Football's Magic Money Tree

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Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sat Aug 28, 2021 7:57 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Sat Aug 28, 2021 3:49 pm
this is interesting, even astonishing, the Spanish government apparently extends repayment schedules to 10 years to loans made to Real Madrid and Barcelona - is this another case of State aid for the European Union to rule against again - though we know that takes years to reach a conclusion

https://twitter.com/tariqpanja/status/1 ... 1245178883

a basic translation:

Money bag Spain's government grants rescheduling to Barca and Real to repay their loans.

White heavy check mark The two clubs now have 10 years to repay the amounts borrowed, 100M for Barça and 200M for Real!
On the face of it this scheme that Barcelona and Real Madrid are benefitting from is similar to that from the Bank of England that both Arsenal and Tottenham utilised (and for roughly similar sums) the difference being that they were due within 12 months, though could have been rolled over for another 12 months) which both have now replaced with commercial loans.

https://www.ico.es/ico/linea-avales

It is also notable that the notice says the loans are subject to European State Aid regulations

Quickenthetempo
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Quickenthetempo » Sat Aug 28, 2021 9:03 pm

Hi Chester.

Has there been anything said about when the installments had to be paid to Garlick?

I've been told tonight the new owners have already defected payment on the first installment. It's been over 6 month so could be true.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sat Aug 28, 2021 9:46 pm

Quickenthetempo wrote:
Sat Aug 28, 2021 9:03 pm
Hi Chester.

Has there been anything said about when the installments had to be paid to Garlick?

I've been told tonight the new owners have already defected payment on the first installment. It's been over 6 month so could be true.
nothing in the press (and I do not have any contacts around the club) but that same rumour appeared from more than one poster on a thread this week,

I think most people thought this summer was the first instalment date given that at the time of the takeover it was reported as a tight schedule. To my mind such a schedule was dependent on a share flip or a significant player sale. From a Mike G and John B perspective you wouldn't want to force the handback at this stage as it would provide no financial benefit to anyone and more importantly Dyche has not renewed his contract yet, as ever I suspect his actions will determine more about our future than anyone else.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Quickenthetempo » Sat Aug 28, 2021 9:55 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Sat Aug 28, 2021 9:46 pm
nothing in the press (and I do not have any contacts around the club) but that same rumour appeared from more than one poster on a thread this week,

I think most people thought this summer was the first instalment date given that at the time of the takeover it was reported as a tight schedule. To my mind such a schedule was dependent on a share flip or a significant player sale. From a Mike G and John B perspective you wouldn't want to force the handback at this stage as it would provide no financial benefit to anyone and more importantly Dyche has not renewed his contract yet, as ever I suspect his actions will determine more about our future than anyone else.
Sadly it came from someone who would know, who's in and around the club.
They said the investment from the East Coast of America has not materialised.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sat Aug 28, 2021 10:20 pm

Quickenthetempo wrote:
Sat Aug 28, 2021 9:55 pm
Sadly it came from someone who would know, who's in and around the club.
They said the investment from the East Coast of America has not materialised.
Hardly surprising given the financial situation, and general outlook that I have been pointing out for a long time, which includes an Independent regulator changing the distribution rules and both UEFA and FIFA favouring a top league of no more than 18 clubs, along with clubs starting to behave in a similar manner to Championship ones but this time wanting European football rather than promotion to the Premier League.

If the suspected transfer spend comes off this summer we will need our revenues to rise significantly to spend again in the next couple of years next or sell a star asset.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sat Aug 28, 2021 10:27 pm

this today from Scorecard column of the Financial Times seems particularly fitting for this thread particularly the last sentence

How football’s leagues stepped up . . . and why it might not be enough

It’s hard to imagine CVC Capital Partners, the Luxembourg-based private equity firm, lending to any individual club in the Spanish second-division. But Javier Tebas, president of Spain’s La Liga, negotiated a deal this month that will see roughly €2bn from CVC redistributed to clubs across the top two tiers in the form of interest-free loans in exchange for a slice of La Liga’s TV money.

In recent months European football leagues have shown that they can borrow on behalf of clubs to obtain finance that smaller teams would struggle to obtain from mainstream lenders.

The investment management arm of US insurer MetLife was willing to provide a £117.5m borrowing facility to the English Football League, which runs the Championship and two other divisions below the elite Premier League, allowing clubs to meet certain tax liabilities.

“As a collective, the security within football is a lot stronger than it is on an individual case by case business,” said Ian Clayden, a partner at consultancy BDO. “It is what a number of clubs are telling us, they would welcome the opportunity to access some sort of growth or development fund.”

But some club executives and advisers are cautious. They say deeper reforms are needed to change the behaviour — overspending on players to win games — that left clubs ill-prepared for the coronavirus cash crunch.

As Tracey Crouch MP reviews UK football finances and governance, the EFL is pressing for more meaningful change, advocating for changes to the way TV money is distributed. It also wants cost controls to keep player wages in check. Stepping back, European football’s governing body Uefa, led by president Aleksander Ceferin, is considering new curbs on player wages and transfer fees.

“It’s very easy to be sustainable,” said Simon Hallett, the owner of Plymouth Argyle, which plays two levels below the Premier League. “You just stop spending so much.”

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sat Aug 28, 2021 11:01 pm

Simon Chadwick is intrigued as to how PSG, Manchester City and even Chelsea are targeted/called out for owner behaviours at home and their geo political aims arising from their involvement in football yet with increasingly aggressive actions in Thailand, Leicester and their owners the Srivaddhanaprabha family who have very close ties to the government/royal family are not given the same treatment

https://twitter.com/Prof_Chadwick/statu ... 4389929985

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Aug 30, 2021 2:46 pm

@SwissRamble looks at the financials of Serie A clubs

https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/ ... 6595528704

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Aug 30, 2021 2:51 pm

This is an interesting perspective on the business of Sky Italia over the last 12 months

https://twitter.com/frankdunneTVSM/stat ... 5203770371

"Sky Italia lost the bulk of the Serie A rights to DAZN. They grabbed Ligue 1 and then renewed with the Premier League. Didn't look like much at the time. Then Messi went to PSG and now CR7 to United. They also bagged Serie B and Serie C. I have a feeling Sky are going to be OK."

of course it has to be said that Serie is currently more competitive than it has been for years which in itself makes it an attractive league to watch

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Aug 30, 2021 3:06 pm

Birmingham City continue to be in the news - mainly for the wrong reasons surrounding it's ownership and how they handle the management of the club, this blog article from from a fan shows the desperately tangled web the owner has created so he is very difficult to find - it involves some serious detective work, kudo's to blogger almajir

https://almajir.medium.com/desperately- ... eb5b53aaa5

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Aug 30, 2021 3:21 pm

The new owners of MLS Franchise Orlando City tell Sportico.com why they paid 10 times revenues for the club it's associated women's team and stadium (that is roughly 1.5 times what the Burnley takeover was valued at last December)

Vikings Co-Owner Explains Wilf Family’s Orlando Soccer Strategy
JOHNWALLSTREET AUGUST 30, 2021

The Wilf family recently closed on their purchase of Orlando City SC (MLS), the Orlando Pride (NWSL) and the teams’ venue, Exploria Stadium. The Minnesota Vikings owners are reported to have paid between $400-$450 million for the assets.

Considering MLS teams are trading at tech-like multiples and that some soccer clubs worldwide are dire need of capital, it is reasonable to wonder why the Wilfs chose to buy Orlando SC. Chairman Mark Wilf cited several factors in his investment thesis, including confidence that MLS is headed in the right direction, soccer’s promising growth trajectory within North America, and his familiarity with the rapidly growing Orlando market (the 2020 Census revealed the Orlando metropolitan area was the second fastest growing large metro in the county).

Our Take: The Wilf family is not new to MLS. The collective (which includes Vikings principal owner and chairman Zygi Wilf, Vikings vice-chairman and co-owner Lenny Wilf, as well as Mark Wilf, the Vikings president and co-owner) has been a part of John Ingram’s ownership group in Nashville since 2017. Prior to buying into Nashville SC, the Wilfs tried to bring an expansion club to Minneapolis. The league ultimately awarded the team to a group led by Bill McGuire.

Serving in a limited partnership capacity for the last four years has given the Wilf family the chance to take a close look under MLS’ hood and reaffirmed their desire to be controlling owners within the league. “We have been at ownership meetings, we have gotten to know Don Garber and others, and we have been very impressed with how the league has been growing step by step; how the talent level is improving step by step. [We have] also been very impressed with the ownership around the table, the facilities that are being constructed and the strength of the franchises,” Mark Wilf said.

Being around the league also helped to solidify the Wilfs’ belief that soccer in North America remains on an upward trajectory. The game’s popularity “continues to increase,” Wilf said. “The 2026 World Cup will enhance [excitement around the sport] and bring on a whole new generation of passionate fans. Of course, it has a very high participation rate amongst youth in America. That is a great recipe to keep this [arc] moving forward.” The Wilf family is actively working with the Greater Orlando Sports Commission to try to bring World Cup games to Central Florida.

The Wilfs have looked at many team ownership opportunities over the years. They pulled the trigger on this one in part because of the family’s familiarity with the market, as well as “a great stadium situation and a great fan base,” Wilf said. “It is the overall picture that makes us believe [there is a lot of runway for growth].”

The family has done real estate business in the area “for many, many years,” Wilf said. For what it’s worth, there is a small amount of property around the stadium that could be developed. But Wilf indicated this investment was primarily driven by the sports ownership opportunity, which includes the women’s game. “The Orlando Pride being part of this purchase was something exciting to us.”

U.S. sports fans have heard about soccer being next for more than a quarter century already. So, there is certainly some skepticism that the sport will ever reach the heights that warrant today’s double-digit revenue multiples. But as Wilf noted, none of the big four sports were on top overnight. “Real stable investment in infrastructure, great venues, great fan affinity; that is how it grows,” he said.

The cost certainty afforded by MLS, along with the closed nature of the league, was “certainly a part of how [the family] looked at the purchase,” Wilf said. (It greatly reduces risk while the league grows). So, naturally he doesn’t believe MLS clubs should be trying to outspend European clubs for players at this point. Instead, he supports the league taking a longer-term approach to improving its on-field product. “As revenues incrementally grow, player development grows, the quality of play grows; that all lifts [the game],” he said.

The new owners view youth development as a means to “grow the game, grow engagement and also be a viable part of the business as these players become successful on the U.S. and global stages,” Wilf said.

They intend to invest heavily in the club’s academy platform. “It is something we are going to emphasize,” he said. “Right now, we have a U-17 and a U-15 club. We’re going to grow that [on the men’s side] and potentially on the women’s side, as well.”

