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 » Sat Feb 20, 2021 1:05 am

Is Football about to step-up it's fight with the government over how it is being treated very differently to the rest of sport and business in general - the treasury is reportedly getting involved in blocking a loan to the EFL designed to aid Championship clubs - from the Telegraph

Exclusive: Championship on the brink as Treasury puts brakes on bail-out
JOHN PERCY FEBRUARY 19, 2021

The Football League and Government were on the brink of war on Friday night after the Treasury put the brakes on a season-saving £100million-plus loan for the Championship.

Second tier executives raged they were being treated harsher than other sectors after inspectors insisted on unprecedented curbs on goal bonuses, new contracts or wage rises.

A Bank of England-backed Covid loan facility - sought by the EFL with a £15million Premier League handout to cover interest and fees - had been due to be paid out to clubs this week.

However, a host of cash-strapped clubs were placed at severe risk of being left unable to pay bills on Friday night as it emerged the rescue package may be withheld completely due to the Government's demands.

With other sports handed access to a £300million winter survival fund, clubs feel they are being discriminated against due to a history of wage over-spending in the Championship.

A new stand off between the league and Government over the clauses could be particularly disastrous when PAYE deferrals expire. An EFL spokesman on Friday night told Telegraph Sport: “We are extremely disappointed by the developments at this late stage of our discussions and we will continue to strongly negotiate with HM Treasury to secure a solution that meets the requirements of Championship Clubs and is consistent with the parameters other industries are being asked to meet."

Championship clubs were informed on Thursday night that there will be a delay on the proposed loan, less than 12 hours before they were expecting the first instalment of funds. "It's not just been delayed - there are no guarantees of any money at all," said one club executive.

Under the proposals of the loan from the Government, clubs would be unable to offer their players any form of improved deal. In December, a £50 million grant was agreed for League One and League Two clubs to protect their futures during the Covid-19 pandemic.

After protracted and often-tense negotiations over the summer, the Premier League also agreed to provide £15million to the EFL to cover interest, arrangement fees and professional fees on any loan.

Championship clubs are understood to have been expecting a figure in excess of £100million from the Bank of England and Treasury's Covid Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF).

However, nearly three months later, Championship clubs executives were in crisis talks to avert another major dispute. It is understood that 14 of the 24 Championship clubs requested an interest-free loan, but are now facing another delay for the funds to arrive.

In a letter was sent on Thursday night, and obtained by Telegraph Sport, the EFL wrote: "We received notification from HM Treasury that it is demanding that the pay restraint attached to the CCFF [Covid Corporate Financing Facility] is to be applied not only to the Football League Company but now also the Championship clubs involved in the loan.

“HMT also added that they deem ‘Relevant Individuals’ captured by the restraint, which in most companies includes board directors and senior executives, to include players registered to the club.

“Nearly a month ago, we sent a note to HM Treasury outlining the reasons why players should not be included in such a restraint but this has been rejected and we are obviously extremely disappointed by this stance.”

Gallingly for clubs, the break down in terms came as Oliver Dowden, the Culture Secretary, announced the Women’s Super League and FA Women’s Championship would receive a combined £2.25million grant "essential league costs, in addition to a proportion of 250,000 free Covid-19 lateral flow testing kits being made available by the Government to elite sports, with women’s sport designated as a priority".

England Netball and the Vitality Super League netball will also receive a total of £4.2 million in grants, which has already provided the expanded league with the confidence to start its 2021 season on 12 February.

In basketball, British Basketball League clubs - including Women’s British Basketball League clubs - will receive £2.5 million in grants and loans, whilst Basketball England will receive a £200,000 grant.

Government has consistently said there is enough money within the Premier League for elite men's leagues to solve their own problems. In response, an EFL statement added: “There remains a significant amount of debt – including HMRC - being stored up by Championship Clubs, caused simply by the inability to generate normal levels of income due to the circumstances created by the pandemic. With the moratorium on PAYE liability enforcement coming to an end on the 31 March, this is very much a live issue for our clubs, who throughout Covid have continued to incur significant costs and need to be able to plan with greater certainty; without further risk in order to keep their clubs fully operational for the benefit of their local communities.”

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sat Feb 20, 2021 1:28 am

Meanwhile the DCMS have refused a series Freedom of Information requests from a journalist in regards to National League funding - which is rather pathetic given the public interest

https://twitter.com/Ollie_Bayliss/statu ... 7150796810

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sat Feb 20, 2021 5:52 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Fri Feb 19, 2021 1:23 pm
We know that the owners of Inter Milan (Suning) have faced some financial distress and have been looking for someone to substantially Invest in or even buy the club from them, but this speech from Zhang Jindong the owner of Suning shows how little the company intend to invest in football - Suning also own PPTV who having failed to pay the Premier League for it's hyper inflated tv rights deal is now going through similar situations on other sports rights.

you have to say that this speech looks very much like a public realignment to Chinese government priorities following a lot of government intervention.

https://twitter.com/tariqpanja/status/1 ... 2785241090
PPTV owned by Suning have announced that they are no longer broadcasting Serie A and the FA Cup due to "failing to reach agreements with IMG (the international rights holder for those properties)" which essentially means that they wanted to renegotiate the contracts significantly downwards after withholding payments and failed to do so

https://twitter.com/titan_plus/status/1 ... 2137218049

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sat Feb 20, 2021 6:51 pm

Were probably less than 4 weeks away from the Premier League publishing it's strategic review, an exercise forced on them in large part as a result of Project Big Picture, It seems that the big six are still pushing for those overseas rights to be sold bey themselves rather than collectively though, and this is the first time I have heard that they are pushing for the same in the UEFA club competitions too - from the Mail

AHEAD OF THE GAME: 'Big Six' clubs are pushing for the right to sell matches direct to overseas fans... while Roy Hodgson tells Crystal Palace to resolve player contract issues before opening talks over his own deal
'The Premier League's Big Six' want to sell matches direct to overseas fans
The request for clubs to be given exclusive rights was part of Project Big Picture

By MATT HUGHES FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 22:31, 19 February 2021 | UPDATED: 10:02, 20 February 2021

The ‘Big Six’ clubs are pushing for the right to sell matches direct to fans in overseas countries, as the Premier League test the market ahead of the next television rights auction.

A request for clubs to be given exclusive rights to sell eight matches per season to international territories, which would be broadcast on their own channels, was part of the controversial Project Big Picture reform proposals tabled last year.

It has been repeated in discussions over the Premier League’s Strategic Review.

The elite clubs are not demanding the right to sell ‘Big Six’ clashes as that would severely undermine the value of the central TV deal, but want to explore the potential of direct-to-fan sales, a model also being considered by UEFA for the Champions League.

The smaller clubs remain to be convinced of the merits of such an approach as they have smaller global fan-bases and their matches are likely to be less lucrative. They may be forced to give ground, however, to prevent more radical reforms such as a reduced Premier League or an overhaul of voting rights being implemented.

The Premier League’s tender process for the next domestic rights deal covering the 2022 to 2025 seasons has been put on hold due to the pandemic, and is not expected to take place until the summer, when it is hoped there will be more clarity on the return of fans.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by GodIsADeeJay81 » Sat Feb 20, 2021 6:56 pm

Does clubs in other sports do direct to fan sales for games on their own websites?

For the NFL I can pay £130 for a season and I get a lot of content for that money.
They even charged me £1 for the Superbowl which I thought was great value.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sat Feb 20, 2021 7:07 pm

GodIsADeeJay81 wrote:
Sat Feb 20, 2021 6:56 pm
Does clubs in other sports do direct to fan sales for games on their own websites?

For the NFL I can pay £130 for a season and I get a lot of content for that money.
They even charged me £1 for the Superbowl which I thought was great value.
Minor sports do

NFL is slighty different because in the UK Sky have the rights, BBC have a highlights and the superbowl itself. they want your data and I presume they target you for the games in London

the thing to remember, and I am sure you know this, is that this is much more about the big clubs wanting to collect their own data from fans willing to part with money to them and installing that initial payment transaction, which can make follow up transactions so much easier with less friction as the information is all in place. It is at least as much about monetising the international fanbase outside the match as the actual match view itself - it also gives them much more concrete information when selling the international rights collectively (and the premier League distribution of those revenues), many of the big six have long argued that they are undervalued.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by GodIsADeeJay81 » Sat Feb 20, 2021 7:13 pm

I don't use Sky to watch the NFL, I use the NFL app and pay them directly.
The app is better than sky, more content, lots of older seasons and during the first lockdown when there was no NFL being played they opened it up for free for 6 months.

I can see why the big 6 feel like they're undervalued, is there any evidence they'd generate as much revenue with their own separate rights?
I know Rangers and Celtic have the TV rights skewed in their favour, to maintain the status quo up there.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sat Feb 20, 2021 7:25 pm

GodIsADeeJay81 wrote:
Sat Feb 20, 2021 7:13 pm
I don't use Sky to watch the NFL, I use the NFL app and pay them directly.
The app is better than sky, more content, lots of older seasons and during the first lockdown when there was no NFL being played they opened it up for free for 6 months.

I can see why the big 6 feel like they're undervalued, is there any evidence they'd generate as much revenue with their own separate rights?
I know Rangers and Celtic have the TV rights skewed in their favour, to maintain the status quo up there.
The Glasgow clubs get a pittance - Championship clubs get more - if it wasn't for The European competitions and UEFA distribution they would be on less than £5m in TV money a season. There is also the point that the SPFL only get so much because of the Old firm games

look at the distribution for the 2018/19 season https://spfl.co.uk/news/spfl-prize-pot-reaches-25m the first of the current 5 year Sky deal

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sun Feb 21, 2021 3:14 pm

The legal drama over the tragic Emiliano Sala case takes a new turn - from GetFranceFootball

Nantes authorities open new investigation following secondary complaint by Cardiff over Emiliano Sala

L’Équipe report that the Nantes public prosecutors have opened a fresh investigation into the Emiliano Sala case after Championship club Cardiff City filed a secondary complaint.

Cardiff’s latest legal complaint concerns a FC Nantes cheque dated 21st January 2019, the date of the player’s death. More than two years on, the legal battle over the €17m transfer continues in this tragic case.

Entrusted to the Territorial Directorate of the Judicial Police, this investigation follows the registration of an additional complaint, sent on January 25th to the public prosecutor of Nantes by the French lawyer of the Welsh club, Mr Antoine Vey. Asked about this new investigation, the Nantes prosecutor’s office did not respond when asked to comment.

Mr Vey – who did not wish to comment – has already filed a complaint against X, on behalf of Cardiff City, on January 28th 2020, for acts including “illegal exercise of the activity of agent,” “illegal exercise of air transport” and “manslaughter.” This first complaint had prompted the opening of an additional investigation by the Nantes prosecutor’s office.

The additional complaint made last month by Mr Vey concerns a €16,291.53 cheque, which was due to correspond to an amount owed to Sala, as part of the termination of his employment contract ahead of the Argentinian’s move to Cardiff City. A cheque made out to the player’s mother, Mercedes Taffarel, and “allegedly dated January 21st 2019” is written in this new Cardiff City legal complaint.

A fatal date which coincided with the death of Emiliano Sala, the victim of a plane crash off Guernsey, around 9.15 p.m. In his legal filing, Mr Vey argues that Nantes backdated this cheque, in order to establish that Les Canaris “no longer had a legal link with Sala.” This would have formally released Nantes from its obligations to the player, in line with labour laws.

For Cardiff, it is, per the filing, “inconceivable” that FCN sent this cheque on the same day as dated, payable to the footballer’s mother, while the disappearance of the private plane (piloted by David Ibbotson) which was carrying Sala occurred late in that very evening. The player’s body was not identified until February 7th 2019. Their argument was why would Nantes send the cheque to the player’s mother before knowing if Sala was dead?

The cheque in question is one of many documents presented before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), where a merciless legal and financial dispute has been ongoing between FC Nantes and Cardiff for more than a year, over the settlement of transfer fees.

The Welsh club’s additional complaint relates to alleged crimes including “falsification of a cheque” and of “attempted fraud” in connection with the production of this cheque.

“FC Nantes’ aim in producing this document was to provide proof that on January 21st 2019, the player was no longer part of his squad and that, therefore, the transfer amount is due to them by Cardiff City FC,” wrote Vey in the filing.

After Sala’s disappearance, the Welsh club quickly refused to pay the transfer fee, contesting the validity of the deal.

An individual close to FC Nantes added: “This is weaponisation of the justice system and the press, even though FIFA said they were wrong (which pushed the Welsh club to appeal to CAS).” Les Canaris did not comment on the cheque.

FC Nantes in this case appear to have the majority of the documentation in their favour, with the player’s transfer agreement being concluded with Cardiff on January 19th 2019 (two days before Sala’s death) and the issuance of his international transfer certificate (CIT), on January 21st, at the end of the afternoon, a few hours before tragedy struck.

A Les Canaris source adds: “In an attempt to escape its payment obligations, however indisputable, Cardiff is shamelessly renouncing any commitment made with Emiliano Sala, dirtying his memory and forgetting the satisfaction of the latter to have signed with the Welsh club.”

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sun Feb 21, 2021 11:59 pm

Rui Pinto may still be on trial in Portugal but there has just been another release from Football Leaks and it puts questions to Real Madrid

https://translate.google.com/translate? ... _1011.html

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Feb 22, 2021 12:16 am

of course Real Madrid were already in the news this weekend for the story that is linking a 150m Euro sponsorship deal for it's women's team from Saudi Arabia -

Simon Chadwick has a long thread about the background to it

https://twitter.com/Prof_Chadwick/statu ... 7213651971

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Feb 22, 2021 1:07 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Tue Jan 26, 2021 11:45 am
It is here the Deloitte Football Money League 2021 report - subtitled testing times

statement
https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/s ... eague.html

The report is downloadable from the link. disappointingly it only lists the top 20 clubs - of which 7 are from the Premier League - notably Liverpool rise above Chelsea and Manchester City to close in on Manchester United

EDIT It is important to note the caveats in reporting, particularly which revenues were able to be reported and why - this explains Liverpoo;'s position amongst others

Another 5 Premier League clubs are in the next 10, note the surprising placing of Crystal Palace just above West Ham and Sheffield United just above Wolves
  • Pos. Club Revenue
    21. Valencia 172.1
    22. Leicester City 171.0
    23. Benfica 170.3
    24. Borussia VfL Mönchengladbach 167.9
    25. Crystal Palace 161.3
    26. West Ham United 158.0
    27. Ajax 155.5
    28. Sheffield United 152.0
    29. Wolverhampton Wanderers 151.2
    30. AC Milan 148.5
@SwissRamble who gets all his source data from Deloitte has a look at the Deloitte Money League 2021 report

https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/ ... 0571738113

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Feb 22, 2021 1:20 pm

@MiguelDelaney in the Independent and the questions raised about the obvious advantages Manchester City and PSG have in a time of Financial Crisis, I would also chuck Chelsea into the mix, though that does not quite fit the narrative

Man City’s relentless streak and the uncomfortable questions it raises
For all the brilliance of Pep Guardiola and his players, clubs backed by the wealth of states and emirates are built to withstand the rigours and complications of this hectic season

Miguel Delaney - Chief Football Writer
2 hours ago

It was the kind of feat that would have felt sensational at a normal club, whatever about normal times, but here felt little more than a footnote. By beating Arsenal 1-0, Manchester City made it 13 victories in a row, which puts them one off the Invincibles’ old 2003-04 record and ensures the club is responsible for three of the six longest winning streaks in English football history. The other two also came in the last three years, under Pep Guardiola.

An important talking point for football is that it was the kind of run that was supposed to be impossible this season. It did look like it might be early on in this season, not to mention other European leagues.

Really, though, it should be no surprise that City have managed it. You can add to that ominous sense of utter predictability the aura that Paris Saint-Germain developed in Camp Nou on Tuesday.

If there are any clubs that are going to withstand the rigours and complications of this schedule, it is those backed by the wealth of states or emirates.

This remains an uncomfortable conversation for football to have - and one so often overlooked when pundits will talk glowingly about the admitted brilliance of these players - but it is one that is still essential. It actually feels all the more important at a time when football is genuinely proving people’s great distraction in lockdown, but is now developing into yet another procession.

You only have to look at the strength of the City bench against Arsenal, or the fact they haven’t missed a £40m-plus signing like Nathan Ake in the slightest.

Financial disparity has been a growing problem for football years, but this emphasised a capability of City’s beyond most others.

In fact, when PSG went for Neymar in 2017, part of the strategy behind the sheer magnitude of the deal was that they knew if they drove up fees and wages to a certain level there would only be a certain number of clubs capable of competing. Among them were the two Manchester clubs and Chelsea. The big Spanish two were not seen as part of that group.

It is possible that the complications from the Covid crisis, far from levelling football, may hasten this reality.

The reality right now is that, in this suppressed market, a £40m defensive signing would make a huge difference to a lot of the biggest clubs - not least the current English champions. It is beyond most, however, including that Spanish two, as well as Juventus. Such a purchase has meanwhile barely been required at City, given how the season has gone. There is already talk of Ake being used as a makeweight for summer targets.

These realities should not be seen as an attempt to dismiss the genius of Guardiola. He has still displayed his brilliance this season, as well as genuine resolve.

City’s current lead is actually all the more notable given how badly the campaign started. At that point, many players were fed up of Guardiola’s intensity. It grated on them, and some were seeing a time in the near future when he might move on. It was also true that the 2017-19 team had probably reached the end of a cycle, requiring change.

These kinds of problems of course always become more pronounced and vocalised when things aren’t going well, but part of the challenge is it all becomes self-fulfilling because it’s so hard to arrest and turn around.

This is what Guardiola has managed. He has built a second title team. In that, it is notable he is no longer so agitated on the line. A manager famous for such histrionics has instead taken a step back and shown the composure to assess this situation and adapt an awful lot about his team - from the fitness schedule to their movement, to their defence.

It has been an immensely impressive ingenuity. This is why he is so heralded, his ability to think about the game on a deeper level.

