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 » Sun Mar 27, 2022 7:47 pm

KRBFC wrote:
Sun Mar 27, 2022 5:25 pm
Which Belgian club do they own? I thought it was Molenbeek who Ntumbu Massanka played for
Blitzer has 6 European clubs and Real Salt Lake which he bought in January, Textor currently 2 European and a Brazilian clubs all since last summer

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sun Mar 27, 2022 9:52 pm

Duffer_ wrote:
Sun Mar 27, 2022 4:57 pm
Who or what is "Chelsea" in the context of insisting on the £1bn additional investment? Presumably it is Chairman, Bruce Buck, and the directors of Chelsea FC plc? Are these individuals sufficiently distanced and independent from Abramovich for us to feel comfortable with them being involved in this process?

It looks to me as though Abramovich's decision to sell prior to sanctions being imposed means the UK government is in danger of being out manoeuvred. The government has intervened to ensure that Abramovich doesn't benefit from the sale proceeds and granted a licence for Chelsea to operate whilst its future is resolved. It looks as though the government has stopped short of seizing the assets and making itself solely responsible for determining the procedure and objectives of the sale. These objectives could be one or more of the following:

1) to remove Russian ownership and influence from the football club;
2) to maximise the sale proceeds for the benefit of charitable organisations;
3) to ensure the future financial stability of Chelsea FC;
4) to promote meaningful fan representation in the future management of Chelsea FC; or
5) something else

The above is not meant as an exhaustive list but it is enough to demonstrate that these demands from "Chelsea" could be at odds with the government's objectives and Paul Waine's post, albeit tongue in cheek, illustrates that point.

And yet the Mirror reports Abramovich will have "the final say" on who buys Chelsea and the Raine Group appear to have been appointed by Chelsea/Abramovich before the government got involved. If the government is in control of the sale process, why would they allow excessive profiteering from the Raine Group?

It all looks a bit of a mess to me but admittedly I am not all over this story. Does anybody have clarity on who the ultimate decision makers are in the sale process? Apologies if I've missed it on this or any other thread.
IS the government being out manoeuvred or did they leave enough room to say they have been out manoeuvred?

quite possibly that is too political a question from me

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Mar 28, 2022 6:07 pm

Interesting news about the 'British' bid for Chelsea - the Centricus bid team have now been told their are no longer in the running - all American bids now

https://twitter.com/tariqpanja/status/1 ... 5561654278

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Mar 29, 2022 10:19 pm

Not the everyday statement you might expect from a football club, but this is England 2022 and Staines Town have made a rather dramatic statement on their website

https://stainestownfootballclub.co.uk/u ... statement/

URGENT CLUB STATEMENT
29th March 2022 by
Staines Town Football Club (STFC) regrets to announce that pursuant to third party breaches of Section 54 of The Modern Slavery Act 2015 and other information that has come to light, we are forced to temporarily suspend all primary operations including but not limited to competitive fixtures, until a thorough investigation into the practices of Downing LLP has been concluded by the relevant authorities.

In the first instance, STFC has an obligation under The Modern Slavery Act 2015 to ensure that our business and supply chains are free from human trafficking and slavery. Our actions, as a full member of The English Football Association (The FA), are compliant and fully concur with The FA statement on Slavery and Human Trafficking (See attached below). This statement and the adherence to The Modern Slavery Act 2015, has also been adopted by every other National Football Association within the United Kingdom and its major member clubs.

Of particular interest to those involved at all levels of football, both within the UK and globally, it has also come to our attention through both substantive and vast evidence from various sources, that Downing LLP, who control and fund the operation of our Landlord, The Thames Club, may be involved through its other holdings in the financing of large scale bribery and corruption. This includes the current funding of a Swiss Bank with international operations that has been found guilty in the United States Federal Court of conspiring to launder over $36 million USD in bribes to officials within the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and other football federations. These bribes were in furtherance of a scheme in which sports marketing companies bribed football officials in exchange for broadcasting rights to football matches.

