Football's Magic Money Tree

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Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Sep 22, 2020 6:28 pm

In a separate but related article the Telegraph then go on to warn of the consequences of government actions from today

More than 10 EFL and National League clubs at risk of going bust after Government scraps return of fans
BEN RUMSBY SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

More than 10 English Football League and National League clubs could go bust after the return of fans in those divisions was scrapped, a leading football finance expert has warned.

Kieran Maguire, a lecturer in the subject at the University of Liverpool, made the grim forecast after publishing data showing every club in the Championship and all but two in the Premier League would have made operating losses in the season before last had they been deprived of match-day income.

Data also showed all but seven sides in League One, five in League Two and three in the National League – many of which do not file detailed accounts – lost money in the same season.

Charlton Athletic, Wigan Athletic, Oldham Athletic and Southend United have all previously been identified as being at risk of going to the wall, even before the coronavirus crisis struck, while Gillingham chairman Paul Scally now warns his own club could do so by Christmas if supporters remained locked out of grounds for up to six months.

Maguire told The Telegraph: “There is a danger of a trickle becoming far more than a trickle. Potentially, we could be hitting double-figures. If you take a look at the worst years pre-Financial Fair Play, we were seeing around about 2003, 2004, seven, eight, nine clubs going into administration. That was partly on the back of the collapse of ITV Digital.

“What we are facing at present with the pandemic is a far greater, far more universal hit to the entertainment sector, to the professional sport sector.

“So, how can clubs in the National League survive if they can’t play matches in front of a paying audience when 60 per cent or more of their money comes through the turnstiles?”

Maguire said the late payment of wages by a club was usually a sign they were in financial trouble.

He also warned that the bitter battle for the ownership of Charlton put them at particular risk.

“Charlton’s a basket case,” he said. “Charlton’s very worrying because there’s presently an injunction against the person that wants to buy the club and somebody else who wants to buy the club who’s been rejected by the EFL.”

But he said no club was beyond rescue provided they had, or found, an owner “willing and able to cover the losses” caused by the pandemic.

GodIsADeeJay81
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by GodIsADeeJay81 » Tue Sep 22, 2020 6:33 pm

You'd need some brass neck on you to go to the gov and seek financial assistance if you operate a business that runs up losses in the tens of millions of £££ each year and never reduces that debt, all under normal circumstances.

Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Sep 22, 2020 6:34 pm

This is the Guardian's take on what the government will and won't do - still seems the world expects/demands the Premier League bail the game out


UK government ready to rescue up to eight sports facing financial black hole
Bailout needed because of delay to return of fans
Matchday revenue crucial to survival of clubs
Exclusive by Sean Ingle, Ben Fisher, Robert Kitson and Aaron Bower

Tue 22 Sep 2020 16.52 BST Last modified on Tue 22 Sep 2020 18.05 BST

The government is drawing up an urgent rescue package for up to eight sports after being warned that numerous clubs were staring down the barrel of financial ruin due to it indefinitely pausing the return of crowds to stadiums.

Football, cricket, rugby union and racing are among those expected to be offered help following a meeting with the culture secretary Oliver Dowden this afternoon. However Dowden also made it clear to financially stable sporting bodies, such as the Premier League, they must also do their bit by also helping teams lower down the pyramid.

On Monday the Sport and Leisure Centre Alliance have asked for a £1.57bn bailout for sport at all levels – to match the funding given to the arts in July. However the Guardian understands that the government is instead considering two separate packages for elite and grassroots sport which will be considerably smaller.

The exact size of the bailout for elite sport is still being discussed inside Whitehall, but grants, loans and rate relief are all options on the table. Some insiders are saying it may end taking a similar form to rugby league, which was given £16m in aid earlier this summer.

While there are optimistic noises for elite sport, the treasury is said to be more sceptical about providing £500m of funds to save grassroots facilities and clubs. It means many swimming pools and local authority leisure centres remain under threat of closure, which could cost thousands of jobs, devastate communities and also result in a drop in participation in deprived areas.

Grassroots sport has also been hit by a government announcement that it will extend the rule of six to all adult indoor team sports, which will particularly impact on basketball and indoor five-a-side football leagues.

News of the bailout for elite sports came after the prime minister, Boris Johnson, announced that the “pause” of the safe return of fans inside sports stadiums could last six months, which came as a heavy blow to Football League and rugby union clubs in particular, given that matchday revenue is so crucial to their survival.

The situation is even more acute in the National League, which is expected to postpone the start of the season when it meets on Thursday. Teams brought players and staff off the government’s job retention scheme on the basis of the campaign beginning on 3 October, but now have huge concerns about coping without matchday revenue.

Scott Priestnall, the Yeovil chairman, said he was worried “for clubs not just at our level but League One, League Two and maybe some in the Championship”, adding: “I fear for sport. Every game that is played behind closed doors reduces our income. We get around £80,000 from the National League for playing in their division, but that is not enough money to pay for two of our biggest earners. How is sport meant to survive without supporters?”

The Premier League also expressed its disappointment there would be no supporters in grounds for the foreseeable future, saying it was “certain” that “fans in stadiums will be as safe or even safer than at any other public activity currently permitted”.

“Football is not the same without fans and the football economy is unsustainable without them,” it said. “Last season, Premier League clubs suffered £700m in losses and at present, our national game is losing more than £100m per month. This is starting to have a devastating impact on clubs and their communities.”

On Tuesday afternoon Dowden met representatives from major sports – including football, rugby union and league, racing, cricket and netball – to listen to their calls for a recovery fund. The scale of the problem in rugby union was made clear by Tony Rowe, the chief executive of Exeter Chiefs, who said clubs were in an “absolutely desperate” predicament because of the lack of supporters inside stadiums.

“We’ve got to get bums on seats,” he told the Guardian. “Without revenue we can’t hang on for ever. We’ve been losing a million pounds a month since March and we’re a club who usually never lose money. You can’t keep doing that. If we can get people back in the ground, at least we’ll have something coming in.”

There are also fears inside British Basketball League that some of its clubs will struggle to survive if they are unable to hold games with crowds. Its clubs are holding crisis talks on Wednesday.

Meanwhile the Rugby Football League is forecasting a significant loss of more than £250,000, because the Challenge Cup final on 17 October is now being played behind closed doors. Super League clubs are having crisis talks this week to see how they plan for the Grand Final in late-November without fans. But while most clubs are forecasting missing out on six-figure sums if the rest of this season goes ahead without fans, the hope is they will make it through 2020, largely because of the £16m in government support and loans they were given in the summer.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Sep 22, 2020 7:06 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Mon Sep 21, 2020 6:01 pm
This could cause quite a stir - from the BBC - Roman Abramovich had stakes in players not at his club - Third Party ownership (now banned of course)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54229269

I suspect that this will form part of tonight's Panorama from 7pm on BBC1

@TariqPanja with some additional background

https://twitter.com/tariqpanja/status/1 ... 4732577796
More details emerging from the FinCEN leak including Alisher Usminov once shareholder of Arsenal, Employer and best mate of Everton owner Farhad Moshiri and of course extremely generous sponsor of Everton - you know anything to help a mate

https://www.occrp.org/en/the-fincen-fil ... ncen-files

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Sep 22, 2020 10:01 pm

The Telegraph again with what it calls "case studies" into how today;s news will impact the different levels of football

Coronavirus case studies: How English football's pyramid will be hit by ongoing fan absence
JEREMY WILSON SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

Premier League: Arsenal
It is exactly 20 years since Arsenal took the momentous decision to buy an industrial and waste disposal estate in Ashburton Grove. Arsene Wenger and David Dein had almost certainly never heard of Roman Abramovich, Sheikh Mansour or Stan Kroenke at that moment but, for all the subsequent financial transformation of English football by billionaire owners, one basic consequence of that decision has remained unchanged.

Arsenal’s business model and entire plan to become one of Europe’s ‘superclubs’ still rests more heavily on its stadium and matchday revenues than just about any other. And, even allowing for all the frustrations at the club’s inability to win a Premier League title since 2004, it has provided a solid foundation for one of the highest wage bills in British football. In the long-term, it will also protect Arsenal against a drop in wider income from the Premier League's broadcast deal. Yet it is also why Arsenal, among all of English football’s elite, will be proportionately most impacted by the potential absence of matchday fans until the end of the season.

Financial analysts Vysyble studied the impact across the Premier League and, with around a quarter of their income generally coming from matchdays, Arsenal are forecast to lose £122.7 million for the period between the start of lockdown in March and next May. That is £40m more than Chelsea and almost £50m more than Manchester City. Even Liverpool and Tottenham, with their respectively upgraded homes, would be forecast to lose between £18m and £16m less.

What will that mean on a day-to-day basis? Whether the decision was morally justifiable or not, that bottom line may well have influenced the staff redundancies earlier this year and, while resources were found to extend Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s contract, Arsenal will be proportionately more restricted than most of their competitors for Champions League football over the next season.

Football League: Fleetwood Town
For League One players, the financial hit of Covid-19 has had serious salary implications.

Fleetwood Town manager Joey Barton offered a graphic illustration of how even the highest earners have had wages slashed in half as clubs seek to avoid crippling losses.

“Our top earner last season would have probably earned around £3,000 a week. Now we can pay maybe £1,500 a week,” Barton revealed.

Across the scale, the already yawning gap has widened between the Premier League stars - whose salaries may have been deferred but not reduced during last season’s lockdown - and those struggling to make a living from the game in the lower levels.

“There are sides in our league who are offering £400, £500, £600 and £700 a week because they have no fans in,” said Barton, who described the prospect of football without fans for most of this season as ‘armageddon’.

“If we don’t have fans back into the stadium, clubs are going to be severely hampered if not forced to the wall.”

In their last set of accounts for 2018-19 - published in April and preceding the impact of the pandemic - the club revealed it employs 50 playing staff and 165 non-playing staff, with their collective salaries amounting to £6.29m. They reported losses of £6m, with the club reliant on the financial input of owner and director Andy Pilley.

Pilley has been among the most vocal in calling for football to come together to find solutions, sentiments his manager echoes.

“We are going to be absolutely decimated,” said Barton. “We have that much money in the game that it should not be happening. We have to protect the game from itself.”

National League: Altrincham
At Atrincham FC they were ready for their return to the National League after promotion in August. The playing staff had been taken off furlough, guidelines had been stringently followed, preparations made to ensure the club’s Moss Lane ground was capable of hosting the anticipated 1,000 spectators, all properly socially distanced. And then came Tuesday’s governmental announcement that the plan to admit fans had been suspended indefinitely.

“If you ask me what we do now, there’s a simple answer: I don’t know yet,” said Bill Waterson, the club chairman. “The National League had repeatedly said if there were no fans there would be no restart. They recognised without fans clubs would not have sufficient income to support playing behind closed doors. Hence the delay of the start to October 3. That now appears to be a gamble that didn’t pay off. And we have yet to hear from them what happens now.”

At Altrincham, Waterson and the board had made plans for every possibility. They have developed a streaming service to allow fans to watch behind-closed-doors fixtures. But he admits that would only deliver about 25 per cent of standard match-day revenue.

“If we started behind closed doors, we could probably live for a month or two. If there is a suspension of the start of the league, we will put our staff back on furlough, which will carry us to the end of October. After that, we just don't know."

But while believing there may well be casualties among National League clubs in these fan-free days, Waterson instated his would not be among them.