It has also been immensely aided by the resources available to the manager. Both of these arguments can be true at the same time. Working at such a club is Guardiola’s reward for being so good.

Such a club’s success is also football’s problem for allowing almost free rein in terms of ownership.

Financial Fair Play can only offer limited restrictions and it is notable that Chris Mort - the former Newcastle United chairman who worked on the attempted Saudi Arabian takeover - said this week he expects an “ambitious club” to eventually challenge it in courts.

That’s one for the longer-term future, but the short-term future is already appearing rather predictable even with FFP restrictions.

It already looks like City are going to win a third league in four seasons, with a huge points return. They are currently on course for 89 points, but that includes the patchy opening games. Another return of over 90 seems likelier. Another domestic treble is meanwhile within reach, and talk is growing of a quadruple. This will remain the great challenge, that restarts this week.

It would just feel so important if, in this season, when everyone in the game is supposed to be feeling the effects of the crisis, one of Qatar-backed PSG or Abu Dhabi-backed City won the Champions League.

The deeper reasons warrant deeper discussion than just praising the football personnel involved. They are why a 13-game winning streak can now be recorded with barely any extra recognition.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Feb 22, 2021 1:27 pm

Anyone see this in the Telegraph over the weekend about the number of Premier League and Big European clubs targeting players nurtured in the Championship - It used to be the source of our talent pool, regeneration, for the most part we can no longer afford to shop there now, and Brexit makes the European small leagues a much more difficult option, it is, our own Academy, League One and cast offs for us I fear.

How the Premier League and Europe's top clubs are turning their attention to the Championship in race for talent
MIKE MCGRATH FEBRUARY 21, 2021

At the time of James Maddison’s move to Leicester City three seasons ago, there were sounds of disapproval coming from intermediaries looking to get their Championship players into the Premier League.

By paying more than £20 million to Norwich City a new benchmark was set for players moving from the second tier. There were fears other clubs would not be willing to part with such a large fee on players schooled in the EFL.

Leicester’s investment now looks shrewd, as does the £8m package for James Justin after he had just helped Luton Town get into the Championship.

Other clubs have followed and when Maddison and his team-mates play Aston Villa on Sunday they will face Ollie Watkins, whose rookie year in the Premier League came after three seasons in the second tier with Brentford and earned him a £28m move to Villa Park.

It used to be the case that recruiting from outside the Premier League meant going abroad, where prices were cheaper or you could discover the next Cesc Fabregas on the notepad of foreign scouts. Now clubs are showing faith in the Championship.

Liverpool turned to Preston North End’s Ben Davies when they needed a centre-back to solve their injury problems. Jose Mourinho also recruited from the Championship for Joe Rodon, who has been singled out for praise recently. Eberechi Eze moved from Queens Park Rangers to Crystal Palace for around £17m and has looked at home in the top flight.

“The Championship will always have these players, there are probably dozens that could make it in the Premier League but some take time, it’s about opportunity,” QPR director of football Les Ferdinand told Telegraph Sport. “If you’re a fan at a top-six club and not spending £40m or £50m the perception is you’re not competing, but the Championship is where players get physical experience to make them ready-made.

“We had no doubt he (Eberechi) could do it. When we looked at him the question was how quickly he would do it. He had a new manager in Roy Hodgson and had to learn, but he soon picked it up.”

During one midweek evening of Premier League football earlier this month, Jayden Bogle had scored for Sheffield United, Dan James netted for Manchester United and Eze set up Palace’s winner. All of them bought from the Championship, having broken through in the second tier and earning their move to the top division. West Ham United’s Jared Bowen is another success story from last season’s January transfer window, after arriving from Hull City.

Former Southampton midfielder David Prutton, an EFL pundit for Sky Sports, believes players are targeted as the Championship gives them an excellent grounding and matures them.

“The Championship can vary in quality but from what I’ve seen helps make players robust and shows younger players what English football is all about,” he said. “You have to have the silk and the steel together and you look at someone like Eze who I’ve always enjoyed watching. You have to credit the time spent developing his talent.

“These players are not cheap but are relatively modest compared to the big leap for Timo Werner or Kai Havertz. I’ve got no doubt it is about the mental and physical side of the game as much as technical.”

Brexit could play a part in less young foreign talent coming to the Premier League, given the points-based system to earn “Governing Body Endorsement” means only the very best will be arriving from abroad. The Championship is a more straightforward place to look for quality.

How the Premier League bet big on the Championship
The Premier League’s trust in Championship players saw Burnley make three bids, the highest at £7m, for Stoke's Nathan Collins during the January window. Collins is expected to play at the top level eventually.

Even Bayern Munich are targeting players from England’s second tier, with Reading full-back Omar Richards in talks with the Bundesliga champions over a pre-contract move in the summer. Max Aarons at Norwich City was also the subject of a loan bid from Barcelona last summer which got turned down.

Liverpool were originally linked with Sven Botman at Lille when they looked to solve their centre-back crisis following injuries to Virgil van Dijk and Joe Gomez. They also made a bid for Marseille’s Duje Ćaleta-Car but turned their attention to Davies.

“You can sign a lad not too far down the Pennines for £2m, which is a lot of money but is low risk in the machine that is Liverpool,” Prutton said.

“Jurgen Klopp described it as a Hollywood move and you’re excited for him. People have meandered their way into the Premier League in different ways. Some players thrive in better environments. When I went to Southampton from Nottingham Forest there were players I hadn’t heard of who I couldn’t get the ball off. You think, ‘this fella isn’t near the first team and I’m not near him’. But players react to that.”

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Feb 22, 2021 1:42 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Sun Feb 14, 2021 1:33 am
A really fascinating (and very long) piece on Norwich in the Financial Times - be aware that most of the financial numbers appear to be about the 2018/19 season - not the 2019/20, the clash is confusing), particularly like the section on the finite and infinite game, it shows an understanding of strategy and I see a lot of that in how our previous board went about it's business. like Sheffield Utd, Norwich have spent a lot of the last 2 - 3 years telling anyone who would listen that Burnley was the model they were looking to achieve.

Norwich City and the battle of football’s haves and have-nots
MURAD AHMED FEBRUARY 12, 2021

At just 22, Todd Cantwell already has a head full of memories. A star midfielder at Norwich City, the football club he joined as a local lad more than a decade ago, he has emerged in recent years as one of the English game’s brighter talents. Slouched on a chair at the team’s training ground, Cantwell sits up when asked to name some of his standout moments to date. The recollections flow easily.

In September 2019, for example, Norwich City faced Manchester City at their Carrow Road stadium. It should have been a mismatch. A team newly promoted to the Premier League, the world’s richest football competition, against the most expensively assembled side on earth.

In the 28th minute, Cantwell watched his teammates complete a slick sequence of passes around those in City shirts. The ball landed at the feet of striker Teemu Pukki, who charged at goal. Cantwell began to run up the pitch.

“It was a 50-yard sprint,” he tells me, blue eyes sparkling. “I was just energised by the thought of scoring, and in football that adrenaline takes over. I knew that if I got in his eye line, I knew Teemu would see me . . . to see the ball slide across and see the open net, you dream of stuff like that.” Cantwell scored, then danced in front of thousands of jubilant fans dressed in the team’s yellow and green colours. Norwich City went on to complete a famous 3-2 victory.

I ask him to fast-forward to July 2020. Carrow Road had been emptied of supporters because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Few witnessed the team being thrashed 4-0 by West Ham United. It was the latest of many defeats in a gruelling season. Norwich City were relegated to the division below.

Cantwell sat alone on the pitch long after the final whistle, frustrated, hurt. “We may not have been expected to stay up, no one here wanted to go down,” he says, quietly. “Everyone wants to play in the best league in the world.”

These flashbacks help explain what makes elite football such a potent spectacle for millions around the world. Over 90 minutes, Norwich City, a side assembled on a shoestring player transfer budget, can beat Manchester City, bankrolled by an oil-rich Gulf state and, at the time, English champions. But over the course of a 38-match season, small miracles are consumed by cold facts. Academic research has shown the amount spent on player salaries is the best indicator of league position. Last season, Norwich City had the second-lowest wage bill in the top tier.

I have come to Norwich City to speak with players such as Cantwell, as well as the club’s owners, executives and coaches, to better understand how the sport became a tale of haves versus have-nots. And to ask whether there is anything that can be done to close the gap between the game’s one-percenters and the rest.

Never a big club, Norwich City hadn’t even played in the top flight of English football until 50 years ago. But through the 1970s and 1980s they established a seat at the top table, peaking in the early 1990s, when the “Canaries” beat Germany’s most successful club, Bayern Munich, in a famous European upset.

Since the turn of the century, however, Norwich have enjoyed five promotions and suffered five relegations between the divisions. Too lean for the big league, too fat for the lower tiers, they are part of a group dismissively referred to as “yo-yo clubs”.

Manchester City used to be one too, before a 2008 takeover by an Emirati sheikh turned them into regular title winners through spending more than £1bn on players. Takeovers like this have given fans of other clubs hopes of attracting their own sugar daddy, an extravagant billionaire willing to spend whatever it takes to acquire glory. Teams such as Chelsea and Leicester City are among the sides to have been transformed in recent years by the backing of benevolent benefactors.

Yet this has helped to create instability at less wealthy clubs like Norwich City, which have had an unfortunate history of overspending on players, all in a forlorn effort to keep up with opponents’ unmatchable financial resources. Can the club do anything to snap the elastic that led it to bounce between the leagues?

Over many hours of interviews, I am told of a new blueprint to avoid the club’s boom-and-bust cycles. It is a plan designed around unearthing more talents like Cantwell. The club’s ambition is simple yet strikingly sober: to become strong enough to avoid yet another relegation from the Premier League, should they return. That would allow them to play Manchester City every season, though they would be extremely unlikely to challenge them for the sport’s greatest prizes.

Is this enough? Many of today’s leading football clubs began as community institutions — Norwich City was formed in 1902 by two schoolmasters — each one as good as the locals who made up their teams. Over decades, the biggest have morphed into multibillion-pound businesses, international workforces and global fanbases. But the majority, like Norwich City, are still followed mainly in the smaller cities and towns in which they are based. Here, supporting a football club is part of a civic identity. The team’s successes — and failure — are a matter of personal esteem.

“There’s part of me that just wants the club to go hell for leather, spend loads and win things,” says a consultant who has worked for Norwich City but declined to be named. The assumption here is that winning matches is the driving purpose of football clubs, victories the way it pays back fervent support. “How does football stay relevant to these small communities otherwise?” asks the consultant. “[Norwich City] has a great model and lots of good people, but the question I have is, what’s the purpose? What’s the point of a football club anyway?”

Delia Smith is the doyenne of celebrity chefs, a fixture on British television since the 1970s with shows such as One Is Fun! and How to Cheat at Cooking. Despite retiring from the small screen in 2013, Smith, now 79, is still best known to the wider British public as a genial TV personality and cookbook writer, rather than the co-owner of Norwich City alongside her husband, the writer and publisher Michael Wynn-Jones.

In 1995, Smith, who describes herself as a life-long fan, was approached by Norwich City’s directors at a time when the club was at risk of going bust. “‘Can you give us £500,000 for a seat on the board?’ they asked me,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Well, you can have a million pounds if you have [Wynn-Jones] on the board as well.’ That’s how it happened.”

The couple entered the sport just as it was undergoing a revolution. Norwich City were a founder member of the Premier League in 1992, when the country’s top sides launched a breakaway from the rest of English club football, setting up a competition funded by Sky, then a new satellite broadcaster.

“A small group of very canny, greedy chairmen hived themselves off and got the whole lot and left the rest of football struggling at grassroots level,” says Smith. “It was a sad day for football.”

Overall revenues for Premier League clubs rose from £120m in 1992 to £5bn last season, according to the consultancy Deloitte. In that period, Norwich City’s annual revenue has risen from £4.6m to £119m, according to Companies House records. But it remains far behind England’s richest club, Manchester United, which made £627m last term.

Most of the cash sloshing through the game is used to finance huge transfer deals and mega-wages for football’s superstars. “Player salaries basically got out of hand,” says Wynn-Jones, a gentle man who speaks barely above a whisper. “That really triggered [takeovers by] sheikhs and the like, because the clubs needed them.”

Smith and Wynn-Jones are among the longest-serving club owners in English football, part of the old guard of supporters-turned-owners who seek emotional returns on their investment over financial ones. Elsewhere these have been replaced by an international cadre of club owners united by net worths — from Arab royals to Russian oligarchs, American moguls to Chinese entrepreneurs.

Several “odd people” have approached Smith about a potential takeover of Norwich City over the years. One investor offered a nominal £1 to take a previously lossmaking club “off our hands”, she says. Another suitor planned to put it into administration to settle debts and cut costs. None was deemed to have the club’s best interests at heart.

Smith and Wynn-Jones’s refusal to sell splits opinion among the local fan base. Some believe that, without heftier external funding, the club is being sold short.

“You have an awful lot of Norwich fans who absolutely love Delia to death,” says Robin Sainty, chair of the Canaries Trust, a supporters group. “A small minority of people absolutely detest her, who think we should be selling out to an Arab multibillionaire or whatever. Then there are quite a lot in the middle who . . . appreciate what she’s done but think it would be quite nice to be a rich club.”

Smith is aware of the strength of feeling. “One guy came up to me [and said], ‘You have dragged our club into the gutter, and would you mind going?’” However, she adds: “Football is such an important thing for the nation. It’s one of the last vestiges of real community where people really belong together. If you see kids at football matches, letting off steam, they’re not out in the streets . . . It’s really wonderful.”

Smith and Wynn-Jones see their role as maintaining a local institution that has survived, just about, for more than a century. The club has often had “sticky moments” that have required Smith to go “up to Carrow Road with a cheque sometimes, because it’s got so bad”, and money remains a problem. In 2016, they overspent on players, again, in an effort to stay in the Premier League. They were relegated, again. That was the final straw. The owners espoused a new mantra of self-sufficiency, to live within meagre means. But how could Norwich City then fund a return to the Premier League?

On a foggy December morning, I drive to the club’s training ground, hidden off a country road on the outskirts of the city. A year ago, the venue was made up of 49 Portakabins alongside a sloped pitch, which became waterlogged on one side during the winter. Gym equipment was housed in a conservatory with room for just four players at a time. Today, as part of an ongoing renovation, with £8m spent to date, there are swish buildings with wood-and-glass facades that evoke a posh barn renovation, as well as flat, manicured lawns for pitches.

I’m greeted by Stuart Webber, the club’s sporting director. As he takes me on a tour, the 37-year-old Welshman greets staffers planting herb gardens and rose bushes. “Without going sort of spiritual or whatever,” says Webber, a man with intense eyes and a tell-it-as-it-is manner, “people feel good when they have colour and freshness around them.”

Webber was introduced to Norwich City’s owners by his wife, Zoe Ward, the club’s business and project director, who was hired in 2015 to help tackle the club’s financial troubles. He began his career as a youth coach at Wrexham, before moving to bigger clubs including Liverpool (where he met Ward in 2010). Appointed head of football operations at Huddersfield Town in 2015, he helped guide them to the top tier for the first time since 1972.

In 2017 Norwich City’s owners hired Webber. Alongside Ward, he recommended upgrading training facilities rather than spending more on players. This explains why the club is acquiring a futuristic new machine: the SoccerBot360.

Created in Germany, it allows players to control a ball on a small turf pitch, surrounded by a wall of video screens that replicate the sensation of having a blur of teammates and opponents around them. In any match, players are forced to make hundreds of snap decisions about when and where to pass and shoot. The idea is they will make faster and better decisions in a real game if they have already seen it thousands of times within the SoccerBot. Set to be built next year at the training ground at a cost of around £750,000, the facility will be the first of its kind in England.

However, if the goal is to reach the Premier League next season, surely the club needs to spend on players who could advance the team right away, rather than many years in the future?

To answer, Webber refers to a book by British-American organisational guru Simon Sinek, The Infinite Game. Relying on research based on mathematical game theory, the writer suggests that in any competition there are two types of “game”. Some are “finite”, like a football match, where there are “known players, defined rules, and an agreed upon objective”. The team that scores most goals over 90 minutes wins. But there are also “infinite games”, where the players and rules keep changing, and the objective is “merely to stay in the game as long as possible”.

Sinek reckons too many organisations fail to understand which game they are playing. In a 2018 presentation, he said that, in the Vietnam war, “the Americans were trying to ‘beat’ the North Vietnamese, while the North Vietnamese were fighting for their lives, and invariably, a different set of strategic choices was made . . . The United States . . . ran out of the will or the resources to play. They didn’t lose, they dropped out of the game.”

For Webber, the objective of a team, winning matches, is different from that of a club. “Football’s an infinite game,” he says. “So when some people say, ‘Why are you spending £2m on a gym? Spend it on a striker, you have more chance of winning next week,’ well, yeah, you probably have. But this team will be here for ever. [Practice facilities will] train more strikers than £2m can buy you. In 15 years, you will look back and think: we brought 30 players through here.”

This long-term mindset has influenced how the entire club plays the game. Under Webber’s direction, Norwich City’s academy players, starting from age seven up to 21, are instructed to play in the progressive, passing style demanded in the first team. Sainty of the Canaries Trust says this is one reason why most Norwich City fans accept the club’s frugal approach: “From a fan’s point of view, we love watching it.”

The playing style was also devised with an eye on the bottom line. Youth teams are told to play with two forwards rather than one, doubling the chances of developing valuable goalscorers. “[Strikers]are like gold dust,” says Webber. “If we can create our own, over time that will then save us millions and millions of pounds.”

Thrust into the first team, Norwich’s starlets have thrived under the new system, grabbing the attention of wealthier clubs. Since 2017, the club has recouped £79.5m in sales of young players. This includes James Maddison to Leicester City, Ben Godfrey to Everton and Jamal Lewis to Newcastle United. The money has helped balance the books.