After the guilty verdicts were handed down, The US Attorney’s Office described the scandal by saying, “The business and its employees facilitated bribes and its compliance department turned a blind eye to glaring red flags of money laundering. This Office will hold accountable those corporations or individuals that use the American banking system for corrupt ends. As today’s resolution makes clear, financial institutions that become complicit in their clients’ efforts to launder illicit funds face significant penalties.”

“Today’s resolution sends a strong message to all financial institutions that if they knowingly misuse our financial system to hide their clients’ criminal proceeds or to promote a corrupt scheme, they will be held to account. From the time of the first FIFA-related indictment, the Department has promised to hold accountable the financial institutions involved in this global criminal scheme. We are delivering on that promise.”

“The business pursued the profit it could make laundering corrupt funds derived from a criminal scheme run by powerful FIFA officials. Their behaviour has earned them the equivalent of a red card, and the money the bank now owes the U.S. government is more than double what it admits to laundering. The FBI operates globally with our international partners, and our message to those who may be looking to profit from similar schemes is simple – the penalties for this type of play are steep. Stay within the rules.”

“The guilty party aided corrupt FIFA officials in laundering over $36 million. Officials that are a conduit for criminal activity undermine their own profession and the health of our financial system. The Bank’s admissions show that IRS Criminal Investigation will relentlessly pursue corruption across borders, including financial institutions that facilitate or conceal criminal activity. This should put others on notice that aiding in corruption will cost you millions.”

Elsewhere, we have also been provided with vast amounts of evidence, that Downing LLP, may be involved through its other holdings in the financing of Environmental Crimes, Price Fixing, Deforestation, Forced Evictions, Human Rights Abuses, Child Labour, Slavery, Gender Discrimination and Murder.

Subsequently, we also believe that Downing LLP may be guilty of Fraud through deliberate misrepresentation of its core ethics to induce prospective investors into allocating capital to them. This includes but is not limited to its ESG representations, its UNGC membership and its 12 Responsible Investor Principles.

Amnesty International after years of thorough investigation, described one of the companies that Downing LLP has invested in, in the following terms, ‘They have built their business on a foundation of human rights abuse. They have also profited from abuses that took place during their investment and in some cases these businesses have colluded in the commission of human rights abuses and engaged in and profit from serious human rights abuses.’

As a separate matter we also have reason to believe that Downing LLP may have breached the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) (Amendment) Regulations 2022, as Downing LLP seems to have been involved in obtaining a benefit from carrying on business of economic significance to the Government of Russia as well as carrying on a business with a Government of Russia affiliated entity.

There are further grounds that Downing LLP, may have, through its holdings, made funds and economic resources available to at least one designated person and engaged in activities that circumvent an asset freeze under UK statute.

This follows nearly four years of actions against STFC by Downing LLP through its holdings in The Thames Club, that includes but is not limited to the purposeful derogation of STFC rights granted under the terms of its lease. This has included the removal of several major sources of club revenue and facilities that should have been available to STFC, alongside other negative actions, all of which have been previously well documented by STFC. All of this has had a severe detrimental effect upon the financial running of the club and hence, negative team performances and all other club business.

As a result of the clubs downward spiral, we have suffered defamation, ridicule, threats and abuse, much of which we have had to accept in the knowledge that the general public were not aware of the appalling depths to which Downing LLP operations have seemingly sunk to via its apparent funding of the most heinous, nefarious and barbaric crimes within our society.

STFC believes that the strategy of Downing LLP, (who seem to have proven via its investment holdings in a business that was found guilty of the bribery and corruption of FIFA officials, that they have no regard whatsoever for a community football club or for the greater good of football), is to execute the purposeful and controlled decline of STFC and thus realise the land value at Wheatsheaf Park through development. We have spent vast amounts of our own external capital, with almost no operating income at the Club, to secure the future of STFC through the purchase of the freehold at Wheatsheaf Park, which has thus far been blocked at every turn.

We are also obligated to comply with the legislative position within the provisions and stipulations of Section 54 of The Modern Slavery Act 2015 and as a result, we must reiterate, that until the necessary government and institutional investigations have proven beyond reasonable doubt that Downing LLP is not funding modern slavery, and that STFC, its business and supply chains, are free from human trafficking and slavery, we must temporarily suspend our primary operations until the conclusion of this process, which we expect to be treated as a matter of absolute urgency.

