Football's Magic Money Tree

[Chester Perry]

Scrutiny of the Adjudicatory panel presiding of the Man City case at UEFA has begun and immediately picked out one potential conflict of interest

http://www.espn.co.uk/football/manchest ... f-interest" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

As we have learned. this is the way business is done in the East and they will not understand the cause for concern (see post #697) - it is a tangled web that has been allowed to grow unabated and probably too late to stop

[Chester Perry]

Following the previous post about the lieutenant the boss has now been charged with the same offences - this could get very complicated

https://apnews.com/09f2a1ddafa149b29cbb00fd6920e6a5" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

And following on in the corruption vein - The only African member of FIFA to publicly support Gianni Infantino when he came to power at FIFA has now been banned from the game for 10years by FIFA - now that is gratitude for you

https://apnews.com/02a7e56925f0429dbc4a51ab9c067c5e" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

An excellent article from Miguel Delaney in the Independent on the State of the EFL pyramid - It could have been written by @AndyhHolt and he is not mentioned once

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/foo ... 26126.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


a bit more data behind those EFL losses mentioned in the article on a club by club basis


https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/statu ... 2788077568" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


and the view from The Times -behind a paywall so transcribed


Football League clubs lost £388m last season as cash crisis is revealed - Martyn Ziegler, Chief Sports Reporter

The growing gap between the Premier League and lower-league clubs has been starkly illustrated by figures that show nearly three quarters of English Football League sides are losing money.

Premier League teams had record revenues of £8.4 bill!

on and 12 of the 20 top-flight clubs made a net profit in 2017-18. By contrast, 52 of the 72 clubs in the Sky Bet Championship, League One and League Two ended the season in the red.

Taking into account all profits and losses, the 20 Premier League clubs made a surplus of £304 million while the 72 EFL teams had a collective net deficit of £388 million.

The financial struggles of lower-league clubs have been brought sharply into focus in the past season. This month Bolton Wanderers became the first English league club since 2013 to go into administration and the situation has resulted in unpaid staff being provided with a food bank. Bury are also in a financial crisis, with players saying they have not been paid for 12 weeks, and the club facing a winding-up petition next month over unpaid taxes.

The biggest losses have occurred in the Championship, with several teams enduring tens of millions of pounds in losses as they chased a place in the lucrative top flight, where income of at least £100 million a season is guaranteed. The four biggest loss- making teams in England were all in the Championship — Birmingham City and Queens Park Rangers, along with Fulham and Wolverhampton Wanderers, who were both promoted to the Premier League.

Derby County have balanced the books by selling their stadium to Mel Morris, the club’s owner, for £80 million, creating an on-paper profit.

Kieran Maguire, a lecturer in football finance at the University of Liverpool, said: “The gap is now so big between the Premier League and the rest that the Championship clubs are prepared to gamble on getting to the Promised Land.

“If you look at it as a three out of 24 chance of winning the lottery then many people might think it’s good odds and so raise the stakes. Club owners who might be sensible in other areas seem to lose their business sanity when it comes to football.”

Maguire said that the financial gap between the Championship and Leagues One and Two was also growing.

An insolvency expert said that most clubs outside the Premier League are technically insolvent and believes that more will go into administration before the end of next season.

“The expenses in terms of player wages are too high and there is not enough income coming in,” the expert said. “It’s unsustainable.”

The situation at Bolton has led to calls for the EFL to toughen its owners’ and directors’ test. Ken Anderson, who bought the club three years ago and paid himself £525,000 in consultancy fees in the first year, had previously been banned as a company director.

He attempted to sell the club to the former Watford owner, Laurence Bassini, who had a three-year ban from any football involvement imposed in March 2013, but was still given the go-ahead by the EFL. The takeover collapsed for other reasons.

Anderson will not end up out of pocket from his time in charge. He is one of several secured creditors who will be paid in full any money owing.

Paul Appleton, the joint administrator of David Rubin and Partners, said that he was hopeful of finding a buyer by the end of June. Interested parties have until 4pm on June 7 to make a declaration of interest and pay a non-refundable £25,000 fee, which will give them access to all the financial information about the club. Four or five potential buyers are expected to pay the fee but they must also provide proof of funds of at least £25 million and have confirmation from the EFL that those involved have passed the owners’ and directors’ test.

Bolton’s players have not been paid since March but have agreed their wages will be deferred until a new owner takes over. “We have had talks with the players via the manager Phil Parkinson,” Appleton said. “They understand the situation and the difficulties we are facing.”

The 92 League clubs ranked in order of profitability

Accounts for last season reveal a gulf in wealth in the English game, with 52 of the 72 EFL clubs losing money.

2017-18 Net profit and loss
1 Tottenham £113m
2 Liverpool £106m
3 Chelsea £62m
4 Arsenal £57m
5 Burnley £37m
6 Southampton £29m
7 Newcastle £19m
8 Hull £19m
9 West Ham £17m
10 Norwich £15m
11 Barnsley £13m
12 Huddersfield £11m
13 Brighton £11m
14 Manchester City £10m
15 Exeter £2.4m
16 Leicester £1m
17 Preston £1m
18 Port Vale £1m
19 Stevenage £0.8m
20 Luton £0.6m
21 Peterborough £0.5m
22 Forest Green £0.4
23 Accrington £0.4m
24 Fleetwood £0.4m
25 Burton £0.3m
26 Shrewsbury £0.3m
27 Gillingham £0.1m
28 Plymouth £0.1m
29 Newport £0.1m
30 Yeovil £0.1m
31 Walsall no profit/loss
32 Barnet no profit/loss
33 Grimsby -£0.04m
34 Cheltenham -£0.1m
35 Carlisle -£0.1m
36 Mansfield -£0.1m
37 Bradford -£0.3m
38 Rochdale -£0.3m
39 Crawley -£0.3m
40 Morecambe -£0.4m
41 Oldham -£0.5m
42 Rotherham -£0.5m
43 Wimbledon -£0.5m
44 Wycombe -£0.7m
45 Crewe -£0.8m
46 Cambridge -£0.8m
47 Chesterfield -£1.1m
48 Lincoln -£1.1m
49 Derby -£1.1m
50 Portsmouth -£1.4m
51 Notts County -£1.5m
52 Swindon -£1.8m
53 Sheffield Utd -£1.9m
54 Northampton -£2m
55 Oxford -£2m
56 Blackpool -£2.1m
57 Coventry -£2.5m
58 Doncaster -£2.8m
59 Bury -£2.8m
60 Swansea -£3m
61 Southend -£3.1m
62 Colchester -£3m
63 Bristol Rovers -£3m
64 Scunthorpe -£3.6m
65 Brentford -£3.9m
66 Leeds -£4.3m
67 MK Dons -£4.6m
68 Millwall -£4.6m
69 Ipswich -£5.2m
70 Bolton -£5.4m
71 Nottingham Forest -£5.6m
72 West Brom -£6m
73 Middlesbrough -£6.6m
74 Wigan -£7.7m
75 Sunderland -£10.2m
76 Charlton -£10.4m
77 Bournemouth -£11m
78 Everton -£13m
79 Blackburn -£16.8m
80 Reading -£21m
81 Sheffield Wed -£21m
82 Bristol City -£25m
83 Watford -£31m
84 Stoke -£32m
85 Aston Villa -£35m
86 Cardiff -£36m
87 Crystal Palace -£36m
88 Manchester Utd -£37m
89 Birmingham -£37m
90 QPR -£38m
91 Fulham -£45m
92 Wolves -£57m

[Chester Perry]

Meanwhile the Premier League's revenues climb and climb

https://www.theguardian.com/football/20 ... Bundesliga" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

@SwissRamble gives his breakdown - This season's TV payments https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/ ... 0102292481" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

to understand how far the PL has come here were the payments after the first PL season in 1992/93

https://twitter.com/sportingintel/statu ... 3492474880" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


the compare that to The Scottish Payouts for the Season just finished


https://twitter.com/RockSportDAB/status ... 6116139008" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

In the next step in outlining his issues with the game @AndyhHolt takes aim at the Big Six, how the will manipulate OTT (Over the Top = streaming) media to the exclusion of everyone else, and how the authorities both Football and Government will allow them to as they are mistaken in their one size fits all approach

https://twitter.com/AndyhHolt/status/11 ... 6403293184" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

In a timely announcement (see posts #1179, #1180 and #1181) FIFA is returning "corruption" to it's code of ethics following it's controversial removal only last year.

https://apnews.com/9280058c39d74bcabc4faaf9bf46a79d" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

The FT Football Business Summit this week certainly managed to capture a few headlines and yet one of my links in post #1158 made mention of Claire Enders prediction that following the dip in domestic rights this cycle the next will make another 20% fall and the Champions League one may drop as much as 40% didn't seem to capture them in the same fashion. Her advice, get your wages in order

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/footb ... -deal.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Yet get promoted with a late charge, some exhilarating football and a narrow 1 -0 victory in the play-off final. Then you spend well in excess of £100m on new talent and don't play the players that got you there, it doesn't work out, you sack not one but two managers and still do not seem to have a footballing strategy or even someone with the slightest understanding of the game in charge of all Football matters, inevitably you are relegated and appoint your 3rd manager of the season (at least he seems to care). Do you lick your wounds and seek to control you finances, no you kick on with that new stand you have been planning (with the seemingly insane confidence that you will be promoted soon)


http://www.fulhamfc.com/news/2019/may/2 ... evelopment" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

I have posted a number of times about Real Madrid's finances (a particular hobby horse of the Telegraph - for good reason) - we have heard about their planned renovation of the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium, but questioned just how they ere going to finance it - well now we know - they have sold the next 4 seasons TV rights to raise euro 200m for the upfront costs

http://www.sportspromedia.com/news/real ... 4g.twitter" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

so the question now is - what are they going to use to buy all those new players they want and what about their wages that only get paid every 6 months - just after the TV monies have been paid

[Chester Perry]

In the spirit of post #1182 BT have commissioned a documentary looking at the state of the game - it will air next week - should be fascinating stuff and features contributions from a numbrr of those I regularly refer to on this thread - It is called State of Play

here is a taste - https://www.youtube.com/embed/DCAUdooR3KU" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It airs after the Europa League final next Wednesday - I just hope it is broadcast via youtube like the match itself

another clip from the programme https://twitter.com/btsportfootball/sta ... 1962149889" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Offthepitch.com looks at the wider implications of the French case against PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaifi in relation to the 2019 World Athletics Championship (see posts #1179 and #1180) - Transcribe as their articles tend to fall behind paywalls

PSG owner’s corruption charge raises bigger questions for European football

French prosecutors charge Qataris sportsbroker with corruption. Nasser Al-Khelaifi says that the payments were a non-refundable deposit for the event’s commercial rights.

Nasser Al-Khelaifi under investigation by Swiss and French authorities.

Possible implications for broadcast deals and sports politics.

by James Corbett

French prosecutors have announced that Paris Saint-Germain president Nasser Al-Khelaifi is under investigation for corruption in a move that potentially holds wider implications for European football.

The charges, which Al-Khelaifi denies, relate to Qatar’s bids to host the 2017 and 2019 track world championships.

As well as holding the PSG presidency, Al-Khelaifi sits on the boards of both UEFA and the European Club Association (ECA) as well as serving as the chairman of one of football’s largest TV rightsholders, BeIN, and Qatar Sports Investments (QSI), which is linked to the Qatari government.

The charges raise yet more questions for UEFA and the ECA, who are currently allied in a battle to control the future of European club competitions. Since October 2018 Al-Khelaifi is under separate criminal investigation in Switzerland, where both bodies are domiciled.

Suspect payments
In the French investigation, the CEO of beIN, Yousef Al-Obaidly, was also handed preliminary charges of corruption, while former IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) president Lamine Diack is also being probed for “passive corruption” in the same case.

The case facing PSG president Al-Khelaifi is based on documents showing that Pamodzi, a company owned by one of Diack’s (The former IAAF president) sons, received two payments totalling $3.5million from Oryx, a Qatar Sports Investments owned company, days before the vote to host the 2017 IAAF World Championships. Oryx, was set up to handle the sponsorship and rights for Qatar’s bid.