That doesn’t mean the entire team is for sale. Last summer, FC Barcelona, the world’s highest-earning football club, approached Norwich about acquiring Max Aarons, a highly rated 21-year-old defender. Teammates jokingly dubbed him “Dani Alves”, after the ex-Barcelona and Brazil great. Norwich refused to sell, believing Aarons was key to the club’s promotion push, which would earn an estimated £170m in Premier League revenue — a more valuable prize that would benefit the club for years to come.

Webber, though, understands players have personal ambitions that may not align with the club’s. So he sat down with Aarons before the start of this season, showing him statistics that ranked the player alongside English right-backs such as Manchester City’s Kyle Walker, Chelsea’s Reece James and Leicester’s James Justin. The numbers showed Aarons had played more minutes than his peers at the same stage of their careers. “I was quite a way ahead of all the other right-backs when they were my age,” says Aarons.

Webber’s argument to Aarons was that, by playing frequently at Norwich City, he was on track to become an even better player before, perhaps inevitably, he moves on to a bigger challenge. Aarons says analysis shows that his ball retention and chance creation have “gone up loads” over the past two seasons. “I’m a lot more composed,” the player says. “I don’t make rash decisions.”

Midfielder Todd Cantwell has emerged as one of the club’s key talents. ‘Everyone wants to play in the best league in the world’ © Daniel Castro Garcia
In a small, sparse office that contains little more than a shelf full of “Manager of the Month” awards, I meet Daniel Farke, the club’s first team coach. We speak in the middle of the day, soon after he has concluded a “light” training session with players before an important match that evening.

“[The players] are up in the morning and have proper breakfast and lunch,” he explains. “You don’t have to do this with the older players, who are a bit more experienced, who have families. But a young person thinks, ‘We’re playing at quarter past eight, so we can sleep till two and have a late night.’”

A relative unknown in England before his arrival in 2017, Farke was sought out by Norwich for his excellent record leading Borussia Dortmund’s under-23 team in his native Germany. Even though the Canaries managed only a measly five Premier League wins last season, the club retained Farke. The other relegated teams, Bournemouth and Watford, both replaced their head coaches in response to the failure.

He says: “Everyone in this business recommended, ‘Listen, with this approach, without spending money, paying for the sins of the past, with such a young side where no one really has Premier League experience — if you don’t add quality, you have no chance.’” But he adds that within the club leadership he felt “unbelievable trust and loyalty” towards him because it was well understood that relegation had been a “realistic outcome”.

Instead, the club’s demand is to instil a progressive playing style and develop young players above all else. That is a noble aim — but surely that will again leave the team as cannon fodder if they return to the top tier?

Tucking his long hair behind his ears, Farke says, “You don’t work in this business just to achieve realistic targets. Otherwise, Real Madrid will win the Champions League title each and every year. Otherwise, I will never win the Premier League title.”

But, he admits, the club’s approach is that the means matter as much as the ends. “It is not so much the goal,” says Farke. “It’s more the way.”

Hours later, I watch Norwich City play Nottingham Forest, two-time European Cup winners who dropped out of the Premier League more than 20 years ago. Before the game at Carrow Road, I’m invited to dine with the club directors. Over succulent grilled fish and a dessert of chocolate cheesecake, Smith amuses guests by revealing that she likes to eat at McDonald’s before away matches. (Her preferred order is a Big Mac.) Wynn-Jones regales the table with memories of Norwich City’s former glories.

The match is a contrast of styles. Norwich hog the ball, passing relentlessly. Forest defend deep, hoof the ball forward while their manager Chris Hughton screams from the sidelines: “Pass! Pass!”

There is no lack of passion on the Norwich City side. In the second half and already a goal ahead, midfielder Emiliano Buendía concedes a free kick. “Why did you foul him?” shouts Farke. “It wasn’t a ******* foul!” retorts Buendía. “**** off!” screams Farke.

Following the free kick, Forest equalise and celebrate wildly, but a few minutes later another smart sequence of passes ends with Buendía scoring the winner. The result left the club top of the Championship table, on course for a swift return to the Premier League. Webber says that with less need to invest in infrastructure, the purse strings will be steadily loosened to acquire players, providing a better shot at staying in the top division for longer.

But the club’s humble culture will come first. “Even when the day comes to spend more money,” says Webber. “It might also not be the right thing for our club to put a £20m player in this dressing room. It would be like putting a Ferrari in a Vauxhall garage. It would look out of place. We’ve got to try and make all our Vauxhalls almost as good as a Ferrari.”

Executives around the sport tell me they have watched the Norwich City model in admiration. But they argue that, ultimately, modern football runs an efficient market. The best players attract the highest price tag and are paid the most. The best teams win the most matches.

That leaves the club with a dilemma. Leaders such as Webber and Farke and emerging stars like Aarons and Cantwell admit to ambitions of moving to the world’s biggest teams in the future. What are clubs like Norwich City to play for, if not the sport’s shiniest silverware?

“It’s about that infinite game,” says Webber, who insists that the process of self-improvement is reward in itself. “Every decision has got to mean that this club is left in a better place than when we arrived.”
The Football Today podcast has picked up on this excellent article and speak to it's writer Murad Ahmed in today's pod - Norwich and the Infinite game

https://www.footballtodaypodcast.com/po ... inite-game

I found it refreshing that at last weeks Financial Times football Summit that the cubs owners talked about having a succession plan in place for themselves and having a strong opposition to the idea of selling their club to an Oligarch or State

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Feb 22, 2021 1:45 pm

On the subject of the Financial Times football Summit here is Murad Ahmed with his takeways from the two days


Scoreboard: 10 takeaways from the FT Business of Football Summit
FEBRUARY 20, 2021

© Financial Times
In this bumper edition of Scoreboard, we bring you all the best news and views from this week’s FT Business of Football Summit.

1. Cash-burning super league clubs under fire . . .

Huge losses suffered by elite clubs have led to accelerated talks about reshaping European football. Spain’s Real Madrid and FC Barcelona are among those discussing a $6bn JPMorgan-backed plan to launch a breakaway European “super league”. (Read about the discussions here).

Christian Seifert, chief executive of Germany’s Bundesliga, launched a two-footed tackle on the project’s proponents: “The brutal truth is that a few of these so-called super clubs are in fact poorly-managed, cash-burning machines that were not able, in a decade of incredible growth, to come close to a somehow sustainable business model. If I was an investor, I’d ask if they are the right partners.”

2 . . . . but an expanded Champions League isn’t a done deal

Kylian Mbappé in the Champions League: how much more can we take? © Lluis Gene/AFP via Getty Images
Those united in their opposition to the super league are divided on reforming existing club competitions, such as the Champions League.

Uefa, European football’s governing body, is proposing an expansion of the current tournament. Richard Masters, the Premier League’s chief executive, said he would not make concessions that would allow for more money-spinning European ties, for example, by reducing the number of teams in English football’s top division.

Lars Christer-Ollson, head of European Leagues, the body that represents national divisions, said he wants any extra Champions League places to be awarded to teams in smaller countries, such as the “champions of Scotland or Denmark, and not the sixth place team in England or Spain.” That idea is anathema to top clubs who want greater guarantees of playing continental football every season.

3. Have broadcasters reached peak football?

Clubs in Europe’s five big leagues — England, Germany, Spain, Italy and France — earned a combined €17bn in revenues last season, primarily through TV contracts. But following the pandemic, growth in football broadcast rights may be set to end.

“There’s certainly going to be a rights correction and it may be seen and interpreted by many as rights deflation,” said Simon Green, head of BT Sport, one of the largest broadcast partners for the English Premier League and the Champions League.

There have been big reductions in the value of TV contracts in Italy and France this year. The same trend would be a huge blow for the Premier League, which will start the auction for the 2022-2025 broadcasting rights later this year.

Richard Masters of the Premier League said it has recently conducted deals with Nent in Scandinavia and beIN Sport in the Middle East at similar or higher values than before the pandemic. “I don’t accept that things have plateaued or that we’re looking at a downward curve,” said Masters.

4. The coming legal battle: Fifa versus agents

Players’ agents, who fight for a slice of the $5.6bn transfer market, are kicking up a storm over plans by Fifa, international football’s governing body, to cap commissions and impose stricter standards on the way players are bought and sold.

Jonathan Barnett, executive chairman of ICM Stellar Sports, which represents star players including Gareth Bale and Aston Villa’s Jack Grealish, said the proposed rules are “against most laws in most countries . . . if we don’t hear from [Fifa], we are going to be in court in about 30 different countries.”

He accused Fifa of failing to properly consult agents over the changes. James Kitching, Fifa’s regulatory chief, had a riposte: “We did consult,” he said. “Consulting doesn't mean getting your own way.”

5. Show women the money!

Women's football has nimbly navigated the coronavirus crisis, signing new sponsors and capitalising on gaps in live sport scheduling to broaden their audience.

National Women's Soccer League commissioner Lisa Baird said prior to the pandemic, internal data showed the US league's fan base was 70 per cent women, but after a successful 2020 tournament their fans had grown to be majority men — in addition to more than tripling some broadcast ratings records.

“Our ratings were very competitive with not just women's sports, but all sports”, she said. “What I don't understand is, why aren't the broadcasters and the sponsors and the advertisers looking at the numbers? Because it's very clear that women's sports in general have lower broadcast fees than men's sports.”

6. For soccer, it’s morning in America

The 2020 Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs have one of the brightest futures of any National Football League team, yet franchise owner Clark Hunt is more optimistic on the growth prospect for his other “football” team, FC Dallas.

“Soccer is the sport of the new America,” he said. “We've got a big demographic shift going on in the United States, and really anybody who is under the age of 35, there's a very good chance that they're a fan of the sport of soccer,” Hunt said.

Hunt and Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber also pointed to the success of homegrown American talent like Juventus' Weston McKennie.

Still, despite ballooning franchise expansion fees, return on investment isn't a near-term goal. “There certainly is an interest in profitability, but I think the focus is on growing the calibre and the quality of the league”, said Jason Levien, chief executive of DC United.

7. Footballers have become athlete activists

Marcus Rashford, the Manchester United striker, has faced attacks by rightwing politicians and commentators for his campaigning on eradicating child food poverty. It won’t stop him attempting to hold the UK government to account though. “I already understood that somebody in my shoes is already a target anyway,” he said.

Crystal Palace star Wilfried Zaha made headlines by vocalising an unwillingness to join anti-racism gestures before matches, saying they were no replacement for progress on systemic changes to prevent abuse. “I feel taking the knee is degrading,” said Zaha. “My parents taught me to be proud to be black. I think we should stand tall.”

8. Deal details: Leeds valuation, SoftBank on Club World Cup

Key figures provided more details on recent football deals. Andrea Radrizzani, owner of Leeds United, said the Premier League club is now valued at £300m, following a fundraising with the San Francisco 49ers in January. The transaction leaves Radrizzani’s Aser Ventures with a 63 per stake in Leeds and the NFL team more than doubled its shareholding to 37 per cent.

Marcelo Claure, chief executive of SoftBank International, confirmed publicly for the first time that his company had been in talks with Fifa over a $25bn deal to invest in an expanded Club World Cup tournament. It appears the pandemic and infighting between the sport’s power brokers ended those ambitions.

9. Why football is more than a financial game

It’s worth remembering that football clubs aren’t typical companies. For 25 years, Delia Smith and Michael Wynn-Jones have been the majority owners of Norwich City, which plays in the Championship, England’s second tier. Despite offers to sell, the pair see themselves as “caretakers” of a local institution.

“We want to try and do it a different way from an Arab Sheikh or a Russian oligarch,” said Smith, whose side sit atop the Championship with a team built on youth players. “A lot of supporters are very, very regretful at having rich owners.”

Maggie Murphy is general manager of Lewes FC, a lower league English side that nearly went bust after the 2008 financial crisis. It has since turned itself into a fan-owned club that pays its male and female players at similar levels. Lewes just signed up Lyle & Scott, making the clothing brand its biggest sponsor to date. “They like our equality stance,” said Murphy, “That’s why they’re with us.”

10. You thought Messi and Ronaldo were good . ..

The FT’s John Burn-Murdoch has crunched the numbers. Data suggests the Norwegian striker is easily outscoring peers like Paris Saint-Germain’s Kylian Mbappe. Not only that, he is on course to overtake the past decade’s superstars: Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Whether Haaland can maintain this high striking rate will be the sporting story to watch in the coming years.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Feb 22, 2021 1:59 pm

More financial woe for the French Ligue - though this was inevitable given the massive rights reduction in the domestic live rights - from SportsBusiness.com

Free requests Ligue 1 rights fee reduction
Martin Ross
February 22, 2021

French telecoms operator Free has written to France’s Professional Football League (LFP) asking for a reduction in its rights fee for a package of near-live rights to all 10 Ligue 1 matches each week, plus a video-on-demand magazine programme.

The request from Thomas Reynaud, chief executive at Free, was made in the middle of last week but was rejected by the LFP on Friday, according to L’Équipe.

Free, which acquired rights from 2020-21 to 2023-24 in a tender process held in 2018, is reported to have argued that the value of its Ligue 1 rights has depreciated in recent months.

This comes after the Ligue 1 domestic broadcast rights suffered a near 50-per-cent fall in value after the collapse of the deal with Mediapro, the production group and rights agency, and subsequent agreement with pay-television broadcaster Canal Plus for the remainder of this season.

Reynaud has argued that Free’s rights, for which the Iliad-owned operator is paying €41.8m ($50.7m) per season, do not command the same interest because Canal Plus can now also boast that it has ‘100 per cent’ of Ligue 1.

It is reported that Reynaud has proposed that Free returns its rights to the LFP and that the league issues a new invitation to tender for the rights from 2021-22 to 2023-24.
The various requests and suggestions from Reynaud were dismissed in a letter from Vincent Labrune, the LFP president, on Friday, L’Équipe reports.

Free has, unlike Canal Plus, refrained from turning to the courts over its misgivings with the LFP and has so far honoured all of its fee instalments. Payments of €7.1m and €6.7m are due on April 5 and June 5, respectively, and the operator has not threatened to fail to settle the payments.

Lawyers for Canal Plus were in attendance on Friday as Paris’ commercial court issued a hearing date of March 2 in the case lodged by the Vivendi-owned broadcaster. It is reported that pay-television broadcaster beIN Sports joined Canal Plus in its legal complaint.

Neither Canal Plus nor beIN took part in the latest tender process with the former originally challenging the LFP’s move to only go to market with rights previously held by Mediapro.

Canal Plus has three outstanding challenges against the LFP. The broadcaster also submitted a complaint to the Autorité de la concurrence, France’s competition watchdog, and also has a historic legal case over the knock-on effect of the ‘Yellow Vest’ match postponements in late 2018.

Canal Plus secured rights to eight Ligue 1 fixtures per matchweek, adding to its existing rights to two live matches per round, sublicensed from beIN. In addition, Canal Plus secured rights to eight Ligue 2 matches per matchweek and a sweep of midweek and weekend magazine programmes. The Ligue 2 rights have duly been sold on to beIN.

The deal with Canal Plus means a marked reduction in domestic rights fees for the LFP and its clubs this season, with a total of between €650m and €670m now expected to be paid over the course of the season. The rights for the 2020-24 cycle were originally sold for €1.15bn per season in the initial 2018 auction.

Canal Plus acquired exclusive rights to two top-pick Ligue 1 fixtures per matchweek in the sublicensing deal with beIN after the latter acquired its rights from the LFP in a deal worth €330m per season (from 2020-21 to 2023-24).

Mediapro had agreed to pay €780m per season and €34m per season for its Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 rights, respectively for the 2020-24 cycle. But both contracts were terminated in December and the rights returned in a dispute over fee instalments.

Free has continued to make its dedicated Ligue 1 app free until the end of the season, giving viewers access to near-live rights against the backdrop of a hugely uncertain broadcast landscape for the property.

The acquisition of the Ligue 1 rights by the telco was thought to be, in part, a defensive move in the case of rival SFR picking up the majority of the Ligue 1 rights. The Altice-owned operator has, however, since altered its strategy in a move away from premium sports rights acquisition.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Feb 22, 2021 2:06 pm

Meanwhile the latest in a long line of disputes between Canal+ and the LFP is to be heard on March 2nd - from SportsBusiness.com

LFP and Canal Plus handed March date for hearing
Martin Ross = February 19, 2021

The legal case put forward by pay-television broadcaster Canal Plus against the recent broadcast rights auction run by France’s Professional Football League is to be heard on March 2.

The date was handed down today (Friday) by judge Nathalie Dostert at Paris’ commercial court.

Neither Canal Plus nor fellow pay-television broadcaster beIN Sports took part in the latest tender process with the Vivendi-owned broadcaster challenging the LFP’s move to only go to market with rights previously held by the Mediapro agency and production group.

Speaking in court, representatives from Clifford Chance, the LFP’s law firm, asked that the case was heard in a week’s time given financial pressures on French clubs.

Quoted by AFP, they said: “We are in a very much in a rush to defend,” adding that the matter is “very urgent” and “carries considerable interests” among the clubs.

However, lawyers from Canal Plus requested an additional week.

Canal Plus has three outstanding challenges against the LFP. The broadcaster also submitted a complaint to the Autorité de la concurrence, France’s competition watchdog, and also has a historic legal case over the knock-on effect of the ‘Yellow Vest’ match postponements in late 2018.

It is expected that there will not be a ruling in the competition case for at least six months.

The legal challenge to the tender was maintained by Canal Plus despite the broadcaster negotiating a rights deal with the LFP for the remainder of the 2020-21 season after the auction, which covered the 2020-24 cycle, did not yield satisfactory bids.

Canal Plus secured rights to eight Ligue 1 fixtures per matchweek, adding to its existing rights to two live matches per round, sublicensed from beIN. In addition, Canal Plus secured rights to eight Ligue 2 matches per matchweek and a sweep of midweek and weekend magazine programmes. The Ligue 2 rights have duly been sold on to beIN.