But while it could take time to realize returns from an investment in player development, the new ownership group believes there are opportunities for shorter-term revenue growth in ticket and sponsorship sales. Wilf also noted that MLS’ national media rights deal is coming up for renewal following the 2022 season (though a 200% increase would represent an increase of less than $4 million/year per club).

The family believes their experience operating Minnesota’s pro football franchise and what Wilf calls a “great sports management team” will help to make their first foray into the soccer business as controlling owners a success. The Orlando SC chairman suggested relationships developed over the last 17 years have already proven to be beneficial as the group works through the process of hiring a new CEO.

It remains to be seen if sponsors will value synergies between the Wilf family’s two pro sports franchises, which are in two distinctly different markets.

The Wilfs paid ~10x revenue for Orlando City–less than the league average (12.2x), but still a significantly greater multiple than the average within any of the other big four leagues. One prominent sports banker suggested the multiple corresponds with the perceived growth opportunity.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Aug 30, 2021 4:45 pm

FIFA release a study of the last 10 years of International Transfers - no surprise the Portuguese clubs top the list of most transfers out by revenue, or that Portugal is the country where the greatest net profit is made on transfer business, similarly England makes the greatest net losses in transfers due to have the greatest spend (mainly in the Premier League)

https://digitalhub.fifa.com/m/47c2f0047 ... Report.pdf

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Aug 30, 2021 6:22 pm

tomorrow sees the 15th anniversary of a shock double signing which eventually led to a massive upheaval in transfer rules as well as a long running legal saga and the fall out out of it was probably more harmful to another club. THese days of course a signing of the magnitude of Tevez and Mascherano to West Ham would be subject to intense scrutiny in the media and by fans, then no one really looked beneath the surface - this from the BBC

Football's most controversial transfer deal? How Carlos Tevez became a West Ham legend
By Harry De Cosemo BBC Sport
Last updated on2 hours ago2 hours ago.

The story began with tension and awkwardness, and ended in the sort of drama that would make Hollywood blush.

On 31 August 2006, 15 years ago on Tuesday, Argentine duo Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano signed for West Ham United, arriving from Brazilian club Corinthians in a deal that was shrouded in mystery.

It would dominate conversation all season, cast a shadow over the Premier League relegation battle and even result in legal proceedings that lasted two years.

'If you make a signing like that, you should be shouting about it from the rooftops'

After impressing at the World Cup in Germany for Argentina that summer, Tevez had been linked with a move to Chelsea. But suddenly the pair appeared, looking rather stunned, holding shirts alongside Hammers boss Alan Pardew at Upton Park.

Their statement didn't elaborate on much, specifying only that they had signed permanent contracts and they represented a coup. But it was the suggestion that "all other aspects of the transfer will remain confidential and undisclosed" which raised eyebrows.

"I was at work and I got a text from a West Ham-supporting mate who said we'd signed the two of them, and I literally replied with: 'Yeah, and the cows jumped over the moon,'" Daniel Hurley, author of The Greatest Escape - a book about the team's 2006-07 campaign - tells BBC Sport.

"I'm baffled that nobody looked into [the transfer] more at the time. To pull off signings like that and basically say 'we don't want to talk about it' is so strange. If you make a signing like that, you should be shouting about it from the rooftops."

As it turned out, the club had broken third-party ownership rules after it was found that the rights to both Tevez and Mascherano were partially held by agent Kia Joorabchian's company, Media Sports Investment (MSI).

The issue came to light when Mascherano joined Liverpool in January, having made just five league appearances in East London.

By then, they had been taken over by a consortium led by Icelandic businessman Eggert Magnusson, and Pardew had been sacked and replaced by Alan Curbishley, with West Ham embroiled in a relegation battle.

Tevez's first goal came after 1,142 minutes on 4 March in a defeat by Spurs - two days after the club were officially charged with wrongdoing over the deal - before he scored in victories over Middlesbrough and Blackburn Rovers.

"Carlos' English wasn't great, but he had a good interpreter who fit in so well with the lads," said January signing Matt Upson.

"He would help him around the training ground, but everyone accepted Carlos - he had that type of character about him."

'If Wigan or Watford broke the rules, we'd have been getting a points deduction'

Pressure was growing at the bottom, with West Ham's rivals demanding a points deduction for the Tevez and Mascherano affair. The Premier League fined them £5.5m, a record at the time, a day before they beat relegation rivals Wigan on 28 April.

"The timing of the decision annoyed me," says Paul Jewell, Wigan's boss at the time. "They came to Wigan the next day, and they were bouncing; they were on a run and beat us 3-0. It should have been dealt with straight away, when it was first flagged up.

"I had someone from the Premier League in my office, and I said: 'If that had been Wigan or Watford who broke the rules, we'd have been getting a points deduction - the reason West Ham aren't is because they are a big club.' His words were: 'I agree with you, but I'll never say that publicly.' I think they were hoping West Ham were going to go down."

At the time, Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore denied any suggestion of bias.

"The punishment wasn't a points deduction at that point, it was relegation," Hurley adds. "Any deduction sends us down, and I think they held the decision so late assuming we'd be down anyway. But we kept winning."

Having been 10 points behind 17th place in early March, a run of six wins in eight games left the Hammers needing a point against already crowned champions Manchester United to guarantee safety on the final day.

'If it was fiction, you'd think it was unrealistic'
Tevez would have the final say as he scored the winner at Old Trafford to secure West Ham's survival.

"If it was fiction, you'd think it was unrealistic," Hurley says. "We had no idea whether we owned Tevez or not, so it was all very murky even then. But we were hoping he would stay, especially after that game."

Sheffield United, who were instead relegated after a final-day loss to Wigan, would then take West Ham to a tribunal and were awarded a £20m out of court settlement in 2009, after it was agreed that Tevez's goals were the pivotal difference in the outcome two years earlier. The Argentine left for Manchester United in the summer of 2007.

"Nobody ever really talks about Mascherano with us," Hurley says. "But when we played Man United the following year, Tevez's first return, before the game, he walks around the pitch doing the 'Hammers' sign. He wasn't even playing for us; he was only with us a few months."

He may have come in through the back door, but left an east-end icon.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Aug 30, 2021 6:35 pm

Today Hearts become the country's largest fan-owned club - a plan we have known of for some time

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/58385733

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Aug 30, 2021 9:11 pm

Tom Reed for Football365.com with some more of the background behind today's confirmation that Hearts are now fan owned

https://www.football365.com/news/hearts ... tle-united

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by GodIsADeeJay81 » Wed Sep 01, 2021 11:46 pm

https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/statu ... 52515?s=19

Sheff Utd borrowing against future parachute payments?
That sounds a bit messy

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QPR Crowdfunding

Post by Paul Waine » Fri Oct 01, 2021 8:21 pm

QPR ask fans to crowdfund new £20m training ground

Tom Roddy, Friday October 01 2021, 12.01am, The Times

Queens Park Rangers have set up a scheme that allows supporters to buy bonds in the club to help finance a new £20 million training ground.

The west London club received planning permission this week to build a training base on a 27-acre site at Heston Sports Ground in Hounslow, which is due to be completed by the 2022-23 season.

QPR’s bond, which has a minimum subscription of £500 and no upper limit, is being used to crowdfund the costs with Tifosy Capital and Advisory. The bond will pay 5 per cent gross interest annually, with an additional 3 per cent gross in club credit, as well as a one-off 25 per cent bonus should QPR win promotion to the Premier League during the scheme’s five-year lifetime.

“As a board, we have a clear vision for QPR: to deliver competitive and entertaining football while ensuring the club becomes self-sustainable,” Amit Bhatia, QPR’s chairman, said. “The new training ground is designed to underpin a renewal of the footballing fundamentals at QPR, to enable the club to compete more effectively on the pitch and to help attract and develop the best talent.”

Norwich City launched a similar bond scheme, also through Tifosy, in 2018 to raise £5m in funds for the Colney Training Centre which was opened in August 2019.

Norwich’s bond sold out before being made publicly available, with more than 700 supporters and investors registering and subsequently receiving a 25 per cent bonus when Norwich were promoted the following year.

**************************

Sounds like a great deal on offer to QPR fans: 5% interest, plus additional 3% to spend at club (I wonder if it can be spent on STs?) and 25% bonus if QPR get promoted to the Premier League. And, the bond principal returned at the end of 5 years.

I wonder how many of the Norwich fans who subscribed for bonds to fund their Colney Training Centre will be using some of their 25% bonus to pay for travel to Turf Moor tomorrow? Maybe they have already travelled up today and are staying at one of the smarter hotels in the area.

I know BFC fans bought shares i previous years. If the opportunity had been there, would you have subscribed for bonds, on similar terms as above, towards the funding of the Gawthorpe/Barnfield re-development?

UTC

PS: This belongs on the Magic Money Tree thread. I've not seen that for some days. More importantly, I don't think I've seen any posts by Chester Perry for some days.

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Re: QPR Crowdfunding

Post by Paul Waine » Fri Oct 01, 2021 9:05 pm

Paul Waine wrote:
Fri Oct 01, 2021 8:21 pm
QPR ask fans to crowdfund new £20m training ground

Tom Roddy, Friday October 01 2021, 12.01am, The Times

Queens Park Rangers have set up a scheme that allows supporters to buy bonds in the club to help finance a new £20 million training ground.

The west London club received planning permission this week to build a training base on a 27-acre site at Heston Sports Ground in Hounslow, which is due to be completed by the 2022-23 season.

QPR’s bond, which has a minimum subscription of £500 and no upper limit, is being used to crowdfund the costs with Tifosy Capital and Advisory. The bond will pay 5 per cent gross interest annually, with an additional 3 per cent gross in club credit, as well as a one-off 25 per cent bonus should QPR win promotion to the Premier League during the scheme’s five-year lifetime.

“As a board, we have a clear vision for QPR: to deliver competitive and entertaining football while ensuring the club becomes self-sustainable,” Amit Bhatia, QPR’s chairman, said. “The new training ground is designed to underpin a renewal of the footballing fundamentals at QPR, to enable the club to compete more effectively on the pitch and to help attract and develop the best talent.”

Norwich City launched a similar bond scheme, also through Tifosy, in 2018 to raise £5m in funds for the Colney Training Centre which was opened in August 2019.

Norwich’s bond sold out before being made publicly available, with more than 700 supporters and investors registering and subsequently receiving a 25 per cent bonus when Norwich were promoted the following year.

**************************

Sounds like a great deal on offer to QPR fans: 5% interest, plus additional 3% to spend at club (I wonder if it can be spent on STs?) and 25% bonus if QPR get promoted to the Premier League. And, the bond principal returned at the end of 5 years.

I wonder how many of the Norwich fans who subscribed for bonds to fund their Colney Training Centre will be using some of their 25% bonus to pay for travel to Turf Moor tomorrow? Maybe they have already travelled up today and are staying at one of the smarter hotels in the area.