Avoid a doping ban
Qatar eventually lost to London but was later awarded the 2019 World Championships. Diack’s son, Papa Massata Diack, a former IAAF marketing consultant, has since been banned for allegations of extorting money from a Russian marathon runner to avoid a doping ban before the 2012 Olympics and is subject of an Interpol wanted notice.

Al-Khelaifi’s lawyers have said the payments made by Oryx were transparent and were simply a non-refundable deposit for the event’s commercial rights if Qatar’s bid was successful.

In that event a further $29million would have been payable. They further claim that Pamodzi has paid $3.2million of the Oryx payment back to master rights holders, Dentsu and the IAAF.

Tainted business
The new charges again call into question Al-Khelaifi’s judgement.

Last October Swiss prosecutors named him a criminal suspect in a case in which he is accused of bribing the former FIFA secretary general Jérôme Valcke to secure World Cup 2026 and 2030 TV rights for BeIN. Al-Khelaifi has denied thosee accusations and voluntarily met with the Swiss authorities.

The Qatari had previously been in negotiations to buy the South American rights company, Full Play, until its founders were found to be among those charged for paying millions of dollars in bribes for rights to TV contracts in the US Department of Justice’s FIFA corruption investigation.

Owed him millions for his vote
During testimony in the subsequent trials in Brooklyn, the Qatar 2022 World Cup was referenced on several occasions by witnesses and defendants.
One witness testified that Julio Grondona, the late head of the Argentinean FA a senior vice president of FIFA, had complained that the Qataris owed him millions for his vote.

Qatar 2022 has repeatedly denied wrongdoing in its successful bid to host the World Cup.

High influence
What happens next in the French case may hold wider implications for a game in which Al-Khelaifi has become one of its key power brokers.
In February he was appointed as one of the ECA’s two representatives to the UEFA Executive Committee, where his influence has been felt as the two bodies collaborate to reshape the future of European club competition. His possible withdrawal – whether involuntary or not – may impact this debate.

Questions have also been raised – most recently by this publication – about QSI’s willingness to keep pumping money into PSG. Could this development shift the debate further towards a strategic withdrawal?

Moreover, sensitivity about Qatar’s image at a time when it is embroiled in a significant regional conflict with its neighbours, may force a rethink about its overall role in football if wrongdoing is proven.

Given its expansion into the game in the past decade, this could encompass any part of Al-Khelaifi’s portfolio: club ownership, broadcast rights holder, or political power-broker.

[Chester Perry]

Wow - Is Steve Gibson confident or just very angry - From the Telegraph

Exclusive: Middlesbrough to sue Derby over alleged breaches of financial rules - John Percy 24 May 2019 • 7:36pm

Middlesbrough have stunned Derby by announcing their intention to sue the Championship club, days before the play-off final at Wembley.
Steve Gibson, the Middlesbrough owner, has taken drastic action in his dispute with Mel Morris by vowing to take legal action over what he insists are clear breaches of financial rules.

Gibson is alleging that Morris has broken the English Football League’s profitability and sustainability rules and Middlesbrough officials contacted Derby on Friday to inform them of their stance.

Boro are understood to be furious that Derby reported a £14.6m profit in their 2017/18 accounts, after Morris sold the club’s Pride Park stadium and then leased it back. Gibson believes that Morris has flouted the rules.

Derby are adamant they have been fully compliant, and the timing of Middlesbrough’s shock move has surprised the club ahead of their play-off final against Aston Villa on Monday.

Morris also twice invited Middlesbrough officials to look at Derby’s accounts in a meeting of all EFL clubs at Nottingham Forest’s City Ground in March.

He said: "Middlesbrough were offered by us in writing to come with their advisors to go through our submissions for profitability and sustainability, [but] they declined."

Gibson’s attempt to force an independent inquiry of club finances was also rejected by all of the Championship clubs in another meeting last month.

Villa and Sheffield Wednesday have also been in Gibson’s sights but his row with Derby is now threatening to turn ugly.
Derby were unavailable for comment.

[Chester Perry]

In post #951 I suggested Sunderland was for Sale again - In post #1035 it was suggested that they may have had a buyer. Sunderland's owners have only been in charge for a year and they seemed to have seduced the fan's with a long term strategy - the first step of which may come on Sunday against Charlton. But are things what they seem?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/footb ... again.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Once again Stewart Donald denies everything

https://www.eveningexpress.co.uk/sport/ ... underland/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Sad to say we may only find out the truth if things go belly up at Wembley

[Chester Perry]

That thread from The FT Football Business Summit in post #1158 I then referred to in post #1186 also contained a discussion about the viewing football engagement and viewing habits of young teens (bitesize follow stars etc - I posted a few things before and they are behaving very similarly to the Eastern audiences). This bitesize engagement is provided by platforms like TikTok and it has been signing up clubs around Europe to host their own channels - now Liverpool have become the first in the Premier League to sign such a deal

http://www.sportspromedia.com/news/live ... ons-league" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

In post #1085 Burnley had dropped 5 places in Brand Finance 50 - Now The POWA Index for England's top clubs has been published showing the best performance for sponsorship in English Football - we are 19th behind the likes of Villa, Leeds, Stoke and West Brom - no points for guessing who is still the clear front runner though

https://sponsorship.sportbusiness.com/n ... ew-report/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

this is important because it is fed by and driven by our ability to derive commercial income and make a return on that sponsorship for the sponsor - more information on POWA Index here https://powaindex.com/#!/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; but not the report sadly

[Chester Perry]

Following a fair bit of discussion on this thread about our own valuation (and Liverpool University saying we were the 7th most valuable club in the PL) I await with interest to see if/where we sit in KPMG's annual list of the 32 most valuable clubs in world football (I will say I don't think we will be in) - just as interesting (if not more so ) will be the formula they employ to arrive at these valuations - the report is expected next week

https://twitter.com/Football_BM/status/ ... 0351633414" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Royboyclaret]

Following a fair bit of discussion on this thread about our own valuation (and Liverpool University saying we were the 7th most valuable club in the PL) I await with interest to see if/where we sit in KPMG's annual list of the 32 most valuable clubs in world football (I will say I don't think we will be in) - just as interesting (if not more so ) will be the formula they employ to arrive at these valuations - the report is expected next week

https://twitter.com/Football_BM/status/ ... 0351633414" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Highly unlikely that Burnley would feature prominently on any list provided by KPMG. It's fair to say that when we parted company with KPMG as auditors of our annual accounts we certainly did not part on the best possible terms.

[Chester Perry]

There have been a lot of changes at Southampton in the last 12 months - Offthepitch.com looks at 3 and believes it knows exactly why they have occurred - transcribed as likely to fall behind a paywall

Lack of transfer assets prompt Southampton changes

Three Southampton executives departed as the price for a lack of bankable stars.

The Saints financial model is built on finding, developing and selling top talent.
by Alex Miller

A lack of bankable playing talent at Southampton was a major cause for three high profile departures from the club.

Sources close to the club have revealed that concerns over a lack of sellable assets, plus criticisms over a lack of young players coming through into the first team, led club shareholders Gao Jisheng and Katharina Liebherr, to take drastic action.

“The perceived lack of obvious top talent and emerging stars has caused the club to make dramatic changes to the structure of the club, as well as changes in personnel”, said a source.

Southampton recently issued a statement saying it was time to take “constructive action" and confirmed a review into the club's football operation.

No extension
Chairman Ralph Krueger’s six-year stay at the club officially ends on June 30th. His contract has not been extended.

His departure follows that of vice-chairman Les Reed, who became the Football Association's new technical director in December. Reed leaving was the removal of the final link to former owner Markus Leibherr.

Reed joined Southampton in April 2010 with the club in League One. He oversaw a period in which the club won promotion to the Championship, then the Premier League and they reached the EFL Cup final in 2017.

Martin Hunter followed Reed in leaving Saints. Hunter joined Southampton two months after Reed in July 2010 as the under-21 head coach and has since held a variety of roles in his eight-year tenure.

Hunter was the Technical Director of Saints and oversaw the development of the under-23 side, managed by Radhi Jaidi.

Nurture players
The club’s model over the last decade has been built on employing coaches to nurture players and selling them for big fees. Over £300 million has been recouped in that time.

In recent years the club nurtured and sold playing talent including Virgil van Dijk, Sadio Mane, Adam Lallana, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Theo Walcott, Gareth Bale, Dejan Lovren, Luke Shaw, Nathaniel Clyne, Victor Wanyama, Toby Alderwireld, Morgan Schneiderlin and Calum Chambers.
Now the owners are keen to avoid having a single figurehead in charge of football, and so are looking at a total of three appointments to head various departments.

First piece in the jigsaw
Ross Wilson, the club’s director of football operations, is overseeing the club’s transfer business, alongside Martyn Glover.

Wilson’s role is to manage the scouting and recruitment of players. He was instrumental in the signing of van Dijk from Celtic for £13 million in 2015.
Glover recently joined as the club’s Head of Scouting and Recruitment. He had been chief scout at Everton since 2016. His appointment is seen as the first piece in the jigsaw of Saints’ restructuring of the football side of the club.

A third member of the new structure is still to be confirmed. A new Head of Football Operations has been touted, with several names tipped to arrive at St Mary’s.

Bankable talent
The return of Paul Mitchell, now at RB Leipzig, has been mooted, while Stuart Webber currently Technical Director at Norwich City, has also been linked.

Ex-Brentford chief executive Mark Devlin was linked to the club before his appointment as Dundalk CEO.

For whoever else arrives at St Mary’s, the brief is clear - bring in and nurture a stream of young bankable talent.

[Chester Perry]

@KieranMaguire looks at the crux of Steve Gibson's case against Derby (why not Sheff Wed and Villa as well?)

https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/statu ... 3175350272" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It don't give him much hope I feel

[Chester Perry]

The Times takes a look at the growing push for a European Super league and despite the PL clubs officially speaking out against it one of them in particular is very gung ho in the push towards it becoming a reality - transcribed as a result of paywall (that's my free articles for another week)


The European Super League is an existential threat to domestic football - Matt Dickinson, Chief Sports Writer

The vision of Ferran Soriano, the chief executive of Manchester City, is modern football hurtling inexorably towards an elite of super clubs. And if you think we are already there, you lack his boundless ambition.

For all the magnitude of Manchester United, Barcelona, Real Madrid and, increasingly, City, Soriano thinks these giants still have a long way to go on the journey from a local sporting circus to “global entertainment companies like Walt Disney”.

As he once explained to The Guardian, how can the biggest clubs have turnover of just €500 million when the grandest claim to have about 500 million fans worldwide? Monetising one Euro from each of them annually is terrible failure to a smart businessman like him in a world where City can have franchises in the United States and Australia, and partner clubs in Japan, Uruguay, Spain, and China while also looking at India and other opportunities.

The global ambition is vast. And that worries other clubs around the Premier League table far more than whether Pep Guardiola’s team are winning the treble, crushing domestic opposition like Watford 6-0 in the FA Cup final, or even if they are breaching financial fair play rules (a charge City deny) to hoover up the best players.

follow Soriano’s thinking through for this elite and inevitably you end up with a Super League and that is no longer some mythical creature — a Loch Ness monster, all rumour — but something that is, scandalously, being given credibility even at Uefa.

This is the real existential threat to domestic football and one that cannot be ignored. It could arrive, with destructive consequences for the game as we love it, via the side door, given proposals for a Champions League overhauled to enrich and protect the elite.

In short, the plan would have only four out of 32 Champions League places dependent on finishing position in a domestic league, and an expansion from six to 14 group matches. It would be a revolution, ending the primacy of the major European leagues. If the top 24 teams in the Champions League each season keep their place, why should United, City or Liverpool sweat for the top four in the Premier League?

Uefa protests that it is only a consultation. Given that organisation’s responsibilities, it should have been dismissed at one glance but the biggest clubs have so much wealth, and therefore power, that the governing body finds itself being bullied from within.

The idea can, and must, be resisted but Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, spoke in London this week of the real dangers of complacency “if we stay at home sipping tea”.

At the Premier League, a statement was released from the 20 clubs which said that the domestic division had to be protected. But, understandably, Tebas rolled his eyes at that and said that the top English clubs should be pushed to be honest about where they stand. There are good reasons to think that public words and private actions can be contradictory.