“We did some serious modelling back in May and we are confident if there is no football at all this season, there will still be an Altrincham FC for 2021-22. That is the only beacon of hope I can deliver: we have looked at the worst and are not scared of it.”

Women's football: Lewes
As the first elite women’s football side to welcome back fans, Lewes were ready to press ahead with their second crowd pilot this Saturday, when they were expecting 250 fans at their 2,500-capacity ground. Like other sport pilots, it was abandoned after the Government's tightening of coronavirus restrictions.

With the English Football League expected to be excluded from an emergency rescue package for sport, there is a genuine fear lower resourced women’s clubs could be out of business by the end of this season.

“Without sustained support from the Government or the Football Association, smaller clubs will struggle,” warned Maggie Murphy, the general manager at the community-owned club.

“I fear the only women’s clubs who can sustain themselves over the course of the season will be those who are dependent on big male clubs for their funds.”

If elite women’s games are not broadcast in the wake of crowd bans, the feeling that fanbases may be lost at clubs who are not propped up by a Premier League ally intensifies.

“Fanbases are still fragile in the women’s game,” added Murphy. “We were trying to transition ours from people who saw women’s football as an event, something they would come to every few months, to something they could come to every week.

“That was already difficult because the leagues are so small, games are already so few and far between so it’s hard to create habits. Now, if you take away the fans - of course you take away the revenue - but you also take away their interest.”

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Sep 22, 2020 10:21 pm

If the Guardian are right about this - The Telegraph also saying the same - then the Premier League will be facing demands for rebates from the overseas broadcasters

All Premier League games in October likely to be shown live on TV
Restrictions on fans in grounds leads to change of plan
Games in September shared between four broadcasters
Paul MacInnes - Tue 22 Sep 2020 19.07 BST Last modified on Tue 22 Sep 2020 21.12 BST

Live TV coverage of every Premier League match is expected to continue into October after the government announced the suspension of plans to return fans to stadiums. Since the restart in June, longstanding broadcasting traditions have been turned upside down to allow fans to keep up with top-flight football. The Saturday 3pm blackout has gone, games kick off at tea-time midweek and the BBC has live Premier League football for the first time.

Although rights holders and the league had hoped for a return to normality this season, the continued spread of the pandemic means live coverage is set to continue. There are 40 top-flight fixtures scheduled in October, although kick-off times are yet to be agreed. September’s matches were shared between Sky, BT Sport, Amazon and the BBC, with Sky screening 18 of the 28 games.

It is understood any extension of the arrangement is likely to be done on a month-by-month basis, with the league having committed this month to taking a “step-by-step” approach to determining “appropriate arrangements”.

The move will be welcomed by fans’ groups who called for all matches to be broadcast on TV while supporters cannot get back into grounds. The Football Supporters’ Federation has called for the arrangement to be extended to the end of the season.

Premier League clubs are less convinced about the merits of the idea. There are concerns that it makes an already compact schedule more difficult for teams, but also that a broadcast schedule built to suit British audiences may affect the global audience watching in different time zones.

The new way of doing things will also complicate what are set to be challenging negotiations when the Premier League tries to strike new broadcast deals. The tender process for the three-year arrangements for 2022-2025 would ordinarily begin this autumn.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Sep 22, 2020 10:56 pm

well that didn't take long - from the Mail

Premier League clubs facing rebate demands from Asian rights holders that could cost tens of millions with broadcasters unhappy at rescheduling of matches to evening kick-offs to benefit domestic fans
- Premier League clubs are facing rebate demands from Asian rights holders
- Broadcasters in the Asian markets are unhappy at rescheduling of matches
- Many games have been changed to evening kick-offs to benefit domestic fans
- The Asian TV market is the most lucrative in the world for the Premier League
By MATT HUGHES FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 22:30, 22 September 2020 | UPDATED: 22:32, 22 September 2020

Premier League clubs are facing rebate demands from Asian rights holders that could cost them tens of millions of pounds as they wrestle with whether to televise every game in the absence of crowds.

Broadcasters in the biggest Asian markets, including Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand, are unhappy with the rescheduling of many matches to evening kick-offs to benefit domestic fans during September, and will demand refunds if the policy continues for the rest of the season.

The Asian TV market is the most lucrative in the world for the Premier League, even after their £188m-a-year contract in China with Suning Holdings was cancelled earlier this month, with the continent contributing around £400m to the top flight’s £1.2bn overseas rights package.

Media companies in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and India pay £330m each year to broadcast matches, and the large number of evening kick-offs this season has not gone down well with their commercial partners and viewers due to the time difference.

There have been only two Premier League matches with the traditional Saturday 3pm kick-off this season — Southampton v Crystal Palace and Leeds v Fulham — which is viewed as the primetime slot in Asia.

Of this weekend’s fixtures, four have evening kick-offs with the League anxious to ensure every game has its own slot so that exclusivity is maintained for their domestic rights holders Sky Sports, BT Sport, Amazon Prime and the BBC.

The League have also introduced an additional Sunday lunchtime kick-off however, which will benefit audiences in Asia.

The League face a balancing act given the growing value of overseas rights, which rose by over a third over the last cycle, much of which was driven by growth in Asia. While fluctuating exchange rates have since reduced the value of the current three-year deal to around £3.6bn, the trend for overseas rights remains upward, whereas the value of the domestic rights package has dropped to £5bn over three years.

Premier League Annual Overseas TV Rights (£)

Asia - 400m
USA - 133m
Middle East and North Africa - 124m
Europe (Outside UK) - 320m
Sub-Saharan Africa - 170m
Rest of the World - 100m

Total £1.247 Bn

Aside from the threat of paying additional rebates at a time when the clubs are missing out on a collective £100m a month due to lost gate receipts, the Premier League are confronting domestic challenges over television.

Many clubs are reluctant to make all matches available for broadcast for the rest of the season amid fears it will reduce their value, and only agreed to do so as a temporary measure on the eve of the campaign.

But they will face strong calls from fan groups to do so. Other clubs oppose giving matches to broadcasters for free, but rights holders are reluctant to commit to additional fees given limited time in their schedules and uncertainty over the rest of the season.

The League have a little over a week to come up with a new broadcast plan, and agree any potential rebates, as the schedule from October 3 onwards has not been finalised.

An emergency meeting of clubs to resolve the issue is expected to be held next week.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Sep 22, 2020 11:03 pm

GodIsADeeJay81 wrote:
Tue Sep 22, 2020 6:33 pm
You'd need some brass neck on you to go to the gov and seek financial assistance if you operate a business that runs up losses in the tens of millions of £££ each year and never reduces that debt, all under normal circumstances.
Apparently one of the reasons that the Government is giving for not helping the Premier League is the level of spending in the transfer window - which to be fair is a darn good reason - not that it helps our sensible club

https://twitter.com/martynziegler/statu ... 2955975683
This user liked this post: GodIsADeeJay81

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Sep 23, 2020 1:19 pm

The Telegraph joins the Premier League must support the pyramid bandwagon - if you are unaware of what the Sean Dyche comment is look here viewtopic.php?f=2&t=49962

Premier League clubs have enough money to help - they must do the right thing and save football
JASON BURT SEPTEMBER 23, 2020

While it understandably sticks in the craw for the Premier League to be lectured to by a government that has so evidently mismanaged the response to the coronavirus pandemic, there was a phrase that emerged during the height of the crisis that resonates again: “Be on the right side of history”.

As things stand, history may well show that a number of football clubs will go to the wall in the coming months, even though the sport remains the richest in the world and the Premier League is at its pinnacle. In years to come we may look back and wonder why that was ever allowed to happen.

Some of those clubs have been badly run, have overstretched themselves or have failed to act. But most will be casualties of a disaster that they had no chance of surviving without outside intervention and support.

Singling out the Premier League is easy. At times it can feel that football is held to a higher account than other sectors and there have been unsavoury attempts to make political capital out of a sport that is told it is vital to public morale and the national mood but is also lectured to about spending, being a role model and doing the right thing when other industries are not even mentioned.

There was logic in Sean Dyche’s argument that there is no outcry for every successful hedge fund manager to help out those less successful and so “if you are going to apply it to football, I think you have to apply it across the country to everyone and every business”.

But, without being too romantic, football - which, by the way, already pays £3.3billion in tax every year - is not like every other business and the Burnley manager knows that all too well. Just because others are not doing the right thing, does it mean you should not? That is where Dyche’s argument fails.

A football club is more than a business even though it needs to be run on business lines. It is a club; an organisation that is supported by people with a common purpose. And that purpose is not financial. It is a different kind of institution.

And if we agree that football has a duty to society, then football also has a duty to football and that means supporting the pyramid through to the grass roots of the game. The Premier League will argue that it is does that already and that, in fact, it is struggling to maintain those payments and can hardly be asked to do more as it deals with its own £700million black-hole.

It was a condition of ‘Project Restart’ that the Premier League would provide assistance further down the leagues when the time came. But there have been two interpretations of this: the Premier League’s insistence that this meant it had to fulfil its existing commitments against the Government belief that if the games were played and the TV money was paid it could do more.

That bit more, in terms of the English Football League, amounts to a bailout of £22million a month from the Premier League while there are no fans or around £200million a season. Ah, critics will say, that is less than Chelsea have paid in transfers alone this summer so surely the Premier League clubs have the cash?

The Premier League has certainly carried on spending without much regard as to what is happening elsewhere and that is uncomfortable. Arsenal, for example, made redundancies but were able to offer Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang a bumper new contract and, while the two are not really related – keeping the star striker gives the club a better chance of getting into the Champions League and staving off further cuts – it just does not look great, does it?

The reality is that the Premier League simply has to help out the EFL, although there have to be some conditions attached. Firstly, there needs to be accountability in any payments that are made, with the EFL clubs each producing clear business plans as to why they need the money, how it will be used and why they do not have other means to cover their losses.

Secondly, the Government needs to be open to discuss with the Premier League as to how it can lead the way for fans to return. The Premier League has become frustrated by the blanket ban that has been applied when it has the technology and the wherewithal to be at the vanguard just as it led the way with testing and creating biosecure bubbles for sport to take place.

Premier League clubs insist that fans can be safer in stadia than they are in pubs and they should, therefore, be allowed to test if that is in fact true because it might just help out other industries. If it means some fans are attending Premier League games but not EFL matches then so be it – if it is a means to generate a degree of revenue that can benefit all.

Of course, as we head towards a second spike of Covid-19, it may be politically difficult – but not impossible – to argue that some form of football crowds can return, but it does not need to be impossible with clinical passports and so on. If the Premier League believes it can do it then let it try as a condition of providing more funding and for the general good.