STFC are a multi-cultural and diverse club that has employed staff across all ethnic and religious backgrounds. We have been at the forefront of initiatives that are inclusive of disadvantaged and oppressed communities. It is simply unconscionable that either as individuals or as a FA affiliated member club, that we can continue to operate at Wheatsheaf Park under an insolvent Landlord, whilst they remain managed and funded by the UK investment fund, Downing LLP.

Until absolute resolution is guaranteed, STFC will not go back to Wheatsheaf Park and play beneath the bloodied shadow of the profits of slavery, child abuse and all else. It simply will not be tolerated and is offensive and unacceptable in every form. Everyone associated with such practices must be stopped in their tracks and brought to book with urgency. This needs to start with the enablers of such acts who appear to operate with complete impunity under our noses, here in the United Kingdom.

Turning a convenient blind eye to these abhorrent practices must come to an end. STFC sincerely hopes that The Football Association, The Isthmian League, Spelthorne Borough Council and all other relevant bodies, agencies and individuals will fully support us in this decision, in compliance with both the law and our zero tolerance policy following the red flags raised since conducting the relevant risk assessment of the information provided to us about Downing LLP, whose Chairman and Founder, Nick Lewis and CEO, Tony McGing, have consistently refused the opportunity to discuss and address these matters with us in a private setting

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by elwaclaret » Tue Mar 29, 2022 10:30 pm

Wow, who needs to worry about money with the number of civil servants that will be needed to cover all the companies in Britain that will catch out?

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Re: Magic Money Tree

Post by ClaretPete001 » Wed Mar 30, 2022 12:41 pm

Royboyclaret wrote:
Fri Nov 17, 2017 12:34 pm
Just the bidding alone for the next TV deal from '19/'20 is going to make for fascinating viewing. Perhaps a little early for the internet giants like Amazon and Apple to become involved but then again maybe not.

No matter, the prediction has to be a similar increase to the last deal (just over 55%) which will ensure a Total Income for Burnley for season '19/'20 of some £150 million.

Staggering figures for a club like ours that just a few seasons ago was relying on director loans simply to pay the wages. Can't stress enough, therefore, the need to stay in the PL at all costs until the bubble finally bursts.
Bit late for that....

The bubble probably won't burst - what will burst is the English football pyramid.

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Re: Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Mar 30, 2022 1:12 pm

ClaretPete001 wrote:
Wed Mar 30, 2022 12:41 pm
Bit late for that....

The bubble probably won't burst - what will burst is the English football pyramid.
Interesting you pulled this out

- bar Covid we were heading quite close to that 2019/20 £150m that Royboy forecast in 2017 (circa £145m+)

- the domestic tv rights dropped for this current cycle are stagnant - with a £400m additional pay out to the football family in the next cycle - effectively a further reduction) the saviour has been the international rights which matched domestic last time and are set to exceed in the next cycle.

- Beyond that the independent football regulator will have a say on distributions with a new EFL commissioned study on parachute payments published earlier this week, it is being used as a further argument to change the distribution model.

- There is still the the loss of in excess of £350m in Chinese broadcasting rights in the current cycle and £340m of rebates, and the fact the Premier League has absorbed the cost of additional support to the football family and has not pro rated solidarity payments to the decreased income - note Parachute payments have been decreased pro-rata

- Those international rights are seeing a very different set of trends, increasing (significantly) in parts of the west (particularly Northern Europe and North America) and decreasing (significantly) in parts in the East (China, India) which in part may be compensatory for the huge changes in fixture times las season

- Yesterday the European Clubs Association were boasting of a 36% increase in revenues for UEFA competitions in the next cycle after they forced changes to the approach including the setting up of a commercial enterprise for the purpose in which shares are 50:50 between the clubs and UEFA, this on top of the changes to the post 2024 league structure (more games, co-efficient qualification places for the big teams (preserves UEFA revenues). Expect more commercial changes,

- It is a fact that UEFA competitions, and their financial distributions have distorted domestic leagues more than any other cause. While UEFA like to boast of greater distributions to an ever wider number of clubs and associations (UEFA Conference League anyone) it does not like to talk about the fact that the proportion taken by Champions League clubs has and continues to grow - with that growth increasingly centred on those 32 clubs that qualify for the deeply damaging co-efficient payments.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by aggi » Wed Mar 30, 2022 5:36 pm

A good analysis of lost revenues/costs arising from Covid was in the Villa accounts.