Thankfully, we have had Football Leaks to unearth just what plotting has been going on behind the scenes. In recent months, Der Spiegel in Germany disclosed meetings, starting in 2016, which involved a secret coalition led by four clubs — Barcelona, Real Madrid, Juventus, Bayern Munich — who were joined for part of the journey by United, Arsenal and AC Milan.

According to hacked emails, there were discussions about how a Super League may work, including the 17 teams with the strongest television presence from England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France permanently, plus one from a knockout of Portugal, Russia, Holland or Turkey.

Bayern were said to have even explored how to break from the Bundesliga, checking the legality of player contracts. Given the documents said that football already earned over $16.7 billion from global TV rights, more than twice American football, there was plenty to back up Soriano’s notion that these big clubs could become so much wealthier. They just have to work out how, among themselves.

After the leaks, there were lots of frantic rebuttals, saying it was just informal chats, but in Spain, they do not have to pretend. As long as a decade ago, Florentino Pérez, the president of Real Madrid, spoke openly of “a new European Super League which guarantees that the best always play the best”.

When Barcelona came to Old Trafford recently, their directors made it plain that they felt 11 years since their previous visit to Manchester had been way too long and there was a need to find ways to play more regularly.

In England, this is not a discussion for public. It is bad for business to be seen to be undermining the collective, which is why all 20 put their name to that statement. But it leaves the majority of Premier League clubs looking at their leading rivals with suspicion, and City in particular.

They find Soriano a difficult customer in any case. Aloof would be the kindest way of putting it. One executive from a mid-ranked Premier League club said that the Spaniard, fiddling on his phone during club meetings, never gave the impression that he looks below the top four in the table. Another said that, of the big clubs, City under Soriano were felt to be the most nakedly aggressive about pushing the claims of the elite.

Given what he was hired to do, with a declared ambition to make City the richest club in the world, Soriano could argue that he would only be doing his job if he was pursuing all possibilities. It is his task to ensure City do not lose out. United can rely on their long-established clout, as a club and brand, to be on the list whenever the invites are sent out to plot how to shaft the rest of the football pyramid. City had no such certainty until the past few years of their massively ambitious strategy.

For some of the top clubs, even if they harbour their own doubts about protected places in the Champions League, this may be less about greed than the fear of missing out.

But there is no defence for plans which are even more of an affront in a year when Tottenham Hotspur are finalists. Spurs would almost certainly have to win the Premier League to qualify for the Champions League if this went ahead in 2024.

As Steve Parish, the Crystal Palace chairman, wrote in an excellent column for The Sunday Times, there would be “no more rising up. No more Tottenhams”. No wonder he called it “the greatest threat for decades”.

This is not scaremongering when Aleksander Ceferin, the Uefa president, seems to regard these plans, championed by Andrea Agnelli, the Juventus chairman and head of the European Club Association, as a compromise to stop a full-blown breakaway. That the idea is not being instantly dismissed tells you everything.

Twenty years after a Super League was first mooted, this would lurch dangerously close. It is instructive to recall that, at that time, Leeds United were on the ascendancy. City were tumbling into the third tier of English football.

In the age of the super club, and Soriano’s vision of global entertainment corporations, perhaps those cyclical transformations simply will not happen any more. But football undermines the possibility at its peril.

[Chester Perry]

@Matt_Lawton in the Mail looks at the financial tightrope act at Derby and Villa, together with why the Owners of Boro and Leeds are left feeling like they are playing under a different set of rules

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/footb ... iches.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Stadium sponsors are not that prevalent at the top of British game (where TV money is so abundant and fans demand traditional names be upheld) and usually only feature when a new ground has been built (it is a different story in the lower reaches of the EFL where the income is crucial and used to get around SCMP by ambitious owners). The biggest of clubs famously came out and said it would not do it even though it commercialises everything else. But what could it be worth to Premier League clubs.

https://sponsorship.sportbusiness.com/n ... ts-report/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

This graphic encapsulates everything that the European clubs fear about the Premier League and much that the top six would like to do to the 14

https://twitter.com/SBI_Barcelona/statu ... 0661779456" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

First raised the prospect of PSG's owners buying an English club in post #826 - if this comes to fruition the self styled biggest club in the world will be even more insufferable (if that is possible)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sport ... Leeds.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

EDIT - love this from Nick Harris @SportingIntel

Leeds have had their share of dodgy / corrupt / clueless / potless / reckless owners in the past 2 decades (current owner is none of those). Yet already seeing concerns among *some* fans not wanting Qatar takeover, presumably on ethics grounds. Interesting.

EDIT 2 - Simon Chadwick adds his informed two-penneth

https://twitter.com/Prof_Chadwick/statu ... 4610036736" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

In post #1068 Nick Harris (@SportingIntel) suggested that even though the Championship play-offs are billed as a £170m game, they are likely to be worth even more - today he provides an suitable example of his claim.

https://twitter.com/sportingintel/statu ... 9435219969" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

What I have not seen mentioned yet with this whole Qatar/Leeds thing is that QSI own Bien media while Andrea Radeizzani owns Elevensports - between them they own a lot of European football rights - this could be more of a diplomatic deal to keep prices down - achieving a similar effect to the peace breakout between Sky and BT

[Chester Perry]

Vysyble have made a blog post ahead of the release of their "We are so rich it's unbelievable" report (that title - for the unaware - is an ironic comment on the popular notion of wealth in football in comparison to their beliefs in the far from universally popular Economic Profit theory)

https://vysyble.com/blog" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Here is the vysyble's view of the match up for tomorrow's Championship play-off final

https://twitter.com/vysyble/status/1131953991510839296" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Shaun Harvey says that EFL clubs would be lost without their owners - but seemingly doing little at the moment to put regulations in place - just a small whine about the financial discrepancy in the PL

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/48412747" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Khaldoon Al-Mubarak the Manchester City chairman maintains the punchy stance they have taken of late when defending their actions against the charges against them - in the Telegraph and likely to fall behind a paywall so transcribed

Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al-Mubarak says criticism from La Liga chief over club's spending is 'hypocritical' - Sam Dean - 26 May 2019 • 10:00pm

Khaldoon Al-Mubarak, the Manchester City chairman, has launched a furious defence of the club’s spending and derided the head of Spain’s top tier for his criticism of their business model.

Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, said last week that City are damaging European football by driving up player prices with their “state-sponsored” cash reserves.

Tebas said that City, who he described along with Paris St-Germain as being run off “one off petrol-money, one off gas”, are inflating the market with their transfer spending.

But Al-Mubarak said it is “hypocritical” for the Spanish league to criticise the spending of English clubs and described it as a “clear attack” on the Premier League.

“He talks about how we distorted the market? There is a hypocrisy in this statement that is ironic,” Al-Mubarak told City TV in his end-of-season interview. “Number one, let’s look at the Spanish league, the time of breaking records on player acquisitions. I mean, who started that?

“Let’s go back to the world records, Figo, Zidane. These huge jumps in these transfers, where did they happen? You have to look back at the history of La Liga, a league dominated by two clubs, and Mr Tebas should look back at the history of that league and distortion that has happened throughout the ages.

“And then you look back at transfers. In the top 10 transfers of all time, Manchester City has not a single player in that, not a single one.”

City are facing the looming threat of a ban from the Champions League after an investigation into an alleged £60 million deception. Yves Leterme, the chairman of chief investigator of Uefa’s Club Financial Control Body, said earlier this year that City faced “the heaviest punishment” if the allegations against them were proven.

The body’s adjudicatory chamber is considering its sentence for the club, who have insisted they are confident any sanctions will be overturned.

Al-Mubarak said he believes “quite comfortably” that City will prevail, provided the process is “judged on facts”. He said: “Am I uncomfortable? No. I respect regulatory bodies doing their job and any regulatory process that asks questions. We have to professionally respond which is what we have done.

“We are dealing with each of these entities as per the process, we have clear answers. I believe, quite comfortably, if the process is going to be judged on facts then unquestionably we will prevail. If it’s not about facts and it’s about other things, then it is a different conversation.”

On Tebas’ comments linking the wealth of City and PSG, Al-Mubarak added: “I think there’s something deeply wrong in bringing ethnicity into the conversation. This is just ugly. I think the way he is combining teams because of ethnicity. I find that very disturbing to be honest.”

The City chairman said there is a “certain level of jealousy” towards their success and insisted that attacks on the club should also be seen as attacks on the Premier League.

He added that those from other leagues are “bothered” by the dominance of English football in this season’s European competitions, with all four finalists in the Champions League and Europa League coming from England.

“Let’s not forget this is the best league in the world and if you look at this season, there is no better testament to this statement where the two European competitions, the Champions League and Europa League, the finals are being competed by English clubs.

“You have four Premier League teams in the two European finals and that’s a fact and that bothers a lot of people in many places. “We have the best league in the world, we have the most commercial league in the world, the most successful clubs in the world, economically, commercially in terms of global presence, and that is why this attack is not just on Manchester City, it is against this league. And I hope people start seeing that and start — I know people don’t want to defend Manchester City — but for God’s sake start defending this league.

“I will not accept for this club to be used as a diversionary tactic on poor investment decisions from other clubs. People make decisions, they’ve got to live by them. We’ve managed ourselves well and we will be judged by facts and facts alone.”

EDIT You can watch an Interview with him here (Warning 22mins long) - https://www.mancity.com/citytv/intervie ... w-part-one" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Claims that Newcastle have been sold to the man who failed to buy Liverpoo - Sheikh Khaled bin Zayed Al Nehayan, the cousin of Manchester City's mega-rich owner.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/sport/f ... -16335734l" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/footb ... llion.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Following Steve Gibson's decision to litigate against Derby see post #1191 @ Kieron Maguire pokes at Boro's sorry financial record

https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/statu ... 8689982464" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

following post #1204 more on the financial implications of today's Championship play off final - this time from:

@SwissRamble

https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/ ... 2424324096" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Daily Mail points out that a Villa win means former owner Randy Lerner gets some of his money back - £30m is a big hole to start a season with

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/footb ... sport.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

The Telegraph broke the story of Steve Gibson taking Derby to court see post #1191 and they have also given space to Mel Morris to respond - transcribed as likely to fall behind a paywall - this is likely to run for a while yet and deemingly in the public arena - Mel has got you there Steve

Mel Morris accuses Middlesbrough owner Steve Gibson of 'hypocrisy' - John Percy - 26 May 2019 • 10:00pm

Mel Morris has accused Middlesbrough owner Steve Gibson of “hypocrisy” after Derby’s Championship rivals announced their plans to sue them over alleged financial breaches.

As revealed by The Daily Telegraph on Saturday, Gibson has vowed to take legal action against Derby as he claims they have broken the Football League’s profitability and sustainability rules.

Gibson has been at war with Derby for months and is furious that Morris was allowed to secure a £14.6m profit in the club’s accounts after selling the Pride Park stadium and then leasing it back. He believes Morris has bypassed the rules by unfair means.

Derby were notified on Friday that Boro plan to sue them, days before their Championship play-off final against Aston Villa.

But Morris has hit back and insisted Derby are fully compliant, branding Gibson’s accusations as “bitching”.

Speaking for the first time in detail, Morris said: “I consider the timing of their action to be cynical, an open attempt to try and steal our focus ahead of a crucial game. Fortunately, we are motivated by such actions. I’ll call it out there because I think it needs calling out.

“The sale of fixed assets is allowed in the rules. In 2016 a club [Boro] got promoted who chose to sell the tax loss from the football club to the parent company, because that then makes it revenue which is a positive towards profit, to help remain within Financial Fair Play.

“When I raised that at a meeting in March, the representative from the club said it was allowed in the rules at that time. So is this! What is different? You set the mould and we copied your lead, now you’re bitching. He [Gibson] had the hypocrisy to do that.

“Even his own fans called it out on their forums and said ‘how dare we do this with our own history’. We discussed this issue again in April and there wasn’t a single vote against, including from their own club! They didn’t even vote for their own motion. It is absolutely hypocritical. I didn’t write the rules.

“They had the gall to say to us this is not right. Absolutely unbelievable. Those things to me are just insane."

[Claretmatt4]

Really interesting stuff Chester keep it coming!