There may be more conditions. But the truth is a simple one in this case. The Premier League clubs, however much they protest, do have the money to help out. It has been the wealthiest league in the world for years, has revelled in that status and it is the pinnacle of the club game. It needs to recognise that responsibility and it needs to be on the right side of history so that when, in the future, what happened in 2020 is discussed and debated it can say ‘never mind what hedge fund managers and politicians did - we did the right thing’.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Sep 23, 2020 5:11 pm

The Telegraph again with a report on how badly each club has been affected by the virus - no surprise we are the least affected in this - it is free to read for the rest of the day and only makes sense with the graphs

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/20 ... d-19-club/

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by aggi » Wed Sep 23, 2020 6:38 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Mon Aug 24, 2020 3:01 pm
The Football Today Podcast explains Project Red Card and what it means for the future of data in football.

https://www.footballtodaypodcast.com/po ... balls-data

EDIT - This is a fascinating listen - Football Today is probably the best Football Podcast out there - never heard a poor one yet, let alone a bad one
Cheers. An interesting case. I've done some work on basketball data and betting and the amount of data is amazing. GDPR and this kind of data isn't necessarily compatible (although there are various commercial carve-outs) so I wonder where it will go.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Sep 23, 2020 6:45 pm

aggi wrote:
Wed Sep 23, 2020 6:38 pm
Cheers. An interesting case. I've done some work on basketball data and betting and the amount of data is amazing. GDPR and this kind of data isn't necessarily compatible (although there are various commercial carve-outs) so I wonder where it will go.
Aggi, in that case you might find this interesting viewtopic.php?f=2&t=20891&start=4803

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by The esk » Wed Sep 23, 2020 7:36 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Tue Sep 22, 2020 7:06 pm
More details emerging from the FinCEN leak including Alisher Usminov once shareholder of Arsenal, Employer and best mate of Everton owner Farhad Moshiri and of course extremely generous sponsor of Everton - you know anything to help a mate

https://www.occrp.org/en/the-fincen-fil ... ncen-files
Fascinating - the Usmanov company (Epion) that allegedly paid Putin's advisor is the same company that BBC's Panorama claimed paid for Usmanov and Moshiri's stake in Arsenal

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Sep 23, 2020 7:39 pm

The esk wrote:
Wed Sep 23, 2020 7:36 pm
Fascinating - the Usmanov company (Epion) that allegedly paid Putin's advisor is the same company that BBC's Panorama claimed paid for Usmanov and Moshiri's stake in Arsenal
Paul do you know anything about these guys who are supposedly trying to take over our club - https://alkcapital.com/

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Sep 23, 2020 8:00 pm

The Esk treats us to Part 5 of Football Shorts - for those of us distracted by the prospect of new investment this reminds us there are more pressing issues - as it looks at "the (current) reality of reducing income and fixed costs"

https://theesk.org/2020/09/23/football- ... xed-costs/

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by The esk » Wed Sep 23, 2020 9:10 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Wed Sep 23, 2020 7:39 pm
Paul do you know anything about these guys who are supposedly trying to take over our club - https://alkcapital.com/
Dave Checketts was trying to buy Sheffield United last year. Owns Real Salt Lake. I am told by my US (Wall Street) contacts he is a good guy (as is Alan Pace)

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Sep 23, 2020 9:19 pm

The esk wrote:
Wed Sep 23, 2020 9:10 pm
Dave Checketts was trying to buy Sheffield United last year. Owns Real Salt Lake. I am told by my US (Wall Street) contacts he is a good guy (as is Alan Pace)
cheers Paul, my understanding was that Checketts sold his stake quite a few years ago now.

It will be a shame to lose that local link, and I am still rather apprehensive about it, but there is no doubt that we do not have anyone with local connections able/willing to make the necessary investment, to keep our heads above the Premier League water line.
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Sep 23, 2020 11:06 pm

It seems that all the pressure on the Premier League to bail out the pyramid is having an impact - at least according to the Mail

Premier League clubs fear PR nightmare if they do not organise a cash bailout for struggling EFL clubs - with opinion divided among top flight teams
- Premier League clubs fear a PR backlash if they don't troubled EFL clubs
- Sportsmail understands there are opposing opinions on providing relief
- The smaller topflight teams are more sympathetic towards helping EFL sides
By SAMI MOKBEL and MATT HUGHES FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 22:30, 23 September 2020 | UPDATED: 22:33, 23 September 2020

Premier League clubs fear a PR backlash if they do not organise a speedy cash bailout for financially troubled EFL clubs.

Sportsmail understands there are opposing opinions among top-flight teams on providing financial relief and talks are ongoing between the leagues. But EFL chairman Rick Parry said Wednesday he remained 'optimistic' of finding a solution.

While some clubs are sceptical about providing EFL clubs with a handout, others — primarily the smaller clubs — are far more sympathetic.

The extension of playing matches behind closed doors because of increasing Covid-19 rates will add to clubs' financial concerns.

There is a growing acceptance that top-flight clubs will have to inject cash into the EFL to keep several teams afloat, knowing that not doing so will have grave consequences and will damage the Premier League's image.

Some club officials want to avoid a scenario where it appears they are offering financial support under duress; or, even worse, not giving them any money at all.

There is a belief that the Government are reluctant to include the Premier League and EFL in a financial relief fund for UK sport after plans to reintroduce fans were scrapped on Tuesday.

Parry said he was disappointed at the Government's decision on fans.

The EFL have warned that their clubs will collectively lose £200million in matchday revenue and other benefits if the whole 2020-21 season has to be played behind closed doors.

'Over many months we have helped the Government devise, refine and pilot stringent stadium protocols to keep supporters safe,' said Parry. 'We are deeply frustrated that we will not be able to continue this work.'

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Sep 23, 2020 11:08 pm

Though until that help arrives the government may provide some short term assistance says the Guardian

Football League expects to get government money to keep clubs alive
Assistance likely to be grants or long-term loans
Funds will help in short term but not see clubs through season
Paul MacInnes

Wed 23 Sep 2020 14.34 BST Last modified on Wed 23 Sep 2020 22.47 BST

The EFL is expecting to receive funding from government to help avert immediate catastrophe in English football.

The money will not be enough to keep clubs afloat for the season but will at least assist in keeping them alive in the short term. What happens after that remains unclear despite negotiations, also involving the Premier League, all summer.

With sport’s Covid crisis having stepped up another notch following the abandonment of plans to return fans to stadiums, governing bodies are waiting with bated breath to hear the contents of a financial rescue package the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is beginning to put together.

That money is likely to come in the form of grants or long-term loans and football is in the queue, with even the Premier League hoping for some form of support from government. The crisis for the lower leagues is more imminent, however, after a weekend of successful pilots that welcomed fans back to grounds turned into a mirage.

For months the EFL has predicted losses of up to £250m for its 72 clubs and those projections look likely to become reality with an acceptance even pilot matches are unlikely to return before the spring.

Speaking on Wednesday the EFL chairman, Rick Parry, expressed disappointment at the curtailment of the pilot programme.

“Following the successful return of supporters to seven fixtures on Saturday, the EFL is disappointed at yesterday’s decision to suspend plans for the return of fans to matches,” he said in a statement.

“Therefore we are deeply frustrated that we will not be able to continue this work and, in doing so, gather the evidence to show that crowds can return safely to football and become an important financial lifeline for our clubs. Therefore, as a matter of urgency we now need to understand what the government’s roadmap is for getting supporters back into stadiums as soon as it is deemed safe to do so.

“I am encouraged that the government has recognised the need for urgent financial assistance for sport and discussions will continue with DCMS and the Premier League.

“We remain optimistic that a solution will be found but we should also be very clear that if it is not, then the outlook for many clubs in the period ahead will be very challenging.”

The EFL is also looking for financial support from the Premier League and believes it should expect it, after government made support for the football pyramid part of the conditions for restarting elite football in June.

The Premier League, meanwhile, continues to point to its own losses – estimated at about £80m a month without fans in grounds - and says it already does its bit to support the game.

Despite nudges and public calls for the Premier League to act – the latest coming from Chelsea’s manager, Frank Lampard – the position of the top flight has not changed.

It is understood that it will require direction from government for that position to shift and so far that push has not been forthcoming. On Tuesday the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, is believed to have told sporting organisations fearful of their prospects for survival that “Boris gets it”.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Sep 23, 2020 11:31 pm

The Telegraph agrees that the Premier League will bail out the EFL but asks cautiously - At what cost?

Premier League will bail out EFL... but at what cost? Strict conditions expected on support package worth up to £250m
Any rescue package likely to be limited to underwriting lost gate receipts, with EFL clubs needing to provide clear evidence to that effect

By Ben Rumsby ; Sam Wallace ; Jason Burt and Jeremy Wilson
23 September 2020 • 8:59pm

Premier League clubs are resigned to having to bail out the English Football League - but with strings attached.

Members of the world’s richest league are expected to impose strict conditions on a support package worth up to £250 million to their lower-league counterparts.

They are prepared to make a take-it-or-leave-it offer after the Government made clear it would not be rescuing the professional game from collapse following the coronavirus crisis.

Premier League clubs had been holding off agreeing to underwrite losses of up to £22m a month being posted by EFL sides until after the planned return of crowds to the game a week today, in the hope both competitions could start generating some ticket revenue.

But Boris Johnson destroyed those plans on Tuesday by announcing a new wave of lockdown restrictions that could force professional and semi-professional football behind closed doors for another six months.

The Prime Minister and his cabinet are determined to hold the Premier League to one of the conditions of the competition resuming this summer in Project Restart after football was suspended in March, which was its clubs supporting the wider football family.

Those clubs, who have already made some contribution to that effect despite losing millions of pounds a week themselves, are now reluctantly ready to go further by bailing out the lower leagues.

However, any rescue package is likely to be limited to underwriting lost gate receipts, with EFL clubs needing to provide clear evidence to that effect.

Premier League clubs have no intention of bailing out teams already at risk of going bust before the pandemic due to poor ownership or other self-inflicted issues.

The league also wants the EFL to agree to support some of its own strategic objectives in exchange for the cash, including post-Brexit quotas on overseas players and on its yet-to-be-agreed curtailment rules.

EFL chairman Rick Parry has been resisting these latter conditions during negotiations over a rescue package but may be forced to accept them if he wants the cash, with Government sources telling The Daily Telegraph it has no intention of dictating what terms are applied to any bailout.

The EFL has been exploring taking out a commercial loan but clubs have told The Telegraph that borrowing money would simply delay their demise.

Parry has already said teams could go bust by Christmas and he reiterated the urgency of a bailout on Wednesday in a statement questioning the Government’s decision to scrap the return of fans.

“Of course we recognise that the UK is facing a significant public health crisis and that sport has to play its part in helping the Government manage the spread of the virus at this difficult time,” he said.

“This is why over many months we have helped the Government devise, refine and pilot stringent stadium protocols designed to keep supporters safe. Staging professional football matches is one of the most heavily regulated areas of crowd management and any supporters attending EFL fixtures, in vastly reduced numbers, would have been required to adhere to social distancing and the rule of six.

“Therefore we are deeply frustrated that we will not be able to continue this work and, in doing so, gather the evidence to show that crowds can return safely to football and become an important financial lifeline for our clubs. Therefore, as a matter of urgency we now need to understand what the Government’s roadmap is for getting supporters back into stadiums as soon as it is deemed safe to do so.

“With extended measures introduced, it is imperative that the financial issues facing our clubs are addressed quickly. EFL clubs lost £50m last season as a result of playing matches behind closed doors or curtailing the season and stand to lose a further £200m in 2020/21 should we be required to play the whole season without supporters in grounds.

"I am encouraged that the Government has recognised the need for urgent financial assistance for sport and discussions will continue with DCMS and the Premier League.”

Wednesday also saw the community leisure sector urge the Government to fast-track immediate financial help while the Premier League and EFL continue to thrash out a deal.

Around one third of public gyms, leisure centres and swimming pools have been unable to reopen, even since Covid-19 restrictions were eased in July, because of lost revenues during the initial lockdown and on-going restrictions on numbers.

Around 6,000 permanent and casual staff have already lost their jobs and, having first asked for Government support last month, numerous facilities are at risk of permanent closure in the coming weeks.