I know BFC fans bought shares i previous years. If the opportunity had been there, would you have subscribed for bonds, on similar terms as above, towards the funding of the Gawthorpe/Barnfield re-development?

UTC

PS: This belongs on the Magic Money Tree thread. I've not seen that for some days. More importantly, I don't think I've seen any posts by Chester Perry for some days.
Bump.

Looks like the previous post on MMT thread was 1st September.

Where's CP? He could be expected to be posting several times a week on this thread.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by edlass » Fri Oct 01, 2021 9:14 pm

I think he alluded to packing it in. I hope he has been able to forget all about football!

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by GodIsADeeJay81 » Thu Oct 07, 2021 9:54 am

https://theathletic.com/news/barcelona- ... 8PsKvP0knr

Barcelona were really hanging over the financial precipice it seems.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by claretandy » Fri Nov 05, 2021 6:06 pm

I see that the new TV deal signed with the American broadcasters is going to be worth another £9M per club, per season. No sign of the bubble bursting just yet.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by GodIsADeeJay81 » Fri Nov 05, 2021 6:33 pm

Leeds - the 49ers now own 44% of the club, long they're expected to assume full control.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Goody1975 » Fri Nov 05, 2021 7:00 pm

Chester Perry is an excellent poster, I do hope he returns soon. This thread has been an excellent addition to this board.
These 4 users liked this post: levraiclaret HandforthClaret tiger76 Long Time Lurker

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by rufus lumley » Fri Nov 05, 2021 7:26 pm

It's my holiday reading.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by GodIsADeeJay81 » Fri Nov 12, 2021 7:50 pm

Revealed: How much each Prem club can spend on players under FFP rules https://mol.im/a/10108067 via http://dailym.ai/android

We do get a mention and it's £171 million, but they state at the end of the article that it would destroy the club if we did that at present

It's also not a target to aim for, but an allowable loss.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by GodIsADeeJay81 » Thu Dec 02, 2021 7:32 am

https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/ ... -wOiw&s=19

After Villa's Chief Executive Christian Purslow appeared on Talksport the other day questioning the need for a independent regulator for football, Swiss Ramble took a closer look at Villa's finances.

If nothing else, Villa highlights the need for an independent regulator when you see how much money their owners have pumped into the club and also written off at the same time.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by GodIsADeeJay81 » Thu Jan 06, 2022 11:26 am

Man City have announced a new partnership deal with a company called Masdar.

Man City and Masdar are both part of the same overall business group...
Sheikh Mansour is directly involved with both of them,

You'd assume Newcastle are watching and learning here.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by claptrappers_union » Thu Jan 06, 2022 11:46 am

As long as the Premier League considers it to be "fair market value" there’s no issues. Newcastle we’re granted permission to let Saudi companies sponsor them in December

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/59657255.amp

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by GodIsADeeJay81 » Thu Jan 06, 2022 12:11 pm

Yeah I know that, City supported Newcastle all the way in that one for obvious reasons

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by RammyClaret61 » Thu Jan 06, 2022 12:12 pm

Newcastle will become another of those clubs who’s players won’t want to play twice a week, will want a break over Christmas. There manager will join the unlimited subs campaign. Their fans will get bigger chips on their shoulders, becoming unbearable. Etc etc etc.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by aggi » Tue Jan 11, 2022 4:01 pm

I see PPLive (the Chinese broadcaster who ended the deal and refused to pay) have now been ordered to pay.
https://apnews.com/article/soccer-sport ... c96c2a2a40
Will be interesting to see if they actually do pay.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Mar 01, 2022 12:46 pm

This is not a return to the way I used to feed posts into this thread, just a couple of articles that remind you of all that it has covered, and why it was important

first up Miguel Delaney in today's Independent

Russia going to war finally removes football’s veil of pretence
If the first casualty of war is truth, it sadly shows how much deception there is in football that it has taken a conflict to bring about some clarity, writes Miguel Delaney
1 hour ago

It was a situation the game hadn’t seen before, but led to a clarity that it has so badly lacked.

Mere minutes after Fifa had announced the ludicrous plan for Russia to compete in the World Cup play-offs without flags or symbols, their next opponents just cut right through that.

Poland’s federation chief Cezary Kulesza called it for what it was.

“In a situation of war in Ukraine,” he said, “we are not interested in engaging in a game of pretences.”

You couldn’t have a better description of what the world of elite football is. One possible effect of this disgraceful war, however, is that those pretences are vaporised.

The situation is far too serious for anyone to have time for football’s self-justifying nonsense. How else to describe some of the scenes in the game over the last few days?

Fifa’s about-turn, in finally banishing Russia, said so much.

Before that, there was Roman Abramovich taking himself out of the game, at least in appearances. For years, the Chelsea owner’s legal team have used the law to suppress even speculation about his relationship with the Russian state and Vladimir Putin. The war prompted Labour MP Chris Bryant to explode all that and use parliamentary privilege to bring the subject into the open, calling for sanctions. The situation escalated to the extent that Abramovich stepped back from Chelsea, with a lot of speculation about what next. The club insist there is no cause to sanction him, and he has secured a series of legal apologies from media over claims of links to Putin.

That “non-political” pretext, however, has led to amazement within the game at claims that Abramovich is now in the position to try and broker peace talks with Ukraine and Russia.

Before that, there was the double-think required at Goodison Park. The uplifting heartfelt gestures by the players, staff and supporters of Everton and Manchester City were unfairly and unfortunately undercut by everything around them.

There were many advertisements for USM, a company which has as a director the club’s influential investor, Alisher Usmanov. He was similarly named in the House of Commons by Dame Margaret Hodge as someone the UK government should sanction. Manchester City were meanwhile draped in clothing promoting many of the business interests of the United Arab Emirates, the state in which their named owner, Sheikh Mansour, is a prominent Abu Dhabi royal.

Earlier that day, the same state - of which Abu Dhabi is by far the most powerful influence - took the widely-criticised decision to abstain at the United Nations Security Council, refusing to back the US resolution against Russia.

In another world, the UAE might face the same scrutiny. They have spent the last few years waging a war in Yemen that remains an even worse humanitarian disaster than Ukraine. Their primary allies are Saudi Arabia, who own Newcastle United.

We have another game of pretences there, of course, after the takeover was justified by the absurd idea that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign investment fund, the Public Investment Fund, is somehow a separate entity. Needless to say, no actual expert on the area gives this any credence.

You can apply similar logic to the residual notion that City are just the private indulgence of a wealthy royal. All of Mansour’s wealth is actually the wealth of an absolute monarchy, with no separation between them. The crown prince, Mohamed Bin Zayed, can appropriate little brother’s investment funds and has already done so once. Some of Bin Zayed's most trusted inner circle, such as Khaldoon Mubarak and Simon Pearce, are in prominent positions at the club.

An increasing problem for the game is that everyone outside is now more attuned to such issues. It is provoking more questions.

It is supporting all the previous criticisms of “sportswashing” states. This war represents one huge reason why critical media raised these discussions in the first place. It is just wrong that clubs are touched by such issues. It is wrong that the warmth towards Oleksandr Zinchenko is complicated by such considerations. That is the reality that can no longer be avoided, though.

This is what clubs have been used for.

One of the reasons we don’t talk about the war in Yemen as much as Ukraine is because states like UAE have done such a good job of weaving themselves into the west. You only have to look at so many holidays to Dubai. Sportswashing is part of the same process, and smooths it.

This is also why it is so wrong to give competitions to states like China, Qatar and - of course - Russia. The idea that sport will help them improve is another pretence, a fantasy. It just helps their sportswashing aims.

We couldn’t escape reality forever. We are at the point the game couldn't go past, where those realities had to impose themselves.

Football was just too greedy and self-satisfied to ever be concerned with such issues. The money was too big, the glamour was too big. That allowed the pretences to become too big. It credulously sleptwalk into a situation where it is entangled in geopolitics, and is now out of its depth, overtaken by events.

It is possible we have reached a point where that is no longer sustainable, where the many problems of football's infrastructure have been exposed. There’s a new, if fleeting, clarity.

This is what the responses of federations like Poland represent, that have basically forced Uefa and Fifa into action.

“People in football are so used to being able to totally control stuff that when they have to deal with a real-world problem they can’t control they are baffled,” says one senior Westminster source who has worked with the game. “They always try to come up with some ‘clever’ solution that is just totally unsustainable, and ends up making them look like they were dragged kicking and screaming.”

You could say similar about the attempt of some in football to just use the word “peace” in absolutely nothing statements about the invasion of Ukraine. It looked like they were more concerned with being seen to do the right thing rather than actually doing it; in pretences.

Fifa’s initial statement on Russia was an example of this.

After radio silence for two days, the game’s federations came up with a bad response that almost everyone predicted, but took mere minutes to fall apart. It says much that the about-turn took just another day.

It wasn’t quite “kicking and screaming”, to give Fifa and the federations their due, but it did shatter a few pretences.

The Independent has been told that a core of European countries - and particularly Poland, driven by Juventus legend Zbigniew Boniek - were central to this.

One common counterpoint has been over where the line should be drawn. Some within the game have argued that similar rationale should be applied to Saudi Arabia, UAE and Israel, as well as USA and Britain given the war in Iraq, with others insisting it could just lead to a precedent where everyone is constantly pointing fingers at everyone else.

These are actually healthy discussions to have, and a point football needs to get to is one where it can actually stage these conversations in an honest manner rather than constantly trying to pretend politics doesn’t interfere.

The last few days have shattered that notion. That is largely down to the sheer extremity of the Russian invasion, both in proximity and shock. It has driven a rare emotion, which has guided a logic that makes it a more immediate problem than everything else.

To go with the invasion, Putin has threatened the use of nuclear weapons, so the point is to sanction them to such a degree that the war is unsustainable among his own population. This would avoid more bloodshed, and sport is a powerful cultural weapon in that.

It was hugely influential with apartheid South Africa, which provides one prominent precedent.

For the moment, another side of this is that it has brought out a genuine goodness in people and the game, and an antidote to such cynicism. The uplifting episode around Benfica’s Roman Yaremchuk was a glorious illustration of humanity, at a time of so much death.

Rather than this energy only going as far as Russia, though, it should provoke these bigger debates. Football needs to accept it is intimately intertwined with politics, and judge everything on a case-by-case basis.

It needs to start seeing things clearly. It won't happen of course. There's always another form of money coming along. The cryptocurrency businesses and private equity firms are already circling.