[Chester Perry]

Following his interview with @TariqPanja in the New York Times (see post #1135 - thanks again edlass) Aleksander Ceferin has now been speaking to Der Spiegel

https://www.spiegel.de/international/eu ... ml#ref=rss" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Simon Chadwick comments on the role of face in the Middle East and links that to the Khaldoon Al-Murbarak interview see post #1208 but is it more of a comment on the Newcastle sale (post #1209)

https://twitter.com/Prof_Chadwick/statu ... 6999258113" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I find it fascinating that what we used to call good manners and form (etiquette) and consequently (and to me sadly) rejected is very similar to that still in play across a vast swathe of the globe

[Chester Perry]

In post #1183 I pointed out the difference in TV revenues between the PL and the Scottish game - Here @ Kieran Maguire looks at the overall financial performance of the SPL -

https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/statu ... 1950974976" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The Scots hate it when SPL clubs are compared to EFL League one clubs but half of those teams are on top end League one revenues - Even Rangers are a bottom half Championship budget

[Chester Perry]

The potential buyers of Newcastle has confirmed they are in talks

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/48420387" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

EDIT - more detail from Offthepitch.com

Newcastle takeover ‘terms agreed’ and due diligence completed - 27 May 2019 6:20 PM - Martin Hardy

Sheikh Khaled has already completed due diligence in Newcastle - a sign of the level of seriousness.
The Bin Zayed Group surprised Newcastle by releasing a statement on late afternoon on Monday.
Caution from club insiders after Staveley and Kenyon failures to buy out Mike Ashley.

The potential sale of Newcastle United to Sheikh Khaled Bin Zayed Al Nahyan moved a step closer today when his group issued a statement that the terms of the deal had been agreed.

The Bin Zayed Group, looking to complete a stunning, £350 million takeover of the Premier League side and end Mike Ashley’s 12 years in charge at St James’ Park, said they were bidding to ‘complete the transaction at the earliest opportunity.

There is still caution, however, within St James’ Park, although the club has officially admitted talks have begun for Sheikh Khaled Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the cousin of Manchester City owner Sheikh Mansour, to take control.

Recent high profile approaches to buy Newcastle from the Sports Direct owner Ashley, first by Amanda Staveley and then the former Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon, failed to materialise amidst much acrimony.

Due diligence finshed
Offthepitch.com can reveal due diligence has been completed by the Bin Zayed Group, a further sign of the level of seriousness of the latest attempted takeover.

Sheikh Khaled Bin Zayed Al Nahyan failed in an attempt to take control at Liverpool last season and those inside Newcastle insist there is still work to be done before any takeover is completed. It will also have to be agreed by Ashley, who bought the club for £133 million from the Hall and Shepherd families in 2007.

Those close to Ashley insist he will want guarantees that any new owners can move the club forward.

Statement from potential buyer
The Bin Zayed Group surprised Newcastle by releasing their statement on late afternoon on Monday.

It read: “In response to numerous reports in the world media this morning, we would like to comment as follows. We can confirm the representatives of his Highness Sheikh Khaled Bin Zayed Al Nahyan are in discussions with Mike Ashley and his team about the proposed acquisition of Newcastle United Football Club.

"We view it as an honour to have the opportunity to build on the strong support, history and tradition of the club. We have agreed terms and are working hard to complete the transaction at the earliest opportunity. Best Regards, Midhat Kidwai, Group Managing Director, Bin Zayed Group.”

Surprised Rafa Benitez
News of the potential takeover broke late on Sunday evening. The Newcastle manager Rafa Benitez, whose contract ends on June 30, was said to be surprised by the developments.

He has been locked in protracted talks about a possible contract extension and that too has still to reach a conclusion. He will ask for clarification from the club’s managing director, Lee Charnley.

Ashley’s reign has been a controversial one. He stated that he had to clear around £80 million of debt (£50 million of which was a mortgage repayment on the development of St James’ Park) following his surprise acquisition of the club in 2007.

He was initially popular and stood with supporters at away games. The relationship turned sour when he clashed with the then manager Kevin Keegan and lost a constructive dismissal brought against him and the club by Keegan. There was a hiring and then not rehiring of Alan Shearer and a controversial decision to attempt to rename St James’ Park.

[Chester Perry]

found this which is quite topical - on 2 fronts - Newcastle and football club valuation - from November 2017

https://vysyble.com/blog-25-november-2017" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

as usual I will add that vysyble's methods and approach is far from universally accepted

[Chester Perry]

The New Yorker has a peak into Football Leaks - This is a serious magazine and a very long article

How Football Leaks Is Exposing Corruption in European Soccer
While Rui Pinto sits in jail, his revelations are bringing down the sport’s most famous teams and players.
By Sam Knight 5:00 A.M.

The first person to receive an e-mail from the whistle-blowing organization Football Leaks was António Varela, a columnist at Record, one of Portugal’s three national sports newspapers. The message arrived early in the afternoon of September 29, 2015. Varela, a precise, watchful man in his early fifties, clicked on a link, which took him to a blog entry that had been created at 5:17 A.M. that day. “Welcome to Football Leaks,” it read, in Portuguese. “This project aims to show the hidden side of football. Unfortunately, the sport we love so much is rotten and it is time to say ‘enough.’ ” Below was a collection of previously unseen documents involving Sporting Lisbon, the eighteen-time winner of Portugal’s national league. “Contracts in Portuguese, contracts in English, contracts in French,” Varela told me recently, in Lisbon. “I had no doubts about it. They were real documents.”

European soccer, which reaches its annual climax this weekend, with the final of the Champions League, the game’s most prestigious club competition, is a wonder of the sporting world. Storied teams such as Liverpool and Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Juventus, rise and fall. Each year, the finest players and coaches conjure, in new forms, soccer’s essential, unthinking grace.

The business side of the sport, however, is more like a painting by Bruegel the Elder. Since 1955, the best teams from each country have played against one another, and that has given rise to a dense intermingling of tactics, feuds, and money. Money above all. “Money scores goals,” as the German saying goes. Unlike American sports, with their draft picks, salary caps, and collective-bargaining agreements, European soccer is a heedless, Darwinian affair. Spending rules are broken. Salaries are secrets. The best leagues are awash in Russian oligarchs, Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth funds, and Chinese conglomerates. Rumors fly. Middlemen thrive. “Between clubs, it’s not only that we don’t trust each other,” a director of a top European club told me. “We betray each other constantly.” Last season, according to the accounting firm Deloitte, European soccer had revenues of twenty-eight billion dollars, about the same as Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Football League combined.

The first documents released by Football Leaks related to a controversial investment model known as third-party ownership. One of the ways that clubs make money is by buying and selling players. T.P.O., which originated in Latin America, allows external parties to buy a stake in promising young players, in the hope of profiting from a huge transfer deal one day. (In 2017, the Brazilian striker Neymar was sold by Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain for around a quarter of a billion dollars.) Proponents of T.P.O. describe it as a form of lending, but many fans believe that it gives investors too much control over a club’s roster and the shape of players’ careers, by influencing when and where a player might be traded.

In Portugal, one of the most vehement critics of T.P.O. was Bruno de Carvalho, the president of Sporting Lisbon, who described it as “a monster coming to football.” FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, banned the practice in May, 2015. But the contracts that Varela read on Football Leaks showed that Sporting Lisbon had entered into a secret, T.P.O.-like arrangement with an Angolan club named Recreativo da Caála. “It was powerful,” Varela said. “People say one thing but they are doing something completely different.”

Varela’s story filled two pages of Record the following day. By the end of the week, Football Leaks had posted confidential contracts from F.C. Porto and Benfica, Portugal’s biggest teams; Olympique Marseilles, a leading French club; and F.C. Twente, of the Netherlands. Fans learned that Jorge Jesus, the coach of Sporting Lisbon, was earning five million euros a season—an extraordinary salary for the Portuguese league—while other files confirmed rumors and disclosed hidden investors. Together, they gave a sense of seeing the business of soccer for the first time.

Football Leaks was hosted by LiveJournal, a Russian blogging service, suggesting that it was the work of Russian hackers. But Varela was struck by the technical nature of the documents. He thought that a disaffected lawyer might be responsible. “They were framing the problems with too much accuracy,” Varela said. At the same time, he worried that the data might be stolen. In late November, after Football Leaks revealed that F.C. Twente had sold stakes in seven of its first-team players to a single investment fund, its president resigned. The club was fined a hundred and eighty thousand euros, and was banned from European competition for three years.

In mid-December, a spokesperson for Football Leaks, calling himself John, agreed to answer questions e-mailed by the Times. “People may think we are hackers, we are only regular computer users,” John said. He claimed that the organization had been given three hundred gigabytes of data by insiders, who were dismayed by soccer’s excesses, and that it was receiving more all the time. “The fight has been hard,” John wrote. “But we won’t stop.” The interview transfixed Rafael Buschmann, a thirty-three-year-old sports reporter at Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, who had covered organized crime and the financial side of soccer for ten years. “I was totally electrified to get a hand on this data,” he told me.

For all John’s bravado, it was clear that Football Leaks was having problems. The first blog was shut down by LiveJournal. So was a second. There were days when the documents were hard to access, or infected by malware, which suddenly filled the screen with pornography. Buschmann wrote to the site for weeks, but received no reply. On January 3, 2016, the group finally responded: “What is your problem with football? Kind regards, FL.” That evening, confidential contracts related to the image rights of Cristiano Ronaldo, at that time the star forward for Real Madrid, appeared on the blog.

Buschmann and John began exchanging messages every few hours. Six weeks later, Buschmann flew to Budapest to meet him. He expected to find a former senior employee of FIFA or UEFA, which administers European soccer, who had gone rogue. But, in a small hotel near the city center, he met Rui Pedro Gonçalves Pinto, a twenty-seven-year-old antique dealer with spiky hair, from northern Portugal. It was around 5 P.M. and Pinto hadn’t yet eaten breakfast. Real Madrid and A.S. Roma were playing that evening. Pinto took Buschmann to a Serbian restaurant to watch the game, and ordered a meat platter. They partied for two days. “I was nearly to death,” Buschmann told me. Before the reporter left, Pinto gave him two hard drives, containing eight hundred gigabytes of data. In the following three years, Pinto supplied Der Spiegel with four terabytes of confidential information, more than eighty-eight million documents—a leak almost twice the size of the Panama Papers and sixty times that of Edward Snowden’s.

The information provided by Pinto has led to the conviction of dozens of top soccer players for tax evasion. It has prompted the Las Vegas police department to investigate an allegation of rape against Ronaldo. It has also revealed likely rule-breaking by Manchester City, the all-conquering champions of the English game, and a plan by Europe’s leading teams to leave their national leagues and form their own competition. Since 2016, Der Spiegel has partnered with media organizations in thirteen European countries to publish hundreds of stories, rewriting much of what was known about the soccer business and changing it in the process. The scale of Football Leaks—its totalizing nature—has brought about a novel anxiety among the sport’s fixers and dealers. “People are going to think at least twice before they do something which is not a hundred per cent straight,” a Portuguese agent told me. Last November, in response to Der Spiegel’s stories about a breakaway league, fans in Germany mounted protests in stadiums across the country.

But Pinto is a confounding figure. With a high-school diploma and no formal I.T. training, he has managed to obtain, and interpret, information that European tax prosecutors and investigative journalists have sought for years. “For me, he is a genius,” Buschmann told me. “The question is, what is the other side of his personality?” As soon as Football Leaks appeared, it had the air of an illicit enterprise. For a long time, after Pinto was identified as the ringleader of the project, he denied his involvement and narrowly skirted arrest.

In January, Pinto was detained in Hungary, on charges of cyber crime and extortion. While he waited to be extradited to Portugal, where he faces up to ten years in prison, I spent two days talking to him in his apartment in Budapest. Pinto is now thirty, but his fresh face and adolescent haircut give him the look of a student who has missed his last deadline. Each day, I arrived at around 1 P.M., when Pinto had just got out of the shower. Many of his answers had an artful, knowing quality. At tense moments, his face broke into a disarming smile. “I really don’t consider myself as a hacker,” he told me.