“That’s impacting communities across the whole country, and that is impacting the health of those communities – there is a real urgency there now and we humbly encourage government to find resolution,” said Huw Edwards, the chief executive of ukactive, which represents public and private sector gyms and leisure centres.

Sport England research recently found that, for every £1 invested in community physical activity, there was a return of £4 in improved health and social incomes.

Edwards is arguing for a package that does not only include core funding, but which could also encompass stimulus like VAT cuts, an extension of business rates relief and initiatives such as extending the Cycle to Work scheme to include gym membership or equipment.

He is also adamant that there is an overwhelming economic, as well as health and social case, for the request.

“There is no trade-off between health and the economy when it comes to investing in our sector,” he said.

“You are making savings across health care, across social care, a massive impact on major NHS issues like diabetes and dementia, and you are reducing tens of millions of GP visits. Where are you going to find a sector that bridges that physical, mental and social wellbeing agenda so emphatically? There is such potential but, to provide those solutions, we need to survive.”

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Sep 23, 2020 11:35 pm

Meanwhile the PFA, who have kept everyone on full pay during the crisis and were recently hung out to dry for paying their finance chief several times the average Championship chief execs salary are continuing to show the way on wages (they are still fighting EFL salary caps) 0 from the Telegraph

£40k for two days work a month: Eye-popping sum as PFA advertises for non-exec directors in restructuring process
There is currently huge scrutiny on the PFA's spending and entire financial model in wake of unprecedented financial crisis due to Covid

By - Jeremy Wilson,
CHIEF SPORTS REPORTER
23 September 2020 • 8:10pm

The Professional Footballers’ Association is advertising for new non-executive directors to appoint chief executive Gordon Taylor’s successor, with candidates to be offered £40,000 a year for between one and two days work a month.

With Taylor again earning more than £2 million in salary, bonus and benefits in the most recent accounts, and football facing an unprecedented financial crisis, there is currently huge scrutiny on the PFA’s spending and entire financial model.

An independent review into the organisation by Sport Resolutions is complete and the PFA says that the recruitment of four independent non-executive directors will be “key to the transformation and restructuring process”.

The job advert estimates a time commitment for the role at “circa 1-2 days per month” and says that the roles will be “remunerated at £40k per annum”.

“These are unique opportunities to work at the heart of football and have a positive impact on the lives of footballers and the industry as a whole,” says the advert.

As revealed by The Telegraph, the PFA’s charity arm is currently reviewing its ongoing link with the trade union as it prepares for life after Taylor and the organisation’s biggest overhaul in a generation.

As well as Taylor's pay, the most recent accounts revealed that director of finance Darren Wilson received £345,516 in salary, bonus and benefits, including pension contributions.

Taylor and Wilson are employees of the union but also Charity trustees alongside Brendon Batson, Garth Crooks, Gareth Griffths, Chris Powell and David Weir. The accounts also revealed that the PFA’s reserves had grown to £63.54 million and that it had heritage assets, including memorabilia, worth £10.77 million.

Taylor became PFA chairman in 1978 and has been chief executive since 1981. Of the six most senior staff, the most recent arrival was 17 years ago.

Wilson has been the director of finance for 18 years, while two of the charity trustees, Batson and Crooks, were respectively deputy chief executive and chairman during periods in the 1980s.

The PFA said that they were “taking forward a number of actions highlighted as part of the independent review process”.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Sep 24, 2020 1:35 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Mon Sep 21, 2020 8:45 pm
Today's Price of Football Podcast suggest that the new 1 year Chinese TV deal is worth only £25m to the Premier League, a huge reduction in income (remember the PPTV was about £565m over 3 years) especially when you consider that the Premier League are still chasing down £160m from last season. I am making that a £320m or so loss on that one deal so far this will be on top of overseas rebates last season of around £170m - those merit payments are ebbing away rapidly

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/f ... 0491924901
I thought the value that @KieranMaguire stated for the Tencent Premier League was a big ouch - it maybe that Kieran grossly overstated it

https://twitter.com/YannickRamcke/statu ... 2729931788

- £7.7m means that the Premier League can say thankyou to UK gov for a lost revenue of £178m this year on that PPTV deal (still £160m missing from last year of course) and we await to see what any new deal for next season will do to revenues.

Yesterdays decision on fans attendance is likely to cost the Premier League a further £700m +. Add the probable rebates for, all games live domestically (and no fans) and the figure sails past £1bn for the season - but the government is still insisting that the Premier League bail out the pyramid
Last edited by Chester Perry on Thu Sep 24, 2020 8:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Sep 24, 2020 8:08 am

The Telegraph reports that the people who are supposed to protect the game have grand plans for how they can make more money for their own organisations

Premier League's solidarity threatened as opportunists prepare for power grab
SAM WALLACE SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

‘It’s not science fiction” protested Gianni Infantino, the Fifa president, as he discussed the latest outbreak of blue-sky thinking at his Swiss institute for bad ideas: this time rearranging the football calendar into blocks of single competitions.

In an interview this month, modestly scheduled to mark his 50th birthday, he proposed playing all the domestic league games globally at the same time, then cross-border club football and finally international football. All of them assigned a window of opportunity to accomplish what needed to be done before the game moved on to the next show. So out would go the old tradition of the integration of the season between league, cup, continental competition and internationals.

If it sounds rather like the football equivalent of arranging one’s bookshelves according to the colour of the spines, then bear in mind that in the chaos of this Covid era there is much up for grabs and many prepared to grab it. The high-priest of the European super league, Andrea Agnelli, addressed his own constituency at the annual meeting of the European Club Association this month, painting a very bleak picture of football’s finances, and projecting losses of €4 billion (£3.66 billion) over the season across Europe’s top 20 leagues.

This is fertile ground for the Juventus chairman, who would like to usher in his new expanded Champions League plan after 2024, when existing broadcast deals expire, as much as Infantino wishes to launch his expanded Fifa Club World Cup at the same time.

Agnelli spoke of “deep scars” in football’s financing and where there is uncertainty there is opportunity for those seeking to remake football their own way.

It has been a bad week for the Premier League and its more dysfunctional sibling the English Football League, with the Government’s new lockdown measures ruling out the return of fans to stadiums until March.

A long winter awaits and, as with the March suspension of the previous season, there is extraordinary pressure once again on the old fissures in the game, the rifts that ordinarily grind along at a glacial pace.

The proposed bail-out of the EFL by the Premier League, with the former pleading a £250 million deficit, is one such issue that threatens the solidarity of the 20 clubs in the top division and their revenue-sharing model.

There will be many Premier League clubs who feel that handing money to some of the owners of EFL clubs is only one step removed, as sensible business strategies go, from investing in unicorn tears, moon-cheese or the goalscoring of Roberto Soldado. Once again it will cause those with the highest costs to question why they are tethered to a system that obliges them to support commercial entities who cannot support themselves.

The Premier League seems resigned to its EFL bail-out, and it is inevitable that even this uniquely corporate entity will be forced to acknowledge it must come to the rescue – albeit with conditions attached. But that also creates an opportunity for those who would seek to divide the league and especially target the top clubs who would prove so useful to wider European or global projects of the kind that Agnelli and Infantino have discussed.

Once again, the league’s solidarity is threatened by the demands being made of it and the question begs itself whether this collective endeavour, with all its imperfections, can be kept intact through another period of instability. Telegraph Sport reports that the biggest deficit in this pandemic, in terms of cash alone, belongs to Manchester United with Covid losses of almost £140 million, followed by the rest of the notional big six.

These are the same clubs that, in the past, have at least listened to the proposals of those who would carve up European and world football to create a new consensus in favour of the wealthy, and one that has been enthusiastically pursued by Agnelli. Before there has been scepticism from the English game’s biggest clubs about compromising the commercial success of the Premier League for an alternative that is untried and so unpopular amongst their core support.

You have to wonder how they feel now, facing up to six months without the return of supporters to their own big stadiums. The expectation from government that the wealthiest clubs help the rest of the game reflects the public view and on the face of it sounds sensible, as those same clubs once again invest in big transfer fees and contracts. But that does not mean that their own finances are not stretched, or indeed that the clubs are happy to do so.

No one knows for sure what is coming in the spring of 2022 when the decisions are expected to be made as to how football looks post-2024.

Rather like the loneliest child in the class, Infantino inaugurated his own club in November 2019, what he has optimistically called the World Football Club Association.

Real Madrid appear to have joined and one can only assume that Infantino’s plans for a biennial Club World Cup in the prime summer slot of his new world calendar are the centrepiece.

Meanwhile, Thursday’s Uefa executive committee meeting will feature a speech from the organisation’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, who desperately does not want to be remembered as the man who lost control of the Champions League.

He knows that he will be obliged to deliver a competition in the future that offers more games, more certainty around places and more money to the most powerful clubs in Europe.

If that is to be the case then the biggest Premier League clubs will need more space in their schedules to accommodate those fixtures. The fragile alliance of the 20 clubs is likely to be tested like never before over the next six months and only time will tell what those involved consider to be sacrosanct and what they say can be discarded.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Sep 24, 2020 8:09 am

Meanwhile @SwissRamble looks at the losses of the Premier League matchday income following Monday's announcement

https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/ ... 0904353792

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Sep 24, 2020 8:52 am

FIFA have released it's new Legal Handbook - not checked for the clause where it is ok for the President to speak to senior government legal officials (who were investigating them) and not have the meeting noted/minuted/recorded or even recollected,

https://www.fifa.com/who-we-are/news/fi ... l-handbook

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Sep 24, 2020 9:12 am

TwoHundredPrecent.com with a riposte to Dyches's ill advised comments from the Tuesday's Press Conference - I suspect he has cost the club and himself an awful lot of goodwill - I have noted before that Dyche has a lot of similarities with Alex Ferguson, this seems like another from that playbook, I just don't think it fit's our times.

Sorry, But Lower Leagues Need Charity to Survive
by Ian | Sep 23, 2020

It rather feels as though scales are falling from the eyes, at the moment. For the last few months, football has been staggering along, doing its best to act as though this was a temporary blip and that getting back to normal would somehow align with the start of the new football season. Fans at all levels of the game had to get used to the reality of life as we knew it coming to a grinding halt in a more general sense than merely football.

There were reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the return of the football too, if taken in complete isolation from the rest of society. The return of the game saw relatively few reported infections, the non-league season was finally scheduled to start, there didn’t appear to have been any Covid-related fatalities within the game, whether we’re amongst those who make their livings from it or the clubs themselves, there were even a lot of goals flying in, for those who watch the Premier League.

The problem, of course, is that football doesn’t exist in complete isolation from the rest of society. The lockdown is tightening again, and the cost to the game this time around could be catastrophic. Professional football – below the Premier League – was atrociously run throughout a period when there was money slowing into it than ever before. That it got through the first lockdown relatively unscathed feels somewhat miraculous, and even that required wage deferrals and financial advances.

This time, however, the game is left completely exposed. Money cannot be advanced forever. Players cannot be expected to tear up their employment contracts. If the lower leagues are going to survive, they are going to need outside support. The hammer blow fell with the news that the government is pausing its plans for the partial return of fans to stadiums on the 1st of October because of the rapid spike in Covid-19 cases.

For the Premier League, this is likely to be little more than a blip. These clubs are cushioned by lavish television contracts and are unlikely to find themselves in severe financial difficulties without match day revenues. But the lower you travel down the football ladder from here on, the more dependent clubs are on match day revenue, and you don’t have to travel very far down before they’re almost entirely reliant on it.