Image
This user liked this post: Paul Waine

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Mar 30, 2022 10:03 pm

The Guardian with the details of the latest meeting of the ECA

https://www.theguardian.com/football/bl ... -influence

ECA helps clubs flex their muscles and increase their influence
Paul MacInnes

The European Club Association has worked with Uefa on a set of competition reforms that would mean more matches, more security and – everyone hopes – more money

Wed 30 Mar 2022 18.51 BST
Something of the ridiculousness of modern elite football could be found on the streets of central Vienna on Monday night as hundreds of the game’s power brokers were escorted across the city to make sure they didn’t miss their dinner. Oliver Kahn was hugger-mugger with Michael Ballack, the Uefa president, Aleksander Ceferin, was being pursued by the Leeds owner, Andrea Radrizzani, and Ajax’s Edwin van der Sar was trying to find out whether Roman Abramovich had been poisoned. They were part of a cohort that resembled a bunch of exchange students as they followed a big sign saying “ECA” to a grand restaurant where the food was later described as disappointing.

The European Club Association is, depending on who you listen to, the secretive power broker at the heart of the continental game or a collaborative collective that seeks to make clubs’ voices heard amid the grinding bureaucracies of football’s governing bodies, Uefa in particular. This week they were holding their general congress in Sigmund Freud’s home town, a year on from apparently embracing their own death drive.

From the heart of the ECA had come the idea of the European Super League, a prospect that sought to offer “significantly greater … support for European football” by placing its biggest clubs in a competition specifically closed to the rest. That idea never quite became reality and this year the ECA, according to its new leader, Paris Saint-Germain’s Nasser al-Khelaifi, was able to declare the Super League “does not exist”.

Legal proceedings in the European court of justice may suggest otherwise, but the point Khelaifi was really making was that he felt confident enough his organisation would not be split should such an idea return in the imminent future. A suggestion that was easy to believe here.

Not only was the mood entirely convivial (something easier to achieve with the remaining ESL members – Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus – having had their memberships revoked), but there was lots to celebrate. Thanks to the efforts of the club competitions committee working group, a body that feeds into Uefa’s executive committee and whose membership is not easy to identify, the ECA had agreed to a set of reforms for the Champions League, Europa League and Europa Conference League that would mean more matches, more security and – everyone dearly hopes – more money for its 249 members.

Among those reforms, which will begin in 2024, are the controversial plans to allow two clubs to enter the Champions League each year based in part on their historical performance. It is a decision that would have benefited Manchester United this year, for example, should they fail to make the Premier League top four.

Then there is the prospect of 10 games for the 36 teams who qualify for the Champions League group stage, an idea that has so far resisted attempts by other parties – such as the Premier League – to take the number down to eight.

Finally, there is the new joint venture that allows clubs to sit at the table with Uefa as they negotiate commercial deals for the three European club competitions, something Khelaifi says has led to a 39% increase in forecasted revenues for the three years after 2024.

So happy days then and a reminder the situation the Super League clubs were desperate to escape was pretty cushy. At the same time, however, the ECA also agreed to new financial control regulations that were tougher than had been expected. Clubs who compete in Europe will have to commit to spending no more than 70% of their income on transfers, wages and agents fees. They will also have to agree to pay money owed on transfers and other payments on time and if they don’t they will be fined European points or even banned from competition altogether.

The mood suggested all these measures had been accepted by the ECA’s 249 members, with barely a note of dissent. The big clubs will continue to get richer, but other clubs see opportunities too. Aki Riihilahti is a vice-chair of the ECA and the former Crystal Palace midfielder is chief executive of his home town club, HJK Helsinki. He points to an increase of £40m each season in solidarity from clubs in the top five European Leagues to those outside as a sign of a more cooperative direction.