The deal with Canal Plus means a marked reduction in domestic rights fees for the LFP and its clubs this season, with a total of between €650m ($788m) and €670m now expected to be paid over the course of the season. The rights for the 2020-24 cycle were originally sold for €1.15bn per season in the initial 2018 auction.

Canal Plus acquired exclusive rights to two top-pick Ligue 1 fixtures per matchweek in the sublicensing deal with beIN after the latter acquired its rights from the LFP in a deal worth €330m per season (from 2020-21 to 2023-24).

Mediapro had agreed to pay €780m per season and €34m per season for its Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 rights, respectively for the 2020-24 cycle. But both contracts were terminated in December and the rights returned in a dispute over fee instalments.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Feb 22, 2021 2:14 pm

David Conn in the Guardian with an article on why English clubs are using high interest loans


Sign of the times: why English clubs are turning to high-interest US loans
Southampton and Derby are among clubs whose stadiums are mortgaged to MSD Capital in search for much-needed funds

David Conn - Mon 22 Feb 2021 08.00 GMT

The new-year sale of Burnley to US investors after 139 years of local Lancashire ownership marked a sign of the times for football as Turf Moor, one of the 12 original Football League grounds, was mortgaged to the American private investment firm MSD Capital.

Three more clubs – Southampton, Derby and Sunderland – had taken out multimillion-pound loans from MSD or MSD’s senior partners, and their stadiums, somewhat newer than Turf Moor, were also mortgaged. Of these four clubs, only Southampton have publicly declared the cost of borrowing from MSD, paying 9.14% interest on a £78.8m loan taken out during the pandemic last June: £7.2m interest a year.

MSD describes itself as a private investment firm, based principally in the Olympic Tower on New York’s 645 Fifth Avenue, which manages the assets of the tech billionaire Michael Dell, founder of Dell Technologies, and his family. The firm’s mission statement sets out: “The purpose of MSD Capital is to make investments that consistently generate superior absolute risk-adjusted returns over the long term.”

The secured loans into football, which MSD’s partners first made to Sunderland in 2019, have been jangling nerves around the game given that ordinary banks, whose interest rates hover not far above zero, can now be wary of lending to clubs. As the pandemic froze the game and its revenues, borrowing to cover the resulting shortfalls became difficult for all but the biggest clubs. A source familiar with MSD told the Guardian the firm began to lend – funded by other investors as well as Dell – at a time when other providers of financing stepped away from football. Inevitably, such borrowing comes with costs, and senior people in football worry that more clubs will take on further high-interest borrowings as the pandemic’s financial impact continues to bite.

Sunderland’s loan, for $12m, was taken on in November 2019 by the owner, Stewart Donald, who was by then actively trying to sell the club. The loan was made by FPP Sunderland LLC, a company registered in Delaware, the favoured state for US corporations; it had a charge over the Stadium of Light and the club’s other assets. FPP’s directors are Glenn Furhman, John Phelan and Robert Platek, respectively the chairman, chief investment officer and a partner in MSD Capital. The source familiar with MSD said the partners themselves made the Sunderland loan, and it was not a loan from MSD itself. Last week, when the 23-year-old Kyril Louis-Dreyfus finally completed his takeover of the club, the loan was paid off.

The loans to Burnley, understood to be about £60m to part-fund the takeover by ALK Capital, went to pay the outgoing local owners, principally Mike Garlick and John Banaskiewicz, and are now charged on to the club to pay: a “leveraged buyout”. That loan and those to Derby and Southampton have been made by MSD UK Holdings Limited, which is registered in Britain and owned by MSD through a company in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands.

Derby and Sunderland did not answer questions from the Guardian about their borrowings in detail, but as they have modern stadiums and infrastructure, it appears the loans were taken to cover ongoing costs, which for all clubs are principally players’ wages. Southampton have made clear they borrowed in anticipation of further losses because of the pandemic.

Derby’s first loan, reported to be £30m, was taken out on 6 August, secured on Pride Park; then in October the club took a further loan, secured on their Moor Farm training ground. Derby’s owner, Mel Morris, who bought Pride Park from the club for £81m in June 2018, has agreed to sell Derby to a company, Derventio Holdings, owned by Sheikh Khaled Bin Zayed Bin Saquer Al Nahyan of the Abu Dhabi ruling family. Reported to have been passed by the EFL in November, the takeover has not completed. Derby have not published their accounts for 2018-19 that were due last June, and were late paying the players in December.

The Derby chief executive, Stephen Pearce, said last month they were confident the takeover would complete; a Derby spokesman told the Guardian that Morris was still funding the club and that the MSD loan was taken out by the company that owns the stadium, not by the club itself.

Southampton’s £78.8m loan was taken out on 29 June, and MSD’s Cayman Islands-owned company has a mortgage on St Mary’s stadium, the training ground at Parks Farm, and the club’s other properties. The Chinese power supply businessman and property developer Gao Jisheng bought the club for a reported £210m in 2017 from Katharina Liebherr, who said at the time that Gao and his daughter Nelly “share our values and ambitions”. But Gao was widely reported to have put the club up for sale last March; the borrowing from MSD followed three months later.

Saints’ accounts for the year to 30 June 2020, covering three and a half months of the Covid-19 shutdown, recorded a £23m drop in turnover, and an overall loss of £76m. Wages, mostly for players, were about the same as the previous, pre-Covid season: £114m. The club said the £78.8m loan from MSD was taken out immediately before the 30 June accounts reporting date, “in order to mitigate against anticipated further losses as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic”. Gao is reported to still be negotiating with potential buyers to sell the club.

Ashley Brown, head of governance at the Football Supporters’ Association, said the MSD loans, secured on clubs’ grounds, were signalling general worries about the game’s financial health.

“Covid-19 has exacerbated the financial pressures at football clubs, but the issue of unsustainability at certain clubs has built up over a number of years and will remain until action is taken,” he said. “Reform is needed to protect our clubs, our heritage and our football assets.”

MSD declined to comment or confirm the interest rates charged at Burnley, Derby and Sunderland, but the source familiar with the firm stressed it sees itself as supporting the clubs through difficult times.

Still, when Pride Park, St Mary’s and the Stadium of Light were built in the Premier League era as landmarks for football’s brighter future, it was never really envisaged they would end up mortgaged to a US lender, via the Cayman Islands tax haven, to help pay the bills.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Newcastleclaret93 » Mon Feb 22, 2021 2:22 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 2:14 pm
David Conn in the Guardian with an article on why English clubs are using high interest loans


Sign of the times: why English clubs are turning to high-interest US loans
Southampton and Derby are among clubs whose stadiums are mortgaged to MSD Capital in search for much-needed funds

David Conn - Mon 22 Feb 2021 08.00 GMT

The new-year sale of Burnley to US investors after 139 years of local Lancashire ownership marked a sign of the times for football as Turf Moor, one of the 12 original Football League grounds, was mortgaged to the American private investment firm MSD Capital.

Three more clubs – Southampton, Derby and Sunderland – had taken out multimillion-pound loans from MSD or MSD’s senior partners, and their stadiums, somewhat newer than Turf Moor, were also mortgaged. Of these four clubs, only Southampton have publicly declared the cost of borrowing from MSD, paying 9.14% interest on a £78.8m loan taken out during the pandemic last June: £7.2m interest a year.

MSD describes itself as a private investment firm, based principally in the Olympic Tower on New York’s 645 Fifth Avenue, which manages the assets of the tech billionaire Michael Dell, founder of Dell Technologies, and his family. The firm’s mission statement sets out: “The purpose of MSD Capital is to make investments that consistently generate superior absolute risk-adjusted returns over the long term.”

The secured loans into football, which MSD’s partners first made to Sunderland in 2019, have been jangling nerves around the game given that ordinary banks, whose interest rates hover not far above zero, can now be wary of lending to clubs. As the pandemic froze the game and its revenues, borrowing to cover the resulting shortfalls became difficult for all but the biggest clubs. A source familiar with MSD told the Guardian the firm began to lend – funded by other investors as well as Dell – at a time when other providers of financing stepped away from football. Inevitably, such borrowing comes with costs, and senior people in football worry that more clubs will take on further high-interest borrowings as the pandemic’s financial impact continues to bite.

Sunderland’s loan, for $12m, was taken on in November 2019 by the owner, Stewart Donald, who was by then actively trying to sell the club. The loan was made by FPP Sunderland LLC, a company registered in Delaware, the favoured state for US corporations; it had a charge over the Stadium of Light and the club’s other assets. FPP’s directors are Glenn Furhman, John Phelan and Robert Platek, respectively the chairman, chief investment officer and a partner in MSD Capital. The source familiar with MSD said the partners themselves made the Sunderland loan, and it was not a loan from MSD itself. Last week, when the 23-year-old Kyril Louis-Dreyfus finally completed his takeover of the club, the loan was paid off.

The loans to Burnley, understood to be about £60m to part-fund the takeover by ALK Capital, went to pay the outgoing local owners, principally Mike Garlick and John Banaskiewicz, and are now charged on to the club to pay: a “leveraged buyout”. That loan and those to Derby and Southampton have been made by MSD UK Holdings Limited, which is registered in Britain and owned by MSD through a company in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands.

Derby and Sunderland did not answer questions from the Guardian about their borrowings in detail, but as they have modern stadiums and infrastructure, it appears the loans were taken to cover ongoing costs, which for all clubs are principally players’ wages. Southampton have made clear they borrowed in anticipation of further losses because of the pandemic.

Derby’s first loan, reported to be £30m, was taken out on 6 August, secured on Pride Park; then in October the club took a further loan, secured on their Moor Farm training ground. Derby’s owner, Mel Morris, who bought Pride Park from the club for £81m in June 2018, has agreed to sell Derby to a company, Derventio Holdings, owned by Sheikh Khaled Bin Zayed Bin Saquer Al Nahyan of the Abu Dhabi ruling family. Reported to have been passed by the EFL in November, the takeover has not completed. Derby have not published their accounts for 2018-19 that were due last June, and were late paying the players in December.

The Derby chief executive, Stephen Pearce, said last month they were confident the takeover would complete; a Derby spokesman told the Guardian that Morris was still funding the club and that the MSD loan was taken out by the company that owns the stadium, not by the club itself.

Southampton’s £78.8m loan was taken out on 29 June, and MSD’s Cayman Islands-owned company has a mortgage on St Mary’s stadium, the training ground at Parks Farm, and the club’s other properties. The Chinese power supply businessman and property developer Gao Jisheng bought the club for a reported £210m in 2017 from Katharina Liebherr, who said at the time that Gao and his daughter Nelly “share our values and ambitions”. But Gao was widely reported to have put the club up for sale last March; the borrowing from MSD followed three months later.

Saints’ accounts for the year to 30 June 2020, covering three and a half months of the Covid-19 shutdown, recorded a £23m drop in turnover, and an overall loss of £76m. Wages, mostly for players, were about the same as the previous, pre-Covid season: £114m. The club said the £78.8m loan from MSD was taken out immediately before the 30 June accounts reporting date, “in order to mitigate against anticipated further losses as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic”. Gao is reported to still be negotiating with potential buyers to sell the club.

Ashley Brown, head of governance at the Football Supporters’ Association, said the MSD loans, secured on clubs’ grounds, were signalling general worries about the game’s financial health.

“Covid-19 has exacerbated the financial pressures at football clubs, but the issue of unsustainability at certain clubs has built up over a number of years and will remain until action is taken,” he said. “Reform is needed to protect our clubs, our heritage and our football assets.”

MSD declined to comment or confirm the interest rates charged at Burnley, Derby and Sunderland, but the source familiar with the firm stressed it sees itself as supporting the clubs through difficult times.

Still, when Pride Park, St Mary’s and the Stadium of Light were built in the Premier League era as landmarks for football’s brighter future, it was never really envisaged they would end up mortgaged to a US lender, via the Cayman Islands tax haven, to help pay the bills.
Hi Chester

Interesting read. From what I gather it looks like MSD only really deal with clubs that are managing there finances pretty poorly?

Do you know if the clubs assets been used as downpayments for the loan as is suggests Southampton Derby and Sunderland has?

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Feb 22, 2021 2:43 pm

Newcastleclaret93 wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 2:22 pm
Hi Chester

Interesting read. From what I gather it looks like MSD only really deal with clubs that are managing there finances pretty poorly?

Do you know if the clubs assets been used as downpayments for the loan as is suggests Southampton Derby and Sunderland has?
Not down payments - securitisation, like your house is security for your mortgage

Yes it is all very clear what has been used as security for the loan and talked about in detail on the takeover thread when it appeared at companies house. By law a business has to lodge these details at companies house for public view, so if other lenders are approached they have a full understanding of what is currently securitised. - The filing comes under a Registration of Charge and can be found here dated 31st December

On the Football Club
https://find-and-update.company-informa ... ng-history

On The Turf and Training Ground - otherwise known as Longside Properties
https://find-and-update.company-informa ... ng-history

On Burnley FC Holding Company
https://find-and-update.company-informa ... ng-history

It was first raised on 24th of December

On Calder Vale Holdings
https://find-and-update.company-informa ... ng-history

On Kettering Capital
https://find-and-update.company-informa ... ng-history

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Newcastleclaret93 » Mon Feb 22, 2021 3:30 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 2:43 pm
Not down payments - securitisation, like your house is security for your mortgage

Yes it is all very clear what has been used as security for the loan and talked about in detail on the takeover thread when it appeared at companies house. By law a business has to lodge these details at companies house for public view, so if other lenders are approached they have a full understanding of what is currently securitised. - The filing comes under a Registration of Charge and can be found here dated 31st December

On the Football Club
https://find-and-update.company-informa ... ng-history

On The Turf and Training Ground - otherwise known as Longside Properties
https://find-and-update.company-informa ... ng-history

On Burnley FC Holding Company
https://find-and-update.company-informa ... ng-history

It was first raised on 24th of December

On Calder Vale Holdings
https://find-and-update.company-informa ... ng-history

On Kettering Capital
https://find-and-update.company-informa ... ng-history
Apologies for coming across quite thick. In theory if we were not able to make payments I am assuming this is very similar to when you can’t make payments on a mortgage? The house (club) would then be under control of MSD?

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Feb 22, 2021 4:34 pm

Newcastleclaret93 wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 3:30 pm
Apologies for coming across quite thick. In theory if we were not able to make payments I am assuming this is very similar to when you can’t make payments on a mortgage? The house (club) would then be under control of MSD?
There are mechanisms in the charge note that they can extract monies to maintain payment schedules by having first call on tv revenues received etc - the last thing MSD want is control of the club (it would put there loans business at risk as a result of conflict of interest), this way is much more profitable and requires little management once in place

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:35 pm

I have been posting for some time about the Chinese exit from European football - here John Wall Street outlines the issues for Spotico.com

CHINESE INVESTORS FLEE EUROPEAN FOOTBALL AFTER HOME GOVERNMENT POLICY CHANGE

BY JOHNWALLSTREET

February 22, 2021 5:55am

Chinese investors are pulling out of European football en masse. In mid-2017 there were upwards of 20 Chinese-owned clubs in Europe. “There are now fewer than 10, and it’s a dwindling number,” said Simon Chadwick (Professor and Director of Eurasian Sport, Emlyon Business School). In recent months, the owners of Inter Milan (Suning Holdings Group), Southampton (Gao Jisheng) and West Bromwich Albion (Lai Guochuan) have reportedly all been looking to divest equity interest or sell the entirety of their ownership stakes.

Conversations with a pair of authorities on sports within the People’s Republic of China (Chadwick and Greg Turner, Founder of Shenzhen High Performance Event Management) suggest there is a good reason for the flood of exits. Over the last five or six years, the Chinese government has dramatically altered its approach to turning the country into a football power. Basically, they decided “all of the money going overseas was better spent on local development,” Turner said.

Our Take: To understand why Chinese nationals are pulling their money out of European soccer, one must appreciate why the investments were made in the first place. Back in 2014, with the country on the cusp of launching its 13th five-year economic plan, President Xi Jinping stated his intent to turn China into a leading FIFA nation (it’s believed the country would also like to host the 2030 World Cup). While there were no explicit references to football in the plan, one of its “crucial elements was the government calling for more outbound investments,” Chadwick explained.

With the Xi administration urging investors to purchase overseas assets and the country simultaneously striving to improve its domestic football program, it made sense that Chinese billionaires and corporations were pursuing international teams in the mid-2010s. Financial upside aside, the belief was that the Chinese would learn how to operate world-class clubs and inevitably be able to bring that knowledge back with them to help the domestic game. “And very quickly, Chinese investors built up a significant network of European clubs,” Chadwick said.

But by mid-2017, the Chinese government decided the country’s domestic football program wasn’t reaping enough benefits from all of the investment capital deployed within the sport and moved to turn the spigot off. They had woken up “to the fact [that the country] was almost like a carcass being consumed by the world of football’s vultures.” There was this considerable outflow of money, Chadwick said, noting the immense stress the Chinese financial system was under at the time (GDP growth in 2016 was the slowest in 25 years). Taking the position that Chinese investments in international football had become irrational, the Xi administration shifted emphasis from elite football to supporting domestic and grassroots efforts. “There was also a shift in government policy towards promoting inbound investments and incentivizing domestic corporations to invest at home,” he added.

Wang Jianlin was the first domino to fall following the introduction of football reform in China. In February 2018, the Chinese billionaire was all but forced to divest his stake in Athletico Madrid. (He was later awarded a CSL club for adhering to the government’s wishes). Ye Jianming, the founder of CEFC China Energy, followed. In April 2019, he too was pushed to sell the interest he’d acquired in a European football club (Slavia Prague). Ye was later jailed for exposing the country’s economic system to undue risk. Since that time, “pretty much everyone who had spent overseas has started to return home,” Chadwick said. Of course, it’s not as if there is much choice—at least, not if ownership hopes to continue doing business in China. Remember, private Chinese companies are “never really private companies,” Chadwick added. They operate at the mercy of the government.

