed finishes each for Arsenal and Liverpool, that 15th place for Manchester United and whatever they have themselves on course for this time out. One or two have generally been there or thereabouts, but all three at once just has not happened. Nor did it really happen before the Manchester City takeover. 

The period between 1996 and 2009 is the exception to the rule, containing 10 of the 11 seasons in which Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United have all occupied top-four positions. Either side of that, you have broad similarities. The late 1950s and early 1960s is the only period in English footballing history when none of the triumvirate was in the top four, and the turn of the millennium the only one when all three were.

The mid-2000s was also perhaps the era when the Premier League's most successful sides had the most meaningful financial heft when compared to the rest of the English game. In the year before the takeover at what was then the City of Manchester Stadium, Manchester United posted revenues of €324.8 million, making them the second-richest club in Europe behind Real Madrid.

At that time, the seventh-richest club in England was, ironically, Manchester City. Their €104 million in earnings was barely enough to place them in the Deloitte Money League outright. In 20th place, they were being out-earned not only by the boys in red but also by the likes of Fenerbahce, VfB Stuttgart and Olympique de Marseille. The gap between them and England's monied elite was vast, United raking in more than three times the revenue of their noisy neighbors.

Move on to the most recent Money League and the picture has changed more significantly than it might initially appear. In 2024-25, the richest club in England still played in red, Liverpool taking in €836.1 million in their title-winning season. This time, however, the seventh-richest English side, Aston Villa, had earned €450.2 million.

In absolute terms, of course, the gap is far greater, but what matters more is the proportions. In 2008, the seventh-richest team in England earned less than a third of what the richest did. Seventeen years later, the richest earns less than double. Meanwhile, the comparative purchasing power of any Premier League side has risen. Nine of the 20 richest clubs in the game are English, as are half of the top 30. Two decades ago, it would have been unimaginable that a club like Brentford might snare Mamadou Sangare from the runners-up in Ligue 1, that Bournemouth might pick up future stars like Junior Kroupi and Antonio Silva, and that a newly promoted side like Ipswich might have the finances to land a Bundesliga champion in Exequiel Palacios.

As football finance expert Kieran Maguire puts it, "the Premier League is the Super League." Scarcely a week goes by without it being impressed on Manchester United that they cannot spend their way out of their latest crisis. It is perhaps too early to be certain what this all means, but it is worth noting that in the past four seasons Bournemouth, Aston Villa, Newcastle (unable to turn on the money taps like City were when they were taken over by sovereign wealth) and Brighton have all broken into the top six.

If the gravitational pull of talent to the Premier League remains as is, an era of relative competitiveness seems plausible. Meanwhile, supporters of West Ham, Villa and Crystal Palace are discovering that a domestic cup win or a strong Premier League campaign can be parlayed into the sorts of European nights they will never forget.

This is not the 1950s or 1960s anymore, when provincial clubs from across the land could take a big swing at a title, but imagine a world where the regulations that Cole and others bemoan were struck from the books. Nothing would stand in the way of those with sovereign-wealth money -- Newcastle United and Manchester City -- but themselves. Those other ambitious clubs that just want to spend their owners' cash could soon find themselves dicing with danger. PSR and UEFA's financial fair play regulations would appear to have entrenched the old powers, but in the last decade and a half no Premier League side with dreams of grandeur has taken the route to the precipice of oblivion that Leeds United and Portsmouth did.

The Big Picture

The arc of the Premier League itself might be very slowly bending toward parity, but that does not mean that Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal are necessarily happy with the status quo. Indeed, if there is any justification for the conspiratorial thinking of City supporters, it comes in how their rivals have attempted to change the playing field to suit their needs.

In October 2020, the owners of Liverpool and Manchester United proposed Project Big Picture, offering the lower leagues a financial life raft in the form of an immediate $325 million payment and a 25% cut of future Premier League TV deals. That came with strings attached, the most notable being a shrinking of the calendar that would surely have suited those teams with lucrative Champions League fixtures and preseason tours. Nine clubs would also have been afforded special voting rights, Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal (and City) among them.

A little over six months later came proposals for a European Super League. Chelsea, Manchester City and Tottenham were in on this one, but it was notable that three of the league's five founders were Joel Glazer (co-owner of Manchester United), John W. Henry (owner of Liverpool) and Stan Kroenke (owner of Arsenal).

"There has been a broad attempt to change the landscape," says Maguire. "Kroenke, Henry and the Glazers are likely to have broadly similar views to each other. Conceptually there is no doubt that what they would like from football going forwards [is greater influence and revenue]. Spurs would like to be at the table with them. Chelsea under Clearlake Capital, the same. Under Abramovich, I'm not sure it would be the same. 

"Manchester City were quite happy being Manchester City. They were quite prepared to achieve what they wanted to independently, as we now find, through sham contracts."