He says the increase in group stage matches, plus the introduction of the Europa Conference League, is strengthening the competitive environment for smaller nations, and helping to develop their players. He also admits to being in the CCC working group.

“I was there and we talked more about football than ever before. “From a broader perspective we are united in what we want. There will be more countries represented in the group stages, which is amazing because that is something that gives a lot of countries relevance and keeps them alive from a professional football perspective. We have five domestic leagues where the TV money is so huge, and that is the reason for the competitive imbalance, but you can use Uefa competitions to give the other 50 at least part of it. That’s why the discussions have really been fantastic: it has given us a view going forward that there is room for all countries.”

He acknowledges that challenges remain, not least keeping local clubs alive while the global televised game continues to grow. “It’s good when there’s the local and the global. So you can support two teams, that’s fine, but if you only have the global brand I don’t think football will have the same fanbase, you don’t have the same initial attachment, it will be only entertainment. But I think people understand that and, as a champion of a smaller country, I really must welcome the discussions and initiatives we have had with Uefa. It’s so much more fair than it’s ever been before. We have to give Uefa and ECA credit for that.”

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Mar 31, 2022 2:08 pm

Interesting stuff from Graeme Le Saux in the Guardian about the Chelsea sale, how all decisions in football are based on money and the reluctance by all in the game to talk about the difficult issues


Interview
Graeme Le Saux: ‘We have to address the pure dominance of money’


The former Chelsea player believes football’s governing bodies should be dealing with questions posed by war in Ukraine

Barney Ronay - @barneyronay
Thu 31 Mar 2022 08.00 BST

“I went to Newcastle versus Chelsea. That game raised an uncomfortable truth about football, ownership and the way our game is run.”

Back in the day proper football men didn’t talk much about politics and certainly not about uncomfortable truths. Probably, people in football should talk about those things a great deal more, if only because they seem so intent on gatecrashing the main stage. Uncomfortable truths: this is the game now.

Graeme Le Saux spent 11 years at Chelsea in two spells, departing the same summer Roman Abramovich arrived, 2003. He works as a Premier League analyst for NBC and also has a non-executive director role with Real Mallorca, a club owned by the US property billionaire Robert Sarver.

If this gives him a degree of inside track, a locus standi on the current shemozzle around football club ownership, then there are other elements, too. Le Saux has always been engaged and politically nonconformist. These things are relative. In pre-modern football any kind of politics, even the most centrist of Guardian-reading, museum-going engagement with the wider world, seemed pretty radical.

If that quality used to mark Le Saux as an outsider, there are certain advantages in being able to speak with a degree of awareness about the challenges the supercharged game faces, as well as in being prepared to go into the kind of difficult places that make you wish the former left-back was still hanging in there as a face on the Match of the Day sofa.

“Of course Eddie Howe doesn’t want to be asked questions about executions,” he says of that afternoon when Saudi PIF instrument met plaything of a sanctioned Putin associate. “It makes him feel very uncomfortable.

“That’s the dilemma. At what point do you put your principles ahead of who you work for? Everyone has to answer that themselves. If he [Howe] is happy fending off those questions with the answers he gave then people will judge him according to that.

“As a player I felt I had principles, that I tried to use my position to include how I felt about stuff. It’s not as easy as just saying this is abhorrent, is it? Or maybe it is.”

The issue closest to Le Saux’s heart is Chelsea’s ongoing sale, from the treatment of the club at the hands of a government in which he has “no trust whatsoever” to the shadow cast over the intervening 19 years and frustration at English football missing a chance to reset the way its governance works.

“There has been a lot of noise around the sale. People who have put in a bid have had a lot of publicity that I assume is coming from them,” he says. “But do any of us really know what the process is? Is this going to be based on the highest bidder or on the right bidder? Are any of these decisions being based on a set of principles or values?

“Football has a choice on the direction of travel. There is an opportunity to change the model now, where people value the sustainability of a football club over whoever bankrolls it. But we’re going to come out in the same place with the same uncertainties. It’s a massive wasted opportunity.”