China’s 14th five-year plan (launched in 2020) formally calls for “money to come back home and for investments to be focused domestically,” Chadwick said. “And it has been rolled out in conjunction with a more draconian state that is acting increasingly bullish toward entrepreneurs and its business people,” he added (see: Jack Ma conspicuously low profile of late). So, it seems safe to assume the number of Chinese owners in European football will continue to dwindle through at least 2025 (when the next five-year plan begins). Turner notes that with local governments now offering incentives for domestic investments, the financial upside to investing in China is also greater now than it was just a few years ago.

Between 2015 and early 2017, Chinese television broadcasters (and digital platforms) also clustered around European football. The competition resulted in companies like Mediapro, PP Sports and Le Sports significantly overpaying for rights. Naturally, “in terms of financial outflows and in terms of delivering return on investment to the Chinese government and Chinese economy, this was not a viable proposition,” Chadwick said (Le Sports has since gone bankrupt). Eventually, those Chinese companies stopped making payments to the leagues.

While Chinese broadcasters have defaulted on agreements with the EPL (Tencent has since inked a one-year deal to broadcast the games), Serie A and Ligue 1, Turner does not believe Tencent will follow suit with the NBA. “[The NBA has] a strong local operation that is focused solely on developing the game in China,” which the government likes to see, he said. Chadwick agreed, though he would not completely rule it out, adding, “The political symbolism [associated] with Tencent defaulting on the NBA would be huge and really could be a prompt to a much wider trade war [with the U.S.].”

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Feb 22, 2021 11:51 pm

Jonathan Liew in the Guardian, looks at the endless churn of football in lookdown and believes that we are becoming so numbed by what we are seeing that we no longer recognising or even caring what is actually happening structurally to the game

Big club power grab in danger of going unnoticed in football's infinite scroll
Fatigue from a seemingly never-ending fixture list means outrage at the actions of self-interested clubs appears to be in short supply

Jonathan Liew - Mon 22 Feb 2021 22.00 GMT

There is a concept in web design called infinite scroll, which you will be familiar with if you’ve ever used Twitter, Facebook or any other popular social media site. Essentially, it’s a piece of code that automatically adds new pages whenever you reach the bottom of the old one, allowing you to keep scrolling forever.

Football’s infinite scroll has been longer in the gestation, but its effects are largely similar. Last week it was announced that every Premier League fixture would be broadcast live until fans can return to stadiums: a move that will create a largely unbroken chain of televised football stretching from restart last June until at least May. On one level, this is a feast of football the likes of which we have never experienced in our lives. But to what end?

The problem isn’t so much the volume of football – as ever, you can watch whatever you want. Rather it’s the thinness and the ubiquity, football flattened out and reconstituted and smeared all over us like meat spread. The time we used to spend anticipating or reliving football is now simply filled with more football: auto-playing, mutating, manspreading. Already the flavours have become largely indistinguishable from each other: Barclays into Carabao into Gazprom, the usual rhythms and rituals of the week replaced with a sort of footballing insomnia. You can never truly sleep, but nor will you ever be entirely awake.

I love football and have spent the majority of my career writing about it. But it feels increasingly illegible: a disorienting, decontextualised stream of content played by various accomplished pressing teams in front of large plastic sheets, while commentators remind you about the game starting in an hour’s time and the latest team news from Villa Park. (There is always team news from Villa Park.)

It’s tempting to see all this as a pandemic-enforced nostrum, a temporary state of affairs. But that would be to ignore the longer-term trends in European football, for which the current content-overload is a dress rehearsal.

Europe’s top clubs are discussing significant changes to the Champions League, which would lead to the group stage being expanded from 32 to 36 teams, playing 10 games each. Three places could be reserved for clubs who failed to qualify but have done well in the past: essentially a safety net that would prevent Europe’s big clubs from ever dropping out of the competition.

This is an idea that in some form has been doing the rounds for several years now, which is why it seems so easy to ignore. Growing inequality, the greed of the richest clubs: yes, yes, terrible stuff. There comes a point when you simply get tired railing against things you can’t control. Yet this is what makes the current moment so dangerous: a sense that a dishevelled, distracted game is sleepwalking into seismic and irreversible change, that football’s bewildering flux disguises a terrifying precipice.

Let’s deal with the practicalities first: 100 extra games into a schedule already screaming at the joints and ligaments. “I think it could be possible to squeeze another four dates into the calendar,” said Lars-Christer Olsson, the chairman of the European Leagues, with all the insouciant magnanimity of a 16th-century pope.

Above all, though, it is this sense of an impregnable cartel slowly walling itself off and leaving the rest of us to gawp from a distance. There is an annoyingly prevalent view that the unpredictability of this season has been a sort of natural corrective to the established order. Paris Saint-Germain are third in Ligue 1. Juventus will almost certainly be dethroned in Serie A. The two Spanish giants are in varying states of disarray.

Look under the bonnet, however, and the post-Covid order is already shaking out. Manchester City, the only club in the country that can afford to have £250m of footballer sitting around – you know, just in case – are surging clear of an exhausted Premier League. Smaller clubs such as Tottenham, Southampton, Burnley and Brighton are loading themselves with debt in an attempt to compete. Championship clubs are being ordered to stop handing out goal bonuses and contract renewals to qualify for a Treasury bailout.

On the continent, the non-Qatar-owned part of Ligue 1 is running losses of more than £1bn. PSG have just signed one of the world’s best managers and either they or City will probably get Lionel Messi this summer. Bayern Munich have just kneecapped their biggest rivals again by signing Dayot Upamecano from RB Leipzig. Genuinely, how do we think all this is going to end?

Maybe it doesn’t. That’s the point. Doubtless if these changes pass the biggest clubs will be back in a few years’ time asking for something else: more games, bigger squads, fewer rules, the copyright to the word football, who knows. Maybe it seems disproportionate to be fuming about the machinations of the European Club Association when most of us are wondering when we’ll see our families again. Maybe, like most seismic changes, this one will happen while we were all looking the other way: too glazed to care, too tired to protest.

As the football continues to fall around our ears like confusing digital rain, we peer ever closer into the void, trying to make out some semblance of a pattern: Leeds and Chelsea Tuesday, City and Real Wednesday; Europa League Thursday. But it makes even less sense and so we peer harder. But it blurs a little and so we keep scrolling

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Feb 23, 2021 11:57 am

At great summary of the bare faced greed and falsehoods proclaimed by the elite who are seeking to perpetuate their current status for eternity by David Ornstein in this piece in the Athletic - I just wish I could transcribe it for you

https://twitter.com/OliverKay/status/13 ... 0113075202

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Feb 23, 2021 12:12 pm

This is a classic example of all that is wrong at Barcelona and the problems of it's election model for those that run the club. Barcelona have over a 1 billion euros of debt, at least of of which is short term debt. In 2 weeks they members will elect a new president, in the meantime they have an offer of 250m euros for a share of their self generated technology business, which is ostensibly being sold to help pay down the debt. So what does a candidate do - suggest buying 3 more superstar players with the money - from Marca.com

Freixa: We have an investor of 250 million euros and Barcelona will sign three superstars
FC Barcelona - La Liga Admitted Mbappe or Haaland could be possible

Cristina Navarro Barcelona - 22/02/2021 17:06 CET

Barcelona presidential candidate Toni Freixa has revealed that his campaign has reached an agreement with an investor to contribute 250 million euros, which can be used to bring in new players.

In fact, Freixa went a step further and even admitted which areas of the squad they are looking at strengthening.

"We have been working for some time now and we can say that we have reached an agreement of intent with an investor who will contribute 250 million [euros] for Barcelona Corporate, which consists of four business lines, in exchange for 49 per cent,"

Freixa told RAC1."Although it will first have to go through the Assembly. We will have the funds for the economic situation to improve so that we can make sporting decisions. And in 2021/22 we will incorporate three superstars: two in attack and one in defence.

"When asked about whether Ronald Koeman would be in favour of these additions, the 52-year-old was clear.

"It's impossible for Koeman not to like them. They are unique players," he said.

"Koeman will be coach until the end of his contract [June 30, 2022], without any doubt. Giving stability to the coach and the team always pays off.

"Freixa was asked if Erling Haaland or Kylian Mbappe could be presented at the Camp Nou, which he said is possible."We have a maxim: we will never talk about players until we present them," the presidential candidate stated.

"It's a bad strategy because you allow other clubs to step on your negotiation. But it is absolutely possible. That's what Barcelona must do: bring in difference-making players.

"Despite the talk of signings, Barcelona's debt cannot be ignored and that could see the club lose Lionel Messi when his contract expires in the summer.

"Messi has given us more than Barcelona has given him," Freixa noted.

"I have spoken to his entourage, but not personally with him. The opportunity for him to continue is open. His contract has to be brought into line with the club.

"We have lowered the revenue by 350 million euros and the player is aware of that. I have never had the contract in my hand."

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Feb 23, 2021 1:36 pm

Essential viewing for anyone interested in the future of football media rights - The FT Business of Football Summit with it's panel discussion on the subject. Claire Enders socking it to us between the eyes

https://vimeo.com/513351482

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Feb 23, 2021 1:53 pm

Ever since the lenders to AC Milan decided to take the club on themselves to get the returns they were looking for in the club they have made consistently better decisions in the drive to get them back to the top of the Italian, European and World game.

This article/interview for SportsProMedia illustrates their commercial/sponsorship vision (there are doing a lot in the inhouse media space too)

https://www.sportspromedia.com/intervie ... l-strategy

at the bottom of that article link is a podcast associated to the article

Inside AC Milan’s preparations for soccer’s next commercial era
AC Milan chief revenue officer Casper Stylsvig explains to the SportsPro Podcast how the seven-time European champions have overhauled their digital operation to meet the needs of fans and partners alike.

By Eoin Connolly Posted: February 22 2021

As the man charged with enticing partners to one of European soccer’s most celebrated teams, AC Milan chief revenue officer Casper Stylsvig has a clear idea of his pitch.

“The two things I’m selling are the past and, more importantly, I’m selling a vision for the future,” he says.

For the first time in a while, on the field, the present has held its attractions for the Rossoneri as well. A youthful Milan side have held their own in Serie A – notwithstanding a 3-0 thumping at the hands of San Siro co-tenants Inter on 21st February – and look well set for their best league finish in close to a decade. Certainly, it is a little closer to what is expected of a club with seven European titles to their name – a place where, as Stylsvig puts it, former captain turned technical director Paolo Maldini talks not just of qualifying for the Uefa Champions League but winning it.

Of course, this is a strange season to be back on song. “It’s unfortunate,” Stylsvig admits, “that we obviously had a few years where we had difficulties on the pitch and finally things are slightly turning, and we can’t have the fans in the stadium to celebrate this with the team.”

Even as Milan look forward, then, to a stadium development scheme that can make their home an elite European venue and “entertainment destination” again, Stylsvig’s focus for now has been on continuing a digital transformation that will bring the club closer to their supporters inside and outside the ground.

The former Barcelona and Manchester United executive suggests that the “more commercial mindset” that has been emphasised since a 2018 takeover by the Elliott Management Corporation has been developed into a creative approach to partnership-building and communication. Key sponsors have been retained through the pandemic, while other deals have been designed to connect the fanbase and explore new opportunities.

Skrill became a global payments partner last May, Banco BPM was signed as the lead sponsor of the women’s team in August, and Roc Nation-owned streetwear brand Paper Planes created a club-licensed line in December. At the same time, Milan have become the most popular Italian soccer club on TikTok and have begun diligently building a presence on shared streaming site Twitch.

A €10 personalised virtual ticket package for the derby against Milan marked the latest attempt to draw the club community together. February also saw the opening of The Studios: Milan Media House, a full-service, 1,000 square metre production facility at the team’s commercial headquarters.

“When you start putting all these together, you need to make sure that your brand is relevant and up to speed,” Stylsvig says. “Generally, football clubs are very good at running from matchday to matchday – they’ve been doing that for a very long time – but it’s the business side of it where you need to understand where to grow your fanbase, which is a challenge for all of us.”

The European game is changing in ways that predate the pandemic, have been accelerated by it and will outlast it. Talking through Milan’s commercial project on the SportsPro Podcast, Stylsvig marked out some of the responses planned to meet those new challenges.

The Covid crisis needed the right reaction

“We recognised very quickly that we needed to adapt and we needed to be much more digitally advanced in order to engage with our fans, not only in Italy but around the world. We recognised the importance of being socially active and giving back to our fans and the community.

“One of the first big events we had, global events, was at the beginning of May when we had From Milan With Love, which was sort of a virtual concert hosted by DJ Khaled. And we managed to put this together in less than a week, and the impact was phenomenal. That was for charity, to celebrate the frontline workers. So that’s just one example where we as a club were trying to think differently, and we were also trying to be more innovative because we believe that the line between sport, entertainment and music is becoming very thin.”

Global fanbases need more and more tailored support

“I don’t want to put a value on it and say that one fan is worth this much in euros, but we know that we need to cater to them. And also, all fans are not alike. We have a huge fanbase in China, we have a huge fanbase in Indonesia which is very different from our fanbase in Italy.

“And then you have certain markets which tend to buy more merchandise. Also, in Asia, we have some big markets there, in the Middle East, Brazil, and then a market where we’re seeing increased interest is North America. So we can’t put a value on each fan but what we can say collectively is we know the more we engage, the more we make it accessible, the more we make the customer journey on our ecommerce platform easier, the more we will sell.”

To create sponsorship demand, meet sponsors’ demands

“I can talk only for us and not the industry as a whole but I think, because we’ve shown our digital capabilities, they buy into that. They buy into that, listen, we’ve been through these tough times together so once better times are coming, let’s enjoy that together. We also made sure to overdeliver where we could overdeliver, and just have a very open approach. So I think they appreciate that.

“For the future, I think in terms of the bigger-ticket items like principal partners, it’s always very difficult to sell these items when you can’t meet up with clients as you could in the past, you can’t host them at a game, and you can’t portray what the brand is about. That’s the challenge. But by showing innovation and saying, ‘We’ve overcome this and these are the case studies we have and this is what we have tracked,’ – we use a lot of metrics in terms of tracking the performance of the partnerships, it’s what we spend a lot of time and effort on – that helps to tell the story and convince.

“So I honestly don’t think the sponsorship market will go down, but I do think the brands are becoming much more sophisticated and they know exactly what they want. So if you don’t tick those boxes, you’re not going to be considered.”

Owning content production creates value at every level

“It’s much easier when we have player appearances, when we have player appearances, when we have player announcements, that we do it in-house – they come and sign the contract at Casa de Milan and then we go to the first floor and we have the photo session there. But also, more importantly, for partners. They can also use the facilities, they can come here and we can create content for them.

“That was very important for us to have that. Of course, there is a cost saving in doing it in-house and not having to rent the facilities outside, but it’s also more the control, the speed, and the flexibility.”

Soccer clubs must think differently after Covid

“I think coming out of the pandemic will change the approach for most clubs – at least for the most successful clubs. They will further develop the digital space, have the fan in focus in terms of how we can engage.

“It’s not only about monetisation because that comes afterwards. It’s about making sure that you give the fan an authentic experience in terms of being close to the club.”

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Feb 23, 2021 3:06 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Fri Feb 19, 2021 1:03 pm
That Football Today Podcast on the Serie A rights revealed that when sky made their pitch for their deal of lesser value they were deeply questioning of DAZN ability to pay significantly more than Sky themselves though they could for the deal and as if to reinforce that argument and the financial surety that they themselves can provide it transpires that Sky have offered to pay 50% of the whole deal upfront and within 3 days of it being ratified, together with and advance of the whole of next seasons money in the current cycle - that must be quite tempting and something the French can only dream of - from SportsBusiness.com

Sky Italia promises €505m upfront payment for Serie A rights
Alex Taylor
February 17, 2021

Italian pay-television broadcaster Sky Italia has written to Serie A club presidents promising an upfront payment of €505m ($610m) if its offer for domestic rights to the Italian top tier is accepted.

The payment would be due within three days of Sky Italia’s offer being accepted, according to the letter cited by Italian news agency Ansa.

The €505m figure (plus VAT) would be comprised of both the final €130m instalment due for the 2019-20 season, as well as a €375m advance payment for the 2021-22 season. This advance payment would represent 50 per cent of the total Sky Italia has offered per season, which stands at €750m.

The letter from Sky “reaffirms the commitment it is willing to make to ensure the League the widest financial guarantees and further contribute to the Serie A Championship should it be awarded Packages A, B and C with regards to the marketing by platform [tender] for the audiovisual rights in question”.

Sky Italia’s bid is not understood to be the highest tabled in bidding for the rights from 2021-22 to 2023-24, however. OTT subscription platform DAZN’s offer of €840m per season for rights to seven exclusive matches per matchweek and co-exclusive rights to the remaining three matches is the largest financial package currently on the table.

Sky and DAZN share rights to the league in the current 2018-19 to 2020-21 cycle worth €973m per season.

Lega Serie A last year took legal action over the non-payment by Sky of its instalment payment with the broadcaster pushing for a reduction given the knock-on effect of the delay to the season caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Civil Court of Milan has now ordered that Sky makes the payment, pending a new hearing in June.

Lega Serie A, the governing body of Italy’s top division, postponed a vote to award the rights last week while it reviewed those two offers.

A group of seven Serie A clubs featuring Atalanta, Fiorentina, Inter Milan, Juventus, Lazio, Napoli and Verona then penned a letter to Lega Serie A president Paolo Dal Pino demanding that the vote be held at the league assembly meeting today (Wednesday).

The seven clubs were bullish about bids for the league, having previously been prepared for a severe economic crunch.

Their letter said: “The widely expected economic contraction has been found to be less than the dramatic forecasts of some, as evidence of both the good work in the negotiations and the remarkable appeal of Italian top football in comparison with that of the other so-called big 5, namely England, Germany, Spain and France.”

DAZN’s offer involves a partnership with Telecom Italia which would see the telco provide a fibre service to DAZN as well as contribute between €300m and €400m to the deal, it is reported.

