Football's Magic Money Tree

[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;

[Chester Perry]

Following on from Simon Chadwick's comments on the Qatar/Leeds situation (see post #1203) and his suspicion Roma was the more likely target for a complete take over following a falling out between the Qatari's and the French on a number of levels today he posted this to further support his theory.


https://twitter.com/Prof_Chadwick/statu ... 4742831104" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

KPMG has launched it's top 32 Football club valuation report

https://www.footballbenchmark.com/docum ... 19_WEB.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

9 Premier League clubs and not including us

EDIT Compare those valuations to these https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/statu ... 8884926465" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; which use the Markham multivariate model I have referred to before https://www.sportingintelligence.com/wp ... -paper.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

and then to the approach outlined by vysyble outlined in post #1218

[Chester Perry]

David Conn analyses Arsenal's finances ahead of the final in Baku and suggests that missing out on Champions League (again) is not too big of an issue (the £35m drop in revenue not withstanding) - should be good news for Man Utd (together with the 25% wage reduction)

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

[Chester Perry]

speaking of Baku - our friends Prof Simon Chadwick and Dr Paul Widdup have this article outlining the complex web behind the choice for the Europa League Final

https://www.policyforum.net/bakus-foot-in-the-league/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[ecc]

Hi Chester,

Thank you very much for providing all these details. I didn't know about the site (Off The Pitch). It looks pretty good.

Cheers.

[Chester Perry]

Hi Chester,

Thank you very much for providing all these details. I didn't know about the site (Off The Pitch). It looks pretty good.

Cheers.

it continues to expand and definitely getting some good contributors on board - it is a shame a lot falls behind a paywall - usually there is 30mins to an hour of initial posting where the article is free to read (like the Telegraph) before it does so - so I catch when I can

[Chester Perry]

An article in the Independent about how Champs League finalists Liverpool and Spurs are among the best run clubs in football

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/foo ... 32816.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It is fascinating stuff, this analytics and I am still waiting for the day when my free view for this apparently excellent if lengthy article
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/maga ... 4KY7QwQP4c" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; - if anyone wants to transcribe I would be grateful

[Vegas Claret]

This is a good thread CP !

[Chester Perry]

post #1208 included an interview with Khaldoon Al-Mubarak here we have the concluding part

https://www.mancity.com/citytv/intervie ... w-part-two" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Whatever you think of the club and it's owners, you have to recognise the strategy, quality of leadership and sense of purpose

[Falcon]

New York Times Article on analytics transcribed for you here:

Jürgen Klopp was in his third week as Liverpool’s manager, in November 2015, when the team’s director of research, Ian Graham, arrived at his office carrying computer printouts. Graham wanted to show Klopp, whom he hadn’t yet met, what his work could do. Then he hoped to persuade Klopp to actually use it.

Graham spread out his papers on the table in front of him. He began talking about a game that Borussia Dortmund, the German club that Klopp coached before joining Liverpool, had played the previous season. He noted that Dortmund had numerous chances against the lightly regarded Mainz, a smaller club that would end up finishing in 11th place. Yet Klopp’s team lost, 2-0. Graham was starting to explain what his printouts showed when Klopp’s face lit up. “Ah, you saw that game,” he said. “It was crazy. We killed them. You saw it!”

Graham had not seen the game. But earlier that fall, as Liverpool was deciding who should replace the manager it was about to fire, Graham fed a numerical rendering of every attempted pass, shot and tackle by Dortmund’s players during Klopp’s tenure into a mathematical model he had constructed. Then he evaluated each of Dortmund’s games based on how his calculations assessed the players’ performances that day. The difference was striking. Dortmund had finished seventh during Klopp’s last season at the club, but the model determined that it should have finished second. Graham’s conclusion was that the disappointing season had nothing to do with Klopp, though his reputation had suffered because of it. He just happened to be coaching one of the unluckiest teams in recent history.

In that game against Mainz, the charts showed, Dortmund took 19 shots compared with 10 by its opponent. It controlled play nearly two-thirds of the time. It advanced the ball into the offensive zone a total of 85 times, allowing Mainz to do the same just 55 times. It worked the ball into Mainz’s penalty area on an impressive 36 occasions; Mainz managed only 17. But Dortmund lost because of two fluky errors. In the 70th minute, Dortmund missed a penalty shot. Four minutes later, it mistakenly scored in its own goal. Dortmund had played a better game than Mainz by almost any measure — except the score.

In soccer, pure chance can influence outcomes to a much greater extent than in other sports. Goals are relatively rare, fewer than three per game in England’s Premier League. So whether a ball ricochets into the net or misses it by a few inches has, on average, far more of an effect upon the final result than whether, say, a potential home run in baseball lands fair or foul or an N.F.L. running back grinds out a first down. Graham brought up another game to Klopp, against Hannover a month later. The statistics were weighted even more heavily in Dortmund’s favor: 18 shots to seven, 55 balls into the box compared with 13, 11 successful crosses from the wing to three. “You lost, 1-0,” he said. “But you created double the chances —”

Klopp practically shouted. “Did you see that game?”

“No, no, it’s just ...”

“We killed them! I’ve never seen anything like it. We should have won. Ah, you saw that!”

Graham had not seen that game, either. In fact, he told Klopp, he hadn’t seen any of Dortmund’s games that season, neither live nor on video. He hadn’t needed to, unless he wanted to experience one of the breathtaking acts of athleticism that can occur in soccer, or the drama of two teams fighting to assert their will upon the other — the reasons, in other words, that most fans watch sports. To understand what happened, all he needed was his data.

Analytics has famously influenced the tactics in professional baseball and basketball in recent years. Ultimately, it may have just as
great an impact on soccer, which traditionally hasn’t relied on statistics to figure out much of anything. Graham, who earned a doctorate in theoretical physics at Cambridge, built his own database to track the progress of more than 100,000 players from around the world. By recommending which of them Liverpool should try to acquire, and then how the new arrivals should be used, he has helped the club, once soccer’s most glamorous and successful, return to the cusp of glory.


Two Sundays ago, Liverpool concluded a regular season as compelling as any in the sport’s history. It lost only one of its 38 games in the Premier League, yet it finished second. Manchester City, the defending champion, edged Liverpool by a single point on the last day after winning every one of its league games since January. (In the Premier League, as elsewhere in soccer, a victory counts as three points in the standings and a draw counts as one; Liverpool set the record for the most points in a season, 97, by a runner-up.) In an added fillip for North American fans, Liverpool is owned by the same group of American businessmen who own baseball’s Boston Red Sox, last year’s World Series winners, while Manchester City has a business relationship with the New York Yankees.

At the same time as it was trying to stay ahead of Manchester City, in England, Liverpool was competing against the top teams from other countries in Europe’s Champions League. In the semifinals of that tournament this month, it overcame a three-goal deficit to defeat Barcelona, perhaps this era’s best soccer team. On June 1, it will face a Premier League opponent, Tottenham Hotspur, in the final.

More than other major clubs, Liverpool incorporates data analysis into the decisions it makes, from the corporate to the tactical. How much that has contributed to its recent performance is itself hard to measure. But whatever the outcome of the final, the club’s ascent has already started to make number-crunching acceptable, even fashionable, in England and beyond. As more clubs contemplate employing analysts without soccer-playing backgrounds to try to gain a competitive edge, Liverpool’s season has served as something of a referendum on the practice.



Klopp analyzed no data at Dortmund. In this, he was like most managers. He was consumed by coaching his young team on the field. But by the time Graham left his office that morning in 2015, Klopp’s epiphany was complete. He was convinced that Graham, despite having watched none of Dortmund’s games, appreciated the unusually bad fortune that had befallen the team almost as keenly as if he’d been coaching it himself. Later, Klopp learned that without Graham’s analysis of that season, which was only one aspect of as thorough an investigative process as any soccer club had undertaken to replace a manager, he never would have been hired. “The department there in the back of the building?” he said recently, referring to Graham and his staff. “They’re the reason I’m here.”