If the first casualty of war is truth, it sadly shows how much deception there is in football that it has taken a conflict to bring some clarity.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Mar 01, 2022 12:50 pm

The second is from the Guardian's Jonathan Liew

Only now is football beginning to wake up to the stench of its own money
Jonathan Liew
Roman Abramovich’s move to step aside at Chelsea highlights the issue of omnipotent foreign owners in the English game
Tue 1 Mar 2022 08.26 GMT

As the old romantic saying almost goes: if you love something, let stewardship and care of it go – naturally, while retaining possession of all the relevant deeds and liquid assets. The news that Roman Abramovich is apparently giving up day-to-day control of Chelsea to the trustees of the club’s charitable foundation has been interpreted in wildly different ways which, with the benefit of a little reflection, seems to have been the entire point of the exercise.

For some it is the ultimate sacrificial act of devotion: Abramovich’s way of insulating the club he adores from the threat of sanction, censure, even seizure. Big surprise: the billionaire oligarch has feelings! For others it is a cynical sleight of hand: the act of very grandiosely doing nothing at all, a solemn legal statement with no legal import whatsoever. For some it is a sign that nothing will be the same again. For others it is a sure sign that Abramovich is intent on ultimately making everything the same again.

Certainly if Abramovich had intended to clarify the ownership situation, or whether he intended to sell Chelsea, or what “stewardship and care” actually means in practice, or any of a number of issues currently worrying Chelsea fans, one assumes he would have done so.

Be nice if we could ask him, wouldn’t it? You know: take some lateral flows, sit him down for an hour with a few journalists or an audience of Chelsea fans. Pick his brains. Shoot the breeze. But the fact that this mundane scenario feels about as plausible as a page from a fantasy novel is, in many ways, the basic problem, a problem that goes far beyond one partially shaven Russian/Israeli/Portuguese citizen and his company credit card. Why does any owner of an asset as cherished as a local football club get to hide like this, essentially to communicate via smoke signals and the occasional managerial sacking? How, in the world’s most popular sport, did we allow one man – any man – to be simultaneously this powerful and this untouchable?

Democratic governments are accountable to their voters. Chief executives are accountable to their shareholders. Who is Abramovich accountable to? The Premier League? Fifa? The only thing we can say with any degree of certainty is that it is not Vladimir Putin. Definitely not Putin. Categorically. We know because a court said so. And so we must conclude that the modern football club owner is essentially a sort of renegade, an independent actor, answerable to nobody but his own theoretical conscience and the siren call of his desire.

From Mike Ashley at Newcastle to the Oyston family at Blackpool, to the Glazers at Manchester United to Mel Morris at Derby, the collateral damage caused by bad owners can be a form of trauma for the fans caught up in it. Abramovich, for his part, has been a reasonably popular absentee landlord, hoisting Chelsea from the depths of fourth place in the Premier League in 2003 to third place now, having spent more than £2bn and signed Nemanja Matic twice along the way. Yet even amid the serial rattle of silverware he is yet to answer any of the questions that have been swirling around him for almost two decades. Why football? Why Chelsea? How did you make your money and what exactly do you intend to do with it? And what is it you want here exactly?

Of course, we know why these questions remain unanswered. For decades English football, taking its lead from the British state, simply bent the knee to foreign capital, trusted in the innate virtue of wealth to the point where even to query the source of that wealth became an act of sabotage or treachery. Owners became gods, omnipotent and unshiftable, bending the rules and making the rules, fending off any attempt at scrutiny with armies of lawyers and lobbyists, spin and silence. Only now is football beginning to wake up to the stench of its own money, and yet the furious backpedalling of the Johnson government and the performative outrage of the footballing authorities suggests that the real red line was not morality but PR.

As ever the only real defence against all of this is organisation and resistance. The only reason Stamford Bridge has been kept out of Abramovich’s hands is through the resilience of the Chelsea Pitch Owners group. Fan solidarity, amplified by social media, helped to strangle the European Super League and belatedly force the government into a review of football governance. But the wider issue here is awareness: a realisation that the fight for sporting representation is really a microcosm of the wider struggle taking place across the board.

For all the senseless tragedy unfolding in Ukraine, Russia is not the enemy here. The dissent and protest of its own citizens in the face of a frightening state proves as much. The real faultline is between the powerful and the powerless, the rulers and the ruled. Recognising football’s complicity in war and cruelty also involves recognising that similar corruptions are occurring everywhere one looks.

The club you love has been trying to monetise you ever since you first clapped eyes on it. The bodies entrusted with the health of the sport are interested in player welfare, racism and competitive balance only to the extent that it might curdle their bottom line. The company whose services you engaged will do anything to avoid speaking to you on the phone. The government you voted in secretly despises you. Crisis has a habit of sharpening the contours of our world, of filtering out the noise. And up close an alarm bell sounds an awful lot like a million pennies dropping.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Mar 04, 2022 1:02 pm

Another one again covering the history of what made this thread important - this time an interview with Simon Chadwick, from two weeks ago just before the invasion of Ukraine

https://worldfootballsummit.com/profess ... c39189b4fc

PROFESSOR SIMON CHADWICK ON RUSSIA, UEFA AND FOOTBALL BECOMING A WEAPON IN GLOBAL WARS
24/02/2022 In Front Highlight, Interviews
World Football Summit speaks exclusively with Professor Simon Chadwick about modern geopolitics rife in football. This interview features as part of the latest edition of WFS Digest, our new insider’s guide to the latest and most relevant thoughts and practises from within the football industry.

Simon Chadwick is a tenured professor at EM Lyon business school and has devoted a good part of his academic life to sports; he actually wrote his doctoral thesis about sponsorships in football. He is currently focused on the “geopolitical economy of sport”: in the last decade he has found himself “increasingly in spaces that were not in Europe, places where the government plays a very prominent role, and also in places with very high rates of economic growth. And I’ve started to observe that sponsorships seem different: Asian airlines, Gazprom, Visit Azerbaijan… You know, this is not McDonald’s, it’s not Coca Cola,” he explains during a conversation with WFS Digest. “There has been a drift towards the east, due to a variety of factors.”

“UEFA takes money from Gazprom; there are 130,000 Russian troops on the border of Ukraine right now, and one of the reasons for that is Gazprom.”

WFS: You have recently written that capitalism won the ideological war thirty years ago, and you describe a global political battle that is being fought currently. Can you expand on this?

Chadwick: What has apparently happened in these last 20 years, or 30, from the early nineties, is that capitalism won and communism lost, and that we live in this free market liberal world. However, this nowadays appears not to be true – Asia and governments are starting to rule. We can’t ignore the fundamental change of policy direction in China and the triumph of globalisation. China and some postcolonial nations suddenly found themselves able to make independent decisions about getting revenues from their oil and gas reserves. Qatar and Russia, for example, have accumulated huge wealth under the scheme that their national resources can be traded internationally. Those developments led to not only different kinds of sponsorship deals – Gazprom and the Champions League is an obvious example – but also led to Qatar making the decision that they wanted to invest their gas wealth into sport, football in particular, as a way of nation-building; essentially creating an infrastructure and an identity, while projecting an image.

At the same time, we have the Chinese government, where – especially after the arrival of Xi Jinping – we’ve seen a very assertive and strong emphasis in sport. So there has been this drift towards the east, due to a variety of factors. For a while, I thought that America was dead, but certainly in football in the last two years we’ve seen that America is certainly not dead. The growth of private equity investments across Europe, the development of SPACS (special acquisition companies) like RedBird, which has a stake in Fenway Sports Group, which owns Liverpool, all these things. So there’s been a certain resurgence of the US, but that now stands in stark contrast with the rise of China, because ideologically, politically, they are diametrically opposed countries. Their view of business, sport, democracy, society is different.

Take the example of somebody like Eileen Gu, the freestyler skier, who was born in the US, has a Chinese mother, an American father, has been educated in the US, will go back to study university in the US, but has competed for China in the Winter Olympics. And after seeing some of the coverage around her, and the questioning of who she is and her origins, she seems caught in the crossfire of this global ideological war, which is about geography and politics, but also about business and sport. Her case is really interesting, because she’s got some big money deals with, for example, Red Bull. And my position on all of this is that football has become a means to an end. It’s almost like a weapon to be deployed in this ideological war between competing sides.

WFS: Do you say this from a purely academic standpoint, or are you also worried by this buildout?

Chadwick: I try to respect everybody and everything, understand rather than condemn. I’m a northwest European liberal, it is the way I like to live my life; but it doesn’t mean I disrespect others who choose to live their lives in other ways. And for somebody who doesn’t want to be fearful and likes rising up to opportunities, and to embrace what’s happening in the world instead of being scared, I say: what an amazing time to be alive!

Take globalisation, digitalisation, concerns about the environment, the geopolitical polarisation, lifestyle changes… it’s an incredible period in human history. So I try not to think in terms of fearfulness. I prefer to think in terms of adverse consequences of these changes. And my answer is yes, I am mindful of them. Based on the current parameters, in all likelihood, my football team, Middlesborough, is never going to win the Premier League. When I was a kid, there was always the chance that Middlesborough might win the league. That chance has gone now. And I engage with football not to witness the domination of the sport by a small number of teams, I engaged because there was always something very exciting about everybody having an equal chance of winning the league.

I’m also mindful about the adverse consequences of some digital developments. With NFTs and cryptocurrencies we’re seeing the new gold rush – and we see today how an organisation like McLaren in F1 has withdrawn from a cryptocurrency relationship. We’ve also seen some cryptocurrency businesses gone bust already. We must be concerned about the origins of some people involved in these businesses. But I have great respect for others, and I believe we’re all entitled to live equally, and clearly some of the nations who are becoming increasingly influential in the world don’t necessarily hold my principles. In sport, there’s fertile territory for some countries to grow into, and also for people questioning some of the people who manage certain organisations. If we look into the US, the hyper-commercialisation of sport driven by US is also of concern. Football destroyed my love of football, is what I say to people now.

WFS: We can therefore imagine you dislike the idea of a Super League…

Chadwick: Well, actually no. As a professional, what we’ve seen in industrial sectors across the world, in financial services, digital technology, and aircraft manufacturing, is industrial concentration, where a small number of very large organisations dominate your sector. I don’t see the Super League as being anything unusual or exceptional in the last 20-30 years. The kind of people who own or run clubs don’t like uncertainty. Businesses don’t like uncertainty. So I can see why those clubs had that idea. As a professional, the Super League follows a trend other industrial sectors have followed. Personally, I don’t care anymore. Sport is gone, football is gone. I feel much more passionate nowadays about other things. And I realise I have contributed to this ecosystem, analysing the market, the business, the geopolitics of sport.

WFS: Do you think the World Cup in Qatar will be a success?

Chadwick: A little part of my soul still simmers with the World Cup. And as an egalitarian, the Arab world has the same right to stage the World Cup as any other part of the world. They are entitled. And if you go to Saudi Arabia, the Riyadh derby, there are fifty-sixty thousand people attending the match and in Teheran 120,000, the greatest derby of the world. There are many fans in the regions. One of the unfortunate things is that the Middle East right to host the tournament became intertwined with some of the governance issues that FIFA was facing, and that was very unhelpful, and ensnared Qatar. I know Qatar is a small country, but there is a hardcore base of real football fans, they have positioned themselves as a regional tournament and many people will travel to the tournament from Asia and North Africa.