Should DAZN be awarded the rights, revenue in excess of its €840m offer would come from the sale of non-exclusive rights to the three non-exclusive matches. It is understood that this would save the league up to €60m per season which it currently pays the Infront agency, its outgoing media-rights adviser, in commission for these matches.

Sky’s offer would give it control of one of the ‘mixed’ marketing packages, comprising rights across all platforms but with only co-exclusivity of internet, IPTV and mobile rights. It has also offered a further €70m per season for the three non-exclusive matches per matchweek.

A total of 14 votes are needed for the league’s new domestic broadcaster to be ratified.
following that move by Sky to question whether DAZN could actually pay for the deal it has put on the table to Serie A, TIM the Italian Telco provider, has been revealed as the source for close to 40% of the bid money, that is a much better balance for nervous clubs, particularly after it was revealed that the weekends Milan Derby was viewed by over 2 million domestic viewers on DAZN's platforms. Here's Bloomberg with the news about TIM

Telecom Italia Set to Pay $1.2 Billion to Back DAZN Soccer Deal
Daniele Lepido, Bloomberg News

(Bloomberg) -- Telecom Italia SpA, Italy’s largest phone carrier, is ready to back DAZN Group Ltd. in its multi-billion-euro offer for broadcast rights to the country’s top soccer league, according to people familiar with the matter and to a confidential letter seen by Bloomberg.

The former telephone monopoly last month reached an agreement with DAZN -- subject to conditions -- on a possible plan that would provide distribution and technological support as well as financing of about 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) for its bid to broadcast the next three seasons of Italy’s Serie A league, the people said, asking not to be named since the deliberations aren’t public.

DAZN, a streaming startup backed by billionaire Len Blavatnik, has offered Serie A 840 million euros per season and Telecom Italia could back that bid by 40%, providing about 340 million euros per year in a content distribution deal, the people said. DAZN is bidding against Comcast Corp.’s Sky.

The streaming company’s business plan “includes an important distribution agreement with a partner who’s an industry leader and will provide further support also from a financial point of view,” DAZN wrote in a confidential letter sent to Serie A on Feb. 8. The message aimed to address concerns raised by some soccer team presidents over DAZN’s strength.

Though the letter doesn’t explicitly mention Telecom Italia, the carrier is the “main distribution partner” cited in the document, people familiar with the matter said.

Annual Payment

The DAZN letter says that the company’s partner “is committed to the payment of an annual guaranteed minimum equal to more than 40% of the annual total amount due to Serie A.”

DAZN also says in the letter that its partner’s payments will be sent through six annual installments of the same amount “made to an escrow bank account to be used exclusively for payments to Serie A.”

For DAZN, a tie-up with a partner with funding capacity could be a game-changer. The streaming company lost nearly $2 billion last year and has been in retreat in the US and Latin America. Prioritizing Italy, Germany and Japan could allow it to grow in markets with less competition.

“DAZN is hanging on to Germany and Italy as key markets and in both it is trying to carve out a competitive position,” said Claire Enders, founder of media consultant Enders Analysis.

No final decision has been made on the plan and Telecom Italia could still withdraw its support, the people said. Representatives for Telecom Italia, DAZN and Serie A all declined to comment.

Live Streaming

A Telecom Italia move into soccer would boost live streaming services in a country that’s still mostly characterized by conventional media such as digital terrestrial television, over-the-air broadcasting dominated by Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset SpA, and satellite programming, which was pioneered in the country by Sky.

Serie A has been seeking new sources of revenue. An effort earlier this month to sell a $2 billion stake to an investor group stalled after the league’s board failed to act on the deal, people familiar with the matter said at that time, raising concerns that the agreement could ultimately collapse.

The Italian league, which features players such as Cristiano Ronaldo and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, is in need of a cash injection after decades of underinvestment. Finances have been further pummeled by the pandemic, as matches have been played to empty or near-empty stadiums and broadcast revenue has declined.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Feb 23, 2021 6:06 pm

It has been a while since I have posted about migrant workers in Qatar and the preparations for the 2022 World Cup. This article suggest that on average since the awarding of that tournament 10 years ago, 12 migrant workers a week have died. Not all have been working on the World Cup infrastructure, but in such a small country this is a truly scandalous figure and situation

https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... d-cup-2022

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Feb 23, 2021 6:16 pm

An interesting thesis - Sustainability and Social Responsibility can make sport a better product.

https://sustainabilityreport.com/2021/0 ... t-upgrade/

there is this youtube talk and discussion on the subject here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRmyQHSObm8

the blurb

How the sports industry should adapt to a new scenario, where “fluid fans” have increased power of choice and more willing to change their minds? A scenario where 75% of sports fans have an increased interest in brands that are socially responsible and 87% of “foward-thinking costumers” believe sport must take action to reduce its negative environmental footprint?

Sport has many dimensions, and one of them is that it is a product. The more it becomes a sustainable and socially responsible product, the more it will be attractive for sports fans and society. This is what Matthew Campelli, founder, and editor of The Sustainability Report, shared during the opening of SportWorks TALKS – The Sustainability Leadership Series.

Mixing research, case studies and inspirational quotes from leaders such as Sebastian Coe, Matthew argued that if clubs, leagues and federations place sports sustainability as a core strategy, in a meaningful and sincere way, they will undoubtedly offer a better product that will benefit all. An instigating TALK, followed by rich questions from participants, that left us all looking forward to the next episodes of the series.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Feb 23, 2021 8:05 pm

Football agents don't enjoy the best reputations in the minds of the media or the public, I cannot imagine many will want to deal with this new entrant in the market place, though you wonder if he will claim a firm grip on Irish talent in the same way he has done with boxing - from the Guardian

Company founded by suspected crime boss Kinahan moving into football
MTK Global announces it is setting up a football agency
Move will raise concern among game’s authorities

Sean Ingle

Tue 23 Feb 2021 19.23 GMT

MTK Global, the boxing management company founded by the alleged Irish gangster Daniel Kinahan, has announced it is moving into football.

The group – which represents more than 300 fighters including Tyson Fury, Carl Frampton and Billy Joe Saunders – said it was setting up a football agency “having already conquered the world of combat sports and become the biggest force in the business of boxing”.

MTK’s move will raise deep concern among football’s authorities, given Kinahan’s notoriety and the speed in which the company has become a major player in boxing. While the 43-year-old has no criminal convictions, he was named in Irish courts as the head of a £1bn drugs and arms cartel.

The new agency, MTK Football, did not respond to questions from the Guardian over whether Kinahan would be involved in the new venture or which players it has signed.

It will be fronted by the little-known agent Danny Vincent, who promised to take MTK Global’s successful formula into football. “MTK are the biggest and best in the world when it comes to day-to-day management of elite fighters,” he said. “Myself and my team believe our passion and knowledge will help replicate that into the world of football.”

MTK Global’s chief strategy officer, Paul Gibson, added: “There has always been an affinity between boxing and football. We see plenty of our fighters enter the ring sporting the colours of their city’s team and footballers regularly take in our events from ringside.

“That’s why we’re so excited by this new venture and the opportunity to explore some of the synergies which undoubtedly exist.”

Kinahan helped set up MGM in 2012, which then changed its name to MTK after a sustained spell of bad publicity. In 2017 he said that he had severed ties with the group but last month lawyers for MTK Global confirmed that he was still advising some of the organisation’s boxers. Kinahan later issued his own statement, insisting he was innocent and that he was continuing to work on “record-breaking” fights.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Feb 23, 2021 8:32 pm

This is a bit of a strange one - though there is little as strange and emotional as Turkish football - Fenerbache are being taken to court by the domestic broadcast BeinSport after a relentless campaign by the Fener president who says the Biensport are influencing VAR decisions against his club, it may cost the league it's TV deal going forward - from CityAM

Exclusive: beIN Sports takes legal action against Fenerbahce over Turkish club's 'beFAIR' campaign
Frank Dalleres

Broadcaster beIN Sports is taking legal action against Fenerbahce over the Turkish club’s high-profile campaign against the network.

beIN is suing Fenerbahce for breach of intellectual property after they displayed “beFAIR” branding on the team’s apparel and pitchside advertising displays.

Fenerbahce and their president Ali Koc have adopted “beFAIR” as the slogan for a public relations war with beIN, even going as far as doctoring beIN’s branding.

Read more: All Premier League games to be televised until fans return to stadiums

They have accused the broadcaster of conspiring against them by manipulating VAR and choosing unfavourable camera angles and highlights. beIN has dismissed the claims.

Lawyers for beIN are set to lodge papers with Turkey’s IP courts in Istanbul in the next 24 hours.

A beIN Media Group spokesperson said: “We will take whatever legal action necessary to protect our rights. As we have shown before, we take an uncompromising approach to the protection of IP, not least because it is the economic foundation of football.”

The club, which signed Mesut Ozil from Arsenal last month, has obstructed media access for beIN and sent players out for interviews and warm-ups in “beFAIR” branded T-shirts and training tops.

Fenerbahce have also displayed the “beFAIR” messaging on advertising boards at home matches.

Referencing the dispute, the club also displayed the message “Fenerbahce cannot be challenged” at yesterday’s 1-0 defeat to Goztepe.

beIN currently pays $370m a year for the domestic rights to Turkey’s Super Lig in a deal that expires next year.

Fenerbahce are one of the three biggest clubs in the country, with Galatasaray and Besiktas, but are more than $700m in debt.

The Turkish Football Federation has announced it will begin the sale process for the next rights cycle soon.

Fenerbahce’s stance is understood to have made beIN question whether to bid again.

The Qatari broadcaster was embroiled in a long-running legal battle over the piracy of its output on Saudi Arabia-based channel beoutQ.

beoutQ, which mirrored beIN’s output, was finally switched off in 2019.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Athletic are covering the story this evening with a lot more detail

https://theathletic.com/2403249/2021/02 ... -t-shirts/

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Feb 24, 2021 1:15 am

A new blog piece from the chaps at Vysyble, who having witnessed a trend for capital expenditure prior to the pandemic are preparing for astronomical Economic losses for last season. for some reason the blog doesn't mention Aston Villa and their massive financial input. I also suspect that, in the short tem at least they will lament the change in status at Burnley come the publications of this years "We're so rich it's unbelievable" report

Measure for Measure
https://vysyble.com/blog-7

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Feb 24, 2021 10:45 am

The latest digital edition of FC Business magazine is now available it features a really good interview with Legia Warsaw's owner who talks openly about the need for reform for European football. He is a member of ECA but talks very differently about what is required to the ECA President Andrea Agnelli and much more like Edwin Van Der Sarr at Ajax

https://cloud.3dissue.com/6374/7271/131 ... .html?r=78

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Feb 24, 2021 11:25 am

Yet another excellent and interesting podcast form Unofficial Partner - Sport, brands and cultural relevance

Our clubs new owners have (perhaps rightly) spoken very clearly about how the growth of our club needs to be based on story telling and getting people attuned and attached/associated to our club - this podcast is all about how and why this is important

https://www.unofficialpartner.com/podca ... -relevance

The blurb

Today’s conversation is about the role of agencies in helping clients be culturally relevant in fans lives across sport, music and esports. And we ask why some brands seem able to build a bridge across those cultural divides, and some don’t.

Our guests are Richard Adelsberg and Owen Laverty from the independent creative agency Ear to the Ground, where something seems to be going right.

Despite the pandemic and the widespread cancellation of sport, Ear to the Ground has had a stellar year, tripling net profits and broadening its client portfolio that includes New Balance, Sony PS5, STATSports and Therabody, the performance tech brand.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Feb 24, 2021 11:41 am

of course some clubs are much more about the story than what is on show on the pitch, and that is what can make a club relevant across the world. St Pauli who play in Bundesliga 2 have over 500 registered fan groups across the world

https://www.aljazeera.com/program/featu ... c-st-pauli

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Feb 24, 2021 11:56 am

More on how China influences the real life activities of it's businesses and for us how that affects football clubs - as ever Simon Chadwick with the collecting of the detail

https://twitter.com/Prof_Chadwick/statu ... 9798684673

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Feb 24, 2021 12:10 pm

oh to be able to read this and share it - Analysis: Debt is football’s dirty word – should it be? from Offthepitch.com


https://offthepitch.com/a/analysis-debt ... ould-it-be

the promotional tweet identifies the right issue

'For some debt is a necessary means, a burden taken on strategically in order to maximise the potential of the club. For others, it is undertaken irresponsibly'

https://twitter.com/OffThePitch_com/sta ... 0097346561

and Dan Plumley of Sheffield Hallam University and the Football Collective makes the point many of the financial and business aware on this board have made

Really good piece, this. Debt is by no means a bad thing. Servicing the debt (or not) when it falls due is the bigger issue. Context is key. What the debt is linked to, the structure of it, and the current situation of the club more important than the headline figures Soccer ballBanknote with pound sign

https://twitter.com/DrDanPlumley/status ... 6018646016

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Feb 24, 2021 5:37 pm

we all know how difficult it is for youngsters pursuing their dream of a career in football - it can be seen clear enough here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HEq8YM ... e=emb_logo

which is why some, with the support/encouragement of their parents will take whatever means they can to gain an advantage. The UK Antidoping authority have just issued a ruling banning for 9 months a 16 year old who was found taking a growth hormone as a 15 year old with his parents complicit in his taking of it.

https://www.ukad.org.uk/news/young-foot ... ine-months

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Feb 24, 2021 5:53 pm

GameofthePeople.com picks up from that David Conn article on financial loans in football and runs with it

Football clubs need cash and they will source it
FEBRUARY 24, 2021 NEIL FREDRIK JENSEN

THE total cost of the pandemic for top level football is still uncertain, but it is no secret that most clubs have felt the pressure of lost income, compromised commercial and broadcasting deals and the almost total loss of matchday revenues.

What’s more, among the consequences of an industry dependent on mass gathering is a loss of confidence among some of football’s partners, ranging from sponsors to financial providers. When times get tough, banks and other financial institutions often lose some, sometimes all, of their appetite for lending, especially to sectors that may be among the worst affected.

Debt
It’s not just lower revenues that have impacted clubs, they have also seen their levels of debt rise during the pandemic. Observers may point-out that football had ventured past the sustainable barrier long ago and that the crisis has merely exposed the unrealistic business models of many of the world’s top clubs. When the leading revenue generator, Barcelona, is said to be on the verge of bankruptcy, you know the system, if not broken, is in dire need of emergency treatment. Debt may be a way of life for many clubs, but when the income dries up, they become very, very vulnerable.

Debt is a universal problem. Barca have total debts of around € 1 billion, while Real Madrid’s indebtedness runs to € 650 million. In Turkey, the country’s big four clubs have a total of € 2 billion of debt. Tottenham, Manchester United and Everton have huge debts, but where English clubs differentiate is that they have been successful in pushing their debts into longer-term facilities.

The pandemic is an unprecedented time, not even the financial crisis of 2008 proved to be catastrophic for most clubs, indeed the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse heralded the start of football’s own bull market, including in Spain, where the country’s economy stared into the abyss.

Right now, football is in need of the very thing that commercial banks have traditionally provided for the industry – short-term working capital cash flow. At the moment, the banks are unwilling to lend funds to clubs that have suddenly looked very flimsy. Interestingly, everybody knew the game had been tip-toeing around the rim of a volcano for some years, but while enormous broadcasting fees rolled in, they were willing to maintain their balancing act.

The UK’s Barclays has long had a link to football and has been among the top lenders to the sector, while Australian investment bank, Maquarie, had a strong appetite for deals with top clubs. Close Brothers is another firm that has been linked to the game. New lenders, known as challenger banks, have also built-up considerable business with football, although the enthusiasm has diminished in the past year or so.

Lenders
While commercial banks, fearful of being linked to any club going under, have retracted from football, other forms of financing have emerged, not always being too beneficial for the clubs themselves. As in any major crisis, when the vanilla high street banks start to shirk from lending, borrowers look for alternative and sometimes onorthodox forms of financing.

Clubs have long used more exotic instruments to raise money, such as factoring – gaining advances on media income (around 40% of the Premier League have opted for this method) – and mortgaging their stadiums. As professionals from asset financing and leasing point out, though, if income suddenly stops, this model can be troublesome.

So if not banks, who will lend? One family office that has been lending to football clients is MSD Capital, the company that manages the interests of computer tycoon Michael Dell’s family. MSD recently lent £ 80 million to Southampton at an interest rate way in excess of standard – 9.14%. This raised a lot of eyebrows in that the extremely high rate suggested a certain degree of desperation from the borrower. But it’s a simple supply and demand argument – MSD have the cash, Southampton need it, and they were willing to pay for the privilege. Firms like MSD tend to take a longer-term view rather than short-term solutions for an immediate problem, so it might be an ongoing relationship that grows.

MSD also played a significant role in the £ 200 million takeover of Burnley, providing some of the cash that fuelled the leveraged buyout by investment group ALK. Burnley was a club that was simple, transparent and easy to understand. Their fans are concerned that they now have a complex club that has a lot of debt loaded upon it and an offshore corporate structure based in Jersey. It’s a far cry from the days when a butcher presided over the club that is the epitome of a club representing a small, “what you see is what you get” town.

The private equity sector is also increasingly interested in football, attracted by its strong brand culture, opportunities in commercial and broadcasting partnerships and recession-proof aspects of the sport. But not everyone likes the idea of private equity’s growing influence, such as in Italy where Serie A clubs have collectively expressed their misgivings about the potential acquisition of Inter Milan by BC Partners.

Clubs have also sought assistance from government or central bank-driven initiatives. For example, Arsenal and Tottenham have, between them, borrowed almost £ 300 million from the UK’s Bank of England.

Inter-linked
Since Manchester United were bought by the Glazers using a LBO structure fans have been suspicious of the financial industry buying into the game. But the use of tools like derivatives, securitisation, bond and equity markets have allowed clubs to navigate choppy waters in the past and also to manage their cash in a more sophisticated way. Football has become a sector and an asset class, which means a different approach has accompanied its transformation from a parochial to a global sector. Furthermore, the introduction of market-savvy owners has created a demand for more creative financial management which may be completely alien to most stakeholders. While this sea change in football’s profile has been beneficial to a certain degree, it also comes with the behaviours of the financial markets, which arguably care little for the romance of the game.