In the 79th minute of the second game of the Champions League semifinal, in early May, a ball was deflected out of bounds for a Liverpool corner kick. Trent Alexander-Arnold, a 20-year-old fullback, was about to move toward the middle of the field to let a Liverpool teammate take it. But as he started to walk away, Alexander-Arnold noticed that Barcelona’s players seemed distracted. Only a few were looking his way. “It was just one of those moments,” he said, “when you see the opportunity.” Alexander-Arnold took four steps, a feint as if heading back to his position. Suddenly he reversed direction, ran to the ball and thumped it toward Barcelona’s penalty area.

By then, Liverpool had already staged an improbable comeback to get the semifinal contest back on even terms. The team scored three unanswered goals, matching the three that Barcelona scored at home in the first game of the home-and-away series. Before the series started, Barcelona were the strong favorite to advance to the final, and the outcome of the first game validated that assessment. After that, someone who wanted to win $100 betting on Barcelona needed to risk $1,800 to do it.



For nearly a generation, between 1975 and 1990, Liverpool was dominant. It won 10 titles in England’s top division. It won the European Cup, which preceded the Champions League, four times in eight years. Liverpool F.C. was so successful that for a time it figured as one of England’s most visible exports. Fan clubs were organized throughout Europe, and in places that hadn’t previously followed the sport, such as Australia and across America.

English clubs in those days were owned by ruddy-faced businessmen
who had kicked the ball around as boys and made fortunes with stone quarries or parking lots. That changed when the richest men in the world began buying them up. In 1997, the Egyptian businessman and department store owner Mohamed al-Fayed took control of Fulham, a London team in the second division, and led its promotion into the Premier League; in 2003, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who had made his fortune in oil, aluminum and steel, bought Chelsea; in 2007, Stan Kroenke, the husband of a Wal-Mart heir, began accumulating shares of Arsenal. That same year, the family that had controlled Liverpool for half a century sold out to two American businessmen, Tom Hicks and George Gillett. Hicks owned baseball’s Texas Rangers and hockey’s Dallas Stars; Gillett parlayed an interest in ski resorts into a Nascar team and the N.H.L.’s Montreal Canadiens. Liverpool itself remained a faded port of half a million inhabitants, only marginally less dilapidated than the gritty, gray-toned, postwar city that had produced the Beatles. Its dockside economy attracted far fewer major corporations than London or even Manchester. And it turned out that Gillett and Hicks had little money left for soccer. Within a few years, Liverpool was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and struggling on the field.

In October 2010, through what was essentially a bankruptcy proceeding, Hicks and Gillett were forced to accept a $480 million bid from New England Sports Ventures. John Henry, the former commodities trader and investment manager who served as the majority shareholder, grew up in small-town Missouri and Arkansas. One of his boyhood passions was A.P.B.A. baseball, a dice game in which the actual performances of major leaguers are translated into cards representing each player; Stan Musial was as likely to hit a triple on Henry’s bedroom floor as he was for the St. Louis Cardinals in Sportsman’s Park. Henry became wealthy from an algorithm he devised that predicted fluctuations in the soybean market. The same sort of analysis is knit into his company’s DNA. Almost no decision there, from hiring executives to where the Red Sox shortstop should play for each batter, is made without it.


At the time that Henry’s group, now known as Fenway Sports Group, acquired Liverpool, the club hadn’t finished atop its league in two decades. Since Fenway couldn’t outspend sheikhs and oligarchs, it needed to be smart. In its first six seasons under Fenway’s ownership, Liverpool finished above sixth place only once. It qualified for the Champions League only one of those years, and was eliminated before the quarterfinals. Its reliance on numbers, many soccer people believed, was undermining the football men who should have been making its decisions. The main obstacle Klopp would need to overcome if he hoped to succeed at Liverpool, the English newspaper The Independent wrote, “will be the club’s deep attachment to the theory that players’ statistics — analytics — can provide most of the answers.”

But Graham’s analytics team can only nudge the team’s outcomes in a positive direction incrementally, one recommendation at a time. And because Klopp also gets advice from more conventional sources, the tactics he chooses end up being a mix of the data-driven and the intuitive. In preparation for the Champions League semifinal, he appeared to focus on how the club’s unusually quick defenders could pressure Barcelona’s forwards, intercepting passes and trying to convert them into instant counterattacks. The plan worked, mostly. In the opening minutes of the first game, Barcelona’s players seemed flustered. But as often happens in soccer, a tactical advantage didn’t translate into an immediate goal. Instead, Luis Suarez, a former Liverpool player, scored for Barcelona.

A 1-0 Liverpool loss would have set up a dramatic second game at Anfield, the atmospheric stadium that has been the club’s home since the 19th century. But late in the match, Barcelona’s Lionel Messi, one of soccer’s greats, scored twice more. The last goal was a free kick that curled around a wall of defenders and just past the outstretched hand of Liverpool’s goalkeeper. It seemed to impart the message that no amount of analytical preparation could overcome the transcendent skill of such a player. “In these moments,” Klopp said after the game, “he is unstoppable.”


In the Champions League, goals scored away from home carry additional weight if the score is tied after both games. That meant if Barcelona scored one goal at Anfield, Liverpool would need five to move on. If that wasn’t daunting enough, two of Liverpool’s best players, Mohamed Salah and Roberto Firmino, were hurt and wouldn’t play. Still, when Divock Origi, the substitute for Salah, scored in the game’s seventh minute, the crowd came alive. Then Liverpool scored two more times early in the second half. That set up Alexander-Arnold’s deceptive corner.

Before taking the kick, he caught Origi’s eye. Then, as Alexander-Arnold raced back to the corner, Origi switched his position. The ball reached him on two hops, and he redirected it into the left side of the net. It was a goal that could never have been scripted, or predicted by any calculations. “We had nothing to do with the fourth goal,” Graham emailed me after the game. “I’m always wary of being assigned credit when none is due.”

The great Brazilian player Pelé once called soccer “the beautiful game.” He didn’t coin the phrase, but after he said it, the description stuck. Fluid, at times balletic, soccer isn’t composed of discrete events, like baseball and American football, and there aren’t dozens of scoring plays to dissect, as in basketball. Rather, much of what happens seems impossible to quantify. Talent is often judged exclusively on aesthetics. If you look like a good player, the feeling is, you probably are.

Most sports use a range of statistics to assess teams and players. Until recently, nobody in soccer cared about much beyond who scored the goals. Now we get updates on how many shots different players have taken, what percentage of the time each team has controlled the ball, and plenty of other metrics. But almost none of that seems to provide a clearer explanation of what’s happening on the field, including which team ends up winning.



For example, a ball deflected by a defensive player over the end line gives the opposition a corner kick — a goal-scoring opportunity. In theory, corners are good, and getting more of them than your opponent would seemingly indicate a successful strategy. Except that corners are more helpful to some teams than others. Teams with attackers who are skilled at redirecting centering passes work to create them, but teams with finishers who have the talent to elude defenders often prefer to take their chances in open play. Those teams don’t try to create corners, and they aren’t especially pleased when they happen.

Or consider time of possession. Teams rarely score without the ball, so having it more than the opponent sounds desirable. Yet some teams don’t want possession of the ball. If you don’t have it, you can’t give it up deep in your own end, a member of Iceland’s defensive-minded national team once told me. Iceland’s ballhandlers aren’t especially adept, so its coaches prioritize keeping the ball far from its goal. In 2016, Iceland advanced to the quarterfinals of the European championships, beating countries many times its size, including England — and tying the tournament’s eventual champion, Portugal. In none of those games did it come close to controlling the ball even half the time.



