To understand why Jamie Carragher was served with a bankruptcy petition on Thursday morning, you have to go back to when he was trying to establish himself in Liverpool’s first team in the 1990s.
More recently, coverage of a campaign led by a group called “V11” has focused on a small number of the 200 or so former Premier League players who became victims of what they describe as “financial abuse” after entering tax schemes — including many linked to the film industry — promoted by the United Kingdom’s government around that time.
In April, Jo White, the Labour MP for Bassetlaw in Nottinghamshire, compared the exploitation of these schemes and subsequent tax shifts to the Post Office scandal, where more than 900 postmasters across the UK were wrongly convicted over missing cash due to false reports by faulty accountancy software.
“Working-class footballers lost hundreds of millions to financial mis-selling, but the V11 group is still being pursued for tax on money they never had,” White said during Prime Minister’s Questions, a weekly chance for MPs to seek answers from the head of their government.
Carragher expects the issue will be “resolved imminently”, with a spokesperson for the Sky Sports pundit telling the Liverpool Echo newspaper that a private tax matter “should have been resolved sooner” and that immediate steps were being taken to settle it.
That resolution with His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) would be similar to the one that some of his contemporaries in the game arrived at when speaking on the record for the first time last year during a BBC documentary called Football’s Financial Shame.
The Athletic has established Carragher’s situation relates to similar film finance schemes, though unlike some of the subjects interviewed for that investigation, he has not been ruined financially. Yet he can no doubt relate to the footballers who have experienced questions and challenges from the taxman, years — and in some cases decades — after they were targeted by the asset management companies and independent financial advisors (IFAs) whose guidance ended up placing them in such positions.
It is perhaps understandable why the struggle of a significant number of professional footballers, who had initially done well out of a sport that easily made millionaires out of those operating in the top flight, did not elicit the same level of public outrage eventually engendered by the Post Office scandal, which impacted involved ordinary working people and in some cases drove them to end their lives.
Until last year, only a few footballers were willing to talk about what had happened to them. In 2023, The Athletic published an article entitled “Fraud, film schemes and devastation: The financial meltdown affecting a generation of players”, in which the ex-Manchester United and England forward Andrew Cole became the highest-profile former footballer to discuss his turmoil because of investments made at the peak of his career a quarter of a century earlier.
“I just wanted to play football and score goals,” he said, adding: “I don’t know a single footballer who doesn’t feel like he’s been ripped off financially along the way.”
Before that, the sense of injustice and humiliation reflected by Cole was largely spoken about privately, with players either too embarrassed to acknowledge they had been taken advantage of or too scared of any public reaction because of the connection to tax.
Andy Cole celebrates after scoring for Manchester United during a 5-1 win against Anderlecht in September 2000 (Clive Mason /Allsport)
In 2022, a friend of a former footballer approached me and explained how an investment in one of the highest-grossing movies of all time had cost him nearly all of his savings. Despite attempts to persuade him, the player did not want to talk, even off-record, and this prompted me to start asking questions elsewhere about the issue, communicating with government officials, figures from the financial sector, filmmakers who ended up in jail, as well as other footballers who were only willing to speak on the condition of anonymity.
The findings were never published because, ultimately, it could not all be pieced together at the time.
The longer and more complex story of how Carragher and so many others arrived in similar positions, however, feels easier to tell four years later. Now one of television’s biggest football personalities, the former England defender finished his Liverpool career in 2013 second on the club’s all-time appearance list, having played 737 games. Three of those came during the 1996-97 season, which was just about to end when Labour came to power following 18 years of Conservative rule.
One of the earliest moves from the new government was by the chancellor, Gordon Brown, who resisted fierce opposition from the financial ministry to introduce a controversial tax scheme in his first budget. “Sideways relief” would allow investors in some industries to claim up to 40 per cent of their money against losses. While aviation and other sectors benefited from the scheme too, films gained more attention: in 1990, actor Richard Attenborough told the Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher that he’d shot Chaplin overseas because “there was hardly any British movie industry left”. The lack of funding meant some filmmakers were selling props mid-production to buy whatever they needed for later scenes.