The corona virus has opened-up old wounds that really need dressing soon. It has shown us smaller clubs have to change their ways, find their most appropriate place in the eco-system and adopt a business model that is realistic and fit-for-purpose. This may mean lower expectations, part-time status and a platform that can lower cost bases. The lower level is not particularly attractive for high finance, but at the top, there is no doubt that the financial industry will walk hand-in-hand with football into the post-pandemic future. Their fortunes are undoubtedly inter-linked.

Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Feb 25, 2021 12:04 am

More strange tales relating to the coming CAF Presidential from Phillipe Auclair for Josimar,con

http://josimarfootball.com/for-a-fistful-of-euros/

For a fistful of euros
24/02/2021

In July of last year, a top Mauritanian club which had been defrauded by its own FA completed its 4-year long quest for justice when its claims were validated by the Supreme Court. Yet the man at the centre of the scandal, FA president Ahmed Yahya is allowed to stand in CAF presidential elections, with the blessing of Fifa. How can this be possible?

By Philippe Auclair

The news shook Mauritania but was barely mentioned outside the immediate region: Ahmed Yahya and his federation had been found to have illegally withheld money owed to ASAC Concorde, one of the country’s top clubs, then transferred that money to a body that wasn’t entitled to it. If this did not constitute embezzlement, it looked suspiciously like it. Mauritania’s Supreme Court threw out Yahya’s federation’s last appeal in July 2020, marking the end of a 4-year-long dispute with the club, a judgement which was then followed by an order of execution at the end of December. The verdicts vindicated the claims made by ASAC Concorde, that Yahya’s FA, The Football Federation of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania (FFRIM), had pocketed the proceeds (amounting to €75,000) of the transfers of two young Mauritanian internationals to Spanish club UD Levante back in January 2016, and this, under the direct and active supervision of Yahya himself.

Josimar understands that these court decisions led the Governance Committee of the African Football Confederation (CAF) to make supplementary checks when it considered Yahya’s eligibility, a decision which infuriated the Mauritanian FA boss, now in the 10th year of his presidency. Yahya was subsequently cleared to run as a CAF presidential candidate when Mukul Mugdal, the chair of Fifa’s Review Committee, concluded his eligibility check on 26 January of this year and informed the Mauritanian that he had cleared this hurdle in a six-line, three-sentence-long email.

It is unclear at this stage whether Mugdal was in possession of all the facts or not, as the matter was only brought to the attention of Fifa’s Ethics Committee very recently; but Josimar understands that CAF’s Governance Committee, chaired by Michel Brizoua-Bi, was apprised of the dossier and decided not to pursue its own enquiries after Mugdal’s decision. When approached by Josimar, Brizoua-Bi said that, as far as he was concerned, “the matter was closed”.

Yet it emphatically is not. Documents which Josimar had access to indicate that FFRIM, under the guidance of its president Ahmed Yahya, wrongly appropriated the transfer fees due to ASAC Concorde. It is a story of deception, abuse of power and dishonesty, backed by very strong, in fact seemingly incontrovertible evidence, which should ensure that CAF and Fifa look into the matter again as a matter of urgency, as the CAF election is only three weeks away.

Gianni’s favourite, Africa’s Golden Boy
It is not by chance that the first country which Gianni Infantino visited during his recent whistle stop tour of Africa was Mauritania. The staging of the U20 African Cup of Nations in the West African islamic republic provided a perfect opportunity for the Fifa president to express the admiration he feels for the youthful president of the Mauritanian FA (FFRIM) Ahmed Ould Yaya, one of the four candidates who are vying to succeed incumbent Ahmad Ahmad at the head of the African Confederation (CAN) when the election is held in Rabat on 12 March.

Infantino, who inaugurated a Fifa-funded artificial pitch on this occasion, didn’t miss this chance to praise Yahya’s leadership and achievements, which he said might be ‘the best in the world’, one of a number of such comments which were felt by many, especially on the African continent, to be out of place just a few weeks before CAF chooses its next president. This happened after multiple sources (including an eyewitness whom Josimar has spoken to) claimed that Yahya was one of the key instigators of the ‘putsch’ which saw president Ahmad Ahmad, banned for 5 years by Fifa’s Ethics Committee but reinstated by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, barred from running for re-election by his own Executive Committee when it convened in Yaoundé on 6 February, ignoring that CAF’s own Governance Committee had indicated that Ahmad should be able to stand after all.

The image of a dynamic, young, ‘modern’ African football leader which Yahya has been careful to cultivate over the years, and has earned him many vocal admirers in Africa as well as in Zurich, shouldn’t hide that he is also a controversial figure at home. His father, a colonel in the Mauritanian army, is claimed to have been involved in the killings of black Mauritanians which took place under president Ould Taya’s dictatorial rule. According to a 1993 Human Rights Watch Report, at least 500 prisoners were summarily executed or tortured to death between November 1990 and January 1991. His son Ahmed, a teenager at the time, clearly bears no responsibility whatsoever in these atrocities, but his family links have led a survivors’ organisation called CCRM (Cadre de concertation des rescapés mauritaniens) to call for the invalidation of his CAF presidency bid. It should be added that this view is not shared by the majority of Mauritanians, many of whom take great pride in the personal successes of the founder of FC Nouadhibou, a team which is now one of ASAC Concorde’s greatest rivals in the country’s top league. At the time of his election to the FFRIM presidency, Yahya was only 35, making him one of the youngest FA chairmen in the world. Yahya is also a successful businessman who runs a fishing company in Nouadhibou, Mauritania’s second-largest city.

Which begs the question: why would a man of Yahya’s status and stature get involved in the embezzlement of a sum which he himself has called ‘derisory’?

The Facts
Mauritania is not known as an outstanding exporter of footballing talents. Its national team has been hovering around the 100th place in the Fifa world ranking for the past five years, has never qualified for the World Cup or the Olympics and has only taken part in the African Cup of Nations once, in 2019. None of the players in its current squad plays in a top league in Europe (or, indeed, any other continent), whilst its biggest clubs haven’t fared better than the Al Murabitun in continental competitions. This made the performance of the country’s U20 at the 2014 L’Alcúdia International Under-20 Football Tournament, a prestigious youth tournament which has taken place annually near Valencia since 1984, all the more remarkable.

Against strong opposition, which included FC Barcelona (against whom they drew), the young Mauritanians played four games there, swatting Indonesia 4-0 along the way. One player in particular shone throughout, the captain of the young Al Murabitun, a midfielder who hadn’t turned 17 yet: Moctar Sidi El Hacen El Id, also known as El Hacen. El Hacen, who played his club football with ASAC Concorde, had been singled out as a special talent very early on: he’d earned his first cap with the senior national team when he wasn’t yet 16, and taken part in every single of the six senior games Mauritania had played in 2014 before the tournament. He was without a doubt his country’s most gifted and most promising teenage footballer.

By the time El Hacen impressed in Valencia, ASAC Concorde had already received five offers of trials – all expenses paid – for its star player from foreign clubs from Morocco (Fath Union Sport Rabat), South Africa (Ajax Cape Town), Italy (USD Vis Ariano) and France (Football Club Mantois 78 and RC Lens). Levante UD now joined the ranks of the suitors. Based in Valencia, the La Liga club had struggled to beat Mauritania 1-0 at the summer tournament. El Hacen had caught their eye, as had his team-mate, left-back Aly Abeid who, while not quite as precocious, would make his senior debut with the national team nine months later.

Yahya had recently appointed a Valencia-born Spanish coach as head of the country’s U17 and of Mauritania’s national football academy: Luis Fuertes Sastre, who would later be promoted to the rank of national technical director before abruptly resigning in January 2020. Fuertes Sastre advised the chairman of El Hacen’s and Abeid’s club, veterinary surgeon Dr. Mohamadou Ba, to employ another Spaniard, former Valencia CF president Pedro Cortes, to represent ASAC Concorde’s interests in the negotiations. Cortes then became the intermediary, and arranged for the two players to remain in Spain in order to find the best possible club for them.

Dr Ba had also enlisted the help of Ahmad Yahya, who has a good command of Spanish, to serve as a conduit in the final negotiations between ASAC Concorde, its two players and Levante UD, and the transfer agreement was finalised at the end of 2015. The Mauritanian club would receive €75,000 – €50,000 for El Hacen, €25,000 for Abeid -, a sum which included the €5,000 signing-on fees of the players. The amount will seem modest by European standards, but was enough to cover the wages of a full XI in the top division of the Mauritanian league for a whole season. It was also a first for ASAC Concorde, who’d never sold one of their players to a top Spanish club before, and for whom this could constitute a springboard for an even more fructuous relationship in the future. What’s more, one of the clauses in the contracts of both players specified that UD Levante would pay an extra €100,000 should they take part in a certain specified number of games for the Spanish club.

It is at this stage that the whole operation unravelled for ASAC Concorde.

Dr Ba had entrusted Yahya with all the documents needed to close the deal, including a copy of his passport, ASAC Concorde’s bank details and an invoice for the transfer fees, drawn on 11 December 2015, which Josimar has seen. The contracts were drawn and duly signed in Valencia on 4 January 2016. But the money did not turn up. Or rather, it did not turn up in ASAC Concorde’s account, but in the federation’s.

The Sting
Unbeknown to Dr Ba, his invoices had apparently never been passed on to Levante UD. The invoices which the Spanish club did receive on 20 January 2016, which Josimar has seen, purported to come from his club and even bore the stamp of ASAC Concorde. But they were not signed by the club’s president. They bore the signature of Sy Aboubacar Alefa, a friend of Yahya’s, who held the rank of 3rd vice-president of the Mauritanian federation and also sat on ASAC Concorde’s board. Dr Ba insists that Sy Aboubacar Alefa never received any mandate of any kind from him.

Documents which Josimar has seen show that Levante tried to transfer the fees due to ASAC Concorde on two occasions, on 27 January and 12 February 2016, to no avail. The money transfers failed both times for the simple reason that the bank details which had been given by Sy Boubacar Alefa were not those of ASAC Concorde, but of the Mauritanian FA. On 13 February, Levante, who were frankly nonplussed by the whole affair, received a letter purporting to be from ASAC Concorde, bearing the club’s stamp, but not signed by its president. It read: “the invoice is in the name of the club, but the payment must be made to FFRIM” – a specification which was nowhere to be seen in the contracts signed by the two clubs. The letter, which Josimar has had access to, had, again, been sent and signed by Boubacar Sy Alefa.

Levante, who acted in good faith throughout, did as they were instructed, and transferred the money into FFRIM’s account on 25 February, something which Dr Ba only discovered three weeks later. Yet, there was still no suspicion of a possible sting at this stage. On 17 March, six of the nine members of ASAC Concorde’s board wrote to Yahya, thanking him for his role in the successful transfer of El Hacen and Abeid to UD Levante, and requesting him to transfer the funds to their club’s bank account. The three non-signatories of this letter were Boubacar Sy Alefa, his brother Sy Aly and one Dieng Amadou Farba, who has since joined the FFRIM’s federal office.

Dr Ba and his team never saw the colour of the €75,000. And they were about to lose their club.

The Coup
On 19 January, FFRIM had sent a seemingly anodyne circular to all First Division clubs, in which it requested them to provide the Association with copies of their statuses and other administrative documents. But ASAC Concorde’s board, who got this letter on 22 January, soon discovered that this was not a routine communication, not for them anyway. The last paragraph read: “Moreover, the clubs whose board officials have come to the end of their mandate must imperatively hold their General Assembly to renew [those mandates] under FFRIM’s supervision”.

On 31 March, Yahya, replying to the request made by the board of ASAC Concorde two weeks earlier, explained that Levante UD had paid the transfer fees, that the money was safely deposited in a ‘local account’, but that it could only be passed on to the club once the ‘formalities’ of the annual general meeting (AGM) and the renewal of the board’s mandate had been completed.

This was despite the fact that, with the assent of FFRIM, the club’s AGM had been set to take place at the end of the 2015-16 season, and that the current board’s mandate had not expired. Still, it could be hoped that this would soon be sorted out, as the said AGM would take place on 29 July at FFRIM’s headquarters, which had been put at the disposal of ASAC Concorde free of charge by Yahya himself.

Ba and his board were in for a surprise. On the eve of the AGM, they discovered that FFRIM had added seventy-one new members to the forty-nine which made up the electoral college of their club. The result was chaos. The hammer blow soon followed.

On 31 August 2016, Yahya decreed that a normalisation committee (of which he handpicked the members) would be put in charge of the affairs of the club for three months, in order to address the ‘legal void’ the club found itself in and organise new elections.

Interestingly, article 3 of this normalisation order, which Josimar has seen, makes specific reference to the transfer of El Hacen and Abeid, instructing the normalisation committee to open a new bank account for the club (which it did), to which the money still held by FFRIM would at long last be transferred.

ASAC Concorde’s board rebelled against Yahya’s decision, but to no avail. Ba was ousted on 26 November and Yahya’s third vice-president Boubacar Sy Alefa put in charge of the club. The proceeds of the sale of the ASAC Concorde players, both of whom had received their share of the transfer fee several months previously, had already been transferred to the account opened by the normalisation committee, on 7 September 2016.

The Verdicts
The end of the story? Its beginning, rather. It’s unlikely that Yahya and FFRIM could have foreseen what followed: Dr Ba decided to fight on, turned to the courts, and was to prove remarkably successful there.

On 27 October 2016, the Civilian Tribunal of West Nouakchott ordered the ‘precautionary seizure’ of the €75,000 which had been paid into the FFRIM account.

On 14 November, the Appeal Court of the same tribunal threw out FFRIM’s appeal against the first decision.

On 28 February 2017, the Civilian Tribunal ordered FFRIM to pay €75,000 into ASAC Concorde’s original bank account, as well as legal costs linked to the case.

On 22 February 2018, the Appeal Court rejected FFRIM’s appeal against the 28 February decision.

The matter was then referred to Mauritania’s Supreme Court. But there, too, Dr Ba won his case. FFRIM’s appeal was thrown out on 14 July 2020. The decision of Nouakchott’s Civilian Tribunal could no longer be contested and, following another judgement (given on 20 October 2020) which found in favour of ASAC Concorde, is now subject to an order of execution. In other words: Mauritanian justice has ruled that Yahya’s FFRIM was consistently in the wrong in its dispute with ASAC Concorde and, therefore, must pay.

Ba scored another resounding win in a related case, when Boubacar Sy Alefa sued him for ‘usurpation of title’. The Public Prosecutor dismissed the charge on 28 September 2020.

Even more importantly, Mauritania’s Interior Ministry certified, on a document dated 7 October 2020, that Dr Ba’s executive board, as elected in 2011, could legitimately aspire to run the affairs of ASAC Concorde.

This must have been one of ASAC Concorde’s most comprehensive victories ever. They’d taken the FFRIM and its president to court, and won, time after time. Four years of fighting had been vindicated. Could their victory endanger Yahya’s presidential hopes, now that some Mauritanian journalists were openly accusing him of abuse of power and embezzlement?

The Case For The Defence
The problem for Yahya is that it was impossible to dissociate him from his own FA in this instance. If FFRIM was guilty, so was he. To start with, he had personally acted as an intermediary in the transfer negotiations, something he acknowledged and, in fact, was proud of, judging by a lengthy response to an accusatory article published in the summer of 2016 on the mauritaniefootball.com website, in which he unpicked the claims levelled at him at great length.

In this response to what he called “mendacious allegations”, Yahya said that the two players, El Hacen and Abeid, “called on me to supervise the contacts with interested agents” (Dr Ba insists that it was at his behest that Yahya was involved) as “no currently valid contract or registration linked [them] to ASAC Concorde” at the time. This was disingenuous. While it’s true that both players were already in Spain at the time of their transfer, there was no doubt whatsoever in anybody’s mind that both were still ASAC Concorde players, whether they’d featured in the games of Levante’s youth team or not. Why would Levante have bothered with negotiating with ASAC Concorde if El Hacen and Abeid had been genuine free agents? Why would they have drawn a transfer contract with the Mauritanian club? Why would they have agreed to pay a €75,000 fee to an entity that held no registration rights? This was clearly nonsense.

Yahya went on to justify that the transfer funds had to transit via FFRIM in respect of Fifa’s ‘new regulations which demand that all money owed in regard to a transfer of a player should go through his federation’. This is incorrect. There was no such stipulation or obligation in Fifa’s transfer regulations in January 2016, and nor is there any today. Clubs must use Fifa TMS as a ‘clearing house’ for the paperwork related to international transfers, and this paperwork must be lodged with their FAs, but when it comes to payments, clubs are free to do their business one-to-one without having to process payments through their national associations. Mauritania was and is no exception to the rule in this respect. To illustrate this, when another ASAC Concorde footballer, El Moustapha Diam, was transferred to Omani club Fanja on 4 February 2016, the full amount of the transfer fee was wired directly into the club’s account without transiting via FFRIM (Josimar saw the BACS).

Yahya went on to explain that the decision to withhold the funds owed to ASAC Concorde was taken following a request made by the club and its president themselves on 25 January 2016. If such a request was made, it never was with the consent of its then president, as Yahya himself appears to acknowledge when he omits Dr Ba’s name from the list of signatories of that letter (*).

It has also been said by supporters of Ahmed Yahya that the cases of El Hacen and Abeid had already been referred to Fifa’s Players Status Committee and to CAS, the Court of Arbitration for Sport and that, in both cases, the bodies had found that FFRIM had acted properly. This is also incorrect. CAS confirmed to Josimar that it had issued no ruling on the subject, whilst we have seen correspondence which show that Fifa’s Players’ Status Committee (which is apprised of the matter) has yet to communicate their decision, despite repeated assurances made to Dr Ba that it would soon do so.

