Offshore tax havens and football

A great piece in today's Sunday Times about "Top football clubs flee to tax havens".

I've blogged before the disgustingly obscene wages that todays footballers get paid in the top flight.

However, thanks to The Sunday Times we now discover that almost three quarters of the football clubs in the Premiership league are based in offshore tax havens.

Direct from the Sunday Times:

"An examination of filings at Companies House by a chartered accountant found that 14 Premier League clubs, 5 championship clubs, 2 Scottish clubs and Hartlepool, a league one club, are based offshore."

Here are some of the clubs and where they are run from:

Fulham FC - Bermuda
Ipswich Town - Bermuda
Blackburn Rovers - Jersey
Tottenham Hotspur - Bahamas
Sunderland - Jersey
Portsmouth - British Virgin Islands
Manchester United - Nevada

British football clubs are becoming an attractive target for wealthy business owners - although it would be much better if these people retained an interest in sport, specifically football rather than an unhealthy attraction to balance sheets.

Mike Warburton, a senior tax partner at Grant Thornton is quoted as saying: the biggest advantage of going offshore was that it allowed a wealthy owner to pour income that had not been taxed in the UK into British clubs.

My reply would be, and so it would if they paid tax here too!

This discussion then moves onto image rights - a headache in itself.

There are arguments for and against in the article, and it is truly a good read.