I think there are issues, like the treatment of migrant workers, but my experience in that country shows it’s a rather more open and progressive place that people imagine. Last year, the country that accepted more immigrants from Afghanistan was Qatar, And most people around the world do not know the country well enough to make a judgement about it. Equally, I don’t think Qatar has worked hard enough to engage audiences and explain who they are and how thy do business. There are many bad things happening in Qatar, but also quite a lot good things going down. As in England, Spain or Argentina. I try to adopt a balanced and hopefully more positive view about the Gulf region. The region is football-crazy and deserve to host the World Cup.

WFS: Talking about sponsorships, was the UEFA-Socios deal a surprise to you?

Chadwick: I’ve seen it all before, to be honest. I saw it in the mid 1990s with the dotcom boom: ‘Everybody has to have a website, every football club and governing body.’ But in 1995 nobody had a website! And suddenly there was this clamour, because people in sports, particularly football, were convinced by others that they could make huge amounts of money with a website. So they all built a website. And if you fast-forward ten years, the same happened with this new thing called social media. And they were told the same: ‘you will make huge amounts of money.’ A lot of clubs dived in and didn’t make a lot of money. During years and years, the discussion has been: how do you monetise social media? And I’m still not convinced that most football clubs have ever made any money out of social media. It’s almost like a third digital wave is coming, where exactly the same thing is happening, sports properties have been told ‘you must do this, if not you’ll miss out and you won’t make money,’ and there is this ripple effect where, because one or two have done it, the rest think they have to do it, and it results in organisations like UEFA signing a deal with Socios. Yes, I was surprised, because UEFA is normally very considerate in the way they do business.

My sense is that UEFA wanted to capture the opportunity as they went by, rather than missing out. But with many NFTs and cryptocurrency businesses there are still many unanswered questions about their backers, their origins, the territory where they are located, the way in which they are changing the dynamic between clubs, fans, governing bodies and others. The positive side of my brain believes that this deal is a validation that this is here to stay and is legitimate. The negative side of my brain says: ‘Step back, reflect on this, wait and see.’ Some people have concerns about these businesses; it is unclear whether these are fan engagement platforms or investment instruments. And from a regulatory perspective this is really important; because if these are companies offering investment opportunities, they are obviously bounded by financial regulations in UK, the EU and elsewhere. But they are usually located in places where the governance of financial organisations is not as robust as perhaps it might be. I am surprised, I think it’s been very fast.

WFS: In this context of geopolitical drift toward the east and what you label as hyper-commercialisation of sport, what future do you envision for transnational governance?

Chadwick: My extremist answer is ‘Rip it up and start again’. Because as we’ve seen with UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations, FFP 1 is proving not so effective as it was intended, and we’re in the middle of a review which will lead to FFP 2. My favourite example is always Manchester City and City football Group, an organisation which operates across multiple territories. Until recently, their headquarters was in one of the world’s biggest free zones in Dubai, where there is minimal scrutiny, reports, standards… I just wonder how a continental governing body of a sport in Europe can ever hope to effectively chase down an organisation owned by a government that has its registered headquarters in a free zone in the Gulf region.

Sport governing bodies were created by and large in Europe by Europeans, for Europe, and are still located in Europe (FIFA, UEFA, IOC). They govern still like it’s the XXth century, except it’s not the XXth century any more… And so how to govern transnationally is a huge challenge. I don’t think these organisations are fit enough, lean enough, fast enough, to be able to keep pace. It’s a gross overgeneralisation, I know, it’ very easy for me to say ‘Rip it up and start again’, but I really can’t see how governing bodies as we’re known them for a hundred years can remain fit and purpose in a world where the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Qatari government, US private equity investors or African governments engage in sponsorships, buy clubs or invest in cryptocurrency businesses that are partners of governing bodies. We mentioned the example of UEFA and Socios, but UEFA also takes money from Gazprom; there are 130,000 Russian troops in the border of Ukraine right now, and one of the reasons for that is Gazprom. It’s not the only reason, but it’s one of the reasons.

Nasser Al-Khelaïfi sits on the UEFA executive council, is head of the European Clubs Association, president of PSG, and also happens to president of Qatar Sports Investment. That to me raises really serious questions about conflicts of interest and the basis of governance. We don’t talk enough about these things. UEFA is just one example and has some issues to think about it. But we’ve seen it in the UK and other countries. Starbucks doesn’t pay its tax bill, Amazon doesn’t pay its tax bill, Google doesn’t pay its tax bill… When the British government is questioned about this, their response always is: ‘Their head offices are located in territories that do not fall within our jurisdiction.’ This issue of transnational governance –not only UEFA or sports– is a global challenge, a battle that football is not winning at the moment.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sun Mar 06, 2022 1:06 pm

The tragic events of the last few weeks have led to a renewed focus on sports washing with the last few days bring up some very good features (and not all from my usual sources)

first up the fabulous Unofficial Partner Podcast and it's news letter - here is how Thursday's newsletter introduced Friday's podcast: a guide to sportswashing

https://unofficialpartner.substack.com/ ... gn=cta&s=r

the podcast is here - as ever it is well worth your time
https://www.unofficialpartner.com/podca ... rtswashing

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sun Mar 06, 2022 1:11 pm

next came an article in the Mail of all places from a sports focussed lawyer
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sport ... shing.html

The expulsion of Russian influence from football after the brutal invasion of Ukraine marks the beginning of the end for sportswashing... no longer can clubs, leagues and governing bodies 'SELL THEIR SOULS', writes Ben Peppi
  • Uncomfortable relationship between sport and politics has never been clearer
  • But leading sports marketer says there's no way back after invasion of Ukraine
  • Sport, and football in particular, will have to make moral and ethical decisions about investment it is willing to accept and can no longer 'sell its soul' for cash
By BEN PEPPI FOR MAIL ONLINE

PUBLISHED: 09:47, 5 March 2022 | UPDATED: 11:45, 5 March 2022

Ben Peppi is head of sports services at JMW Solicitors. He has overseen deals involving Anthony Joshua and West Ham striker Michail Antonio, as well as many Premier League teams, Premiership Rugby sides and national governing bodies, He is regarded as one of the leading commercial and marketing experts in sport.

When sport sells its soul, it leads to the exploitation of the most powerful cultural asset on the planet.

The uncomfortable relationship between sport and politics has never been more obvious than in 2022 with a Winter Olympics in Beijing, a World Cup in Qatar and the formation of a proposed Saudi Golf League.

However, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has turned the tide of acceptance and will spell the beginning of the end for sportswashing.

'Sportswashing' – the use of sport by an individual, group, corporation, or nation-state to improve their tarnished reputation – works.

For too long the political world has had the upper hand.

The idea that politics should be kept out of sport has formed the basis to a defensive narrative, which justifies those in power spending hundreds of millions of pounds owning football clubs, hosting the world's leading sporting events and sponsors and brands using sport for political gain.

Think Saudia Arabia, Qatar and Gazprom.

Football, in particular, turns a blind eye to the long-term effects of influential executives cosying up to policymakers.

On receiving an Order of Friendship from Vladimir Putin in 2019, FIFA President Gianni Infantino remarked: 'the world has created bonds of friendship with Russia that will last forever.'

In this case 'forever' has been short lived.

However, football is biting back and the ethical, moral and social lens of sport is now viewed through will mean that it is not just wealth that matters.

Sportswashing as we once knew it will be pretty much impossible as a result of this.

The announcement this week that Roman Abramovich is to sell Chelsea Football Club, an owner who for many kicked off the modern sportswashing era, represents this profound shift.

In a statement, Abramovich stated his decision to sell was 'in the best interests of the club, the fans and the employees.'

Abramovich was never at Chelsea to make a profit - that much has always been clear - but if he has decided a £1.5bn loan doesn't need to be repaid, what does that say about his true intentions when he purchased the club?

He didn't know the supporters or the employees then and he didn't do it for financial reasons.

Chelsea was purchased to protect Abramovich; he did it to create a positive international profile. Sport was used for political gain.

The start of an era which then saw oil money transfer the balance of power in English football culminated late last year in the Saudi ownership of Newcastle United.

The ramifications of the past week have led to calls for the Premier League to enact a human rights element to their owners and directors test.

Too little, too late.


Would the Premier League have sanctioned Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund's purchase of 80 per cent of the club, a body with close ties to the Saudi state and their abhorrent human rights record and participation in conflict across Yemen, if this had existed just a few months ago?

The answer is no, and due diligence must improve.

The general feeling at clubs is that while this has long been the accepted practice, the globalised yet volatile environment we now find ourselves in will mean clubs like Newcastle United will be on alert.

They will be watching the events of the past week, knowing that the intense scrutiny they were already under will be heightened even further.

Clubs cannot shy away from matters like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, nor can they be in any way associated.

The 2022 World Cup in Qatar has used migrant labour to build the stadiums and infrastructure

It is no surprise then that Newcastle United's club director Amanda Staveley called Abramovich's situation 'unfair' earlier this week, as it would be logical to think that all forms of sportwashing will be in the crosshairs of any effective regulator of English football following the expulsion of Russian influence.

Newcastle United's ambitious plans require world-class players, but stars are not going to find the prospect of a team being owned by a state with a questionable human rights record appealing, even if money talks.

Nor will commercial partners – Everton have had to suspend deals with Russian companies USM, Megafon and Yota due to the scrutiny they have come under this week.

While it would be wrong to suggest hitting Newcastle United's owners in the pockets will have much of an impact, we should not rule out significant action against stakeholders by the Premier League or UK government further down the line either.

It should not have taken a hostile invasion for the world to recognise sportswashing as an insidious problem within the game, but decision makers, teams and organisations are finally being held accountable.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sun Mar 06, 2022 1:16 pm

That was followed by Jonathan Wilson in the Guardian who used his encyclopedic historical knowledge of the game to provide some context

https://www.theguardian.com/football/bl ... flict-1942

Russia exploits football as soft-power tool but it also helped forge Ukraine’s identity
Jonathan Wilson
Sat 5 Mar 2022 20.00 GMT
The Kyiv Death Match of 1942 has resonance in the present context of conflict but its significance is complex

Josef Kordik was sitting in a cafe in Kyiv when a bedraggled man on the street caught his eye. That, he was sure, was Myklova Trusevych, the great Dynamo goalkeeper. He rushed outside. It was spring 1942, a few months after the city had fallen to the Nazis.