If that all sounds quite cartel-ish, Maguire would suggest otherwise. "A cartel stops everybody else from taking part. This is an interest group who have common interest. They're trying to hijack the legacy sport of football for their own ends."

Their past wheezes may have fallen foul of the English supporter, but Maguire predicts they will try again, pointing to the increasingly likely re-election of Gianni Infantino as FIFA president next March. That could mean a doubling down on the Club World Cup, for which a joint venture has been agreed with European Football Clubs. It is expected that the 2029 iteration of the competition will make room for more clubs per country, opening the door for at least some of the Premier League's red brigade (unfortunately for Manchester United, qualifying for any global competition on sporting merit seems a long shot).

"Those clubs will want to ensure that they're at the top [of the] table because Chelsea made £80 million from winning a competition last year that nobody watched," says Maguire. "They will watch if we've got four Spanish teams, four English teams and so on as opposed to the two of the latter. It would have helped if it had been Manchester United and Liverpool, as opposed to Chelsea and Manchester City. The media interest would have been there.

"It's Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool that drive viewing figures, that drive clicks, that drive interest, that drive engagement."

Brand value

And that is the fundamental truth that drives so much frustration at Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool from City in particular, but also from those across the Premier League who share Cole's view. There may not be a Red Cartel, but it is hard to argue against the fact that those three teams are a bit different. Anyone who has worked in football media will be able to tell you that there is the web traffic generated by those teams and then, a chasm later, there is the rest of the league. You might not need that expertise either. Wherever in the world you are reading this, there is a fair chance you are more likely to cross paths with an Arsenal, Liverpool or Man United fan than a fan of any other team, with Chelsea as a potential exception. 

That much is apparent in Brand Finance's most recent assessment of the value of the world's top 50 football clubs. One might reasonably assume that City's perceived value to non-UAE sponsors has taken something of a kicking over the course of the last month. If that is the case, quite the gap has emerged between England's premium brands and the rest.

Ultimately, these three clubs timed their ascent fortunately. Liverpool's success in the 1970s and 1980s was among the contributory factors in their popularity in continental Europe, particularly Scandinavia, as indeed it was among floating voters in the UK. The establishment of the Premier League as a global sporting mega league dovetailed with Arsene Wenger, Sir Alex Ferguson, Thierry Henry and David Beckham duking it out for titles. It's no wonder so many felt compelled to pick a side in that great rivalry. And once you've picked your team, you're probably stuck with it. This isn't a grocery store.

These teams aren't willing to settle for what they have. Kevin Demoff, president of team and media operations at Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, has suggested that "Arsenal can be the biggest global brand in the world." The Gunners, who have worked deliberately to situate themselves at the nexus of culture and creativity since being fully taken over by the Kroenkes in 2018, are the yardstick by which the rest of the KSE empire is assessed, Demoff added. That is a collection of sports teams that includes the Denver Nuggets, Los Angeles Rams and now the Los Angeles Angels. Against all those teams, many of them championship winners, it is the team from north London that is considered the most premium brand.

Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United have the weight of history in their favor. Sponsors want their reflected glow. Players dream of taking the field at the Emirates, Anfield and Old Trafford. Managers convince themselves they are the one to turn the project around. Can anything be done about that? The rest of the Premier League could drag them into a more balanced playing field in financial terms.

Maguire's pitch is a hard cap based on average player costs with a "super tax." "What the owner has to do is put the additional cash in an escrow account. If the owner walks away or if their business goes belly up then you've got three years' worth of physical cash to acclimatise to a different lifestyle." Even he acknowledges that it's a hard sell. "Liverpool aren't going to vote for it because it increases competition. Brighton aren't going to vote for it because [owner] Tony Bloom doesn't have enough money to compete with Newcastle and Aston Villa."

Proposals for an anchoring system, which would have limited spending on squad costs to five times the broadcast and prize money of the league's bottom club and might have included a salary cap, were summarily dismissed when put to a vote in November 2025. Seven clubs voted in favor of the proposals. Manchester City were among those to vote against.

Realistically, even balancing out the money only does so much. If the English top flight were to implement the sort of financial regulations more commonly associated with the NBA or NFL, Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United would still be the premium franchises. Their resonance, their location, their history would attract the best in much the same way as the Los Angeles Lakers or Miami Heat do. However you organize a competition, there is no escaping the fact that some teams are just bigger deals than others.

Given the opportunity to hamstring the richest teams, the Premier League, in which television revenue is still distributed more equitably than in many other major European leagues, continually chooses not to. That, of course, is the point. If ever the other 17 clubs deemed the imagined cabal to be over-mighty, they could bring it to heel swiftly under the "tyranny of the majority" that was Manchester City's issue when they were fighting the league over associated party transactions. It would seem quite a challenge to run the Premier League from the shadows when you have less than half the votes required to block any changes.

And so no, there is no Red Cartel. But then you, I and Manchester City probably knew that already.