The hit is a double-whammy for those clubs that fall between these two particular stools. The National League had timed the commencement of their new season with the planned relaxing on restrictions at games, but now all clubs above Step 3 find themselves having the cost of putting on matches without anyone attending. The cost of this in League Two has been estimated at around £20,000 per match. And on top of this, clubs that have been taking advantage of the government’s furlough scheme also face that coming to an end in a couple of weeks time, with no announcement of any extension or replacement having yet been announced.

To a point, the National League has to face up to a huge tactical mistake, here. The league pushed for its three divisions to be classified in order to get last season’s play-offs played behind closed doors. This decision, however, now seems to have returned to bite them on the backside. Step 3 and below – one division below the National Leagues North & South – are for now exempted from the new rules and are able to welcome up to 600 supporters through their turnstiles as they are considered to play at a “recreational” level. The National League, however, is now classified as “elite” level sport, and is therefore now marooned alongside the EFL.

Financially, it doesn’t seem likely that the FA is going to be able to do very much. They announced at the end of June that they were making 124 positions redundant, with potential losses as a result of the pandemic being predicted to go as high as £300m. Indeed, even that only now seems to have been the tip of that particular iceberg. According to leaked papers published this morning, the men’s futsal team is being axed, and a proposed women’s futsal team will not be going ahead and, ominously, grassroots football – which is already practically on its knees for a lack of facilities – faces cuts of £22m per year.

The Premier League and/or its member clubs could probably afford to make some form of solidarity payment, but billionaires don’t become billionaires by displaying basic human decency, so the idea of the sort of money required to keep things anywhere near solvent across the entirety of the game being handed out without the most Faustian strings imaginable attached feels far-fetched, especially when we consider attitudes of the likes of the Burnley manager Sean Dyche, who said of the idea that bigger clubs should do something for their smaller brethren:

If the Premier League can do their bit to enhance the chances of other teams surviving possibly they may step in but does that mean every hedge-fund manager who is incredibly successful does that — filter down to the hedge-fund managers who are not so successful? Does it filter down from the restaurants, so the ones who are surviving can look after the ones who are not surviving?

You can’t just measure football on its own — there are lots of businesses out there that are making huge sums of money who could therefore protect businesses in their line of work. If you are going to apply it to football, you have to apply it across the country to everyone and every business, then you have a balanced and fair look at it.

Sean Dyche is, presumably, against his club being any part of collective bargaining for television rights, since this is really a form of wealth distribution. We trust he’ll be ensuring that he’ll be campaigning for Premier League clubs to negotiate their own television rights packages when the current contract ends, even though this would almost certainly mean vast increases in television money for the six richest clubs whilst Burnley’s would almost certainly look more like what they’d get were they in the Championship.

Or… it might just be possible that he’s just another hypocrite who believes that ‘handouts’ (as any sort of support for anybody less well-off than themselves have become known, so repugnant has British culture become when it comes to discussing such matters) are A Good Thing when his club is the beneficiary of them, and A Bad Thing when it isn’t. All we can say for certain is that these words may even come back to haunt Dyche when either his time at Burnley or Burnley’s time in the Premier League comes to an end.

His attitude, however, is probably fairly widespread throughout the Premier League, so this leaves the government as the most likely source of financial assistance. It was reported yesterday afternoon that they are planning a ‘rescue package’ for up to eight sports, though the efficacy of this will come entirely down to what any final packages look like. They could be very good, or it could be a mere veneer of gloss on a package which rescues very few but allows the government to claim that it ‘tried.’

Considering the amount of money they’ve wasted on face masks that didn’t work and that they’re intending to spend £100bn (a number so vast that it’s almost involuntary to spell-check it every time you type it) on a mass testing programme described by critics as “waste/corruption on a cosmic scale”, you’d think that they’d be able to come up with something that could keep our football clubs alive, as well as other sports that are suffering at the moment.

The chairman of Dagenham & Redbridge has told the Press Association that £20m would probably shore up the three divisions of the National League, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that £100m would probably be enough to see everyone from League One or League Two down through this period as well. And yes, that does sound like a lot of money, but this is the point at which we’re duty bound to remember the craziness of football’s finances. £100m is definitely a lot of money, but such is the imbalance in football’s finances that it’s the equivalent to what Bournemouth made in Premier League prize & TV money for the 2019/20 season alone.

At the time of writing, though, it’s impossible to predict exactly what the future will bring. West Ham United players and the manager have been confirmed as having tested positive for the virus. Leyton Orient have had a number of players test positive for the virus. Orient couldn’t test because they couldn’t afford to and were only tested because they had a League Cup match a Spurs which was subsequently called off, costing them £125,000 in television appearance money.

Spurs supporters – because in all honesty supporters are the only people that we can trust to do the right thing at the moment – had, by this morning, spent £20,000 in the Orient online store to try and make up some of this financial loss. This seems likely to be the pattern for the next few months, of infection clusters popping up and leading to cancellations at short notice, but obviously no-one can say for certain how the rest of this will play out. It already feels as though it may yet prove impossible to end this season on time.

The FA issued a response to the government’s announcements this morning which proves little more than that somebody there has got a degree in the bleeding obvious, but it’s really difficult to say much else at the moment. All we can say with a reasonable degree of confidence is that lower division football down to the National Leagues North & South are going to need financial support from somewhere if they’re going to survive until next April without crowds being able to attend their matches.

If you’re a follower of a Premier League club or a member of the government and you’re happy for numerous football clubs to fold over the next six months, then carry on very much as you are. Otherwise, the money required to keep our football pyramid has to come from somewhere, so perhaps it’s time to stop telling smaller clubs and their supporters – who, by and large, have been more accepting of this financial distortion than any of the biggest clubs deserve – that they’re the problem and start doing something practical to help them instead.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Sep 24, 2020 9:24 am

this is quite significant when you apply it to the European equivalent - The Asian Champions League has expelled the defending Champions for fielding a team of just 9 players as Covid ravaged their team - from Sports Business - Imagine Andreas Angelli if it were Juventus

AFC Champions League holders expelled after Covid-19 outbreak
Tom King, Asia Office - September 24, 2020

Reigning champions Al Hilal have been removed from the AFC Champions League after naming a line-up with only nine outfield players due to a Covid-19 outbreak.

The Saudi Arabian side failed to name the required 13 players for their AFC Champions League (West) Group B match against Shabab Al Ahli Dubai, of the United Arab Emirates.

Under Article 4.3 of the special rules applicable to AFC Competitions during the Covid-19 pandemic, the team was deemed to have withdrawn from the competition, the AFC said in a press release.

A Covid-19 outbreak affecting 15 Al Hilal players meant the team had only eight virus-free outfield players for Wednesday’s match against Shabab Al Ahli Dubai. Al Hilal named two goalkeepers on the bench but could not fulfil the minimum squad requirement of 13 players.

The ruling means all matches played by Al Hilal are considered null and void and therefore Pakhtakor of Uzbekistan and Shabab Al Ahli Dubai have progressed to the Round of 16 from Group B.

Al Hilal and the Saudi Arabian federation requested a postponement of the match against Shabab Al Ahli Dubai, but the AFC rejected it, deciding that it would have negatively impacted the match schedule of the AFC Champions League (West).

Earlier this month, Abu Dhabi-based club Al Wahda withdrew from the competition due to positive Covid-19 tests, which prevented the squad travelling to Qatar.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Sep 24, 2020 9:34 am

Most of us have heard of Fanatics, the global retail enablers for clubs such as Everton, but for some reason I have not registered "experiential services agency" (yes really) Legends - this profile from SportsProMedia looks at their new partnership with Real Madrid and the person running it (who previously was at Spurs for over a decade. It is quite a long read

https://www.sportspromedia.com/intervie ... u-hawksley

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Sep 24, 2020 9:58 am

On Tuesday despite pleas Leyton Orient had their League cup tie with Spurs postponed (and probably cancelled with a default loss) after a surge of Covid infections in the team, the tie had been selected by Sky and Orient would have received a 6 figure sum for the game. Since then Spurs fans have overwhelmed Orients online store with orders to help make up for the loss - it is another football fan good news story

https://twitter.com/leytonorientfc/stat ... 2872516613

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Sep 24, 2020 10:39 am

Today is a big day for non-league football - The National League and National Leagues North and South will decide whether to start the season as intended on 3ed of October behind closed doors - the decision is in balance given most clubs have many full time staff. Of course they are classed as elite football by the government (and there fore subject to the no-fans rule) because a number of clubs campaigned vigorously for that status so they could finish last season and have the opportunity to be promoted - those that didn't want that burden are now be forced to suffer again as a result

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Sep 24, 2020 3:03 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Mon Sep 21, 2020 6:01 pm
This could cause quite a stir - from the BBC - Roman Abramovich had stakes in players not at his club - Third Party ownership (now banned of course)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54229269

I suspect that this will form part of tonight's Panorama from 7pm on BBC1

@TariqPanja with some additional background

https://twitter.com/tariqpanja/status/1 ... 4732577796
The Guardian's David Conn with more background to this particular story and the general issue of 3rd Party Ownership

Abramovich's buy-up of rival players sheds a little light on murky world
David Conn

Thanks to the FinCEN files, we know the Chelsea owner had ‘economic rights’ in other clubs’ players, but the transfer business remains mostly opaque and out of reach

Thu 24 Sep 2020 11.54 BST Last modified on Thu 24 Sep 2020 14.10 BST

It is only due to the “FinCEN Files,” a huge leak of confidential information, that the world knows a sliver more about the predilection Roman Abramovich apparently had for buying “economic rights” in players at clubs other than his own. This nugget has been sifted from more than 2,000 suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed with the US government’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), that would have remained unknown but for the reporting on the leak by the BBC and other media organisations.

Yet as these episodes always do, by providing a one-off glimpse into vast secretive dealings this leak also delivers a jolting reminder of how much remains unknown, about the multibillion-pound business of human football talent.

Years pass before tiny pieces of this huge global jigsaw turn up accidentally, and are painstakingly put together. A spokeswoman for Abramovich has not denied the essence of the reporting, that the Chelsea owner also owned a company, Leiston Holdings, registered in the British Virgin Islands, a tax haven, that was advised by the agent Pini Zahavi and bought rights in players at Sporting. The spokeswoman’s statement concentrated on emphasising that there was no wrongdoing in any of it: “third-party ownership” of footballers was allowed worldwide until Fifa finally banned it in 2015 – the Premier League banned it earlier, in 2008 – so no football rules were breached. Abramovich and his advisers could not know if a SAR was indeed filed with the FinCEN relating to him, she said, and if it was: “Millions of SARs are filed yearly and a filed SAR on its own does not mean that a transaction was unlawful or otherwise in breach of rules or regulations.”

To further questions, about why Abramovich invested in third-party ownership of players at other clubs, he has declined to comment, and there is no requirement on him or anybody else to provide any further information.

In all these years of enormously billowing transfer fees, eye-watering commissions paid to agents, and profits made by investors in tax havens from buying and selling rights in players, solid facts and details have largely remained confidential. So the FinCEN material about Abramovich owning Leiston Holdings is a genuine revelation, but most of the rest of the jigsaw puzzle remains in shadow.

One small piece of it had been lying about in public for years: it was a long-established fact that Leiston Holdings had bought rights in Sporting players. It was just that, until now, it was not known who owned that company, as it was registered offshore.