Pinto prefers to talk about what he has uncovered, and to describe the evolution of European soccer from a varied and distinctive game to a corrupt playground for the international élite, in which only the richest, least scrupulous clubs can thrive. Pinto sees the future currently awaiting European soccer as bland and predictable. “It will be like plastic,” he said. “Everything would be like a plastic thing.” Pinto has studied the cases of celebrated leakers (his lawyer, William Bourdon, represented Snowden), and I often got the impression that he is trying to expand the definition of what a whistle-blower can be. In 2016, Buschmann asked Pinto where his information came from, and he replied, “Some of our sources do not realize that they are our sources.” One afternoon with me, Pinto mused out loud about why none of his insiders had gone public. He questioned whether Europe’s whistle-blowing protections were strong enough. I suggested that perhaps his sources hadn’t gone public because they didn’t exist and that Football Leaks was the result of Pinto’s hacking alone. “That would be a plot twist,” he said, flashing me his smile. “The biggest plot twist ever.”

Pinto grew up in a small, blue-tiled house on a hill in Vila Nova de Gaia, which faces Porto, Portugal’s second city, across the River Douro. On a dazzling morning in April, four of the eight newspapers on sale in town had stories about him on the front page. Pinto claims that he learned to read by listening to soccer commentators and matching the names that he heard against what was written on the players’ shirts. At the age of four, he began to stay up late on Sundays, to watch the highlights from the weekend’s games, and to keep notebooks, in which he would write down scores and players’ statistics.

“My father once said that football will destroy my life, because I was kind of a fanatic, actually,” he told me. Pinto’s father, Francisco, designed dress shoes at a local factory. His mother, Maria, looked after him and his sister, who is ten years older. Francisco dabbled in antiquities, and when Pinto was seven his father bought an Intel Pentium desktop computer with a dial-up Internet connection and installed it in the living room, to buy and sell ancient coins online. “EBay at that time was an extremely awesome opportunity,” Pinto recalled. “I learned everything sitting next to him.” Pinto became fascinated by the Phoenicians, and by the Iberian and Celtic tribes that settled in Portugal before the Romans came. He watched the History Channel and dreamed of becoming an archeologist.

When Pinto was eleven, his mother was given a diagnosis of advanced lymphoma. He visited her in the hospital every day after school. After she died, he resolved to tell no one. “I just pretended that nothing happened and that is all,” he said. He started skipping classes. He stayed up late, online. In school, Pinto was a quiet, distracted presence at the back of the class, who seemed to get his information from elsewhere. “It’s very, very difficult to characterize Rui,” Mario Falcão, Pinto’s high-school geography teacher, told me. “If he wanted it, he would probably be the best pupil from the class, but he was not.”

In 2004, when Pinto was fifteen, his team, F.C. Porto, won the Champions League, led by a brash, exacting coach named José Mourinho. Pinto was ecstatic. “He came very happy to class,” Falcão recalled. But most of the time he was not there. Pinto’s father often apologized for his son’s poor attendance. “What can a father do with a teen-ager who passes all the night with the computer?” Falcão said. Pinto digitized the records of the school library. When I asked Falcão whether he agreed with Pinto’s description of himself as a normal computer user, he said, “No,” and then repeated the word eight times.

Pinto enrolled at the University of Porto, to study history, in the fall of 2008. The following month, Banco Português de Negócios, a private bank, was nationalized amid allegations of fraud and money laundering, marking the start of the country’s financial crisis. Pinto became part of what is known as Portugal’s geração à rasca (“generation in trouble”). Unemployment among the young reached almost forty per cent. Hundreds of thousands of people emigrated. “These younger people, twenty-five years or less, have to tell themselves this is not going to work,” Filipe Carreira da Silva, a sociologist at the University of Lisbon, who has studied the economic crisis, told me. In 2009, the shoe factory where Francisco had worked went bankrupt. (He had taken early retirement, to concentrate on antique dealing.) In 2011, Portugal accepted a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. “I mostly lost my motivation to do anything,” Pinto said. “More and more events started to appear and to show everyone how doomed was Portugal.”

In 2013, Pinto took part in a study-abroad program in Budapest. “I am not a rich person, so I could not go to a city like London or Paris,” he told me. When he arrived at his student dorm—in a complex of large Soviet-era apartment buildings in the east of the city—he experienced a sense of release. Budapest was fun. He loved the light on the Danube and the cobbled streets. Mixing with students from across Europe, Pinto gained a broader sense of the Continent’s economic crisis. He read about attempts by the German tax authorities to trace money that had been moved offshore. When he considered Spain, Italy, and Greece, where painful austerity measures had led to widespread street protests and the rise of populist parties, Pinto was struck by the passivity of his home country. “If you look at the Portuguese people, most of the young people, they don’t want to get involved in any of this,” he said. “They accept everything so easily.”

In the fall, Pinto returned to Vila Nova de Gaia. He was in the sixth year of a three-year history degree. He helped his father with the antique dealing, but not much else was happening. On September 18th, Pinto had €31.67 in his checking account. The following day, he received a transfer of €34,627 from a client account at Caledonian Bank, a small private bank in the Cayman Islands. On Friday, October 11th, Pinto received a second windfall from Caledonian Bank—this time from an account belonging to NetJets, the private-jet-rental company—of €227,332.80. Two days later, he paid a cell-phone bill of fifteen euros.

The second transaction triggered an alert at the bank. The transfer was cancelled and the money was returned to NetJets. According to a criminal complaint, filed with Portuguese prosecutors the following week, someone had used a phishing attack to access Caledonian Bank’s backup e-mail servers. Equipped with usernames and passwords, the hacker had ordered the transfers to a Deutsche Bank account in Lisbon registered to Rui Pinto. The data from the first transaction were garbled, but the second transfer appeared to have been executed at 5:46 A.M. on October 10th, from a computer-science lab at the University of Porto.

Pinto hired a lawyer, Aníbal Pinto, who works out of a glass-walled office on the outskirts of town. (The two men are not related.) When I asked Rui why he had hacked into Caledonian Bank, he told me that he copied about a terabyte of data from the bank’s servers, which he intended to hand over to European tax investigators. “It was kind of interesting to find out what was going on,” he said. But he never followed through. Pinto’s account was frozen on November 6th. The police investigation was slow. The bank refused to name the victim of the first transaction and the lab at the university did not keep computer-use records for more than seven days. Pinto maintained that the second transfer was a banking error and that the money from the first one belonged to him.

During the summer of 2014, Aníbal Pinto reached a deal with Caledonian Bank, in which his client agreed to return half the first transaction and keep the rest, a total of €17,313.50. Pinto was never charged with a crime.

In February, 2015, Pinto moved to Hungary for good. “Portugal is a lovely country for a holiday,” he told me. “Just that.” His father now traded in old posters, photographs, railway maps, and flyers, mostly from the nineteenth century. Budapest was rich in ephemera from the industrial revolution and the early twentieth century, which the Pintos sold for ten or twenty euros per item online. In his first months in the city, Pinto went for interviews at a few call centers, where he could use his English and Portuguese.

But he was increasingly distracted by soccer. That spring, Swiss police, acting on instructions from the F.B.I., arrested nine FIFA officials at a meeting in Zurich, on corruption charges relating to the organization’s decision to award the upcoming soccer World Cups to Russia and Qatar. Pinto was also concerned about the fate of his home-town club. A week after F.C. Porto’s victory in the Champions League in 2004, Mourinho had left to manage Chelsea, a London club that the previous year had been bought by the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. During the intervening decade, Porto had found it impossible to match the spending of the biggest clubs, in Germany, Spain, and England, or of trophy assets, like Paris Saint-Germain, which had been acquired by the Emir of Qatar.

Like other teams outside the gilded élite, Porto was taking ever-greater financial risks in order to compete. When Pinto was back in Vila Nova de Gaia, he had travelled to a few away matches with the team’s hard-core supporters’ club, the Super Dragons. At the games, he heard about a company named Doyen Sports Investments, backed by Kazakh money, which had been involved in several recent transfers. “Something was not O.K. with football,” Pinto said. “The fact that I got such a confirmation coming from so close to Porto make me decide to act.”

During the summer, Pinto acquired thousands of internal e-mails and contracts from Doyen. He would not tell me how. “What I can say about it is that it was surprising how confident these football entities are,” he said. “They think they are untouchable.” One transaction that Pinto pieced together—a loan deal between F.C. Porto and Real Madrid for a young Brazilian midfielder named Casemiro—appeared to include a seven-hundred-thousand-euro fee for the son of Porto’s club president. “I felt like they were stealing my football club,” Pinto told me. “And that no one in Portugal even cared about it.”

Doyen, which had offices in London and Malta, was run by Nélio Lucas, a charismatic Portuguese agent in his late thirties. Between 2011 and 2015, Doyen invested around three hundred million euros in T.P.O. deals. When Football Leaks went live, that fall, Doyen was the common thread in many of the stories. On October 3rd, four days after Pinto posted the first documents, Lucas received an e-mail in excellent Portuguese from someone calling himself Artem Lobuzov. (The name belongs to a Russian freestyle swimmer who competed in the 2012 Olympics.) Lobuzov threatened Lucas with more damaging disclosures. “The leak is worse than you can imagine,” he wrote. Lobuzov said that journalists were desperate for him to share what he had. “You certainly wouldn’t want that, right? But we can talk . . .”

Lucas reported the e-mail to the Portuguese police, who had already received a complaint about Football Leaks from Sporting Lisbon. In the following days, Lucas shared his conversation with Lobuzov with detectives from the country’s cyber-crime unit. On October 5th, Lobuzov said that a payment of between five hundred thousand and a million euros would be a “good donation” to make the material disappear. Lucas played along. Four days later, Lobuzov e-mailed to say that his lawyer was waiting for Lucas to make contact. The lawyer’s name was Aníbal Pinto.

A meeting was arranged for October 21st, near Lisbon. Aníbal Pinto flew south, from Porto. A driver picked him up from the airport and took him to a roadside café on the A5 highway, around ten miles west of the city. Pinto was uneasy. “Lawyers usually meet in their offices,” he told me. The location had been chosen by the police. A surveillance van was stationed out of sight. Pinto was joined by a lawyer for Doyen and by Lucas, who was wearing a wire. Two plainclothes officers sat at a nearby table.

The men discussed a possible contract between Doyen and Lobuzov, worth three hundred thousand euros over five years. Conscious that the police were listening in, Lucas floated the idea of Lobuzov coming to work for Doyen as an I.T. consultant. He asked Pinto about his client’s hacking abilities. “I immediately explained, this is a young Portuguese kid,” Pinto recalled. “Not a major criminal organization.” But Pinto described the Caledonian Bank case. “I already had something similar with him,” Pinto explained. Toward the end of the meeting, when Doyen’s lawyer was in the bathroom, Lucas offered Pinto a million euros to reveal his client’s name. Pinto refused.

Rui Pinto told me that he posed as Artem Lobuzov to check that the documents he was posting were real. “I wanted basically to see the reaction,” he said. “I know it was a naïve attitude.” In early November, Lobuzov announced that he was walking away. Lucas and Doyen ultimately came to suspect a different reason that Lobuzov had broken off contact. The company hired a Portuguese security firm to study its servers. The investigation showed that Doyen’s staff had been the victims of a phishing attack during the summer of 2015, in which they received replicas of Dropbox folders from contacts at various soccer clubs. On July 19th, Lucas had received a file named “Players,” supposedly from an official at F.C. Porto. When he attempted to open it, the file installed malware, which forwarded the contents of Doyen’s London servers to a Russian e-mail address. The hack raised the possibility that Lobuzov was able to read Doyen’s communications with the police in real time. (Pinto told me that this was not the case; he read the messages only months later.)

The end of 2015 was a heady, disorienting time for Pinto. Fresh documents were pouring into Football Leaks from law firms, clubs, and agents. There were thousands of PDFs and e-mails, which Pinto had no easy way of searching. He worked at night, combing through documents page by page. “It was extremely hard for me at that time to realize the extent of the wrongdoings,” he said.

Pinto sought to post at least two contracts every day. But he was often disappointed by the media coverage, which reduced Football Leaks to a source of gossip about famous players. On January 20, 2016, Pinto published the transfer contract of Gareth Bale, a Welsh winger who had moved to Real Madrid from Tottenham Hotspur, in the summer of 2013, for a little more than a hundred million euros. The contract was the seventy-seventh published by Football Leaks. It showed that Madrid had announced a fictitious, lower fee, in order not to offend Madrid’s star player, Ronaldo, who was acquired for ninety-four million euros. “It caused a kind of impact,” Pinto said. “But, yeah, it’s just nonsense.”

