Richard Masters, the Premier League’s chief executive, received a total compensation package of £2.6 million for the year ending July 2025, a figure that includes a performance-related bonus of £1.1 million.T2, The Guardian The sum, disclosed in accounts filed at Companies House on Tuesday, represents a seven-hundred-thousand-pound increase on the £1.9 million Masters earned in the preceding twelve months.T2, The Guardian It is, in every particular, an indefensible amount of money to pay the chief executive of a members’ association at a time when that association’s members are pleading poverty, and when the supporters who fund those members are being asked to pay more for less.
The Premier League is not a company in the conventional sense. It does not manufacture a product. It does not generate revenue from a proprietary technology or a patented process. It is a competition-administration body owned, in equal voting share, by its twenty member clubs, and its stated purpose is to organise, regulate, and market the most-watched domestic football league in the world. What it pays its chief executive is therefore not a private matter between an employer and an employee. It is a public statement about what English football’s governing institutions value, and it is a statement that, in the current climate, reads as a declaration of war on common sense.
The current climate is not abstract. It is the season in which Everton and Nottingham Forest have been docked points for breaching Profit and Sustainability Rules, the mechanism that replaced Financial Fair Play after a decade of legal challenges and internal lobbying. It is the season in which clubs have argued, in submissions to the league and in public statements, that they cannot afford to compete without either selling players or breaching the rules that were ostensibly designed to protect them. It is the season in which supporter groups at Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Tottenham, and elsewhere have organised ticket-price protests, walked out of matches, and published detailed analyses showing that the matchday experience has deteriorated while the cost of attending has risen by double-digit percentages over five years. It is the season in which the league’s own broadcast revenue, while still the largest in European football, has plateaued domestically, forcing the league to seek ever more lucrative and politically compromising international deals to maintain the growth trajectory its executives have promised to its investors.
Against that backdrop, a £2.6 million pay packet for the man whose principal recent achievements include presiding over a governance structure that has produced four seasons of legal correspondence over FFP violations and a regulator that clubs now refer to, in private, as “the auditing department” is not a reward for performance. It is a reward for compliance with the ownership class’s preferred status quo, a status quo in which the regulator regulates the small clubs and the large clubs regulate the regulator. Masters’ bonus, in this context, is not compensation for having done a difficult job well. It is compensation for having done a difficult job in the way the people who set his salary wished it to be done.
The argument that Premier League executives must be paid at market rates to prevent them from being recruited by rival sports organisations, a variant of the “talent retention” defence that has been deployed for every senior football-administration salary since the Premier League’s formation in 1992, does not survive contact with the facts. The Premier League’s domestic broadcast deal is the largest in European football. Its international deals are growing. Its matchday revenues, while falling as a share of total income, still amount to hundreds of millions of pounds per season. The organisation is not at risk of collapse. It is not competing, in any meaningful sense, with the NFL or Formula One for the same pool of administrators. The people who run the Premier League are, for the most part, former lawyers and former marketing executives who have spent their careers inside football-administration structures and who would, without exception, accept the job for half the money and consider themselves well compensated. The market-rate argument is a fiction, and its persistence is a measure of how successfully the Premier League’s ownership class has normalised the idea that the people who serve the game are entitled to be paid as if they own it.
The people who own the game, or at least own the clubs that compose it, have spent the past five years arguing that they cannot afford to compete under existing financial regulations, that the gap between the Premier League’s haves and have-nots is growing, and that the only solution is either a relaxation of the rules or a redistribution of broadcast revenue that would, in practice, mean the smaller clubs subsidising the larger ones’ transfer-market ambitions. These are the same owners who approved Masters’ pay package, who set his bonus targets, and who have, through their collective silence on the matter, endorsed the principle that a seven-hundred-thousand-pound annual increase for the chief executive is an acceptable use of the league’s administrative budget while the clubs they own are cutting staff, raising ticket prices, and arguing that they cannot afford to pay their players’ wages without breaching the rules their regulator is meant to enforce.
The Premier League’s supporters are not, on the whole, naive. They do not expect the people who run the game to work for free. They do not expect the Premier League to be administered by volunteers. What they do expect, and what they are entitled to expect, is that the people who set the league’s priorities will not, in the same season, approve a £1.1 million bonus for the chief executive and then tell the clubs whose supporters are protesting outside the ground that the league cannot afford to cap ticket prices, cannot afford to fund the women’s game to parity, and cannot afford to enforce its own financial rules without years of legal correspondence and a settlement that admits no wrongdoing. The Premier League’s governance, under Masters’ tenure, has not been a failure of competence. It has been a success of the ownership class’s preferred agenda, an agenda in which the regulator regulates the powerless and the powerful pay themselves handsomely for having arranged it so.
The verdict is the simplest sentence in this column. The Premier League’s £2.6 million chief executive is not the problem. He is a symptom of the problem, which is that English football’s governing institutions exist, in 2026, to serve the people who own them and not the people who watch them.