So the world is now informed that Abramovich, one of the original Russian oligarchs, while owning and vastly funding Chelsea, also bought up rights to Sporting players. They included the Peruvian winger André Carrillo, who played against Chelsea in the Champions League in 2014. Zahavi, the agent whose long career is a one-man atlas and history of the burgeoning transfer business, confirmed to the Guardian that he advised Leiston Holdings on players whose rights they might buy, although he said he had not known that the owner was Abramovich.

It was, though, already known that Abramovich, through Chelsea, was apparently involved in third-party ownership of players. The Guardian reported six years ago that Chelsea appeared to be in partnership with the Quality Football Ireland group of companies which invested in players’ rights, advised by another of the game’s prodigiously-earning agents, the Porto-based Jorge Mendes. Then too, it was Sporting players – nine of them, including Ricky van Wolfswinkel, the Dutch striker Norwich City subsequently signed from Sporting for £8.5m – who could be identified as having their rights part-owned by these companies.

There is a reason, though, why Sporting came up repeatedly as an apparent base of third-party ownership, by Abramovich-owned or -linked investment entities and others: like Benfica at that time, they declared such deals in their annual financial reports. Sporting’s accounts, for example, note that in the year to 30 June 2014, the club owed Leiston Holdings €2.6m for “amounts already received for the transfer of part of the economic rights of some players”. Quality Football Ireland was also listed, owed €14m, along with Doyen Sports Investments, another well-known company then involved in third-party ownership, owed €4.5m, and Holdimo SA, owed €20m.

Away from those Portuguese clubs which published their dealings with third-party ownership investment companies, the extent of the trade at other clubs was mostly not declared. This device, in which a club sold a percentage of a player’s value for cash up front from an outside investor, was institutionalised through the 2000s in Portuguese, Spanish and South American football. It was alien to the English game before 2006, when the investor-owned Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano signed for West Ham immediately after making their names internationally for Argentina in that summer’s World Cup.

The Premier League’s revulsion at aspects of those deals, and at the very concept of players’ rights and onward transfer fees being owned by financial investors rather than clubs, led to the ban in England as early as 2008, and pressure on Fifa for the global ban that finally came seven years later. But the legacy of this practice, who made what money on which players, remains largely unknown outside these occasional leaks. And the global footballer transfer business, the value of which has now multiplied into fees unthinkable even in 2015, is still conducted through dealings and documents that remain confidential, with the public allowed barely a peek.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Sep 24, 2020 10:28 pm

I have been saying it for a while along with others (including The Esk), but this is the first time that the mainstream British media have cottoned on - the next tv cycle for the Premier League is looking like it will produce a significant drop in revenues - from the Telegraph.

Premier League braced for £675m slump in TV revenue
TOM MORGAN SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

The Premier League is facing a fresh financial blow as broadcasting dealmakers forecast the next domestic TV sell-off could fall by up to £675 million.

A potential 15 per cent dip in one of the most lucrative agreements in world sport has been predicted on the back of £1 billion-plus losses for the clubs during Covid-19.

Several top-tier executives – already facing demands to contribute to a bail-out of the English Football League – suspect Sky and BT will trim offers.

The Premier League had already recorded a 10 per cent drop-off in the last domestic cycle and analysts are convinced it will be impossible to generate an increase on the current £4.5 billion deal.

Around 200 of the 380 matches are likely to be made available again for the world’s richest domestic competition when the auction opens either in December or early next year. The deal kicks in the season after next.

Experts say valuations peaked in 2016, and, while Sky and BT still consider the league their most valuable offering, Covid-19 has accelerated a gradual fall. Amazon, which bought up matches for the first time last season, is not expected to compete with the big two bidders.

“It’s difficult to see how the Premier League can conjure a situation where it’s more attractive for them to pay more money,” said Julian Aquilina, of Enders Analysis. “Maybe they can keep it flat, but BT always talk of going ‘flat to down’ when they have their calls. I would imagine, realistically, that it’s going down in value because it’s been at such a high.” He declined to put an exact figure on the potential fall, but sources close to talks said “up to 15 per cent is realistic”.

Andrea Radrizzani, the Leeds United owner, said the league could still diversify its offering to digital platforms to increase revenue, but there is no suggestion that the likes of Netflix or Facebook are interested in tabling a bid due to the limits over syndication worldwide.

Sky and BT have enjoyed record levels of viewers during lockdown, but both suffered serious financial damage over the past six months, with the latter increasing its fees by £4 a month. David Kogan, a former media rights adviser to the Premier League during six rounds of domestic rights deals from 1999-2015, said the “Covid crisis has actually acted as an accelerant of factors within the Premier League that were already evident”.

“It’s going to have a big impact but I think that impact would have happened anyway, only over a longer period of time,” he said.

There have been signs Sky is becoming less aggressive in bidding since the Murdoch sell-off to Comcast. Kogan, however, said it was impossible to put a realistic prediction on the next rights price. “The one certainty in selling rights – and I’ve sold rights for many rights-holders over the years – is you don’t know,” he said.

The Premier League has declined to go into detail over the new deals, but sources close to the league said it was “optimistic” ahead of the next auction.

A host of broadcasters have already warned of potentially difficult times for rights packages. However. Yousef Al-Obaidly, chief executive of BeIN – the league’s biggest overseas rights holder, – warned last October that “the endless growth of sports rights is over” and in certain cases internationally, “rights values are going drop off a cliff” as he warned of the damage caused by piracy and changing trends in sport TV consumption.

The league faces a complex task trying to modernise its offering. The deal with Amazon this season was understood to have been agreed at a price less than BT were offering because the league wanted to trial a new market.

Covid-19 has hit Sky hard, with second quarterly revenue falling 12.9 per cent year-on-year, and cash flow expected to fall 60 per cent. “Football is still by far and away the most important sport for the broadcasters to have in the UK, particularly with something like the Premier League, which has a much more elevated status than any other competition,” Aquilina said. “That’s by far and away better protected, but that’s not to say the rights won’t decline in value.”

If the current package remained in place, he expected a decline in the value again, as companies such as Sky and BT “are under pressure to cut their costs. They’re under pressure to cover their costs, and they have identified lots of different areas where they can redeploy that capital, like drama programming, and originals”.

Amid turbulence surrounding Covid and a potential bail-out for the EFL, the next domestic rights deal will be a major test for Richard Masters, the league’s chief executive. He moved quickly to sign up Chinese internet giant Tencent after the league’s previous three-year contract for the region collapsed, but the next domestic cycle – which had already dipped 10 per cent from the record high of more than £1.7 billion-a-year in 2016 – will inevitably be measured against the profits achieved by his predecessor, Richard Scudamore.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Sep 24, 2020 10:33 pm

Meanwhile the Guardian says that the Government is still insisting that the Premier League provides financial support to the English Pyramid

Premier League told to help smaller clubs as government outlines sport plan
Oliver Dowden will be ‘asking sports to help themselves’
Leicester Tigers chairman Peter Tom warns of disaster
Sean Ingle

Thu 24 Sep 2020 20.01 BST Last modified on Thu 24 Sep 2020 20.34 BST

The government has ramped up the pressure on the Premier League by confirming for the first time that it expects them to help lower league clubs in peril.

The warning came from the culture secretary Oliver Dowden, who said that while he was “acutely aware” of the devastating impact of postponing the return of fans, he would also be “asking sports to help themselves – starting with the Premier League in respect of football”. That position is shared by Downing Street and was reinforced by the sports minister Nigel Huddleston, who told parliament on Thursday: “Where it can, we will expect the top tiers of professional sport to look at ways it can support itself, with the government focusing on those most in need.”

Those comments are likely to make many in sport nervous. There is still a faint hope in the sector that the government could ride to the rescue with a rescue package similar to the £1.5bn given to the arts in July. However the Guardian understands that nothing like that is on the table – and any help is likely to be in the millions not billions.

It is also unclear whether the government’s demands will cut any ice with the Premier League, with some clubs privately telling the Guardian they feel their first duty is to help non-playing staff keep their jobs during the pandemic. At any rate, any offer of assistance is unlikely to be imminent given it would have to first be approved at a Premier League shareholders meeting. Dowden also enjoys the strong backing of Downing Street, which is keen to see the top flight do more to provide financial support for EFL clubs in particular. Ministers and officials held meetings on Thursday afternoon to discuss how to sport deal with the effects of the pandemic crisis.

Meanwhile the Leicester Tigers chairman, Peter Tom, added his voice to those warning that having no crowds for six months threatens the future of English professional rugby. “This is a disaster for Premiership Rugby and all the clubs involved,” he said. “I’m very worried about what the future for English professional rugby is. Nobody will be able to sustain this.”

However the National League, which has warned that its season was under threat, was more bullish – saying that it hoped to announce a “critical financial support package very soon” which would enable it to start playing again on 3 October.

The government has also confirmed that an independent team of sport, health and technology experts has met for the first time to explore how fans could return to sports events. However speaking in the Commons, the shadow sports minister Alison McGovern blamed the government for not doing more during the summer to help sport.

“The government’s failures on track and trace have consequences for football clubs and we all want to know what the plan is to save the game we love,” she said. “So suppose, as has been indicated in the media, that the Premier League is not prepared to underwrite the rest of football, I’d like to know who then would be to blame when clubs collapse? Will it be the Premier League or will it be Conservative ministers speaking from this despatch box?”

Meanwhile Leyton Orient’s League Two fixture at Walsall on Saturday has been postponed in the wake of the majority of the their first-team squad testing positive for Covid-19. More than a dozen Orient players are thought to be self-isolating as per government guidance.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Sep 24, 2020 10:39 pm

In the first days of football's shutdown back in March I suggested that this was an opportunity for the game in this country to reolve it's many dilemas - very little of that has actually been done - Barney Ronay picks up the baton in the Guardian

Never waste a crisis: Covid-19 trauma can force sport to change for good
Elite sport will be fine in the end but the entire structure needs rethinking and taxpayers’ money should go to the grassroots

Barney Ronay - Thu 24 Sep 2020 19.30 BST Last modified on Thu 24 Sep 2020 20.03 BST

Pack up the flags. Close the turnstiles. Cover the plastic seats with an inspirational tarpaulin. The gates are being closed. And frankly it is anyone’s guess when they might be open again.

The news this week that the government has withdrawn its mandate for the staged return of spectators to professional sport has been greeted with dismay, and at times a barely contained sense of anger, among those whose job it is to keep the industry wheels clanking along.

Football has spoken loudest in the last couple of days, with the EFL chairman Rick Parry stating that clubs stand to lose a further £200m if the entire season is given over to ghost games. The talk in Premiership Rugby is already of bankruptcy or even a reversion to amateur status should the current disaster-scenario timeline continue to its logical end. Point to a sport, any sport, and the story is the same: crisis, collapse, a chasm of debt.

There have been suggestions already of a government bailout, a possibility that comes with two significant caveats. First, the chancellor is not minded to include the Premier League or Championship in any financial aid, understandably so given the endless spume of TV rights payments and the inanity of player salaries.

And secondly, well, have you actually seen the government recently? Or indeed the prime minister himself, who these days resembles an increasingly confused elderly labrador dressed up in a suit and pushed out in front of the cameras to talk about graph-based infection trends, which is only now, 10 minutes into its TV spot, realising it shouldn’t actually be able to talk.