By the time Pinto met Buschmann, from Der Spiegel, a few weeks later, he was considering abandoning the project. “It was, like, messing up with my mind a bit,” he said. After the Lobuzov e-mails, Lucas had hired Marclay Associates, a London-based private intelligence firm, to unmask Football Leaks. By mentioning the bank hack, Aníbal Pinto had given the investigators a valuable clue. In March, 2016, a Web site called Football Leaks: Revealed briefly appeared, naming Rui Pinto as the source and publishing his photograph. The site was taken down, but Pinto was shaken. He finds Hungarian winters hard at the best of times. “It’s like an extra weight over my shoulders,” he told me. That spring, Pinto decided to pause Football Leaks for six months, to enable Der Spiegel to work through the data. But he would continue to look for secrets. “There was something in him,” Buschmann told me. “It was very powerful—to bring him to this point and not to let him stop.”

Since 2011, Der Spiegel has occupied an austere tower in Hamburg, overlooking the city’s former docks. The Football Leaks data are kept on the tenth floor, in an office labelled “Geräteraum,” or Equipment Room. On an overcast morning in March, I sat in the Geräteraum with Buschmann, his editor, Michael Wulzinger, and Nicola Naber, a researcher, who have been the principal custodians of Pinto’s data since the spring of 2016. They had tidied the office for my arrival, taking down diagrams and wall charts used to plot the latest wave of Football Leaks stories, which were published last November. Only a few pink Post-it notes remained on the glass wall next to Naber’s desk: “Write”; “Confront”; “Write”; “Confront.”

The first hard drives that Pinto gave to Buschmann contained around eighteen million files. Der Spiegel bought new servers and created a secure network to handle the data. “We went shopping,” Naber said. The magazine’s I.T. team converted PDFs and e-mails into searchable text, while the reporters worked on Intella, specialized software used by prosecutors in fraud cases, to make connections within the documents. When I visited, the Intella home screen showed some sixteen million e-mails, eighty-five thousand presentations, six hundred and eighty thousand spreadsheets, and a hundred and five thousand contacts in the Football Leaks database. I typed in the name Jordan Pickford, the current goalkeeper for the English national team. There were twenty-four hundred and twenty-four results. Mesut Özil, an ethereal German playmaker for Arsenal, the team that I support, generated eighty-six hundred and twenty-nine.

An early story that the Spiegel team worked on was about Ronaldo’s tax affairs. Ronaldo, a five-time winner of the Ballon d’Or, for the world’s best player, is a near-mythical figure in Portugal, and Pinto’s favorite player. In the spring of 2016, Pinto had discovered a company named Tollinn, in the British Virgin Islands, which Ronaldo might have been using to evade taxes that he owed in Spain. For weeks, Naber set about matching Ronaldo’s global assets—two hundred and twenty-seven million dollars in 2015—against his tax obligations and offshore income. It was all in the data. “You sit here thinking, What would I need to know?” Naber told me. “And then you think, I would need to know the raw income in Ireland. You look it up and it is there. It’s crazy.” (Last June, after pleading guilty to tax fraud in Madrid, Ronaldo was given a two-year suspended jail sentence and fined almost nineteen million euros.)

A few revelations leaped out. Wulzinger showed me the paperwork for the transfer of Paul Pogba, the midfielder for the World Cup-winning French national team, who moved from Juventus to Manchester United for a hundred and five million euros in the summer of 2016. The contracts promised forty-nine million euros to Pogba’s agent, Mino Raiola, who represented all three sides in the deal. More often, however, the Spiegel team chased tantalizing hints in a sea of information. They came to see the sport in another way. One evening in 2017, Buschmann was in a restaurant, watching Madrid’s two major clubs compete for a place in the Champions League final. At one point, his mind drifted to the various funds and middlemen implicated in the match. When Buschmann looked at the clock, twenty minutes had passed. “I have often had the feeling in the last months and years that I can’t watch the game like before,” he told me.

Pinto didn’t have that problem. During the summer of 2016, the European Championship was held in France. Pinto followed the Portuguese team, captained by Ronaldo, obsessively. “Most people, they don’t know how to separate things,” he told me. “Outside of the pitch, I don’t see Ronaldo the same way I see him inside the pitch.” Against the odds, Portugal reached the final, playing France, in Paris. Pinto watched the game in a pub in Budapest. Ronaldo left the field with a knee injury in the twenty-fifth minute, Portugal beat France in extra time, and Pinto burst into tears.

The reporters in the Geräteraum sought to observe clear boundaries with Pinto. There was a risk of inciting him to hack. “When I have a source where—maybe five or ten or fifty per cent—he could be a hacker, it is totally impossible for us to ask him about documents,” Buschmann said. But there were times when they needed him. In the fall of 2016, Der Spiegel and its partners in European Investigative Collaborations—the reporting consortium that has worked on Football Leaks—were approaching the deadline for their first set of stories. But there was a glitch: thousands of documents weren’t showing up in the Intella software. “Our I.T. team worked on this for weeks,” Buschmann said.

One weekend, Pinto flew to Hamburg. During the afternoon, he insisted that Buschmann take him to see Hamburger S.V., the local Bundesliga team, play a match. He drank a few beers. “For me, it was totally stressful,” Buschmann said. “The stadium was full of cameras.” In the evening, Buschmann took Pinto to the Geräteraum and showed him the problem. Pinto sat at a desk next to the window. It was the first time he had used Intella. Buschmann left the room to make coffee. “When I came back, he was ready,” Buschmann said. The problem was fixed.

That December, Der Spiegel and the E.I.C. published their first Football Leaks stories. The leading articles were about Ronaldo’s finances, Doyen’s aggressive T.P.O. deals, and a network of Argentine agents who used shell companies and straw men in the Netherlands to evade taxes. The first stories went live at nine on a Friday night. In Budapest, Pinto was madly scrolling Twitter. He messaged Buschmann, “This is the most important day of my life.”

In early 2017, Pinto came across a file that was labelled “Las Vegas.” “I was kind of curious about it,” he said. “Why ‘Las Vegas’? Let’s see what’s in here.” The file contained e-mails between U.S. and Portuguese lawyers about an alleged incident that had taken place at the Palms Place Hotel, in Las Vegas, on the night of June 12, 2009. “I got shocked,” Pinto told me. “It was a rape case.” The documents included a settlement agreement, signed on January 12, 2010, between a “Ms P” and “Mr D,” in which Ms P was paid three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. A confidential side letter identified Ms P as Kathryn Mayorga, a former model who was then working at an elementary school, and Mr D as Cristiano Ronaldo.
Pinto alerted Buschmann, who was at work on a book about Football Leaks with Wulzinger, and writing at home in Münster, a two-and-a-half-hour train ride from Hamburg. Clubs and companies implicated in the first wave of Spiegel stories had mostly reacted with silence, or with fury that the information had come to light. In late December, 2016, officials from Europe’s top leagues had written to FIFA, saying that a breach of the Transfer Matching System—the global clearing house for soccer transfers—was the only plausible source of the leaks. More private investigators were hired to find out where the information was coming from.

One evening, taking the subway in Hamburg, Buschmann realized that he was standing on the wrong platform. As he ran to make his train, a wiry older man with a passing resemblance to Clint Eastwood switched platforms, too. The doors closed before the man got on. A few days later, Buschmann noticed the same man, in a heavy gray coat, entering a bookstore in Münster. “I thought, O.K. Be cool. It is maybe something paranoid,” he told me. It was only when the man sat near him in a restaurant in Berlin, three hundred miles east, that he was sure he was being followed. The rest of the Spiegel team believed that their e-mails and movements were being tracked, too. “They knew more than we would like,” Wulzinger said. When Buschmann travelled to Las Vegas to investigate the rape allegation, he saw the man again, watching from a parked Volvo.

The defensive response to Der Spiegel’s stories made Pinto question the appetite of soccer’s regulators to clean up the game. In interviews as John, he invited FIFA and UEFA officials to make contact with Football Leaks, but no one did. Pinto sees most soccer journalists as deferential to the sport’s powerful broadcasters and sponsors. “They don’t want the people to see the truth,” he told me. Pinto sometimes refers to “real fans,” who will demand a financial and moral overhaul of the sport, as the intended audience for Football Leaks. But it is not clear whom he means by this, or whether such a group exists.

On April 14, 2017, Der Spiegel revealed the rape allegation against Ronaldo without naming Mayorga. The timing was propitious. Ronaldo, then at Real Madrid, was playing in a two-match Champions League quarter-final against Bayern Munich, the country’s biggest club. But the story gained little traction. GestiFute, a Portuguese soccer agency that represents Ronaldo and Mourinho, and whose president, Jorge Mendes, is one of the most powerful figures in the game, dismissed the article as “a piece of journalistic fiction.” Ronaldo scored two goals in the first game against Munich and a hat trick in the second. “Our story nearly was atomized,” Wulzinger said. “The public did not take notice of it.”

In Portugal, too, interest in Football Leaks had fallen away. After the initial stories about Sporting Lisbon and F.C. Porto, the platform had focussed mainly on the sport’s larger leagues. But, on a Tuesday afternoon that April, Francisco Marques, the communications director for F.C. Porto, was leaving a restaurant near Porto’s stadium when he received a message from an encrypted e-mail platform called Tutanota. It appeared to include an internal media-briefing document belonging to Benfica, F.C. Porto’s archrival. Marques asked the sender how he could be sure that it was real. “I think the attached images will suffice,” the source wrote, including screenshots of three Benfica officials’ in-boxes. One image had been taken in the previous half hour. A few days later, Marques received about twenty gigabytes of internal Benfica e-mails.

The rivalry between Benfica and F.C. Porto contains multitudes. It is the south against the north; the capital against the rest; cosmopolitan glamour against honest toil. Between them, the clubs have won the Portuguese league sixty-five times. In a country of ten million people, Benfica claims to have six million supporters, an assertion that gives rise to the idea that it is the most powerful institution in the country. Supporters of other clubs refer to Benfica as the Octopus and to the supposed shadowy nature of its influence in Portuguese society as Benfiquistão, or Benficastan. When I asked Marques whether he considered returning the e-mails, he laughed. “No,” he said. “This is a war.”

Marques has a show on Porto’s TV channel, and in the weeks that followed he began to read the Benfica e-mails aloud on the air. He excluded personal gossip and salacious material, and focussed on evidence of Benfica’s attempts to control the Portuguese game. In one instance, he shared secret briefings distributed to pro-Benfica commentators on Portuguese TV. In another, he read an e-mail correspondence referring to the “priests”—a group of eight referees who could be relied on to favor Benfica at decisive moments—which ended, “Now delete everything.” There was a PowerPoint presentation, from June, 2012, in which Benfica officials mapped out a five-year plan to “dominate the external environment” and increase the club’s power over Portugal’s politicians, journalists, and justice system. “Now it is public,” Marques said. “It is not fair. The competition is not fair.”

In early June, Marques handed the Benfica e-mails to the police. He had wondered whether they were connected to Football Leaks in some way. The source described himself as a Porto fan but a critic of the club’s president. On the afternoon of July 12th, Marques received a Tutanota e-mail with four attachments, concerning a deal that Benfica had struck on land taxes around its stadium, in Lisbon. Marques never heard from the source again.

On October 19th, the police raided Benfica’s Estádio da Luz, in northern Lisbon. Six weeks later, the leaks started again. This time, the source simply posted the club’s e-mails, unedited, on a blog titled O Mercado do Benfica, or the Benfica Market. “There were many dirty things,” Marques told me. The e-mails contained medical records and conversations between club officials and their wives, along with player contracts, tactical reports, and the club’s internal finances. A senior Benfica official compared the leaks to being under a terrorist attack. “We don’t know when it comes, the next one, where it comes from, or what sort of missile it is,” he said. “We don’t know anything.” The police raided the club’s offices twice in the early months of 2018. That March, the head of Benfica’s legal department, Paulo Gonçalves, was arrested on suspicion of bribing three judicial officials to provide him with updates on the case.