Kordik was a Moravian who had been left behind after fighting for Austria-Hungary in the first world war. He had not enjoyed his new life and watching football had been his only joy, but the occupation had meant opportunity. He had falsely claimed Volksdeutsch status and been installed as manager of Bakery Number 1.

But for most people occupation had brought suffering. Trusevych had sent his wife, who was Jewish, to Odesa to escape the fighting. His home had been destroyed and he was sleeping rough. Kordik offered him work and accommodation at the bakery. Other stricken Dynamo players joined him. When regular football was established as a way of normalising the occupation, the bakery set up a team and proved themselves the best side in the city.

They played the Luftwaffe team and beat them 5-1. Three days later, on 9 August, they played them again, winning 5-3 in what became known as the Death Match. No game has ever been so shrouded in myth. In the years immediately after the war, it was in effect hushed up.

Should Kyivans really have been playing football with the occupiers? After all, one player was sentenced to five years in the gulag for collaboration while another had emigrated to Canada; by definition, they were not good Soviets. But by the Brezhnev era their victory was celebrated: brave Communists offering hope to the people of Kyiv by beating the Nazis.

Details accrued, from the plausible – an SS officer had warned them not to win – to the absurd – the players were shot at during the second half. The bare facts are tragic enough. Around 10 days after the game, the players were arrested, seemingly because, having played for Dynamo, the team of the interior ministry, they were technically members of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.

One, Mykola Korotkykh, had briefly been an active officer and died under torture. The others were sent to a camp near Babyn Yar, a ravine in Kyiv that was the site of a Nazi massacre of Jews in 1941. On 24 February 1943, in reprisal for bomb attacks marking the anniversary of the foundation of the Red Army, one in three prisoners were murdered. Oleksiy Klymenko and Ivan Kuzmenko, both of whom had scored against the Luftwaffe, were killed that morning, along with Trusevych.

It is a story that has particular resonance in the present context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but its significance is complex. The term sportswashing may have existed for half a dozen years and the modern practice of states or oligarchs taking control of clubs has taken it into a new phase, but football has had soft-power potential since it became a mass preoccupation in the late 19th century.

That can be manipulated, but football is as much a theatre as it is a tool: its soft-power potential is not easily wielded. As the Death Match shows, events are open to multiple interpretations: what one generation feared as collaboration the next saw as heroism; when, in 1971, a memorial was erected to the four players who were killed, it was opposed by the KGB. New meanings are still being teased out of the legend: in Match, a 2012 film about the game directed by Andrey Malyukov, the heroes are Russian‑speaking Communists while those who work with the Nazis speak Ukrainian.

Football, hostage as it may now be to finance, has a mischievous tendency to confound the best-laid plans: Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City, for all their investment, have still not won the Champions League, while Chelsea won it for the first time with an interim manager and probably the worst squad they have had since Roman Abramovich’s arrival.

It is 17 years since CSKA Moscow, the former army club, became the first Russian side to win a European trophy. At the time, it was still partly owned by the Russian Ministry of Defence and was sponsored by Sibneft, a corporation owned by Abramovich, although he was bought out by Gazprom a few months later. The Ministry of Defence sold its remaining 25% stake to Bluecastle Enterprises, a company registered in London. The remaining 75% is held by the state development corporation VEB.RF whose chairman, Igor Shuvalov, was sanctioned by the UK on Thursday. Bluecastle, run by CSKA’s president, Evgeny Giner, continues to operate freely.

Three years after CSKA’s success, Zenit St Petersburg, who have been owned by Gazprom since December 2005, won the Uefa Cup. Russian football seemed on the verge of an era of great success, but the league is now ranked 10th in Europe, behind Scotland.

There was perhaps a natural ceiling to Russia’s challenge to the big four or five leagues and limits on foreign players have raised domestic salaries more than quality, but interest has waned since the World Cup and sanctions imposed after the invasion of Crimea in 2014 have had an impact, with Giner’s energy business particularly badly hit.

Then there are the indirect consequences of involvement in football. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi takeovers of Manchester City and Newcastle have led to far greater scrutiny in Britain of those countries’ human rights records than would otherwise have been the case. Such investment is seemingly still regarded as a net positive, but there have been costs. Who would have considered the rights of migrant labourers in Qatar before it bid to host a World Cup?

The irony of this is that for all Russia’s efforts, most particularly by hosting the World Cup and the Winter Olympics, to use sport as a propaganda tool, it is sport that, before the war, provided probably the most visible examples of Ukraine’s existence. Until Volodymyr Zelenskiy emerged as a hero of resistance, the most famous Ukrainians to the rest of the world were sportsmen, Vitali Klitschko and Andriy Shevchenko. Anybody who followed the Champions League knew Shakhtar and Dynamo.

The same soft power Russia tried to exploit also gave Ukraine an identity. In the information war, that is no small matter.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sun Mar 06, 2022 1:23 pm

I will leave the final word for now with the one, Professor Simon Chadwick, who has defined sports washing for what is is - an approach for legitimising an entity when we already know better and as with today's first post he brings it right back to England's and the Premier League's doorstep - nothing new just a succinctly pointed reminder

https://twitter.com/Prof_Chadwick/statu ... 7916371975

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Mar 09, 2022 1:36 pm

I have always argued that our new facilities at Gawthorpe are good but no where near the level most of our fans perceive them to be be, though it would seem even Leicester's hugely impressive £100m+ facility is a little behind the global mark - from the Telegraph, the link takes you through the paywall

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fw ... e-world%2F

perhaps the real takeaway here is not that facility but the sheer volume of Academies that PSG are putting in place - again something I have previously posted about particularly in relation to Chelsea and their plans to have proper PL/FA accredited Academies dotted around the country. No matter how we much we try, developing our own players is getting more and more difficult. These clubs are actively destroying the business models of clubs they will almost never face.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by ClaretPete001 » Wed Mar 09, 2022 2:10 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Wed Mar 09, 2022 1:36 pm
I have always argued that our new facilities at Gawthorpe are good but no where near the level most of our fans perceive them to be be, though it would seem even Leicester's hugely impressive £100m+ facility is a little behind the global mark - from the Telegraph, the link takes you through the paywall

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fw ... e-world%2F

perhaps the real takeaway here is not that facility but the sheer volume of Academies that PSG are putting in place - again something I have previously posted about particularly in relation to Chelsea and their plans to have proper PL/FA accredited Academies dotted around the country. No matter how we much we try, developing our own players is getting more and more difficult. These clubs are actively destroying the business models of clubs they will almost never face.
Good stuff Chester - interesting reads and all very predictable...!

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Mar 11, 2022 2:05 am

With the Abramovich thread now locked - here is David Conn of the Guardian with the best summary of the situation the game has known ever since he arrived


Football ignored the truth about Roman Abramovich’s oligarch money for too long
David Conn

The facts about the Chelsea owner’s assets have always been there to see for anyone who cared – but too few in the game did
Thu 10 Mar 2022 20.30 GMT

It must have been a bracing morning call at Stamford Bridge, with the news that Roman Abramovich is now considered so toxic that the government has slapped him with sanctions after 19 years in which he has been garlanded as the Chelsea benefactor.

For the UK, the Premier League, for football – for all of us – it would feel a little better if we could say this has come as a terrible shock, that nobody has known enough about Abramovich all these years. But sadly that kind of reassurance would be just more self-delusion, and the times we are in surely demand a bit of straight talking.

Of course it was stunning to see the government actually freeze Abramovich’s assets, overthrowing his and Chelsea’s complacency with one closely typed paragraph damning his closeness to Vladimir Putin. But really the shock was mostly of recognition, pointing past the emperor’s clothes – and trophies, in Abramovich’s case – to some naked truths in plain sight all along.

The court proceedings referred to by the Home Office, in that document Chris Bryant read out to such dramatic effect in the Commons two weeks ago, took place in 2012. By 2019, after the novichok poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the everyday English city of Salisbury, the government took the view: “Abramovich remains of interest to HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] due to his links to the Russian state and his public association with corrupt activity and practices … An example of this is Abramovich admitting in court proceedings that he paid for political influence.”

The court judgment by Mrs Justice Gloster stated that it was Abramovich’s own case that the political lobbying activities of his former oligarch partner, Boris Berezovsky, providing him with political krysha (protection) were: “Inherently corrupt, and that likewise, the deal between the two men, whereby Mr Abramovich agreed to pay Mr Berezovsky for his krysha services, was also corrupt.”

The judgment also noted that Abramovich had “very good relations” with Putin, including “privileged access” to the Russian president.

How the money was made was known and well-reported by 2003 when Abramovich bought Chelsea, and the club’s successes have been funded with his oligarch money. Players were bought in waves as never before, and he bankrolled transfer fees and wages the club could otherwise not have paid. In that way he bought the Premier League, the Champions League and, just days before Putin invaded Ukraine, the Club World Cup.

It could also be comforting to lay blame for the reverent indulgence of Abramovich at the doors of just the Premier League, the Football Association or a succession of governments more than happy for Britain to soak up cash from anywhere. But that would be a cop-out too: the facts have been there for anybody who could be bothered to care.

There was, though, a wilful obliviousness to the known facts of how he had become an oligarch, and he proceeded to cement his presence and Chelsea’s super-club status while football adjusted to his mega-spending. After it was all laid out in 2012, his representatives said Gloster had not got her assessment quite right. They played down Abramovich’s relationship with Putin, pointing to evidence that he was “not in the inner circle”.

Recently, he started even to come on to the pitch to celebrate a trophy. For those who did care, it was painful to see César Azpilicueta, the modern model professional with his work ethic, captain’s armband and side parting, ushering his owner to centre stage with the Champions League trophy at the final last season. The globally broadcast images of Abramovich, with his wide, triumphant smile and his hands on football’s greatest prize, were not a great look for football, for Britain or for Europe.

Finally the government has ploughed through all the froth, stating in its reasons for the sanctions that Abramovich is a “pro-Kremlin oligarch” who has had “a close relationship for decades” with Putin, and had “preferential treatment and concessions from Putin and the government of Russia” including contracts in the run-up to the 2018 World Cup. His company could supply steel to the Russian military, which could be used to produce tanks, and could provide money, goods or technology “that could contribute to destabilising Ukraine”.

There is a clear challenge for English football, which is important even in this horrifying context, as the glamour and legitimacy it bestows is coveted by all manner of regimes and money men. It must ask whether it does enough to ensure that its irresistible sport and adored clubs are forces for good in the world – because after being captured by cash, its rules have been exposed as laughably inadequate.

Even now, its owners and directors test appears to approve Abramovich as “a fit and proper person”. The rules were designed to stop small-time crooks taking over small football clubs, and have never been equipped for the Premier League’s modern age. People are barred if they have a criminal conviction for dishonesty or have been made bankrupt.