For these sorts of reasons, soccer was assumed to be unsuited to the analytical approach described in Michael Lewis’s 2003 book “Moneyball,” about how the Oakland A’s baseball team found an advantage by evaluating players using different criteria than everyone else. Soccer seemed impossible to quantify. Much of the game involves probing and assessing, moving the ball from player to player while waiting for an opening. And then the only goal might come from a winger who has done little else — after, say, a faulty clearance by a team that otherwise has been entirely dominant. “Our game is unpredictable,” says Sam Allardyce, who has managed 12 clubs over nearly three decades before Everton fired him last year. “Too unpredictable to make decisions on stats. We’re not talking about baseball or American football here.”

Chelsea created the Premier League’s first analytics department in 2008. Arsenal later bought a statistical analysis company, StatDNA. But the managers of those clubs didn’t see an advantage in applying data to the sport, or they were too busy trying to keep their jobs to figure out how to do it. A few years ago, the OptaPro analytics conference emerged in London as a way for the tiny band of soccer quants to present papers to one another. Still, all those charts with arrows and heat maps revealing where most of the action takes place seemed to have little effect on the game. As new metrics emerged, commentators and coaches took pride in repudiating them. When ESPN’s Craig Burley, a former Premier League midfielder, was asked on the air to comment about a team’s “expected goals,” a formula that calculates how often a team should have scored as opposed to how often it actually did, he replied with disbelief. “What an absolute load of nonsense that is,” he shouted. “I expect things at Christmas from Santa Claus, but they don’t come.”

But teams like Chelsea and Arsenal have resources at their disposal that allow them to accumulate the best talent. Compared with them, Liverpool was essentially in the position of those 1990s A’s teams. A different approach was necessary for it to keep up with them. And all those players running around the soccer field were clearly doing something. Every now and then, too, goals were scored. If collecting and analyzing data could help divine a connection, wasn’t it foolish not to try it?


About half an hour into a game at Anfield last January, the midfielder Naby Keita received the ball from his left and started to dribble with elongated strides. At the time, Liverpool led the Premier League, as it had for much of the season. A loss by Manchester City the previous night gave Liverpool an opening to extend that lead to seven points if it could beat Leicester City now. From his seat in the stands, Graham exhorted Keita.

“Go on, Naby,” he said, in his deep Welsh accent. “Go on!”

Keita passed two Leicester defenders. Then he hesitated for a moment and lost the ball. Graham sighed.

“Ahhhh, Naby,” he said.

Graham grew up an hour’s drive from Cardiff as a Liverpool fan. His childhood in the 1970s and ’80s coincided with Liverpool’s era of dominance. It didn’t hurt that one of the club’s best players, Ian Rush, happened to be Welsh. Before each game, he and the three analysts who work under him compile a packet of information. By the time Klopp decides which of their insights are worth passing along to the team, the equations are long gone; the players are only dimly aware that some of the suggestions are rooted in doctorate-level mathematics. “We know someone has spent hours behind closed doors figuring it out,” says the midfielder Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. “But the manager doesn’t hit us with statistics and analytics. He just tells us

what to do.” Often, the advice contradicts what someone merely watching videos of the games might come to believe. Graham and his team could report that a club’s strong-footed left winger sends booming crosses over the defense toward the goal. But the data indicates that the less impressive crosses coming from the right wing, often accurately placed, result in goals far more frequently. That sounds rudimentary. In soccer, it is practically a revolution.


Graham’s weightiest responsibility is helping Liverpool decide which players to acquire. He does that by feeding information on games into his formulas. What he doesn’t do is make evaluations by watching those games. “I don’t like video,” he says. “It biases you.” Graham wants the club that he works for to win, but he also wants his judgments to be validated. “All of these players, there has been discussion of their relative merits,” he said. “If they do badly, I take it as sort of a personal affront. If I think someone is a good player, I really, really want them to do well.”

Keita is one of Graham’s finds. Born in the West African nation Guinea, he was playing for the Austrian club Red Bull five years ago when Graham noticed the data he was generating; it was unlike any he had seen. At the time, Keita was a defensive midfielder, positioned in front of Salzburg’s defenders. Occasionally, defensive midfielders will evolve into central midfielders, who play farther forward. Keita did. Rarely, if ever, will they emerge as attacking midfielders, whose role is largely offensive. Keita did that too.

Keita’s shifting roles made a muddle of the conventional statistics used to quantify a player’s contribution to his club. For example, the position you play in soccer, unlike basketball, has a significant effect on your chances of putting the ball into the goal, or how frequently you leave your feet to nudge it from an opponent. But Graham disdains those statistics anyway. He has only slightly less contempt for some of the more evolved metrics, like the percentage of attempted passes that are completed. Instead, he spent months building a model that calculates the chance each team had of scoring a goal before any given action — a pass, a missed shot, a slide tackle — and then what chance it had immediately after that action. Using his model, he can quantify how much each player affected his team’s chance of winning during the game. Inevitably, some of the players who come out best in the familiar statistics end up at the top of Graham’s list. But others end up at the bottom.


Keita’s pass completion rate tends to be lower than that of some other elite midfielders. Graham’s figures, however, showed that Keita often tried passes that, if completed, would get the ball to a teammate in a position where he had a better than average chance of scoring. What scouts saw when they watched Keita was a versatile midfielder. What Graham saw on his laptop was a phenomenon. Here was someone continually working to move the ball into more advantageous positions, something even an attentive spectator probably wouldn’t notice unless told to look for it. Beginning in 2016, Graham recommended that Liverpool try to get him. Keita arrived at Liverpool last summer.

As of the January game against Leicester City, Keita’s play hadn’t seemed to justify Graham’s endorsement. The calculations insisted that Keita was doing as well as ever, but few fans realized that — and some of Liverpool’s executives probably didn’t, either. For Keita’s sake, and for the sake of Graham’s peace of mind, some goals or assists would help. In the second half, Keita dribbled the ball through several defenders. Somehow, he emerged with nobody between him and the goalkeeper. As Graham lifted himself halfway out of his seat in anticipation, Keita shot. At the same time, a Leicester player careened into him. The ball went wide, and to the displeasure of Liverpool’s fans, no penalty was called. Graham groaned. Soon after, Keita was removed for a substitute. Graham clapped enthusiastically as Keita left the field, but when I asked if he thought Keita had played well, he wouldn’t give me a definitive answer. He would tell me tomorrow, he said, after he looked at the data.

Graham was laboring through a two-year post-doctorate at Cambridge when he realized he didn’t want to be a scientist. Most of the breakthroughs in his area, polymer physics, had been made years before. “The classic papers had been written in the 1970s,” he says. “So you’re searching around for something you can maybe make a little progress on.” When someone forwarded him a notice for a job at an analytics start-up that was hoping to consult for soccer teams, he was intrigued. He landed the job and was told to read “Moneyball.”




For four years, from 2008 to 2012, Graham advised Tottenham. The club was run by a series of managers who had little interest in his suggestions, which would have been true of nearly all the soccer managers at that time. Then Fenway bought Liverpool and began implementing its culture. That included hiring Graham to build a version of its baseball team’s research department. The reaction, almost uniformly, was scorn. “ ‘Laptop guys,’ ‘Don’t know the game’ — you’d hear that until just a few months ago,” says Barry Hunter, who runs Liverpool’s scouting department. “The ‘Moneyball’ thing was thrown at us a lot.”

Graham hardly noticed. He was immersed in his search for inefficiencies — finding players, some hidden in plain sight, who were undervalued. One afternoon last winter, he pulled up some charts on his laptop and projected them on a screen. The charts contained statistics such as total goals, goals scored per minute and chances created, along with expected goals. I was surprised to see Graham working with such statistics, which he had described to me as simplistic. But he was making a point. “Sometimes you don’t have to look much further than that,” he said.