The Benfica scandal, the biggest in Portuguese soccer in recent decades, has driven the enmity between the clubs to new heights. Benfica is currently suing F.C. Porto, seeking seventeen million euros in damages. When Marques dropped me off at my hotel in Porto, he showed me his phone, which each day is deluged with messages from Benfica fans, promising to kill him. “It changed my life,” he said, not entirely unhappily. “Now I can’t go to the south.”

Spurred by the Benfica leaks, prosecutors looked at other recent sports-related crimes in Portugal. These included the Doyen extortion case against Artem Lobuzov, which had been dormant for more than two years. A handwritten note in a Portuguese police file, dated April 27, 2018, said that the Doyen complaint had been investigated alongside the alleged hacking of Sporting Lisbon, in the early days of Football Leaks, in the fall of 2015. “A suspect has been identified,” the note read. “Rui Pinto.”

At the time, Der Spiegel and the E.I.C. were preparing their second wave of Football Leaks articles. At the beginning of 2018, Pinto had given Buschmann more hard drives, which brought the number of documents in the Intella database to more than seventy million. The team in the Geräteraum decided to pursue two stories that had eluded European soccer journalists for years. The first was about how the most profligate clubs—namely, the Qatar-backed Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City, which is owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family—had been able to defy the sport’s spending rules. Since 2013, under a set of regulations known as Financial Fair Play, European clubs have had to balance their expenditures against their income from soccer-related sources in order to take part in UEFA competitions. But, for years, the teams with the wealthiest owners seemed to benefit from suspiciously generous sponsorship and marketing deals, which helped to keep their finances in line.

The Football Leaks data showed that, in the summer of 2012, P.S.G. signed a five-page sponsorship contract with the Qatar Tourism Authority for more than a billion euros. (A UEFA investigation later calculated its true market value to be around fifteen million.) Internal e-mails from Manchester City suggested that club officials were massaging deals and supplementing them with funds from Sheikh Mansour’s holding company, Abu Dhabi United Group. In the spring of 2013, Manchester City’s chief financial officer, Jorge Chumillas, e-mailed one of the club’s directors, Simon Pearce, to check that it was O.K. to alter a series of contracts, in order to comply with UEFA’s rules. “Of course,” Pearce replied. “We can do what we want.” (Manchester City denies all allegations that have originated from the Football Leaks data, saying, “The attempt to damage the club’s reputation is organized and clear.”)

Der Spiegel also pursued a story about a long-rumored plan for Europe’s biggest clubs to leave their national leagues and form a closed, N.F.L.-style competition covering the Continent. The idea of a soccer “Super League” has been around since the late nineteen-eighties. It is the logical commercial end point for a sport in which a handful of teams currently dominate their domestic markets, but in many countries it would break more than a century of sporting tradition. By searching the e-mails of senior officials at Europe’s leading clubs, the reporters at Der Spiegel discovered detailed discussions about the formation of a Super League in early 2016. That February, Bayern Munich—the most successful team in the history of German soccer—explored the legal implications of withdrawing from the Bundesliga. In the following months, executives from seven powerful clubs, including Barcelona, Juventus, Manchester United, and A.C. Milan, met twice to discuss potential formats for the breakaway league. One presentation was called “A Super League Scenario for Top European Football.”

A club director involved in the discussions told me that the plan was a negotiating ploy. “It was no secret,” he said. But he didn’t make the idea sound entirely abstract, either. When I asked whether a Super League in European soccer was inevitable one day, the director replied, “In a certain form, yes.” He weighed the pros and the cons of the format. “You have to be careful,” he conceded. “There is the fact you are killing the rest of football in Europe.”

In the summer of 2018, the rape allegation against Ronaldo gained fresh impetus. Encouraged by the widespread reporting of sexual misconduct by powerful men and the use of nondisclosure agreements to silence victims, Mayorga hired a new lawyer, Les Stovall, who wrote to Pinto through an anonymous e-mail address, asking if he had any other documents. Pinto unearthed multiple versions of a twenty-seven-page transcript of an apparent interview of Ronaldo, identified as X, conducted by a member of his legal team, Paulo Rendeiro, about the alleged attack. Answers in the earliest version of the document appeared to corroborate Mayorga’s account:

X: She said that she didn’t want to, but she made herself available. The whole time it was rough, I turned her onto her side, and it was fast. Maybe she got some bruises when I grabbed her. . . . She didn’t want to “give it to me,” instead she jerked me off. I don’t know any more exactly what she said when she was jerking me off. But she kept saying no. “Don’t do it”—“I’m not like the others.” I apologized afterward.

In the transcript, Mayorga was identified as Ms C:

Question: Did Ms C ever raise her voice, scream, or yell?

X: She said no and stop several times.

Pinto sent the transcript to Stovall, who forwarded it, with other information from Football Leaks, to the Las Vegas police on August 25th last year. In September, in an interview with Der Spiegel, Mayorga accused Ronaldo of raping her, and the Las Vegas police opened an investigation. Ronaldo has protested his innocence throughout. In an Instagram video posted two days after the story appeared, he described the reporting as fake news. “It’s normal,” Ronaldo said. “They want to be famous to say my name. But it’s part of the job. I’m happy man, and all good.”

On September 13th last year, two weeks before Mayorga’s interview appeared, Sábado, a Portuguese magazine, named Pinto as the source behind Football Leaks and the prime suspect in the release of the Benfica e-mails. Pinto’s face was on the cover. The Portuguese media harried him, and his Facebook page rapidly filled with threats from Benfica fans. Pinto had worried about being publicly identified, and about how best to defend himself, for some time. In 2017, prosecutors from France’s Parquet National Financier, an anti-corruption unit, had made contact with Football Leaks, inviting John to share his data. (France has some of the strongest whistle-blowing protections in Europe.) The following summer, Pinto approached William Bourdon, who specializes in whistle-blower cases, and asked him to broker a meeting.

In late November, Pinto travelled to Paris to meet with the P.N.F. “I spoke as a witness,” he recalled. “Basically said what kind of data I have, how I got the data, and that is all.” Pinto told me that he also met with officers from France’s witness-protection program, who gave him a secure phone with which to contact them in case of an emergency. “They considered that my situation was quite alarming,” he said. After he returned to Budapest, Pinto resolved to move to France in February. “All this situation was a bit stressful,” he told me. Pinto confided in Buschmann. “He said often to me, ‘I will have a family, I will have kids,’ ” Buschmann said. “ ‘I will have a normal life.’ ”

In the middle of January, 2019, Pinto’s father and his stepmother, Elizabeth, visited him. “They suspected that something was going on,” Pinto said. When they arrived at Pinto’s apartment, on a quiet, residential street in Budapest’s seventh district, they couldn’t open their luggage. Their suitcases had combination locks, which seemed to have been tampered with. The following evening, Pinto and his father went to the supermarket. When they returned to Pinto’s street, there were police cars and men in uniform. “I realized, O.K., they are coming for me,” he said. Upstairs, the police seized Pinto’s laptop, three cell phones—including the one belonging to the French authorities—three USB sticks, and fourteen hard drives, containing twenty-nine terabytes of data. Pinto was taken to a detention center, where he asked to call his lawyer. The police said no. “They said, ‘This is not an American movie,’ ” Pinto recalled.

Pinto was released under house arrest. When I visited him, in late February, he wore a Levi’s T-shirt, jeans, and an electronic tag on his left ankle. His parents had stayed in Hungary, but his apartment felt spare, as if he had recently moved in. There was a double bed in the living room, where his parents slept, a table with a brown synthetic tablecloth, and some small, gaudy landscapes on the walls. The police had taken his DVR.
Pinto was spending most of his time thinking about his case. According to the arrest warrant issued by the Portuguese authorities, he was being held on six charges, relating to the alleged blackmailing of Doyen and the hacking of Sporting Lisbon contracts in the fall of 2015. The warrant made no mention of the Benfica e-mails and the subsequent embarrassment for Portugal’s biggest soccer club, which Pinto was convinced were the real reasons for his arrest. “Politicians, prosecutors—even police detectives—they lose their focus when it comes to football,” he said.

When I asked Pinto if he had anything to do with the Benfica scandal, he denied it, in Pintoesque fashion: “I’ve never seen a statement from the police or the Portuguese authorities linking me to this.” He worried that his gargantuan data set, of which Der Spiegel possesses only around fourteen per cent, might be lost or destroyed if it were handed over to the Portuguese police. He was also afraid of being attacked by Benfica’s most notorious supporters, a group called the No Name Boys. I asked Pinto if he was aware of the irony of being killed by soccer fans. “Yeah,” he replied. “I’m aware of that.”

The following week, Pinto had an extradition hearing at Budapest’s central courthouse. I arrived early, with Buschmann. The corridor outside the courtroom filled with news crews and lawyers. Bourdon was there, wearing a long green overcoat. Pinto is five feet six inches tall. When he appeared, led by two thickset Hungarian police officers, he looked like a student on a Eurail trip gone wrong. “He is a cat,” Bourdon murmured. “A poor, fragile cat.” Extraditions between E.U. member states are almost always routine affairs. When the judge ordered that Pinto and his data be handed over to the Portuguese authorities, Bourdon slapped his rollerboard suitcase in frustration. After the hearing, Pinto sat on a bench in the corridor in handcuffs and gave an impromptu news conference to some Portuguese journalists. “I did this for the public,” he said. “I did this for all football fans.” The journalists wanted more, but Pinto seemed to dry up. “What else can I say?” he added. “I have to go to a Hungarian prison.”

Pinto was extradited to Lisbon on March 21st. Three days before he was handed over to the Portuguese police, Belgian prosecutors came to Budapest and copied all his data. Pinto’s hard drives, which are heavily encrypted, are what he hopes will eventually secure his freedom. “It is one thing to copy them—it is another thing to have access to them,” a member of his legal team told me. In February, prosecutors from Eurojust, the E.U.’s judicial-coöperation unit, met in Brussels to discuss how to analyze the Football Leaks data in a systematic way. Jean-Yves Lourgouilloux, of the P.N.F., described Pinto as a whistle-blower and confirmed that the French authorities had looked at twelve million documents so far. The following month, UEFA announced that, as a result of the Spiegel coverage, it was investigating Manchester City, the newly crowned English Premier League champions, for breaking its financial rules. The club faces a potential ban from the Champions League. “You don’t have to convince me that Pinto is at risk of one day being convicted as a hacker and for stealing information. It’s true, there is a risk. But Snowden did the same,” Bourdon told me. “There is a principle of proportionality—of the violation of the law compared to the services rendered. Pinto came from nowhere and he opened the eyes of millions and millions of citizens.”

In Portugal, Pinto’s return was front-page news. When I was in Lisbon last month, an impersonator was playing him on Portuguese late-night TV. The name of the character was Rui Pinto, the Hacker. In the last months of the Benfica Market, which has gone quiet since Pinto’s arrest, the blog took on a broader, anarchic quality, posting e-mails from one of Portugal’s largest law firms, and also secret judicial documents. Although Pinto denies any involvement, he is widely seen as a figure of general, youthful rebellion in a country where other forms of activism have been absent. “Rui is literally one in a million,” Carreira da Silva, the sociologist, told me. He is also a hero to everyone who hates Benfica. During my conversation with Marques, F.C. Porto’s communications director, we discussed the greatest recent figures in Portuguese soccer: Mendes, the agent; Mourinho; Ronaldo. “Now we have four,” Marques said. “Football after Rui Pinto is better.”

While Pinto awaits his trial, he is being held at a prison next to police headquarters, in central Lisbon. Francisco Teixeira da Mota, Pinto’s Portuguese lawyer, told me that he expected prosecutors to try to add the theft of Benfica’s e-mails to the case. “That is a risk that can happen at any moment,” he said. Pinto is being kept away from the other prisoners, for his own protection, but when he is allowed to exercise or to venture outside his cell he sometimes hears them yell his name, in what he takes to be encouragement. To pass the time, he has been reading a book about espionage during the Second World War. I once asked Pinto whether he was an idealist, and he surprised me by seeming not to know the word. We were in his apartment in Budapest. He opened a laptop and looked it up. “A person who is guided more by ideals than by practical considerations,” Pinto read from the screen. “Utopian, visionary, wishful thinker, fantasist, fantasizer, romantic, romanticist, dreamer.” It was enough. “Maybe this word applies to me. Maybe, yes.” ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the June 3, 2019, issue, with the headline “The Final Whistle.”