No, Abramovich doesn’t have any convictions and no, he has never been bankrupt. He became a billionaire in the “wild east” of Russia post-communism, which was not governed by the rule of law. For nearly two decades, he has been allowed to bestride the game, flood it with his money and claim its greatest prizes, and all that has only finally ended because of an actual war.
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Paul Waine » Fri Mar 11, 2022 10:02 am

Matthew Syed with another excellent article in The Times,

Abramovich sanctions: Chelsea fans have acted as PR bots for Roman Abramovich and Vladimir Putin

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bb2b ... 19ffedbafa

The link will take readers past the pay wall.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Mar 11, 2022 12:25 pm

I will add this from Miguel Delaney in the Independent and make a point of highlighting a particular section that demonstrates just how involved Abramovich was in the Russian Government - all in the public domain for over 15 years

‘Totally uncharted territory’: Chelsea facing harsh reality of life after Roman Abramovich
The sanctions against the owner not only impact the here and now of the football club but its future too

Miguel Delaney - Chief Football Writer - 10 minutes ago

Among the Chelsea players, there was dark humour about the news, and more earnest questions about what next and what it all means.

The first thing that should be said is that there is a seriousness here way beyond football. The notification of Roman Abramovich’s sanctioning relayed the following, among a lengthy piece of information that was among the very longest of those concerning the 204 individuals named.

“Abramovich is associated with a person who is/has been involved in destabilising Ukraine and undermining and threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine, namely Vladimir Putin, with whom Abramovich has had a close relationship for decades.”

This was a fact that media sought to publish and explore for years, but were shackled by the billionaire’s heavy use of litigation.

As long ago as 2006, the book The Billionaire from Nowhere by Dominic Midgley and Chris Hutchins reported the following words of radio owner Alexei Venediktov, who recounted an exchange with Abramovich.

“At my last meeting with him, he said to me, ‘Alexei, I promise you I am not interested in politics.’ So I reminded him how in 1999 he had helped form the cabinet, how all the candidates for ministerial positions in Putin’s government had had to go one-by-one into an office to see him. He said, ‘That didn’t happen.’ I said, it did, because I was in the Kremlin that day and saw it with my own eyes. ‘Oh,’ he said, laughing, ‘those were just friendly conversations.’

“I respect him a lot,” Abramovich said in a 1999 interview with the media arm of Gazprom. “Putin is an independent figure. He knows in which direction to lead the country . . . in my opinion, everything that Putin does, he does almost without making any mistakes.”

All of this is now in the open. It undeniably changed the perspective of the last 19 years of Chelsea success, which have a very different sheen. There is an asterisk beside every trophy, at least morally.

A more serious consequence is that it also leaves an uncertain future for over 1,000 people who work at the club.

“We’re talking about all the casual staff who maybe work one day every two weeks and they rely on this additional money,” says Dan Silver of the Chelsea Supporters Trust. “It can put food on the table. There are so many loose strands about the sanctions in place, we want a very, very quick resolution on this from the government to make sure the future of these people is not jeopardised. The footballers will be fine, they’ll get other contracts. It’s the people that rely on the club; hopefully there’s going to be a bit more licence on the sanctions.

“Right now, nothing is off the table. One thing we know for certain is that the club and the landscape of the game have been irrevocably changed. “It’s unprecedented,” one source said. “Totally uncharted territory.”

It is quite a lesson in how precarious football has made itself. Just a few weeks ago, Chelsea were one of the game’s few superclubs, financially insulated from the effects of the pandemic and even set to improve their position from it. That position is now totally up in the air, as the club lives from day to day in terms of finances. Revenue streams have been cut off. Doubt is growing over how long they can pay the bills.

Any fears that this could lead to Chelsea’s death are significantly overstated. It will only be the end of the Chelsea we’ve come to know. There is absolutely no political will for a social institution like this to go to the wall, or for fans to suffer, particularly when so many supporters are in swing constituencies. Solutions will be found.

The special licence issued to Chelsea so they can still run as a football club does not currently allow the sale, but the government would be willing to allow a special dispensation.

No 10 has already announced that it is open to the sale of the club, and are talking to those running the club, but stressed that in “no way” could the proceeds benefit Abramovich.

It may well benefit some of the more opportunistic bidders, as they don’t have the Russian-born billionaire setting so high a price. Parties remain interested, including the Reuben brothers. They are seen as far more realistic than Nick Candy, who isn’t believed to have the money, but the Reubens would have to sell their stake in Newcastle United.

It is quite the timing that Eddie Howe’s side are the next team Chelsea play at home on Sunday. This whole situation will bring renewed focus on ownership, which is all the more pointed for Newcastle and Manchester City, given Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are positioning themselves so close to Russia. That’s modern football.

There was another stark sentence in the statement by the prime minister’s official spokesperson when discussing the possibility of a government-sanctioned sale. “These measures are obviously designed to punish Putin and ensure any revenue generated cannot make its way through to the Russian war machine.”

The government are also conscious of the effect on the football pyramid, and there may well be ripple effects there. The legalities could take as long as three months, but there is a time pressure.

Chelsea have had a series of revenue streams cut off, which means they could well go into administration very soon.

A statement from the club said they are currently trying to renegotiate the terms of the special licence, with sources maintaining that is to allow some income so they can operate as normally. With only £20,000 allowed for expenses on away games under the stipulations, many in football even doubted whether that would be enough to cover next week’s Champions League trip to somewhere as close as Lille.

This is the level we are talking about.

“The Chelsea situation is alarming on several levels,” says Dr Rob Wilson, expert on football economics from Sheffield Hallam University. “In the simplest terms, freezing the owners’ assets prevents the club from being supported on an ongoing basis. This could lead to the club being placed into administration if unable to pay its debts as they fall due.”

Many players were already considering their futures. All of those out of contract, and particularly Antonio Rudiger, Cesar Azpilicueta and Andreas Christensen, are said to have made up their minds. Many will not want to stick around for any uncertainty.

If the current stipulations persist, we may even have a situation where Chelsea beat Middlesbrough in the FA Cup quarter-finals, and Wembley is half-empty for the semi-final because ticket sales are handled through the club. Chelsea are currently only allowed to let season-ticket holders attend home games.

That very prospect should put further focus on Tracey Crouch’s fan review, which already seems woefully out of date. Its inability to properly tackle club ownership looks so short-sighted. That will now be reassessed. The Independent has also been told that Crouch has been in touch with the Supporters Trust, but has so far felt “reactive”.

The game needs to get proactive on all this, to re-assess where it’s going, and the path it’s been on.

This is why ownership matters. This is why it is wrong to allow states to own clubs. This is the mess football has got itself into. Chelsea are caught right up.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Paul Waine » Fri Mar 11, 2022 5:46 pm

Times reporting that Chelsea's bank accounts/corporate credit cards have been frozen by their banks. This apparently goes beyond the Gov't sanctions, because of the license conditions - but, their banks don't have the risk appetite to keep the accounts open.

Elsewhere, I've seen someone use a new word: "shedenfreude" - "pleasure from Chelsea's misfortune...

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Quickenthetempo » Fri Mar 11, 2022 6:00 pm

Christensen already agreed terms with Barcelona.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Mar 11, 2022 8:08 pm

The Telegraph provides insight into the level of financial difficulty that Chelsea suddenly find themselves - though it does seem they are not yet quite ready to adjust expectations to their new found circumstances - the link takes you through the paywall

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fw ... amovich%2F

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by ClaretPete001 » Fri Mar 11, 2022 8:17 pm

The sound of stable doors shutting and horses Hooves trotting can be heard echoing around Westminster.

Apropos of nothing, I think the authorities should also look at irresponsible opportunistic purchases as well.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Mar 11, 2022 9:20 pm

Anyone who has followed this thread over the years will know my thoughts about Socios (fan Tokens) and their founder Alexander Dreyfus - it seems he may be exposed as the dubious dealer he is - our thanks go to offthepitch.com

https://offthepitch.com/a/exclusive-foo ... g-millions

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fo ... g-millions

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Mar 11, 2022 10:49 pm

Most of you know Rory Smith for his contributions to Radio 5's Monday Night Club, he is also the Chief Football writer for the New York Times and has today posted this about the Abramovich situation

Roman Abramovich and the End of Soccer’s Oligarch Era
Stripped of its Russian benefactor, Chelsea now faces a reckoning. Soccer’s will come next.

By Rory Smith
March 11, 2022, 11:00 a.m. ET

There were, over the years, three stories that explained how Roman Abramovich washed ashore at Chelsea. Each one, now, serves as a kind of time capsule, a carbon-dated relic from a specific period, capturing in amber each stage of our understanding of what, precisely, soccer has become.

The first took root in the immediate aftermath of Abramovich’s takeover of Chelsea. It was light, fuzzy, faintly romantic. Abramovich, the tale went, had been at Old Trafford on the night in 2003 when Manchester United’s fans stood as one to applaud the great Brazilian striker Ronaldo as he swept their team from the Champions League.

Abramovich had been so smitten, it was said, that he had decided there and then that he wanted a piece of English soccer. He considered Arsenal and Tottenham and settled on Chelsea, drifting bohemian and glamorous just below the Premier League elite. He had fallen, so hard and so fast, that he bought the club in little more than a weekend.

And that, at the time, was almost enough. It was absurd, alien, the idea of this unimaginably wealthy enigma suddenly descending on Chelsea, lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars in transfer fees as if they were nothing. But it was flattering, too, in those early days of Londongrad, of Moscow-on-Thames, as the stuccoed houses of the capital’s finest streets were filling with Russian oligarchs, the country’s finest schools thronging with their children.

All of it appealed not just to the laissez-faire approach of Tony Blair’s Britain — come one, come all, as long as you can pay for the price of a ticket — but to the ego of both the country as a whole and the Premier League in particular.

Russia’s young plutocrats had more money than Croesus, more money than God, money that could buy anything they wanted. And what they wanted, more than anything, it seemed, was to be British. Abramovich wanted to be British so much that he had bought a soccer team, a plaything in the self-styled greatest league in the world. His money added just a little extra spice, a further dash of glamour, to the Premier League’s endlessly spinning drama; his money served to make the great English soft power project just a little more enticing.

It was only a few years later that the second story emerged, in the aftermath of the jailing of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. Perhaps, the idea was floated, Abramovich had not fallen in love with soccer; or, rather, he had not only fallen in love with soccer. Perhaps he did have an ulterior motive. Chelsea, after all, did not just provide him with access to the very highest echelons of British society; it gave him a profile, a fame, too.

He did not seem to relish it, particularly — “one day they will forget me,” he had said, in one of the rare interviews he has granted since arriving in England — but he seemed prepared to believe it a price worth paying. Being an oligarch was a dangerous business. Chelsea, perhaps, was Abramovich’s security against the shifting tides in the Kremlin.