For Le Saux, part of the frustration is seeing football being asked to solve problems that are equally present in the power structures around it. “Just look at the relationship between Russian money and politics, if that’s the focus of our attention at the moment. If we go back six weeks, Roman Abramovich owning Chelsea was not a problem for the British government, despite what they already knew. There is clearly an inconsistency around what value and standards we place around certain industries. And it seems football always has to carry the burden.

“There is a huge lack of trust at the moment. There are real concerns around institutions that are meant to be there to support us. Look at the problems in politics and in things like policing. If there was trust in how our country is run you might not ask these questions. Whereas now we’re all asking whose self-interest is going to be served in this deal?”

With that in mind, does he really think people in football can be expected to take the lead on these moral issues? “Ultimately, it comes down to what sacrifices you’re prepared to make,” Le Saux says. “Will anyone say, ‘I’m not going to play for this club for this reason, it goes against my core principles’? I think some players would. I’m sure the players do care.

“If I was in the Chelsea dressing room the day of the Newcastle game I would have worn a Stop The War T-shirt in support of Ukraine. Everybody had the opportunity and still does to say this is the new era for Chelsea.

“But that is where leadership is important. The bigger question is should football, should the Premier League, should the Football Association put players in the position where they have to make those moral decisions? Should fans have to? We’re all being asked to enforce our own morality.

“That’s why we need leadership and governance to plot a course through those very difficult questions. These principles should be under lock and key in one of those buildings, not at the feet of a football player.”

There is sympathy also for those whose jobs are under threat. “The government felt the need to sanction oligarchs but I don’t think they have the first clue about the impact on fans and on everyone that works at the club, from players to the coaching staff to the backroom employees,” says Le Saux.

“People are very quick to stick the boot in when something goes wrong – that’s part of the ‘banter’ of football. So I’m not surprised some Chelsea fans feel confused by this. It’s not about them being the victim; there are people being shelled, this is not about football fans. But they have woken up from one day to the next with the club they have supported for however many years in complete turmoil.

“How do they get back that pride, that connection with the club? It’s a massive part of this takeover. We can’t let the situation drag on in this weird limbo. At the same time it would be a disaster if we rushed through a bid without considering the opportunities and the longer-term plan.”

The longer-term plan: this is always the tough bit. Le Saux is pretty radical on the idea of structural, even philosophical change. “The big change for me is trying to address the pure dominance of money. That creates so many other problems. It creates inflation. It creates the imbalance that has been clear for some time.

“Look at Chelsea. Roman invested £1.5bn of his own money for the club to be so dominant. You think, if that’s what is required then is that how we really want the game to exist? The amounts are just jaw-dropping.

“We have allowed every decision to be based on money. No one should be surprised at the talk of a super league because the big clubs always need more fuel in the top of the tank. Can we reset that? Rather than Chelsea going to the highest bidder do we try to add an idea of integrity into the mix? Once the valuation on the club is met can the government or the regulator say it’s time to look at sustainability and fan engagement and building on a different model?

“There has to be a willingness in football to see change, to show some restraint. Salary caps are difficult because then you say, well, money goes underground. But that shouldn’t stop you from trying to regulate and find a balance.

“I work with Mallorca and financial fair play has stopped us from investing, because even if the owners wanted to invest in reasonable things the salary cap is so small that we have to ensure that money goes on getting the first team to a competitive level. FFP punishes the smaller clubs and benefits the bigger clubs.”

For now, Le Saux will be glued to the denouement to the season, albeit with some reservations over what the next few months may bring for his former club. Thomas Tuchel has been the peg holding the playing side together. How long can he be expected to hang in there?

“Tuchel has been great for the Premier League, he’s fascinating when he talks about tactics, he has that high emotional intelligence,” says Le Saux. “But he will be as shocked and unsettled as everyone else. And people aren’t going to say: ‘Let’s give Chelsea some time and let them sort themselves out.’ They’re going to say: ‘Who can we get now because they’re all going to be at a discount?’

“One of the biggest issues facing Chelsea is cash flow. Can they get enough in to keep paying everyone? It just feels like an absolute mess.”