In 2014, Chelsea acquired the contract of the Egyptian attacking midfielder Mohamed Salah. Salah arrived with a reputation as a rising star, though in two years with a Swiss team he scored just nine goals. At Chelsea, he had what was by all accounts an undistinguished tenure, playing in 13 games over two seasons and scoring twice, while spending much of his time being loaned out to other clubs. Eventually, his contract was sold to A.S. Roma, in Italy. At that point, Salah was considered to have little chance of ever succeeding in England.



Playing in the Premier League is unique, according to the English soccer community. Competition is more balanced than elsewhere; nearly every match is a struggle. English players learn the game in frosted conditions that tend to thwart precision passing, fostering a rough, overtly physical style of play. The intensive media attention is distracting. The weather is often terrible. Some players, the assumption holds, just aren’t suited for it. But others don’t get the chance. “There’s this idea that Salah failed at Chelsea,” Graham said. “I respectfully disagree.” Based on Graham’s calculations, Salah’s productivity at Chelsea was similar to how he played before coming to England, and after he left. And those 500 minutes he played for Chelsea constituted a tiny fraction of his career. “They may be slight evidence against his quality,” Graham said, “but they are offset by 20 times the data from thousands and thousands of minutes.” In the conventional notion that playing in England is different, Graham saw an opportunity — an inefficiency in the system.

Graham recommended that Liverpool acquire Salah, who was thriving in Italy. In American sports, the team might have offered another player in exchange. In soccer, players’ rights are bought and sold in a worldwide marketplace. Once a sale price is reached, negotiations begin with the player. If he isn’t satisfied with the salary being proposed, or if he dislikes the city where the team plays or the manager he will play for, he can remain where he is. Grooming emerging talent and then selling the rights to it for a profit can help smaller teams stay solvent. Even some clubs playing in their countries’ top leagues, such as Germany’s Bayer Leverkusen, use the process to generate enough income to remain competitive. “Transfers are where the money is,” Graham said. “They are a huge component of financial performance.”

That July, Liverpool paid Roma about $41 million for Salah. Graham’s data suggested that Salah would pair especially well with Firmino, another of Liverpool’s strikers, who creates more expected goals from his passes than nearly anyone else in his position. That turned out to be the case. During the season that followed, 2017-18, Salah turned those expected goals into real ones. He broke the Premier League record by scoring 32 times. He also became the symbol of Liverpool’s revival. His crown of curly hair and infectious grin, and his stubby legs that somehow ate up ground as he raced across the turf, made him one of soccer’s most recognizable players. In what turned out to be a harbinger of this year’s progress, Liverpool made an unanticipated

run to the final of last season’s Champions League. That provided the first tangible evidence that the strategies put in place by Henry and his Fenway group were working. This season, Salah was one of the three players who led the Premier League in goals. (His teammate Sadio Mané was another.) The website Transfermarkt, which tracks player valuations, estimates his current value at $173 million.


Another acquisition may have been even more important. Soon after arriving at Liverpool, Graham was asked to research a left winger at Inter Milan, Philippe Coutinho. His data strongly endorsed Coutinho. Liverpool bought Coutinho’s rights for about $16 million. Over the next five years, Coutinho’s play contributed to Liverpool’s revival. But his most important contribution was to accrue value. Last year, Barcelona paid Liverpool about $170 million for Coutinho. Soon after, Liverpool spent more than $200 million on three new players: Alisson Becker, the goalkeeper; the midfielder Fabinho; and the fullback Virgil van Dijk. All became crucial contributors this season. These were known commodities, and none came at a bargain price. But without the profit made by selling Coutinho, Henry assured me, those players would not have been acquired.


At Melwood, the club’s training complex in a residential Liverpool neighborhood, Graham works in a white-walled room, down a corridor from the coaches and the cafeteria. Tim Waskett, who studied astrophysics, sits to Graham’s left. Nearby is Dafydd Steele, a former junior chess champion with a graduate math degree who previously worked in the energy industry. The background of the most recent analyst to be hired, Will Spearman, is even less conventional. Spearman grew up in Texas, a professor’s son. He completed a doctorate in high-energy physics at Harvard. Then he worked at CERN, in Geneva, where scientists verified the existence of the subatomic Higgs boson. His dissertation provided the first direct measurement of the particle’s width, and one of the first of its mass. Another club might conceivably hire an analyst like Graham, or Steele, or Waskett, and maybe even Spearman. But it’s almost impossible to imagine any but Liverpool hiring all of them.

As often as possible, the analytics staff arrives at Melwood in time for breakfast. The food in the cafeteria includes locally sourced eggs and five or six kinds of salad greens and beef aged in a glass locker. Players sit at one of two tables with coaches and trainers. The analysts, who look like nobody else in the building, sit at an adjacent table. Greetings are cordial, even friendly. But there’s little evidence that the players know one analyst from another. The morning after the Leicester game, Graham sat with his back to Keita, their chairs touching. Hours before, he’d been shouting at Keita from the stands. Now he was within a foot of him, eating the same poached eggs, yet there was no interaction between the two of them. “If he wants to talk about the game to me, he can initiate that, and I’d be delighted,” Graham said. “Otherwise I’ll leave him in peace.”

At one point, Spearman went to get coffee. He returned with a question rooted in the intersection of breathless fandom and mathematical geekiness: Who would be the most accurately regarded player in soccer? Not the most underrated or overrated, but the one whom conventional wisdom comes closest to gauging correctly.

“It has to be Messi,” he said. “Because if he isn’t the best player in the world, he’s second. So the most that opinion could be off is one place.” As if to punctuate his point, Spearman suddenly spilled his coffee so that it streamed down the middle of the table. The analysts erupted in good-natured jibes. “You’re not doing a good job at convincing anyone that you’re not a nerd,” Waskett said.

Spearman hasn’t had much to do with Liverpool’s recent success. He does almost none of the work that Klopp sees, and he’s rarely involved with discovering players. His mandate is more ethereal. Spearman knows just enough about the sport, or just little enough, to try to change it. “We’re just starting to ask the question, ‘Why don’t we try to play football in a slightly different way?’ ” Graham explains. Soccer is the sum of thousands of individual actions, but the only ones Graham’s model can evaluate are the passes, shots and ball movements that are downloaded from the official play-by-play. “There are still fundamental limitations in the data we have,” Graham says. “It’s still like looking through a very foggy lens.” By working to get the mathematical rendering closer to reflecting what actually happens on the field, recording not just that a defender kicked a pass to a midfielder but how hard it went and what happened when it was received, Spearman is looking to find a path through the fog.



Most of his time is spent creating a model that employs video tracking. It assigns numerical scores to everything that happens to everyone, even when the ball isn’t involved. That includes a fullback racing down the sideline, forcing a lone defender to choose between two players to cover, or a striker getting into position to receive a cross directly in front of the goalkeeper, even if the pass sails over his head — “every action, how much value it adds, how well it was performed,” Spearman says. “Once you have that, you can start to create new approaches.” One might be to script plays, like in the N.F.L., radically altering the nature of a game that has resisted change for more than a century.

First, though, Liverpool needs to figure out how to beat Tottenham. Like baseball’s A’s, this current club still hasn’t won any titles. Another loss in a final, coupled with its Premier League finish behind Manchester City, could be interpreted as confirmation that analytics can get a team only so far. That would be unfair, of course. If soccer were soybeans, you could plug data into an algorithm and know just what to do. Instead, the sport is unpredictable enough to remain fascinating, filled with perfect plans foiled by the imperfections of those sent out to employ them, and undermined by the vicissitudes of chance. The jostle that threw off Keita in the Leicester City game easily could have led to a penalty shot. A successful conversion would have given Liverpool two additional points — and, ultimately, the Premier League title.

But that’s how probability works. Even when odds are diligently calculated, and the options judiciously weighed, the wrong number can still come in. The team that wins isn’t always the one employing the most elegant calculations, or even the one the models predict. It’s a lesson taught by the dice that John Henry rolled during the baseball simulations he played as a kid. That frustrates the analysts, perhaps — but it can make for a beautiful game.