CAF and Fifa did come to a decision, however: Ahmed Yahya was eligible for the most powerful position in African football, regardless of what Mauritania’s courts had ruled. It is a decision they might come to regret, just as Yahya might come to regret ever getting involved in the transfers of two unknown players to a Spanish club.

Post Scriptum
As to El Hacen and Abeid, neither has quite hit the heights which some hoped they could reach; but, at least, they got their €5,000 and are still plying their trade in Europe. El Hacen left Levante for Real Valladolid, then was loaned out to Segunda Division CD Lugo, for whom he’s made sixteen appearances this season. Abeid, now valued at €0.5m, was loaned by Levante to Alcorcón before becoming a free agent and joining French Ligue 2 club Valenciennes, for whom he’s become a regular starter in 2020-21.

(*) Josimar asked Ahmed Yahya whether he had any comments to make on the final decision of the Supreme Court or if he wished to add anything to the statement he published in 2016. No response has been forthcoming yet.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Feb 25, 2021 12:31 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Tue Feb 23, 2021 8:05 pm
Football agents don't enjoy the best reputations in the minds of the media or the public, I cannot imagine many will want to deal with this new entrant in the market place, though you wonder if he will claim a firm grip on Irish talent in the same way he has done with boxing - from the Guardian

Company founded by suspected crime boss Kinahan moving into football
MTK Global announces it is setting up a football agency
Move will raise concern among game’s authorities

Sean Ingle

Tue 23 Feb 2021 19.23 GMT

MTK Global, the boxing management company founded by the alleged Irish gangster Daniel Kinahan, has announced it is moving into football.

The group – which represents more than 300 fighters including Tyson Fury, Carl Frampton and Billy Joe Saunders – said it was setting up a football agency “having already conquered the world of combat sports and become the biggest force in the business of boxing”.

MTK’s move will raise deep concern among football’s authorities, given Kinahan’s notoriety and the speed in which the company has become a major player in boxing. While the 43-year-old has no criminal convictions, he was named in Irish courts as the head of a £1bn drugs and arms cartel.

The new agency, MTK Football, did not respond to questions from the Guardian over whether Kinahan would be involved in the new venture or which players it has signed.

It will be fronted by the little-known agent Danny Vincent, who promised to take MTK Global’s successful formula into football. “MTK are the biggest and best in the world when it comes to day-to-day management of elite fighters,” he said. “Myself and my team believe our passion and knowledge will help replicate that into the world of football.”

MTK Global’s chief strategy officer, Paul Gibson, added: “There has always been an affinity between boxing and football. We see plenty of our fighters enter the ring sporting the colours of their city’s team and footballers regularly take in our events from ringside.

“That’s why we’re so excited by this new venture and the opportunity to explore some of the synergies which undoubtedly exist.”

Kinahan helped set up MGM in 2012, which then changed its name to MTK after a sustained spell of bad publicity. In 2017 he said that he had severed ties with the group but last month lawyers for MTK Global confirmed that he was still advising some of the organisation’s boxers. Kinahan later issued his own statement, insisting he was innocent and that he was continuing to work on “record-breaking” fights.
On the back of this news is the story that FIFA and the FA are being urged to blacklist MGM's own - that could be difficult given a lack of criminal conviction - from the Telegraph

Fifa and FA urged to blacklist Daniel Kinahan after boxing firm he co-founded branches out to football
Exclusive: Football has been urged to ensure the controversial boxing broker, who helped strike a deal for Fury v Joshua, cannot operate

By Ben Rumsby and Tom Morgan, SPORTS NEWS CORRESPONDENT
24 February 2021 • 6:49pm

Football was on Wednesday told to blacklist the controversial boxing broker who helped strike a deal for Tyson Fury to fight Anthony Joshua from involvement in the sport.

Fifa, the Football Association and others were urged to ensure Daniel Kinahan could not operate in the game after the boxing management firm he co-founded confirmed it had chosen to do so.

MTK, which cut formal ties to Kinahan four years ago but whose fighters he still brokers deals for, was also under mounting pressure to open its books to prove it was no longer run by him or being funded through the proceeds of crime.

Kinahan has no criminal record but has been named in court over his alleged involvement with the drugs-trafficking operations of a notorious £1 billion Irish cartel which has been linked to almost 20 murders.

He vehemently denies the claims against him.

Neale Richmond, a member of the Irish parliament and an arch-critic of Kinahan, told Telegraph Sport: “I repeat my call that MTK needs to open up their books, be transparent and show they have zero connections to Daniel Kinahan.

“Football authorities need to be proactive here. Before allowing MTK access to the game, they need to get undertakings and real proof that Daniel Kinahan has no involvement. They cannot be ignorant of the very real issues here.”

MTK Global did not respond to requests for comment but its president, Bob Yalen, has previously told the BBC its funding had not come from drugs money.

The FA did not comment, while Fifa did not respond to requests for comment.

Fury sparked outrage last year when he thanked Kinahan for helping line up what would be the biggest bout in British boxing history against Joshua.

As revealed by the Telegraph, it was decided subsequent negotiations would take place without Kinahan’s involvement.

The sports company announced that it would be launching MTK Football, and will represent players “having already conquered the world of combat sports”.

It comes weeks after Kinahan's links to alleged criminality were the subject of a BBC Panorama documentary.

As the eldest son of Christy Kinahan, a convicted drug dealer and founder of the so-called Kinahan Cartel, he entered the industry with a controversial reputation.

Kinahan has never been convicted of a crime, however, he remains wanted in Ireland over other reported charges of drug trafficking.

In recent years, MTK has repeatedly claimed Kinahan has stepped away from the company although the company has also recently conceded that he advises some of the boxers it represents.

Last May, MTK Global announced a partnership with KHK Sports which it said will “bring the biggest fights to the Middle East” along with broadcasters ESPN, BT Sports and Sky Sports.

Last week, the Irishman denied allegations in the programme, and claimed he is still arranging world title bouts. "I am proud to say today that I have helped organise over a dozen major world title fights," said Kinahan in a statement sent to TalkSport's White and Jordan show. "I continue to be involved in planning multiple record-breaking and exciting world title fights".

Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Feb 25, 2021 11:37 am

Matt Slater for The Athletic asks has the Premier League TV rights bubble burst. It is effectively a lengthy summary of everything that I have posted on TV rights in the last 18 months on this thread - I just wish I could transcribe it for you who don't subscribe to what is, in fairness, the best football writing from a single source I have ever found

https://theathletic.com/2396993/2021/02 ... ed_article

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Feb 25, 2021 11:53 am

today's Business of Sport Podcast from The Athletic discusses the compromise that the European Leagues are looking for in the Champions League revamp currently proposed for post 2024

the blurb

Host Mark Chapman and The Athletic's football news reporter Matt Slater speak to Jacco Swart & Alberto Columbo, executives from European Super Leagues, the organisation that is working with the Premier League, Bundesliga and La Liga to lobby against the more radical proposals for European club competition reform.

We hear about the conversations that are taking place to broker the ongoing power struggle between UEFA, European football's richest clubs and their domestic leagues.

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cH ... IEhAF&ep=6

you will hear mention of a Landscape report - that is the Financial Landscape of European Football produced by UEFA in November which can be found here

https://europeanleagues.com/wp-content/ ... OTBALL.pdf

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Feb 25, 2021 1:04 pm

the Guardian look at the current state of Derby, as takeover talk has become silent and debts continue to mount

Takeover silence and mounting debts: how did it come to this for Derby?
Proposed Middle Eastern buyout has failed to materialise and owner Mel Morris’s top-flight dream is more distant than ever

Ed Aarons Thu 25 Feb 2021 12.51 GMT

“I hope together we can help steer this club back into a sustainable place in the Premier League,” announced Mel Morris in September 2015. Born and raised in Littleover – less than five miles from Pride Park – the man who made most of his estimated £500m fortune after backing the firm behind the mobile gaming app Candy Crush Saga had finally achieved a lifelong dream of buying his beloved Derby County.

The club had just missed out on the play-offs a few months earlier, and Morris’s optimism appeared understandable. Yet 10 full-time and interim managers later, Derby are battling to avoid relegation under Wayne Rooney with a squad whose wages were unpaid at the beginning of January. The club no longer owns its own stadium and has mortgaged its training ground in pursuit of further finance.

As a proposed takeover by Middle Eastern investors grows more unlikely by the day, Derby are in a precarious financial position and in danger of relegation to the third tier for the first time since the mid-1980s despite a recent renaissance on the pitch.

Morris initially bought a 22% share in the club in May 2014, days after they had lost to Queens Park Rangers in the Championship play-off final, and Derby posted an operating loss of close to £10m two months before he purchased the club from the US-based holding company North American Ownership group 16 months later. After another defeat in the play-offs in 2016 and finishing ninth the following season, losses had risen to more than £20m.

Neither Gary Rowett in 2018 nor Frank Lampard a year later could break the play-off curse, and an accounting miracle appearing to take place in the East Midlands a few months after the 2019 defeat by Aston Villa at Wembley. Derby announced that for the financial year ending June 2019 they had made an operating profit of £14.6m.

It emerged that – much to the chagrin of fellow EFL clubs – the club had sold Pride Park to Morris for a reported £80m and leased the property back from him for £40m. Derby were charged by the EFL with breaching financial regulations but vigorously denied wrongdoing and an independent disciplinary panel last August cleared them and ruled that the club had not inflated the valuation of their stadium.

Last summer it was reported that Morris’s purchase of Pride Park was financed by Rams Investment Limited, a company with links to the Swiss-Turkish businessman Henry Gabay. Gabay – who was arrested in France last year in relation to a German tax evasion scandal but has denied any wrongdoing – wrote on Twitter: “Delusional, fake news has no limits”

Despite the financier’s claims to the contrary a Land Registry document states that Rams Investment Limited holds a charge on Pride Park. The same document makes clear that any sale of the stadium is conditional on written consent from Rams Investment. However, a Derby spokesman said there was categorically no loan or charges outstanding to Rams Investments Limited and/or Gabay and said the club would be in touch with the Land Registry to amend the error.

Only a year after the purchase of Pride Park, Morris entered into a loan agreement with MSD Holdings, an investment group part-owned by Michael Dell, the founder of American computing company Dell Inc. The amount MSD loaned to Derby was reported to be £30m secured on Pride Park, with a further loan, secured on their Moor Farm training ground, taken in October. Documents relating to the loan registered at Companies House stipulate that Derby cannot sell their training ground without the written consent of MSD with charges held against “The Derby County Football Club Limited, although a Derby spokesman told the Guardian that the MSD loan was taken out by the company that owns the stadium (Gellaw Newco 202 Limited), not by the club itself.

In November, it was announced that a £60m deal had been agreed “in principle” to sell Derby to Derventio Holdings UK Limited, a company owned by Sheikh Khaled Bin Zayed Al Nehayan, whose cousin Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan is the owner of Manchester City. It is unclear whether the debt Morris has accrued in relation to the stadium and the training ground will need to be refinanced if the takeover is completed.

Derventio Holdings UK has been assisted by Christopher Samuelson, an influential financier involved in takeovers at Reading and Aston Villa. Samuelson and fellow director Andrew Obolensky resigned the day after the takeover in principle was announced, leaving Midhat Kamil Kidwai as Derventio’s only director and Sheikh Khaled – who has previously failed with attempts to purchase Liverpool and Newcastle – listed as a “person with significant control”. A few weeks later, the club and Bin Zayed International issued a joint statement assuring supporters that the takeover remained “on track” with a view to completion before Christmas.

That failed to materialise. Derby ended up paying the players their wages for December more than a month late and being placed under a transfer embargo, with the CEO, Stephen Pearce, blaming the error on a misunderstanding with the prospective new owners.

Last week in an interview with the Mail on Sunday, Morris insisted that the takeover was “not finished” and vowed to keep the club afloat until a transition to a new owner is complete. “Literally every day is spent trying to work out how to improve our situation,” he said.

There have been reports of new American investors and of Erik Alonso – a Spanish agent who briefly worked as an adviser to Sheffield Wednesday’ owner Dejphon Chansiri – having also shown interest in purchasing the two-times league champions. But with the debts piling up, it seems Derby’s future remains very much in the balance.

Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Feb 25, 2021 1:31 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Thu Feb 25, 2021 11:53 am
today's Business of Sport Podcast from The Athletic discusses the compromise that the European Leagues are looking for in the Champions League revamp currently proposed for post 2024

the blurb

Host Mark Chapman and The Athletic's football news reporter Matt Slater speak to Jacco Swart & Alberto Columbo, executives from European Super Leagues, the organisation that is working with the Premier League, Bundesliga and La Liga to lobby against the more radical proposals for European club competition reform.

We hear about the conversations that are taking place to broker the ongoing power struggle between UEFA, European football's richest clubs and their domestic leagues.

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cH ... IEhAF&ep=6

you will hear mention of a Landscape report - that is the Financial Landscape of European Football produced by UEFA in November which can be found here

https://europeanleagues.com/wp-content/ ... OTBALL.pdf
todays Sports Business Podcast from The Athletic on European Club Competitions and the stance of the European Leagues relates directly to this article

https://theathletic.com/news/european-c ... cfZD1TOkyY

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Feb 25, 2021 2:10 pm

Simon Chadwick with a very long thread and a number of links to papers and articles relating to Soft Power and the the Brand Finance Soft Power Index

https://twitter.com/Prof_Chadwick/statu ... 8098238464

Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Feb 26, 2021 1:37 am

FIFA never cease to amaze - 4 years they have been investigating "conduct" charges in relation to the 2006 World Cup in Germany, not it has been thrown out because of an expiry of limitation - you couldn't make it up

The announcement
https://www.fifa.com/who-we-are/news/de ... ee-in-the-

The Judgements
Theo Zwanger
https://resources.fifa.com/image/upload ... vnwkqzcamf

Franz Beckenbauer
https://resources.fifa.com/image/upload ... 0nawedpqsj

Horst Schmidt
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=20891&start=6400

Of course this was not that unexpected - just look at this article written in 2018 by Rob Harris for the Associated Press

Keep bribes quiet for 10 years, FIFA won’t punish you
By ROB HARRIS - August 14, 2018

LONDON (AP) — FIFA has officially eradicated corruption. All it took was pressing the delete key.

Soccer officials and players who bother checking out the new code of ethics governing their conduct will find the word “corruption” missing. They also will discover how to avoid being banned for paying and receiving bribes.

Corruption was scrubbed as an official misdemeanor during secret meetings where executives executed the first overhaul of the code since a wave of scandals left soccer’s governing body “clinically dead” by 2015. That was the hyperbole used by Gianni Infantino during a speech at the World Cup in June boasting of his own apparent achievements cleaning up FIFA.

But in two years as FIFA president, Infantino has been accused of violating governance rules and forcing out officials who threatened his position.

It will be even easier now for FIFA to banish critics.

A new offense has been introduced in the ethics code — defamation. There are no specific examples, providing flexibility for the ethics committee to decide on the burden of proof — as with all cases.

“Persons bound by this code are forbidden from making any public statements of a defamatory nature towards FIFA and/or towards any other person bound by this code in the context of FIFA events,” section 22.2 of the new code states.

Those found to have defamed FIFA will be banned from any football-related activities for up to two years and they can be booted out for five years for repeated “serious cases.”

The vagueness provides leeway for FIFA, through theoretically independent ethics organs, to punish detractors.

“This will tamp down criticism of all kinds, which is presumably what FIFA is hoping for,” former FIFA governance committee member Alexandra Wrage , an expert in anti-bribery compliance, told The Associated Press on Monday. “While well-governed organizations are encouraging transparency and urging people to speak up if they have concerns, FIFA takes the authoritarian stance that people should stay quiet.

“Defamation requires a false statement and FIFA would have to prove that any criticism was false, but the real value to FIFA is the chilling effect this will have on critics.”

The ethics code was first introduced in 2004 by Sepp Blatter to provide a veneer of probity for an organization abused for personal gain by so many for decades. Of course, Blatter was expelled from the FIFA presidency for financial misconduct in 2015 by the ethics committees he created. Blatter’s toppling came amid the fallout from American prosecutors indicting dozens of football officials and entities for corruption — the concept now erased by FIFA from its principle English-language ethics documents.

Bribery is still prohibited in the ethics code, but the ability to prosecute cases has been weakened.

The 2012 code said “prosecution for bribery and corruption” was not subject to a “limitation period.” However long it took investigators to uncover offenses, you could still be sanctioned.

But section 12.1 of the new code states, “Bribery, misappropriation of funds and manipulation of football matches or competitions may no longer be prosecuted after a lapse of ten years.”

The message to soccer officials not deterred from seeking to profit from bribery and fraud by the criminal cases: As long as the misdemeanor is not discovered for 10 years you will be in the clear at FIFA.

Ethics prosecutors now only have five years to complete cases into other general breaches of the code — half the previous time permitted to uncover wrongdoing.

The new code does allow the lead ethics prosecutor Maria Claudia Rojas to enter into plea bargains to resolve cases that do not involve bribery, misappropriation of funds or match fixing. But that could add another layer of murkiness and secrecy, keeping cases hidden from public view.

“The new FIFA is a democracy it is not a dictatorship,” Infantino told FIFA members during an address in 2017. “It is a transparent organization ... a deeply honest organization.”

But ask for clarity on changes to the ethics code that helped to banish a raft of unscrupulous officials and there is little willingness to be transparent. FIFA was ill-prepared to respond to questions following a review by the AP of the new code ahead of its implementation. The Zurich-based body only says the changes were based on proposals from the ethics committee, whom soccer fans never get to hear from.

During their first years in the job, the heads of the investigatory and adjuratory chambers of the ethics committees have been blocked from speaking to the media by FIFA.

FIFA finally has found more compliant scrutineers of ethics. The previous judge and prosecutor were ousted in 2017 by Infantino, prompting them to claim FIFA’s integrity was being jeopardized by the president.

After the revamp to the ethics code — approved in private by the FIFA Council — soccer’s resolve to kick out the crooks still seems ambiguous. Particularly when the very word corruption has been purged.

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