[Chester Perry]

Quite a bit of questioning over whether the announced bid for Newcastle is likely to go through - some questioning if he is another Bassini type figure

https://twitter.com/AdamParsons1/status ... 4028345349" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

and this from the Telegraph

Newcastle United sceptical that bid from Sheikh Khaled will lead to sale - Luke Edwards - 27 May 2019 • 10:36pm

Newcastle United remain privately sceptical that an offer from Sheikh Khaled bin Zayed Al Nehayan will lead to the sale of the club as Mike Ashley looks to bring an end to his 12-year reign at St James’ Park.

Although there was an initial wave of excitement on Tyneside after the Bin Zyayed Group released a statement confirming they had “agreed terms” the optimism was gradually replaced with familiar misgivings. This will be the fifth time in 11 years that Newcastle have supposedly been on the verge of being sold by Ashley, but on each occasion the talks have collapsed and there are growing fears this will follow suit.

Telegraph Sport understands that although a price has been agreed with the Al Nehayan, the United Arab Emirates based businessman is yet to provide proof of funds with sources indicating there is a long way to go before a deal is concluded.

Manager Rafa Benítez has also been told it is business as usual as no takeover is imminent. Other interested parties are also adamant claims Newcastle are on the verge being sold to Al Nehayan are completely false. It is also understood that a report stating that papers have been submitted to the Premier League to ratify the takeover are also inaccurate.

The statement said: “We can confirm the representatives of his Highness Sheikh Khaled Bin Zayed Al Nahyan are in discussions with Mike Ashley and his team about the proposed acquisition of Newcastle United Football Club.

“We view it as an honour to have the opportunity to build on the strong support, history and tradition of the club.

“We have agreed terms and are working hard to complete the transaction at the earliest opportunity.

“Best Regards, Midhat Kidwai, Group Managing Director, Bin Zayed Group."

According to reports in the Middle East, Sheikh Khaled bin Zayed Al Nehayan who is a distant relative of Manchester City owner Sheikh Mansour has also promised to keep manager Rafa Benítez and provide money to improve the squad in this summer’s transfer window.

However, sources closer to St James’ Park insist nothing has been finalised and privately, senior figures, including managing director Lee Charnley and manager Benítez, were as surprised as anyone to learn the club was on the verge of being sold on Sunday night and have been trying to seek clarification from Ashley before they make any official comment.

That will inevitably raise fears that this is just another false dawn, with all the claims and counter claims reminiscent of so many previous unsuccessful takeover attempts at St James’ Park.

Ashley has tried and failed to sell Newcastle several times since he bought it for around £140m from former owners Sir John Hall and Freddie Shepherd in 2007. Some have even questioned whether he has ever been serious about selling given his inability to find a buyer.

“The first aborted attempt came in 2008, shortly after Kevin Keegan had resigned as manager in protest at boardroom interference in recruitment.
Ashley also put the club on the market for just £100m in the summer of 2009, following relegation to the Championship. On both occasions, there were strong reports a sale was close to being agreed, only for the talks to collapse and Ashley to remain at the helm.

The club was put up for sale again two years ago and once more deals were supposedly in place for him to sell. Financer Amanda Staveley claimed she was close to completing a takeover in December 2017 only for Ashley to dismiss her attempt as a “complete waste of time” a few weeks later.
More recently, former Manchester United and Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon announced he was trying to buy the club, but although he was given access to the date room for due diligence before Christmas, a bid never materialised.

Al Nehayan has previously failed in a bid to buy Liverpool, with the Merseyside club pulling out of talks in August last year when he was unable to provide proof of funds or pay a £25m deposit.

Crucially, this time, the Sheikh is not the only interested party who has been locked in negotiations with Ashley, which increases the chances of a successful takeover taking place.

Telegraph Sport has been aware of talks taking place under strict rules of secrecy for some time. Interestingly, Ashley insisted he would walk away from any deal if details were leaked before an agreement was in place, as he was tired of people using the club to boost their profile.

Indeed, sources close to those talks have reacted with scepticism to claims Al Nehayan has beat them to it, with two well-placed figures dismissing claims Ashley has sold the club as “bulls---t” and “complete b-------.”

EDIT and this https://twitter.com/CraigHope_DM/status ... 8904705025" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

In post #1170 Royboyclaret was trying to decipher how the newly confirmed overseas PL TV deal would breakdown for clubs - Here the Telegraph shares it's interpretation along with wondering how the big six can be kept satisfied in the future now the rest gave them some concessions - As ever behind a paywall

Cartel power of 'Big Six' will only increase after grab for overseas rights money - Jason Burt - Chief Football Correspondent

Now we have a figure for the increase in Premier League international broadcast deals: £1 billion. Speaking at a conference last week Richard Masters, the interim chief executive, confirmed there should be a 30 per cent rise in the rights for the next three seasons to 2022, meaning the value will go up from £3.2bn to £4.2bn. Happy days.

And what a relief for the Premier League and its 20 clubs especially when there has been a drop in the value of the UK domestic rights, down around £400 million (to about £5bn) for the same period. An informed debate is underway, discussing whether broadcasting income has not just peaked but is actually going down the other side of the vertiginous hill.

On balance then, the fees are still going up – a rise of around nine per cent as the overseas increase more than compensates for the decrease in domestic rights. And those overseas rights need to keep going up because, according to Claire Enders of Enders Analysis, there will be a 20 per cent drop in the kind of prices Sky and BT Sport are willing to pay when the next round of negotiations come around.

The Premier League knew this would happen. In an interview with Telegraph Sport three years ago the then chief executive Richard Scudamore claimed the league was “nowhere near” saturation point but only because there were so many overseas markets – India and China, in particular – to exploit.

The prediction was that the overseas rights would grow and, within a decade, outstrip the value of domestic rights and that appears to be happening even more quickly. It also needed to happen to keep the clubs or, rather, the so-called ‘Big Six’ of Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal and Manchester United, happy and on board.

But at what price? What also happened last year, in one of Scudamore’s last acts before stepping down, is hugely significant and bears out predictions that the financial gap between the ‘Big Six’ and the rest of the Premier League is simply going to widen. The power of the ‘Big Six’ is growing to an unprecedented, cartel-like level.

A new agreement was struck which changed the formula over how the overseas money is distributed. The six will get a bigger piece of the pie. Until now it has been shared equally. For example, this year Huddersfield Town earned the same as Manchester City from international TV rights: £43.2m.

With the domestic rights the money was always divided part equally, part according to where a team finishes and part according to how many times they are shown on TV, which, naturally, favoured the six clubs. So, overall, City earned £151m and Huddersfield £96.6m with the biggest difference of course made up with the merit money (ie the gap between finishing first and 20th). City earned £38.4m and Huddersfield just £1.9m in merit fees.

That is changing. The international rights will soon no longer be shared equally, as has happened in every previous deal, which means where a team finishes in the league will become a factor – capped at 1.8 times more than the lowest-earning club. The gap will grow and grow. Over a three-year cycle it will equate to another £90m - £30m per season – more for the champions.

The argument from the ‘Big Six’ is that, with overseas rights even more than domestic rights, they drive the interest in the Premier League and, clearly, they have a point. Asian audiences do not get up early to watch Huddersfield or Fulham but are enthralled by Liverpool or Tottenham.

That is indisputable but it is also against the essence of the Premier League whose distribution model, already skewed towards the ‘Big Six’, at least has had a greater element of democracy about it than other leagues and hence played to that competitiveness as its biggest selling point: the notion that anyone can beat anyone on their day.

Those days are already not only fewer than ever but with this new model are going to become rarer still. The chances of any team breaking into the top six, without catastrophic failure by one of the big boys, is extremely remote.

The Premier League will become increasingly dependent upon overseas rights and a tipping point will soon be reached, maybe even in the next round of negotiations for 2022-25, when they outstrip the deals to show games domestically, which raises the spectre of – what happens next? How can the ‘Big Six’ be satisfied?

How overseas TV cash is carved up in new model

Under the new distribution model, Premier League clubs will be guaranteed £40.7million from overseas TV rights, with the remaining income given out according to their league position for the first time. This is how the surplus cash will be carved up:

1 - £23.8m
2 - £22.61m
3 - £21.42m
4 - £19.04m
5 - £17.85m
6 - £16.66m
7 - £20.23m
8 - £15.47m
9 - £14.28m
10 - £13.09m
11 - £11.9m
12 - £10.71m
13 - £9.52m
14 - £8.33m
15 - £7.14m
16 - £5.95m
17 - £4.76m
18 - £3.57m
19 - £2.38m
20 - £1.19m

Everything appears to be under debate – a restructuring of the Champions League, the threat of a breakaway European Super League – which would inevitably mean those big clubs becoming ever more powerful and dominant in their national leagues.

Warnings have been sounded that, for example, limiting access to the Champions League by guaranteeing places in it for clubs already involved – which is one of the proposals put forward by Uefa – would be anti-competitive. But then the problem with changing the formula of how the Premier League distributes its money means it is heading that way anyway.

Of course England is fortunate that it has a ‘Big Six’ – not a big one or two. City have become the first club to retain the Premier League in a season when Juventus won the Italian title for the eighth year in a row, it is seven years for Bayern Munich in Germany, Paris Saint-Germain won in France for the sixth time in seven years and Barcelona have won four of the last five Spanish titles.

But the ‘Big Six’ are breaking away. Not literally but effectively and the consequences of changing the way in which the money is distributed are beginning to dawn. The chasm will grow not shrink. “The key thing about the Premier League is that you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Masters also said last week. The reality is that we do.

Ferguson makes his point
It is hard not to read significance into Sir Alex Ferguson’s praise of Bayern Munich. Speaking ahead of Manchester United’s Legends match, a 1999 Champions League final reunion, Ferguson told MUTV: “Bayern is a club run in the proper foundation of it. Former players run it really, Uli Hoeness and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge. They run the club in the right way and they are always winning the league in Germany. They’re a great club.”

Although clearly not as undiplomatic as the forthright tirade recently issued against the United players by lifelong fan Geoffrey Boycott, also broadcast on the club’s in-house TV station, it felt far more resonant given who said it and that it invited such an obvious comparison. A comparison that Ferguson did not have to spell out.

[Vegas Claret]

Hopefully the super league will mean the big teams **** off into it and have to ditch their domestic leagues

[Chester Perry]

Hopefully the super league will mean the big teams **** off into it and have to ditch their domestic leagues

I cannot believe these clubs would ditch that level of income or FIFA/UEFA would allow.

It could only happen if they took all the TV monies for the top leagues in Europe away with them leaving the remanents of the PL with the equivalent of the current EFL deal. They would also have to make up for the additional home games they have lost out on for all those mid week nights they have currently.

One thing for sure, any super League breakaway would never have to games kicking off at the same time as the money they want would mean broadcasters would demand screening every game live, meaning games more or less every day during the season.

[Chester Perry]

@Swiss Ramble takes a timely look at Derby's finances as they are to spend another year in the Championship - meanwhile we wonder what chicanery will Mel come up with to avoid FFP sanctions in the coming accounts?

https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/ ... 1115725824" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[LeadBelly]

Their stadium had a book value of £41 million but Mel bought it off them for £81 million; the "extra" £40 saving their bacon somewhat. I wonder what rent he's charging them?
Perhaps Mel will buy Keogh this year for £50 million and lease him back for ten bob a week.

[Chester Perry]

There is no wriggle room left for Morris now at Derby - the Sevco has the staff costs, the Stadium has been sold, amortisation is reduced by residual values. All this is why he put £23m of new share capital in last summer and will have to do something similar again this summer if he wants another push. That is £200m they are into him for, and why it is up for sale. #lovingtheclubtoitsdeath

[Chester Perry]

I regularly refer to Simon Chadwick (@Prof_Chadwick) now he and his primary research partner Dr Paul Widdup have been given a column at Offthepitch.com - here is their first offering - a look towards this weeks European finals and how they are played by teams who are English in name only

https://offthepitch.com/a/europes-club- ... sh-affairs" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

an article looking at Chinese sponsorship in football

http://www.ejinsight.com/20190528-footb ... n-mystery/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;