[Chester Perry]

Cheers Falcon really enjoyed that

[Chester Perry]

Another article from Simon Chadwick traces the growth and influence of the Premier League to all the final places in this season European cups, and how it has become big box office

https://theconversation.com/premier-lea ... nce-117030" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It covers a number of themes from other articles this week but adds in the soft power influence that the PL adds to UK PLC

[Chester Perry]

On the day that the Premier League announced that it's free to air tv rights in 40 African countries has been sold to a company run by Sepp Blatters nephew - @tariqpanja writes a story for the New York Times about a host of new evidence left by Chuck Blazer

that PL announcement
https://www.premierleague.com/news/1226895" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

the NY Times article - I still waiting for my free views to rest but no reason why you can't read it if interested

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/spor ... lazer.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

EDIT - Infront who have just won those rights are currently dealing with a bit of a sticky situation where it was found an employee defrauded clients to benefit his company - well it's nice to know the Blatter's are still associated in some way to corrupt practices

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

[Chester Perry]

Football experts from 53 of the 55 member associations in UEFA talk about the state of football in their country. A strange source but interesting reading

https://www.bettingcircle.co.uk/whats-t ... n-country/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

In 2007 Mathew Briggs became the Premier Leagues youngest ever player when he came on for Fulham against Middlesbrough - Fulham spurned the advances of Man Utd and Bayern Munich for him, he played just 11 more times for them over the next 8 years and is now in the 8th tier of the game - in these 3 videos he tries to understand what and why things went wrong for him - it is an illuminating insight of those who fall away from the magic money tree

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsfTV0- ... e=youtu.be" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQJiszIq1o8" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg015WkGdFI" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Simon Chadwick has been a very busy man in the last few days it would seem - another article, here this time with a prospect that the Middle east quarrel being played out by northern English football teams

https://theconversation.com/english-foo ... 1559116322" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

He also wrote this after the World Cup last year

https://theconversation.com/football-ma ... dis-100103" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

An article on "post access sportswriting" - showing how the print media rinse football's magic money tree to death even when they have almost no real access to players or managers

https://www.theringer.com/sports/2019/5 ... ce=twitter" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It is a grim and sorry tale that explains a why stories are so late after the initial event - but that is the economics of the back pages

https://twitter.com/_PaulHayward/status ... 6898172928" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

This Newcastle buyout is throwing out an awful lot of stories with very few confident it will actually amount to anything meaningful

whatever Sheikh Khaled claims

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/48449769" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Interesting family history

https://twitter.com/sportingintel/statu ... 6741439489" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Interesting business connections - "Fit and Proper" anyone

https://twitter.com/NcGeehan/status/1133233661019660288" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

By the way if anyone could transcribe that Chuck Blazer article from the NY Times in post #1241 I would be very grateful -(so few free articles/so many good ones to read)

[Chester Perry]

@jonawils with a really good article on why the Premier League is starting to eclipse the rest in Europe

https://www.1843magazine.com/features/a ... red-europe" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

the politics of European Football

https://twitter.com/gdunbarap/status/11 ... 1302180867" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

French FA president Noel Le Graet is one of the most prominent critics of the ECA plans for post 2024 European Club Competition

[Chester Perry]

Following KPMG's football top 32 valuation report (see post #1230) Deloitte have released their annual report into football finance and gone all New Order doing so

https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/s ... ness_group" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

there is an opportunity to download the whole report on that page and those from previous years too

[Chester Perry]

After last nights Europa League Final @SwissRamble is able to give is final estimate of Revenues from the competition for Chelsea and Arsenal this season

https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/ ... 8277295105" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

After last nights Europa League Final @SwissRamble is in a position to estimate all UEFA payments for Chelsea, Arsenal and Burnley

https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/ ... 8277295105" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

I have been hit by the free article limit again - this time at The Blizzard (3 a month) - It is a really good periodical and writes deep and informative pieces - this one looks particularly interesting - if anyone is willing to transcribe

https://twitter.com/blzzrd/status/1133689201759850497" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Falcon]

Blizzard Article transcribed here for you:

Sepp Blatter

The president of Fifa admits he may stand for re-election in 2015 and reveals concerns over the Qatar World Cup

By Philippe Auclair
1st March 2013


We're in the small hours of the morning in one of Moscow's better hotels, late in the autumn of 2010. A few journalists are sharing gossip around a bottle of Chablis, of which the bar's wine list offers a bewildering selection. All of us have been invited to see at first hand how Russia is coiling the spring in its bid to host the 2018 World Cup. Fifa's decision will be made public in a few weeks' time. 'Made public', not 'made', as it's quite clear to all those who follow these sorts of things closely that a significant majority of the 22 remaining ExCo members (Amos Adamu and Reynald Temarii, both of them suspected of corruption, had been suspended in November) are keen on the Russians. And the Qataris. Quite naturally the conversation drifts to the stories which shroud the process in a smog of allegations, about which most of the bidding nations seem quite happy to give 'private briefings'. No-one's found the smoking gun yet, but everybody's convinced it's been fired a few times. Quite naturally, the name of Sepp Blatter is mentioned time and again. The septuagenarian Blatter, the supreme football politician of our age, must be pulling the strings. But if there are strings to pull, they're of the kind that enabled Christopher Reeve to fly like Superman in those old pre-CGI movies. You just know the special effects squad must have used something but the editor's done a brilliant job. Superman's revving the planet faster than Sputnik, with no strings attached.

"One thing people forget, or fail to get," one of our group says, "is that, at heart, Blatter is a romantic." The natural response might be to laugh. Isn't it agreed that Joseph S Blatter is a bad thing? But we're all listening, as the man who's speaking knows him better than most — certainly better than any of us. He's worked with Blatter for over a decade; he's been party to discussions that we'd all have loved to witness and write about; we also know him to be trustworthy and sincere; he didn't ask for water when the second bottle was brought to our table. Blatter-bashers would struggle to understand how he could have served such a master for so long without becoming tainted himself. But he did, within Fifa, and wasn't. So Sepp is "a romantic", really? Our friend wasn't referring to Blatter's tenure as the President of The World Sociey of the Friends of Suspenders, a position he was elected to in 1973. The story of how the amateur Swiss footballer from Visp and one-time general secretary of the Swiss Ice Hockey Federation placed himself in the wake of João Havelange, climbed up the Fifa ladder and became the ruler of that empire in June 1998, gazumping Lennart Johansson in the process, is well-known and, at first glance, anything but 'romantic'.

But let's take a step back. Joseph Blatter joined the Fifa 'family' in 1975, as the organisation's Technical Director, becoming its General Secretary six years later. Fifa was near-bankrupt in the 1970s. Attendances were falling in almost every single domestic and international competition. Is football a better game to watch now that it was then? The change to Law 12 — a change of which Blatter had been a vocal advocate — banning keepers from handling a back-pass, was met with scepticism when it was introduced in 1992 by the International Board. Few would now question that it had a hugely positive impact on the game, perhaps more than any other such change since the 1925 modification of the offside law. Dangerous tackles from behind were made red card offences in 1998. Again, Blatter had pleaded in favour of a measure that many believed unenforceable or even detrimental to the game. They were wrong. Africa has staged a World Cup. Women's football has developed to an extent that was unthinkable when its first World Cup was held in 1991 in China. Fifa's coffers are bursting with cash — over £740m — which, no matter how questionable the manner in which these millions have been harvested and might have been misused by certain individuals, help finance thousands of grass-root schemes throughout the organisation's 209 associations. Football is objectively healthier now that it was when "the man who has fifty ideas a day, fifty-one of them bad", according to a German wit, decided to throw in his lot with the now-discredited Havelange.