There is no certainty here, no long-term promise that can be guaranteed to last the next few policy lurches. Professional sport is facing a crisis of unprecedented urgency. It must be prepared to face it largely alone.

At which point it is worth being clear on exactly what is at stake. This is a moment of peril that should raise questions far beyond simply survival or sustaining the status quo. Questions such as: what is sport actually for? And more to the point, what do we want it to look like when this is all over?

Amateur female rugby union players contest a lineout in Leamington Spa. Photograph: Colin Underhill/Alamy Stock Photo
It helps to define the terms of all this jeopardy. There has been a lot of emotive rhetoric about sport being on the verge of extinction, its very existence in doubt, as though the basic ability to participate, support and spectate could be vaporised out from beneath us.

This is incorrect. What is being menaced is the current financial management of professional sport, its existing models and cultural practices, much of which is pretty joyless and dysfunctional in the first place.

Even within this there are layers. The top tier of global sport will carry on regardless, constrained but far from imperilled. Manchester United could lose £120m should the plague-hiatus extend to the spring. Big deal. Budgets will be shaved and new signings restricted. But half that amount was thrown away just paying Alexis Sánchez’s wages. The pandemic has reinforced an obvious truth: football at this level isn’t operating on any recognisable human scale.

The real jeopardy applies to the levels of professional sport below the elite. It is here, from football league to county cricket to racing and athletics, that there is a genuine threat of long-established institutions going to the wall. In many cases this is the result of a deadly interplay with pre-existing greed and flaky accounting. Only one Premiership rugby union club failed to make a loss last year. Reading FC spent a sum equivalent to 194% of its turnover on player wages two seasons ago. Nobody could have foreseen the precise outline of a bat-derived global pandemic. But events – human history suggests – do tend to intervene at some stage.

Even well-run institutions at amateur level will be vulnerable to the impossible maths of the situation. It may be an auditing process is required for any bailout fund, with loans and grants parcelled out on merit.

It is to be hoped the system is lenient. The sums are likely to be small in the context of the overall Covid debt. The institutions involved are part of a patchwork sporting culture that deserves protection no matter how iffy their current administration.

This has been one upshot of the current crisis, a laying bare of certain key truths. This is not always a bad thing. For a start, it turns out the absence of crowds is a genuine drag to the brand value of the Premier League, a key part of its eminently saleable fan culture has often been rather carelessly used in the past. The absence of supporters has clarified their value.

Newcastle’s manager, Steve Bruce, spoke earlier this week about players and managers feeling demotivated by the empty stands. Perhaps clubs and administrators might try to nurture this a little when supporters do return. There is plenty that can be done, from ensuring younger fans can afford to come to fighting the urge to retain the new late-night kick-off times. A year away is a long time. That thread must be maintained.

Indeed, for all the trauma, this is also an opportunity for sporting organisations to engage in a profound period of introspection. Some structures have proved surprisingly resilient. Cricket is run by a single dictatorial governing body. It turns out this is a pretty good way to manage a financial crisis. With any luck the ECB might yet take a similarly pragmatic view of its current plans to introduce an untried vanity format next year.

In elite professional football good sense would demand player salaries are capped or controlled relative to income. It is an absurdity that this small group of dependents, the sport’s single outstanding cost, are threatening to kill the industry that supports them. Good sense, as ever, may have to join the back of the queue.

As for the idea of trickle down from the top end, here is a non-fun fact: Gareth Bale could personally keep every club in League Two in business by paying their total combined wage bill out of his annual playing salary. This probably won’t happen. The point is just that he could.

Again: what is sport for exactly? Step down to the bottom tier in this structure and amateur and recreational sport will carry on regardless. The base elements of participation and support, the basic soul of sport, will survive all this.

In many ways recreational sport has been defiantly alive during the time of lockdown. Amateur cricket found its season crammed into a snatched six-week summer romance and has been a tour de force, drawing on its deep reserves of community and volunteer culture. More people have taken up or returned to cycling and running. The campaign to restart indoor sports such as badminton and netball has emphasised their vitality even in the process of curtailing their immediate fortunes.

It is here, not in the professional ranks, that taxpayers’ resources should be focused. The government is said to be hesitating over a grassroots resurrection plan. It should be doing precisely the opposite of hesitating. The nation’s health, physical and mental, demands a regeneration of these shared resources.

In the meantime professional sport will survive in some form or other, just as football went on during the blitz, and just as crowds came flocking back in the summers and winters of the postwar Golden Age.

But it has also been clear for some time that the system isn’t working as it should. Sport will no doubt find itself falling into that much-referenced “abyss” over the next few months. It also has the freedom to start climbing out.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Sep 24, 2020 10:51 pm

The Daily Mail's Martin Samuel thinks Sean Dyche had a point the other day - he is one of a small group

MARTIN SAMUEL: Sean Dyche is right, it's one rule for Amazon and another for top flight clubs... high street retailers could do with learning from football's proposed largesse
- Sean Dyche has spoken out about the double standards of financial bailouts
- The likes of Amazon and Tesco are not bailing out smaller high street retailers
By MARTIN SAMUEL - SPORT FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 22:30, 24 September 2020 | UPDATED: 22:30, 24 September 2020

'If the Premier League can do their bit to enhance the chance of other teams surviving, possibly they'll step in,' he said.

'But if you are going to apply it to football, you have to apply it to every business. Every successful hedge fund manager — are they going to filter that down to the hedge fund managers that are not so successful?'

In a word? No. But that is because an unsuccessful hedge fund manager is, more than likely, just less effective at the job.

It is not necessarily the global pandemic that dictates accomplishment in this field.

In good times, or bad, the skill is judging the market. Money can be made in a downturn, just as easily as it can be lost in an upturn. Football is different. Nothing could prepare for this particular slump.

There were plenty of clubs outside the Premier League that were going along quite nicely, or at least surviving, until coronavirus struck. The absence of crowds has turned thriving or solvent businesses into catastrophic black holes. The Premier League at least has the insurance of its television contract, and can help.

So it is very different to a hedge fund. That doesn't make Dyche's analogy entirely wrong, though.

Take supermarkets and the hospitality industry. One is now thriving in terms of sales and holding steady in terms of profit, to some extent at the expense of the other. People are staying home, and spending more on shopping for food, drink and other necessities.

True, supermarket running costs have risen, due to the commitment to resources necessary to deal with Covid-related procedures, but both Tesco and Sainsbury's say their profits will be stable year on year. At the same time, restaurants and related hospitality businesses have collapsed. Yet nobody is joining those particular dots.

There has been no suggestion of a levy on supermarket profits to fund the ailing hospitality trade.

Eat out to help out, that was the Government's plan. And, when everybody did, it transpired it was the public's fault coronavirus was on the rise again. Businesses just getting back on their feet were ordered to close early.

Amazon and the high street retailers form another area that might learn from football's proposed largesse. A tax on online retailers to bail out ailing high street shops has been part of the discussion for more than two years now, yet nothing gets done.

In July, Dave Lewis, Tesco's chief executive, called for an 'Amazon tax' of two per cent on online retail, saying it would raise £1.5billion, enough to cut business rates by 20 per cent for retailers.

Yet why should Tesco benefit there? Unlike high street businesses, supermarkets have the capacity for online trade and are taking it up enthusiastically.

And while online is the least profitable arm of their service, the boarded up shops in high streets do not belong to supermarkets.

Yet, still, no Amazon tax. So Dyche's point stands.

Other industries are not expected to look after those at the bottom of the pyramid and while the argument is that football clubs are exceptional, being part of the local community, so was the high street butcher, baker and greengrocer before supermarkets undercut them all.

For some reason we think Manchester United are responsible for Macclesfield Town, but if Tesco kill your butcher with mass-produced loss-leading discount meat, that's a cheap dinner and capitalism at its finest. So let's not pretend that those, like Dyche or Paul Barber at Brighton, who wish to look after number one are greatly different to executives in any other industry.

United are £140m down through Covid and while it can be correctly argued that Britain's richest club can afford to take that hit, the caveat is: not indefinitely. Premier League clubs have business models set up on Rick Parry's new normal from when he was chief executive of the top flight.

It used to be 50 per cent of broadcast revenue for Division One, 25 per cent for Division Two and the remaining 25 per cent split in half between the bottom two divisions.

That would solve just about every financial problem the Football League clubs currently face. But it would ruin the Premier League, which now budgets for keeping the lion's share of TV revenue, while below gets what it is given. Premier League clubs would go under if broadcast money was halved. So there is no way back that would not be catastrophic for somebody. Meaning the divide grows ever greater.

There is a moral imperative to help the EFL, yet genuine fear from leading clubs who live to their means, however extravagant that may appear. This is where we are now: a gap so great that cup competitions can be placed in jeopardy by the mighty difference in Covid protocols. EFL clubs are no longer testing, Premier League opponents test weekly. Should they even be allowed to meet, in these circumstances?

Tottenham paid for Leyton Orient's Covid tests this week and the results were so startling their game could not go ahead. Hull, meanwhile, rejected a similar offer from West Ham, and played.

So what is the strategy here? Does it now pay to take a risk, bearing in mind that if Orient had adopted Hull's plan, their game would have been played with the financial bonus of television coverage?

How can it be that the smart move is now blissful ignorance and the chance that Covid could spread through the Premier League like wildfire, putting the entire financial pyramid in jeopardy?

Any EFL bail-out is being made possible by a single revenue stream: Premier League and Champions League broadcast money.

And if there are no matches, the necessary refunds would send the lower leagues' begging letter to the bottom of a very large in-tray.

For at this point no amount of talk about football families and duty would be relevant.

'We should be a family in football,' said Paul Scally, chairman of Gillingham. 'We've been a family for 125 years and now when a member of the family is struggling it's time for the wealthy big brother to step up and help. It's as simple as that.'

Well, yes and no. Scally has been at Gillingham since 1995 and anyone who has served at that coalface for a quarter of a century warrants celebration.

He's not there for the kudos or the glory. Men like Scally help keep football in this country alive.

However, it is worth remembering that in 2002, when Gillingham were briefly promoted to what we now call the Championship he was so incensed at the plan to split a £90m television windfall through the entire Football League, he proposed a breakaway second tier — a division Gillingham had at that time been part of across four years in 85. So much for family.

And that really is the problem. Coronavirus is an enhancer: of every selfish trait, every protective trait, every pessimistic trait, every frightened trait.

Just as Tesco worry about Amazon but don't lose sleep over restaurants, so Dyche will peer into the gloom and see only ambitious, jostling clubs that are desperate to take Burnley's place, but want Burnley's help doing so.

And he knows, deep down, it has to be given.