That was the story we told ourselves as Chelsea went from usurper to establishment, the club that initially inspired the idea of cracking down on arriviste wealth suddenly recast as one of its foremost advocates. It was the story that took root as Chelsea racked up Premier League titles, as it conquered Europe not once, but twice: that soccer was the sanctuary, the ultimate mark of acceptance.

It was only, really, when others started to adapt Abramovich’s playbook that the narrative was challenged. First one and then two Premier League teams fell under the aegis of nation states, or of entities so closely aligned to nation states that it can be difficult to tell the difference unless you really, really want to squint. The idea of sportswashing bled into the conversation. The sense that soccer was being used took root. Abramovich’s possible motives were reconsidered.

And then, on Thursday, we saw for the first time — plain as day — what the purpose of it all had been, the story in its true, unvarnished form. For two weeks, the British government had dallied over applying sanctions to Abramovich, not necessarily the richest or even the most powerful but still by some distance the most high-profile of all of the caste of oligarchs, the face of oligarchy in the west.

A surprising portion of those two weeks, it turned out, had been spent trying to find a way to make sure that Chelsea could continue to function, roughly as normal, once Abramovich’s other assets were frozen. The players, the staff and the fans — especially the fans — must not suffer, the government said. A few hours earlier, Russian artillery had shelled a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine. But the government was clear: The sanctity of the Premier League could not be sullied.

That was the purpose all along, it seemed. Abramovich probably did cherish the profile that owning Chelsea brought him. He certainly seemed to relish the sport.

But mainly, he had come to soccer because it entangled him in British society in a way that owning any other business simply would not. None of the other oligarchs who have been sanctioned have been given a bespoke “license” to continue operating one of their businesses. That is not, after all, how sanctions are supposed to work. It had taken us 19 years, and the death of thousands of Ukrainians, to realize that, to see the world as it was.

Now, at last, we know why Abramovich was here. Now, at last, we can begin to understand the price we have all paid. It is not only Chelsea that must now face up to an uncertain future: not only the next few months, as the club picks through the thicket of restrictions on its existence — its club store closed, its hotel no longer permitted to sell food and rent rooms, its crowds restricted to season-ticket holders — but beyond, too.

The club could yet slide into bankruptcy, sold off to the highest bidder by the government. Or perhaps it will wither, slowly and irrevocably, its players leaving whenever they are permitted, the club unable to sign replacements. Maybe there will be peace, and an easing of the sanctions, and maybe Abramovich can recoup his investment and his loans. No matter how it plays out, there is no going back. The fans do not, and cannot, know what comes next. It is up to them to decide if the memories and the trophies were worth it.

The echoes of Abramovich’s swift, abrupt exit, however, will carry out further into the game. His arrival marked the start of what will come, in time, to be thought of as soccer’s oligarch age. It was Abramovich, as noted last week, whose arrival kick-started the inflationary spiral that has fractured European soccer beyond repair, with only a handful of clubs hoarding all of the wealth of the game, ruthlessly stripping its natural resources for their benefit.

His departure will prove to be no less epoch-defining. Modern elite soccer is built on growth, the conceit that there is always more money out there. That is why Real Madrid and Juventus and Barcelona want, so fervently, to launch a European Super League, because they are convinced that if only they did not have to deal with UEFA, they would be able to harvest the bottomless riches of all of the broadcasters and sponsors desperate to fill their accounts.

It is why UEFA has been so determined to expand the Champions League, so convinced that it can find the money to satiate the boundless greed of the great and the good. All of it is based not only on the idea that the golden goose will keep laying, but the faith that there are a hundred, a thousand more golden geese out there, a whole flock of them.

If that was ever true, it is not now. UEFA will find another sponsor for the Champions League to replace Gazprom, but it will not find one that is quite so generous. There is, after all, a premium to be paid for exercising soft power. Exponential growth is rather more challenging when one of the prime drivers of it has closed down.

So, too, the clubs face a reckoning. Not only the teams owned by princelings and nation states and politicians, but those that are not. It is not just the promise of soaring television rights deals that have drawn the “acceptable” investors into soccer, the private equity groups and the hedge funds and the Wall Street speculators. They have no more fallen in love with the game than Abramovich.

All of them have bought in to get out, at some point in the future, when they have made their clubs as profitable as possible, when the prospect of a lucrative return is at hand. And yet, all of a sudden, they find their list of potential buyers limited. Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia: They all have their clubs now. The great gushing of cash from China ended years ago, as Inter Milan might attest. Now Russian money is out of the question, too.

There is no shortage of the rich and the powerful and the speculative, of course, even with those markets closed up and sealed off. But those that remain are a different type of buyer: They are other private equity firms, other hedge funds, other Wall Street and Silicon Valley types. They are, for the most part, the ones who want to make a profit. They do not want to be the ones who buy at the peak of the market. They did not make their money by being the sucker.

That might seem, perhaps, a little indistinct, a touch theoretical, but it has real consequences. It means reassessing how much profit might be made, and how large the payout might be. That, in turn, means altering the equation of how much it is worth putting in. The change will not be immediate, overnight, dramatic. But it will be a change nonetheless.

That will be Abramovich’s ultimate legacy, the lasting impact of the era he began on what seemed to be a whim and he ended, in the space of a couple of weeks, in the middle of a war. Soccer’s age of the oligarch is over. This time, there can be no excuse for failing to understand what the game has become. On that, we have clarity. Where it goes from here remains shrouded in doubt.

Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Mar 11, 2022 11:39 pm

I seem to be posting much more often than intended of late

It has taken longer than I thought it would to get round to this - Saudi Arabia - Newcastle United - The Yemen - following the sanctions against Abramovich, but still no mention of Abu Dhabi/UAE - Manchester City - Saudi Arabia - The Yemen

Shouldn’t someone in football also care about the war in Yemen just a little?

Barney Ronay
Chelsea’s ownership is finally facing deserved scrutiny but there is a double standard when it comes to Newcastle’s owners

Fri 11 Mar 2022 20.37 GMT

The internet always knows what you want. This week a particular video clip has been popping up in those wormholes filled with adverts at the side of my screen, pressing its nose up against the glass for hours on end like an unhappy cat mewling at the window.

Alan Shearer slams Roman Abramovich over Ukraine statement. There it is again. And here is the text of Alan’s actual slamming: “There’s still no condemnation from Roman or the club about what’s happening in Ukraine.” It is a robust and sincere statement, deserving of serious treatment. So let’s break this down.

Alan Shearer has clearly looked at the facts. And he has decided that the invasion of a neighbouring state, the bombing of civilians, the use of advanced weaponry: all of this is unacceptable.

By extension, for an English football club to be owned by someone complicit in such crimes, well that is unacceptable too. This is non-negotiable. As Alan Shearer rightly states, we cannot have our football clubs tarnished, sullied, or linked with regimes that may be guilty of such crimes.

At which point three possibilities present themselves. Alan Shearer has never heard of the war in Yemen. Alan Shearer is unaware of who Mohammed bin Salman is, or what he does as his main day job. Or third, Alan Shearer is wiling to overlook both of these things because he really likes and cares about Newcastle United.

And sadly at this point the world does start to intrude. It isn’t hard to make the connection here. Newcastle United are owned by a fund that is governed by a state. And that state is also, like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, involved in the bloodstained invasion of a neighbouring state.

For the last seven years Saudi Arabia has been waging a war that has led to the deaths of an estimated quarter of a million people, not to mention famine, chaos and societal collapse. The organisation Human Rights Watch has called for an investigation into the role of Mohammed bin Salman – who, to be clear, manages the fund that runs Newcastle United - for alleged war crimes.

And yet instead of calling out, say, Amanda Staveley for failing to condemn these issues Alan Shearer believes instead that the takeover of Newcastle by the Saudi fund is “a special day” filled not with pain, guilt and chicanery, but with hope. It might be funny. If only it wasn’t so depressing, and so difficult.

This is not an unprovoked, ad hominem attack on Alan Shearer. It is a considered, ad principium attack on the world view he is espousing. I like and admire Alan Shearer, both as a great ex-footballer – among the best in the world in his pomp – and as a pundit too, a role he has grown into from the early awkwardness as a rather taciturn ex-pro, to his current incarnation as an honest, forensic and informative dispenser of truths.

Except, not so much here. That state of cognitive dissonance is just too weird to gloss over. Shall we set it out here, just to be clear? Roman Abramovich has been sanctioned by the British government because he is “associated with a person who is or has been involved in destabilising Ukraine and undermining and threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine.”

What happens if we take these words and transpose them? Because Newcastle’s ownership is not just “associated with” or distantly tied to the destabilising, undermining and Biblical-scale destruction of it own neighbour Yemen. It is openly and personally engaged in it.

This not a link that needs to be proven or teased out. It is literally the same person overseeing both the football fund and the fighter jets. And given it is now OK, and indeed de rigueur to suggest Chelsea’s trophies are stained by the blood of the citizens of Kyiv and Mariupol, it has been an odd thing to scan the sports websites and slip between these two extremes.

Over here we have the guilt and the shame of Chelsea. And then just below the news from Newcastle about what an excellent job Eddie Howe is doing (which he really is) and what a smart, entirely commendable bit of spending that £80m winter window investment is turning out to be.

This is not whataboutery. It is literally the same thing. Football owner + bloody war = undesirable. This is genuine equivalence. An estimated 10,000 children have been killed or maimed in Yemen. Shouldn’t someone in football also care about it just a little? Alan? Are there, like, any more videos?

There are two things worth saying about this. First, it is just so hard, and so complex. It’s not the fault of the club’s supporters, who are being asked to process and take a view on something that has so many angles, and who only really come to this place for a little light and joy, to savour that connection. This thing has been foisted on all of us. How do we solve it?

Perhaps some basic clarity would help. This is the second thing here. The truth is quite simple. We don’t talk about sanctioning Saudi, or have images of the war in Yemen placed in front of us on a daily basis for one very obvious reason. Saudi is an ally. Whereas Russia is hostile.

Check back and Abramovich was also hit with sanctions because the government suspects he has been “supplying steel to the Russian military which may have been used in the production of tanks”. Let’s take that across too. Newcastle’s fund is owned by an entity that is literally, not potentially, sending tanks to kill civilians. But in this case those arms are supplied by Britain.

To date the UK has supplied the Saudi coalition with £10bn of Typhoon and Tornado aircraft, Paveway bombs, Brimstone and Storm Shadow missiles. Zoom out and it isn’t hard to picture a world where Putin is calling for sanctions against Britain and ordering Abramovich to offload Chelsea to preserve the good name of the Kremlin.

This is the world in which sport finds itself embedded. What has changed is the hard edges of where this thing can lead are now very visible. If Shearer’s paradox teaches us anything it is that you either see it and reject it en bloc; or it is probably best to keep quiet.

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