So, yes, perhaps the arch-manoeuverer, the political virtuoso who is always one step ahead of his adversaries, is also a 'romantic', if only for his capacity to turn the conviction that he is acting for the good of the game into a formidable weapon in the fight to gain and hold onto power. Those who dismiss Blatter as an out-of-touch, quasi-senile buffoon because of his suggestions that women footballers should wear "tighter shorts" (January 2004) and gay fans "should refrain from sexual activity" when they attend the 2022 World Cup in Qatar (January 20101) make a mistake that has proven fatal to many of his former rivals: they underestimate him. Meeting the Fifa president face-to-face for the first time, as I did for this interview, conducted on the occasion of the International Football Arena in Zurich2, I was struck — as many others before me have been — by the agility of his mind, his personal charm and his ability to suggest one thing while saying quite another. As is the rule on such occasions, a list of topics (Brazil 2014, Qatar 2022, financial fair-play) had been agreed upon before I could be led into the inner sanctum of Fifa's headquarters, which can only be accessed once your guide's fingerprints have been scanned by a laser beam. Joseph Blatter, the romantic schemer, the man who put chips into footballs, is clearly in favour of cutting-edge technology.


Mr President, Brazil 2014 is now a year and a half away and there are still many doubts as to whether the country will be ready to welcome the World Cup...

...and we'll have had the Confederations Cup by then.

...Do you share any of these doubts?

Listen, as in every process of organising a World Cup which I have lived through for a number of years, there are always delays in the building work. But, ultimately, all the games take place. So, in my case, it is not necessary to be pessimistic and say, "They won't be able to do it." If Brazil, the sixth largest economic power in the world, with its 200 million inhabitants, a footballing nation par excellence, were unable to deliver a World Cup... they'll do it. Yes, there are delays, there's a bit of this, a bit of that. But you've got to say that the political organisation of Brazil plays a role in this. You've got a central government, but this central government has delegated the mission to organise this World Cup to the governors of the various provinces, and within those provinces, you've got the cities, and, naturally, politically speaking, the system isn't the same everywhere, which creates interferences and delays from time to time. I assure you, in the end, everything will be fine even if, as I have seen it with my own eyes before — in Portugal, at the 2004 Euro — you've still got to apply a lick of paint on the opening day of the competition.

The difference, this time, is that there are a number of important, powerful people within Brazil who are openly critical of the whole process, especially as far as the financing is concerned, people who think this money would be better used in other fields. Can this not have an adverse effect on what is happening there?

I am in regular touch with the Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. She delegated all her powers [in this matter] to her sports minister, Mr Aldo Rebelo. We at Fifa have asked our general secretary Jérôme Valcke and his staff to take care of all the administrative details. Now, as you know, Brazil is going through a very dynamic phase of economic development... and social development too. When you've got a big event like [the World Cup], people say, "Yes, football's fantastic," but others add, "We've also got another big event to take care of!" The Olympic Games, of course. They take place in a single city, of course, but they affect the country as a whole. Brazil "saw big." And Brazil has to digest it.

Didn't Brazil see too big?

I don't think so. It's a great country. I'm certain Brazil will be able to deliver a great World Cup. You'll see. As soon as we play the Confederations Cup there [from 15 to 30 June 2013], things are going to move, things are going to get hot! Not like in other countries where football isn't anchored as deeply as it is there in the people. Everyone's a footballer in Brazil. We're going back to the essence of football. Of course, the English will tell you (adopting a mock British accent), "We are the country of Association Football," but Brazil hasn't won five World Cups by chance. They last had a chance to organise it in 1950. Three generations ago. It is only fair that they get a chance to do it again. Brazil will deliver.

Going beyond 2014 and looking ahead to 2022, we've recently heard a number of officials — your Fifa vice-president Michel Platini among others — recommending that the Qatar World Cup should be held in winter, more precisely in November and December 2022, in order not to clash with the Winter Olympics. Are you open to this switch? Would you be in favour of it?

The World Cup is going round the world. We'll be in Russia in 2018, as no eastern European country has ever hosted a World Cup, and the last major global event to take place there was the 1980 Olympics. Then Qatar. Good. The basic conditions — not just for Qatar, but for all the candidates — were the same. It means that the Fifa World Cup is played in June and July. That's the basic condition. And it is on this basic condition that the Executive Committee took the decision to give the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. Now, naturally, a bit late perhaps, we realise... we already knew that it gets very hot in Qatar at this time of the year. The other candidates had battled for their bids on the basis of a World Cup that would be played in June and July. Now, who can change that? Firstly, it is not us, Fifa, who are going to take the initiative to do so, even if eminent... or important members of our Executive Committee3 have expressed themselves [in favour of a winter World Cup]. The basis remains the same: June, July. If someone wants to change that, the request must come from Qatar. Qatar should present a request to Fifa — which Qatar hasn't done yet. No discussion has been held. Voilà. And if you changed something, what would the reaction of the other candidates be? They'd say, "If the basic condition is changed, what's going on, what's happening now?" That's one thing. The other thing is the international schedule — even though, with all parties in agreement, an international schedule can be changed.

Some leagues are completely opposed to this, however. Wouldn't that create a political storm? Wouldn't that be detrimental to football?

I can tell you that Qatar hasn't finished being a subject of preoccupation in the football world.

Should Qatar 2022's Supreme Committee turn to you and say, "Mr Blatter, we've gone deeper into air-cooling technologies, and we really think it'd be better if the tournament was played in November and December," would these words find a sympathetic ear — or would you tell them, "Perhaps it'd be better to reconsider the bid from A to Z?" What would Australia say, or the USA?

Or Japan, or Korea! Listen. If I had to govern the football world with 'ifs'...[laughs] In any case, I cannot give a personal answer. I have to abide by the decisions that have been made by Fifa. It is my duty, my responsibility and my right to defend Fifa's principles. And one of these principles was: June, July.

In what respect would a summer World Cup in Qatar represent a step forward for football?

The important thing for me was that the World Cup should travel round the world. I remember how, when South Africa was chosen to host the 2010 World Cup, I had told the crown prince of Saudi Arabia — who was a passionate supporter of Morocco — that, for me, Africa lies south, not north of the Sahara. He replied, "Mr President, I invite you to think, one day, about the Arab world, and give it the World Cup." That is the case with Qatar. It is the realisation of what I'd said in June 1998, when I was elected president of Fifa. I'd been asked, "What is your programme?" and I'd said, "To give the World Cup to Africa and to go round the world with the competition," so that it wouldn't remain the privilege of Europe and the Americas. We're now facing a problem. But perhaps it's a false problem and the technology [to cool stadiums] will be there in 2022. As Fifa president, I repeat: June, July.

Wouldn't the Americans, the Australians, the Japanese and the Koreans turn against Fifa if it was decided to switch the tournament to winter? Wouldn't that be a plain breach of tender?

In any case, it wouldn't improve Fifa's reputation, I can tell you that.

...which Fifa could do without — which leads me to the question: now that a new Ethics Committee has been named, are you satisfied with the progress that's been made in terms of governance?

We're in the last bend before the last straight. We initiated the reform in 2011 and we have a road map that leads to the 2013 congress [which will be held in Mauritius from 30 May]. The Ethics Committee now consists of two entities, each of which has a completely independent chairman. That's done. What's left to do is to elect the members of the tribunals, which we'll do at this Congress. We'll do the same thing for the Disciplinary and Appeals Committees, in order to have complete separation of powers within Fifa. Second, the Audit and Control Committee, which is an internal FIFA organisation — but with an independently-chosen president — has been set up. Third, there are the statutory changes, which we're now in the process of identifying in consultation with the national associations. We'll have their feedback in February, their answer to questions like: "Should the ExCo be chosen by the Fifa congress, or by the confederations? Should there be an age limit? Should there be a limit to the number of terms that can be served?" All of this is supervised by the Independent Governance Committee which is presided over by Dr Mark Pieth, whose work will be concluded in 2013. This means that we now have safeguards in place — off the pitch. But that's not enough. Fifa, that's 300 million people. You can't have a single tribunal for 300 million people. It only means something if it goes down to the 209 national associations and the six confederations. The system can only work that way. At Fifa level, on 1 June, it'll be done. And then we'll get on with the electoral campaign for 2015 [laughs]. I'll be able to say, "My Fifa is now in calm waters, I can leave the boat in two years' time."