But he's right: it is one rule in the tax havens of globalised trade, and quite another at Turf Moor.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:05 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Thu Sep 24, 2020 10:39 am
Today is a big day for non-league football - The National League and National Leagues North and South will decide whether to start the season as intended on 3ed of October behind closed doors - the decision is in balance given most clubs have many full time staff. Of course they are classed as elite football by the government (and there fore subject to the no-fans rule) because a number of clubs campaigned vigorously for that status so they could finish last season and have the opportunity to be promoted - those that didn't want that burden are now be forced to suffer again as a result
No decision made, or at least announced as yet - but the National League have confirmed that they are talking to the government about financial support

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/54281233

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Paul Waine » Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:14 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Thu Sep 24, 2020 10:51 pm
The Daily Mail's Martin Samuel thinks Sean Dyche had a point the other day - he is one of a small group

MARTIN SAMUEL: Sean Dyche is right, it's one rule for Amazon and another for top flight clubs... high street retailers could do with learning from football's proposed largesse
- Sean Dyche has spoken out about the double standards of financial bailouts
- The likes of Amazon and Tesco are not bailing out smaller high street retailers
By MARTIN SAMUEL - SPORT FOR THE DAILY MAIL

********************
All text edited to save space - see above.
********************

But he's right: it is one rule in the tax havens of globalised trade, and quite another at Turf Moor.
Silly article and silly arguments by Martin Samuel. The general tax payer is the group providing financial support where it is needed. Yes, Amazon and other on-line retailers are doing well, similarly, supermarkets and D-I-Y stores. On the other hand the travel and the hospitality sectors are struggling. Football, without spectators is similarly struggling. There is a difference, however, between football teams and supermarkets and other food stores. Football is a sport that exists through competition between teams, organised in leagues and cups. Leagues require all the teams to play each other. Cups require a number of knock out rounds to identify the winner. In other words, football teams don't exist as individuals in isolation from other football teams, they play games between them. That is not the case for supermarkets, small shops, pubs and restaurants etc etc. They all offer something individual. They provide services to their customers. Tesco doesn't need Aldi or Asda to be a success, it competes against them for the same customers.
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:14 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 11:27 pm
Ignoring all the other turmoil around them - Man City press on with their rival arena for the MEN

https://www.ft.com/content/7c133302-58b ... 0f971febbc

I posted before that CFG is about building business relationships not football and this is one of the more naked examples of it
apparently Man City get the planning permission for their Indoor Arena - like it was ever in doubt - Abu Dhabi own so much in Manchester now and this will undermine the Council owned MEN Arena

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk ... a-18990579

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Wile E Coyote » Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:15 am

chester, nobody can doubt your incisive know how, but i get the impression that you would regard a live game much the same way sheldon cooper would.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:18 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Thu Sep 24, 2020 10:28 pm
I have been saying it for a while along with others (including The Esk), but this is the first time that the mainstream British media have cottoned on - the next tv cycle for the Premier League is looking like it will produce a significant drop in revenues - from the Telegraph.

Premier League braced for £675m slump in TV revenue
TOM MORGAN SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

The Premier League is facing a fresh financial blow as broadcasting dealmakers forecast the next domestic TV sell-off could fall by up to £675 million.

A potential 15 per cent dip in one of the most lucrative agreements in world sport has been predicted on the back of £1 billion-plus losses for the clubs during Covid-19.
The chaps at Vysyble with the cumulative impact of rebates in the current cycle (so far) and the feared drop off in the next cycle

https://twitter.com/vysyble/status/1309246799585128449

They have been kind enough to assume that the Premier League will get the missing £160m off PPT that hey refused to pay in March

I must stress we are talking TV only here - Matchday, and Commercial Income drops need to be added on top
Last edited by Chester Perry on Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:46 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:20 am

Wile E Coyote wrote:
Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:15 am
chester, nobody can doubt your incisive know how, but i get the impression that you would regard a live game much the same way sheldon cooper would.
How so? - speaking as a Big Bang Theory fan from the pilot episode

Perhaps you missed my daily commentaries of the 2016 Olympics on this board, that was when I showed my OCD to the world
Last edited by Chester Perry on Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Wile E Coyote » Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:22 am

chester gets a sideways look from Leonard /

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:23 am

Wile E Coyote wrote:
Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:22 am
chester gets a sideways look from Leonard /
Ah that might explain the looks from my wife - who is no Amy by the way
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Wile E Coyote » Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:27 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:20 am
How so? - speaking as a Big Bang Theory fan from the pilot episode

Perhaps you missed my daily commentaries of the 2016 Olympics on this board, that was when I showed my OCD to the world
sadly, i did .

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:38 am

Wile E Coyote wrote:
Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:27 am
sadly, i did .
Happy days, there were some great threads - I would start each day by listing all the key events and a synopsis of our chances in each - Imploding Turtle and Caernarvon Claret kept me company throughout.

Technically It was my most difficult Olympics yet - for some reason I have witnessed (via tv and recently the internet) every single GB Gold medal performance at first broadcast (almost all live) since 1980, at times in 2016 I had to have 4 different screens on the go to catch them all, actually saw the first broadcast of every British medal at those games - next summer will be a lot easier if it happens, I don't think we will get half as many,

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Wile E Coyote » Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:50 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:38 am
Happy days, there were some great threads - I would start each day by listing all the key events and a synopsis of our chances in each - Imploding Turtle and Caernarvon Claret kept me company throughout.

Technically It was my most difficult Olympics yet - for some reason I have witnessed (via tv and recently the internet) every single GB Gold medal performance at first broadcast since 1980, at times in 2016 I had to have 4 different screens on the go to catch them all, actually so the first broadcast of every British medal at those games - next summer will be a lot easier if it happens, I don't think we will get half as many,
I am the same with tadpoles and spanish historians from 1931.
I usually rely on doorknobs from Paris in the latter period of Picasso to elevate my understanding, particularly if they are orange coloured. we have much in common.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:54 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Sat Aug 22, 2020 11:38 pm
A week ago FIFA found itself overuled by the courts in Trinidad and Tobago - following it's efforts to "normalise" the ountry's FA after it elected a leader that was not Gianni Infantino's preferred candidate. That story had first been introduced to us by @PhilippeAuclair in a series of articles for JosimarFootball.com - In this article for the same outlet he talks about what that judgement could mean for FIFA -

Judgment day
21/08/2020

A court ruling in Trinidad & Tobago could set a dangerous precedent for Gianni Infantino’s organisation. And it shows that FIFA, after all, is not above the law.

By Philippe Auclair

In matters of law, the most publicised cases are not necessarily the most momentous. Who would have thought that the court action brought by RFC Liège midfielder Jean-Marc Bosman against the Union Royale Belge des Sociétés de Football Association ASBL would transform football as it did after the European Court of Justice ruled in his favour on 15 December 1995?

..........
Remember this - FIFA have today enacted their revenge, suspending the Trinidad and Tobago Football Association - and their reasoning - under FIFA law's you cannot take FIFA to court if you are member association. Is this why they have just published that 1000 page Legal handbook

https://www.fifa.com/who-we-are/news/fi ... ssociation

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:57 am

Wile E Coyote wrote:
Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:50 am
I am the same with tadpoles and spanish historians from 1931.
I usually rely on doorknobs from Paris in the latter period of Picasso to elevate my understanding, particularly if they are orange coloured. we have much in common.
I have a growing collection of images of Parisian Doorknockers........... I am beginning to realise I have a problem :shock:

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Sep 25, 2020 1:00 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Tue Sep 15, 2020 2:30 pm
following the news of Barcelona's losses last season, Juventus have announced their 2019/20 financial results - it is a big ouch but nothing like the drop in revenues at Barcelona - from SportsProMedia

Juventus hit by €71.4m loss for 2019/20
Deficit increases by €31.5m as Serie A winners fall into the red for third consecutive year.

Posted: September 15 2020By: Ed Dixon

- Revenues down from €621.4m to €573.4m
- Juve posted €39.9m loss in 2018/19
- Covid-19 means club expect another negative financial showing next year

Italian soccer champions Juventus have posted losses of €71.4 million (US$84.8 million) for the year ending 30th June 2020, a rise of €31.5 million (US$37.4 million) on their previous financial results.

.................................
@SwissRamble reveals that Juventus have had to restate their losses to a higher figure of €90 million

https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/ ... 3739043846

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Sep 25, 2020 1:11 am

The Times suggest that the Premier League is playing hardball with the government over a bailout of the pyramid - getting fans back is the crux of it

Premier League’s bailout ultimatum for EFL clubs
England’s top tier will only help divisions below if there is plan for fans’ return

Martyn Ziegler, Chief Sports Reporter
Friday September 25 2020, 12.01am, The Times

The Premier League will demand guarantees over the return of fans this season before they agree to bail out lower league clubs.

Government ministers confirmed yesterday that they would not provide any money for elite football and expected the Premier League to support the 72 clubs in the EFL to the tune of £200 million.

Many senior figures among the 20 top-flight clubs were already furious that the ban of fans was extended indefinitely from October 1 when they had complied with all the safety requirements for social distancing. Now they believe it is even more unreasonable for the Premier League to be asked to provide the finances to the EFL when they themselves are facing losses of tens of millions of pounds per club without even an indication of when they can start to have paying supporters back through the turnstiles.

One chairman told The Times: “We’re under huge amounts of pressure to help the EFL and there is a willingness to do so but we need some guarantees over the return of fans this season. There has to be a timeline about when clubs can get fans back before we can agree to start paying out huge sums to other parts of the game. Most countries in Europe seem to be welcoming fans back in some numbers. We were leading the way in fans’ safety and test events — now we are lagging behind.”

Robbie Cowling, the chairman of League Two side Colchester United, has written an open letter to Boris Johnson summing up football’s frustrations. He said: “There is absolutely no reason for the government to apply a rule that rides roughshod over the expertise of the safety advisory groups.

“Just so I understand it when I’m having to lay off even more staff, can someone explain to me again how I can safely sit in a confined aeroplane with 300 other passengers and I can safely eat inside a restaurant or drink inside a pub until 10pm but I can’t safely attend a football match which is predominantly outside and has been certificated as safe by a SAG [Safety Advisory Group]?”

Oliver Dowden, the culture secretary, told Parliament yesterday that the government had instructed “sports to help themselves, starting with the Premier League in respect of football” rather than ask for financial support from a proposed £1.5 billion Treasury rescue fund.

Nigel Huddleston, the sports minister, also told MPs he was unable to give any details of when fans could return, adding: “I wish I could confirm definitive timescales; we live in such uncertain times. We recognise the impact of the decisions this week to delay the re-opening of stadia over the winter will have on sport.”

Aleksander Ceferin, the Uefa president, yesterday listed 29 European countries where supporters are now allowed into football matches in varying numbers from 1,000 fans up to 50 per cent of stadiums, including all the main football countries apart from England, Spain and Portugal.

The former football agent Jon Smith has told talkSPORT that he is in talks with the Premier League about American pension funds providing the £200 million EFL package in the form of a loan with the top-flight clubs paying the interest.

The government has announced that the Premier League’s chairman Gary Hoffman will sit on the new Sports Technology and Innovation Group (STIG), which has been given the task of finding hi-tech solutions to allow spectators safely back into venues. David Ross, the founder of Carphone Warehouse, will lead the group, which had its first meeting yesterday.

A range of options will be looked at including tracking devices to measure social distancing, fluorescent disinfectants to reveal how often surfaces are touched and technology to assist in safe travel to venues.

Football crowds in Europe

Germany
Crowds were allowed to return to the Bundesliga last weekend with six out of the nine games having fans in the stadium. The number ranged from 4,600 to 9,300, filling 10 per cent to 25 per cent of the stadium seats.

Italy
Serie A allowed up to 1,000 fans to return to games last weekend with the first game to benefit being Parma at home to Napoli. Fans were required to wear face masks and maintain social distancing, with temperature checks carried out before fans entered the stadium. Spain La Liga resumed last weekend but without any fans in stadiums.

France
The French government has allowed up to 5,000 mask-wearing, socially distanced fans to watch Ligue 1 games. But on Wednesday new restrictions were imposed limiting attendances at sporting events to 1,000 in several areas including Paris because of a rise in cases.

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