Jamie Carragher before his final Liverpool game against Queens Park Rangers 13 years ago (John Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
Before 1997, British film was limping towards a dozen or so movies a year, but within a decade, the figure had rocketed into the hundreds. According to one filmmaker, speaking on condition of anonymity, like others in this article, to protect relationships, Brown’s decision “set off a bomb that footballers did not understand but became central to its growth”.
Following the formation of the Premier League in 1992 and the injection of television money, footballers were earning better wages than ever. Many invested in property, restaurants and hotels, but movies were more exciting. “They imagined themselves walking down the red carpet at Cannes,” said the filmmaker, who spoke of the “greasy middlemen” who only “half understood what they were doing”. He added: “The only thing they understood was the opportunity to claim back money. In the short term, that justified their role in the players’ lives.”
Footballers generally wanted to outsource the management of their finances. Independent financial advisors would arrive on the scene, but during the same deregulated period, footballers, like everyone else, did not have to declare whether they had received professional guidance about where their money was going. The filmmaker compared the early 2000s to the Wild West. He recalled players from rival clubs investing in the same project.
None of this was illegal. What was illegal were claims of dramatically inflated budgets for films that, in some cases, were never made. Meanwhile, some films were made with claims of tremendous cost, but they were not distributed. It came to be thought of as one of the most widely exploited tax credits in British history. The filmmaker described it as a “licence to print money”, but eventually, the law caught up with some of those who took advantage of the system, with charges of tax fraud and jail time following for unscrupulous producers and their accountants.
In the early years, with film booming, several legitimate schemes using sideways relief became popular, including one that had been successful in Canada: ‘sale and leaseback agreement’ (SLB). In basic terms, this enabled high earners, including footballers, to claim tax rebates on their income, provided they invested the money in film, with tax on any subsequent profits being deferred in some cases for as long as 15 years.
There was a problem with this. Few footballers, even those with long careers at the highest levels, sustained the same level of income after retirement, so it became harder for them to pay their taxes. Meanwhile, ultimately, any tax scheme is beholden to HMRC’s direction. The taxman had already started examining how film and other industries had used sideways relief when a monumental financial event changed the direction of much of the Western world’s fiscal approach.
The UK reacted to the financial crisis of 2008 by ending three terms of Labour rule within two years. With the Conservative chancellor George Osborne attempting to claw back cash under the banner of austerity, HMRC decided investors were no longer entitled to tax relief and had to pay up.
This decision fell around the time of the expenses scandal, which exposed personal claims made by a large number of parliamentarians as well as members of the House of Lords, despite UK tax law and ministerial guidance both stating such expenses were not deductible for tax purposes.
Though tax deferral might be considered differently from the rather thornier issue of tax avoidance, this was not a convenient time for any footballer, active or otherwise, to speak about concerns relating to the investments they’d made many years earlier.
One former footballer admitted to me that he wasn’t even interested in film, nor was he “clever enough” to make far-sighted decisions about potential impulses in financial systems. He was too focused on his football career to stop and think about the potential problems his money might cause, and he simply trusted an IFA to invest £250,000 in a movie he had never even watched. “With any scheme, there’s a risk, but given that the government was encouraging it and Labour was so popular at the time, I thought it was a good idea because everyone benefited,” he said. “It felt like nobody could lose and it was sold to me like a pension.”
Around 2010, the former footballer was informed that he was being investigated by HMRC. “You get a lot of people saying ‘greedy footballers’, but that wasn’t the case. Why would I claim a couple of hundred grand back when I had more in the bank at the time? It doesn’t sound nice when you put it like that, but it’s true. I didn’t need the risk, the stress or the potential inconvenience. It didn’t change anything for me financially. It just seemed like a safe investment.
“I’ve regularly had to give money back. It feels like it’s always there, dangling over you like a sword.”