Are you really counting yourself out for the 2015 election?

[Pause]

You're in very good health, you...

...Listen...[laughs]

Never say never?

Never say never again? Well, there'll be candidates. I'm sure of that. I'll have been at Fifa for 38 years in February. We've created a Fifa that is about democracy — all the associations have one vote, the small ones like the big ones — and solidarity. The World Cup must remain the number one competition, because it is our only source of money and, with that money, we can develop football in the whole world. It's been accepted now. But there is now a trend, by which clubs think that they're more important than the rest of the world, than the national teams... but that's not true. Ask any citizen of any country how important he thinks his national team is. Solidarity between clubs and national teams is essential. Fifa stands for discipline, respect, fair-play, not just on the field of play, but in our society as well.

As you mention fair-play, how do you view the 'Platini reform' and the introduction of FFP by Uefa? Could the regulations that are phased in in Europe serve as a model for other confederations, in Asia, for example, where the problem of 'financial doping' is just as acute as it is in Uefa countries?

I must say that, within Fifa, financial fair-play is already safeguarded by our Audit and Control Committee. Each [national] association must exert that control. I'd say that the phrase "financial fair-play" has a pleasant ring to it... but I don't know if there's fair-play in financial matters. In financial matters, it's about the bottom line, profit and loss. Simply call it "audit and control", and you've got it. For the whole world. And it might be a bit simpler to say, audit and control, rather than [respect] fair-play. In "fair-play", there is the word "play". And you shouldn't play with finances. Those who do are gamblers.

When you see what's happening at PSG, and sovereign funds — Qatar, in this case — which are willing to commit unbelievable amounts of money to football, how do you react as a football man and as president of Fifa? Can it work?

As long as you've got serious investors who wish to put money into football, I applaud. It proves that football is attractive. What upsets me, what I find scandalous is when clubs accept fools. We've seen that in England with Portsmouth, we've also seen that in Switzerland. Three clubs have fallen into that trap and succumbed, Neuchâtel-Xamax among them4, of which I am still the honorary president. But as long as you've got investors who are paying the players...You also pay the great stars of cinema and theatre, the singers who give four or five concerts a year and are paid huge amounts of money. Why shouldn't footballers be paid, players who put on a show twice a week for thousands in the stands and millions on television? If it's done seriously, I find nothing shocking about that, either as a football man or as Fifa president. What happens is that you've got clubs which are more popular than others, because they've got the better players, and the others say, "Why not us?" But go back fifty years. Look at the great leagues. The Italian one, for example. Fifty years ago, who was playing for the title? Inter, Milan, Juve. In England, it was between the Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and London clubs. What's changed? Same in Spain and Germany. As the saying goes, "You only lend money to the rich." So, if [new] investors can pull a league up, it's a good thing, I think. What matters is financial equilibrium, audit and control.

But people in France will tell you that it is impossible for a PSG to balance its accounts in the short or medium term. They'll never recoup their investment.

This investment is never rewarded. You have investors, like the Americans in the Premier League, who provide bank guarantees. You have patrons like Abramovich, who give their money to their clubs. You've got Qatar, which is one family [the al-Thani dynasty]. If they put money into football... I haven't got anything against it. How long they'll put money into football is another matter. Will they carry on or not?

So this new money, going into new clubs, disturbing the established order, can be a good thing?

Yes, of course. As long as these investors are serious. Look at Switzerland again. Lausanne, Servette... what happened is that it was not properly controlled by the league or the association. As to PSG, if they've got the money, what's the problem?

One last question: we remember your reaction at the 2010 World Cup, when Frank Lampard scored a 'ghost goal' against Germany, and you said, "I never want to see that again." Fifa has now completed extensive tests of goal-line technology — but how do you reconcile Fifa's promotion of technology with Uefa's reluctance to embrace it?

It's not Uefa which has a different view. It is Monsieur Platini. It is not Uefa. If you go to the associations which compose Uefa, or ask the professional leagues, you'll see what they say. That — that is a Michel Platini idea, Platini who, for a reason... has put it in his head that he didn't want technology on the goal-line, because if you put it on the goal-line, tomorrow you'll use it for off-side decisions, and so on. That's him. When the majority of fans, leagues — and referees — thank Fifa for introducing goal-line technology, that's not very positive for the development of football.

[Chester Perry]

Remember last week at the FT Football Business Summit the English press were falling all over themselves to quote La Liga chief Javier Tebas - at another football summit in Madrid this week he came out with this

https://twitter.com/RobHarris/status/11 ... 6081113088" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I particularly like the bit that because football is a team game doping of players is not an issue - remember It has long been suspected that Spanish teams have been doping for many years (or throughout the period of their unprecedented international success)

[Chester Perry]

Javier Tebas has also been watching a lot of TIFO Football vids on youtube - he played this this afternoon while making the comments in the post above

https://twitter.com/tariqpanja/status/1 ... 7875673089" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

All the furore around Man City and UEFA would have you believe they were the only ones under scrutiny and judgement from the UEFA Club Financial Control Body (CFCB) Adjudicatory chamber - they are not. Both AC Milan and Fenerbahce have been referred recently - Milan for a consecutive charge of the same offence (that they are challenging at the Court of Arbitration for Sport) they had a ruling on last year

AC Milan
https://www.uefa.com/insideuefa/about-u ... 99206.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Fenerbahce - FC Porto also under embargo for failing to wholly meet targets imposed last year
https://www.uefa.com/insideuefa/about-u ... 06588.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

In post #1201I referred to an article referring to the Duff & Phelps report on the value of Stadium sponsorship in the PL - today Offthepitch.com have used it as the basis to say that Daniel Levy has got it wrong in asking for £20m a season

Spurs stadium naming valuation overpriced - by Alex Miller

Tottenham unlikely to negotiate stadium naming rights at current valuation.
Independent report reveals market value of a deal.

Tottenham Hotspur might have overpriced the naming rights valuation of their new stadium, according to latest research.

It is understood Spurs chairman Daniel Levy has placed a £200 million valuation on a naming rights deal for a ten-year rights deal - the equivalent of £20 million a year.

An independent report by Duff & Phelps has calculated the value of naming rights for the new Spurs stadium at £17.5 million a year - the third highest valuation in the Premier League.

The £2.5 million a year mis-match in valuations, explains why the club has so far failed to secure a naming rights partner.

Decreasing value of naming rights
Offthepitch.com understands talks are continuing with several parties, while reports have emerged HSBC walked away from a deal over the club’s valuation.

Many football-marketing experts believe the value of stadium naming rights has decreased in recent years because companies can compare it with other marketing options, including social media.

The value of stadium naming rights - Value per year- Source: Duff & Phelps

Manchester United - £26.75 m
Manchester City - £21.9 m
Tottenham - £17.5 m
Liverpool - £16.9 m
Chelsea - £16.75 m
Arsenal - £16.65 m
West Ham - £5.55 m
Newcastle - £3.9 m
Everton - £3.3 m
Leicester - £3.2 m
Southampton - £1.75 m
Palace - £1.4 m
Brighton - £1.3 m
Wolves - £1.25 m
Watford - £1.15 m
Burnley - £1.1 m
Bournemouth - £800,000
Cardiff - £350,000
Fulham - £300,000
Huddersfield - £200,000

It is unlikely a brand would consider changing the name of the historic Anfield Stadium or Old Trafford, after observing the backlash from Newcastle fans when St James’ Park was changed to the Sports Direct Arena.

The report by the US-based consultancy placed Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium as the most valuable naming rights proposition, with a value of £26.75 million per season.

Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium was second at £21.9 million. Liverpool’s naming rights estimate has risen to £16.9 million, assisted by their appearance in the Champions League final last season and strong league performance this season.

Backlash from Newcastle fans
It is unlikely a brand would consider changing the name of the historic Anfield Stadium or Old Trafford, after observing the backlash from Newcastle fans when St James’ Park was changed to the Sports Direct Arena.

Tottenham Hotspur’s Champions League performances this season have provided a further premium to be paid by a brand wanting to have their name on arguably the best stadium in Europe.

There is also less risk of fan backlash and negative publicity as any potential deal would not involve changing the name of a historic stadium that is sentimental to fans.

The final cost of Tottenham’s stadium project could exceed £1.2 billion.

Construction experts estimated the final bill for the project - including stadium, delay-related costs, land acquisition and related developments will exceed £1 billion.

Most expensive season tickets
Spurs are exceeding expectations on and off the pitch. The club reached the Champions League final this season and posted a word-record profit of £113 million in 2017/18.

Matchday receipts for the same season increased from £45.3 million to £71 million after the move to Wembley and Spurs will likely see a further increase from the new stadium.

The club will have the most expensive season tickets in the Premier League in 2019/20, with adult prices ranging from £795 to £2,200.
Matchday income will be boosted through catering - estimated at £800,000-£1 million per game.

Additional revenues from a stadium naming rights deal would afford the club additional financial strength to pay down construction costs.
A source said: “The club possess the most impressive stadium in the Premier League, but the financial pressures of the construction are only just beginning. A naming rights deal would greatly help.”

-------------------------
Remember post #1113 and Man City altering the sponsor logo to "Choose Etihad" at the Emirates FA Cup final - well Simon Chadwick has spotted a potential opportunity for more of the Gulf dispute to be played out in English football and it could help with Spurs funding the Stadium

https://twitter.com/Prof_Chadwick/statu ... 2321166336" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Came across this today - a blog post from Daniel Geey (@FootballLaw) the author of "Done Deal" a very experienced sports lawyer with a strong Football focus - it is about football clubs setting up sponsorship with betting companies - topical for Burnley fans and English football in general given the general prevalence of it in the game (today West Ham announced an extention of the relationship with Betway in what they claim to be the biggest deal outside the top 6)

https://danielgeey.com/to-gamble-or-not ... -partners/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It never ceases to amaze me just how many different specialists make money out of 22 guys kicking a ball around on a patch of grass

[Devils_Advocate]

If anyone has £1.1m laying around 'The Long Ball Arena' has a good ring to it

[Chester Perry]

Following on from post #1255 The Telegraph have this article - strangely it does not mention the doping point

La Liga president continues row with Manchester City chairman over suggestions of racism - Tom Morgan, Sports News Correspondent
30 May 2019 • 10:01pm

A war of words between Javier Tebas, the outspoken president of La Liga, and Manchester City escalated on Thursday as he accused the club's chairman Khaldoon Al-Mubarak of ignorance over insinuations he is racist.

In the latest of a tit-for-tat exchange, Tebas responded to an interview with the club website in which Al-Mubarak had accused rivals of "jealousy". Last week Tebas said the Premier League champions were damaging European football with their "state-sponsored" cash reserves. In response, Al-Mubarak said on Sunday that there was something "deeply wrong about bringing ethnicity into the conversation".

However, speaking in Madrid ahead of the Champions League final, Tebas said: "I think there is a lot of ignorance about certain things, firstly about how financial control works in European football and ignorance on regards to financial doping.

"I am not at all racist. I have no issues about ethnicity. How can I be racist if two of my grandchildren are Arab? I would be a racist against my own grandchildren! That just shows the ignorance and how easy it is to say things without knowing all the details and people's background.

"You are talking the ethnicity, it's not true. People get confused when I say they are opening up the petrol and gas and finance it like state clubs. It's not the first time I've spoken about it - we had [Roman] Abramovich at Chelsea - they had a lot of losses and he covered it by putting in more money, but he doesn't do it any more."

The outspoken president of La Liga was critical of a lack of regulation from Uefa, which he also denounced over proposals which could severely limit entrance criteria to the Champions League to create billions more pounds for Europe's biggest clubs.

Tebas has been a long-standing critic of City and has previously expressed doubts over whether the Premier League champions or Paris St-Germain would face sanctions because of a tangled web of financial relationships with Europe's governing body. Both City, who are facing a looming one-year ban over an alleged £60million deception, and PSG deny wrong-doing over financial fair play.

“The problem with PSG and City is they are state-run clubs: one off petrol-money, one off gas,” Tebas said at the FT Business in Football summit last week.

"The damage happening on Euro football is massive because they are inflating the market so clubs have to pay ridiculous sums to keep their players."
---------------------------

In this article Tebas is quoted as saying Real and Barca have never been financed by the Spanish State - hmmmmmmmmm - might be losing that argument I think (still no mention of doping other than financial)

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

Not mentioned here either - though he has a dig that match-fixing must be going on elsewhere and it seems that only Spain are doing something about it - that and playing down the PL success in Europe this year by effectively saying - why did it take them so long?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/48459730" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

or even here

https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/soccer ... um=twitter" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

If anyone has £1.1m laying around 'The Long Ball Arena' has a good ring to it

If we did that I would suspect that we would have to drop the sponsorship of the individual stands - I do wonder if that adds up to more for a club like ours where the traditional long associated (revered?) name would be dfficult for a sponsor to subsume/replace

I am expecting an announcement of a new sponsor of the Cricketfield Stand (see post #937) though given the rise in the shirt sponsorship deal it could be them

[Chester Perry]

Posted on the Bury no wages thread earlier this week that Bristol City had been threatened with being struck off due to failure to post their accounts with companies house - Well they have been made public today - @kieranMaguire has a poke through them

https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/statu ... 8941932545" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

- yet another EFL club in a sorry state this one with operational losses of £65k per week

and Kieran also points out that with these figures League 1 as a whole lost £1.2m a week in 2017/18 - Blackpool and Oldham still to post accounts

https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/statu ... 3977091072" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Shaun Harvey officially leaves the EFL today - @KieranMaguirre has started a Shaun Harvey Appreciation Thread #SHAT

https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/statu ... 2152016896" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

Leicester, QPR and Bournemouth all tried to get away without paying FFP fines to the EFL (all have resolved their situations with fines far less than originally proposed). Rules were tightened and punishments toughened including the prospect of points deductions determined by the EFL being carried into the Premier League

Following the Premier League's refusal to sanction the above teams, the EFL aligned it's FFP rules to the Profit and Sustainability ones in the PL, This was done with FL approval and increased hopes that the punishments could be passed through (with PL Blessing)

http://www.financialfairplay.co.uk/fina ... lained.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Now Aston Villa, who have been walking a financial tightrope since relegation are heading back to the PL with many believing they have flouted FFP (Profit and Sustainability rules to get there) are expected to avoid any points deduction that should be coming their way as the PL will not enforce it.

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

[Chester Perry]

Comprehensive article in the Newcastle Chronicle (actually produced by the Press Association) outlining why Middle East Investors are interested in the English game - includes perspectives from a range of specialists including Simon Chadwick

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

[duncandisorderly]

Shaun Harvey officially leaves the EFL today - @KieranMaguirre has started a Shaun Harvey Appreciation Thread #SHAT

https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/statu ... 2152016896" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Now this is a level of childishness I can get behind.

[Chester Perry]

FC Bayern CEO Rummenigge gets a grilling from Der Spiegel on the proposed changes to European Club Competition post 2024 - and backtracks from the talk within the Football Leaks documents

https://www.spiegel.de/international/eu ... 70196.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Chester Perry]

The clearest possible representation of tv payments across the top 4 leagues in Europe

https://twitter.com/SBI_Barcelona/statu ... 5235485696" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;