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Apr 01, 2022 1:13 am

Interesting stuff about some of the Chelsea bidders being discussed in the House of Lords yesterday - with calls for Parliament to block one particular bidder as a result of past activities - of course in other previous times those past activities would probably have qualified him for a seat in the House of Lords if he was British.

from the Telegraph, the link takes you through the paywall

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

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Apr 01, 2022 1:24 am

Meanwhile there has been some heated exchanges in the FIFA convention in Qatar, as the world cup and all that it has come to represent draws greater international scrutiny

this report in the Guardian only represents a small part of what happened today which followed this statement https://www.fotball.no/tema/nff-nyheter ... -congress/

Qatar World Cup chief bites back after criticism from Norwegian FA
  • Lise Klaveness raises issues such as human rights and equality
  • Hassan al-Thawadi says people must ‘educate themselves’
https://www.theguardian.com/football/20 ... -klaveness
Paul MacInnes Thu 31 Mar 2022 15.41 BST

Dispute over the legacy of staging the men’s World Cup in Qatar broke out on the floor of the Fifa Congress on Thursday, with the president of the Norwegian Football Federation calling for stronger action, only for the head of Qatar’s Supreme Committee to insist she “educate” herself over the issues.

In a tightly managed set-piece event in Doha before Friday’s World Cup draw, Lise Klaveness’s address upset the consensus when she said Fifa must act as a “role model” and called on the organisation to do more to support the families of migrant workers who had been killed and those injured working on the World Cup project.

“Our game can inspire dreams and break down barriers but as leaders we must do it right and to the highest standards,” said Klaveness, a former Norway international. “We cannot ignore the calls for change and how Fifa runs the game has so much to say for how the game is perceived. Fifa must act as a role model.

“In 2010 World Cups were awarded by Fifa in unacceptable ways with unacceptable consequences. Human rights, equality and democracy – the core interests of football – were not in the starting XI.. These basic rights were pressured on to the field as substitutes, mainly by outside voices. Fifa has addressed these issues but there is still a long way to go.”

Klaveness went on to call for specific reforms. “Migrant workers injured or families of those who died in the buildup to the World Cup must be cared for.”

The Norwegian FA president’s speech was followed by an unexpected address from the general secretary of the Honduran FA, José Ernesto Mejía, who said it was not “the right forum or the right moment” to make such remarks.

The secretary general of the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy (SC), Hassan al-Thawadi, then gave a passionate address defending the steps Qatar has taken since winning the right to host the World Cup. He said the country had undertaken “12 years of continuous work … dedicated to ensuring this tournament leaves truly transformational social, human, economic and environmental legacies to be remembered. We are acutely aware of the spotlight that comes with hosting the greatest show on earth and we have embraced it.”

Thawadi said that the most important legacy of the World Cup would be to correct prejudices that saw the Arab world as a place of conflict. He said he also wanted to reassure those concerned over a social legacy, citing the positive reports made by international trade unions over the development of workers’ rights. “Our adversaries have become allies,” he said “[and] even our harshest critics such as Amnesty recognise our commitment.”

He also criticised Klaveness for not speaking to the SC individually about Norwegian concerns. “On [the issue of a] social legacy, I would like to assure the Norwegian FA,” he said. “[But] I’d like to express a disappointment. Madame president visited our country and did not request a meeting. She did not attempt a dialogue before addressing Congress today. We have always been open for dialogue, we always welcomed constructive criticism. We have always had the doors open for anybody who wants to understand the issues, who wants to educate themselves before passing any judgment.”

The Guardian understands that Klaveness has addressed Thawadi personally over the social legacy in Qatar as part of a Uefa working group which has visited the country.

There was also controversy over a moment later in the Congress when Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, presented a video documenting the progress made on workers’ and human rights in Qatar since it won the World Cup.

The video said that the SC was instrumental in ending the kafala system in the country and featured the general secretary of the Building and Woodworkers’ International, Ambet Yuson, praising improvements in worker safety. “The health and safety standards in the stadium construction sites are at the same level as the health and safety standards in Europe,” Yuson said.

The video also showed Piara Powar, chief executive of the Fare network which campaigns for equality in football, talking about dialogue over the safety of LGBTQ+ supporters in Qatar, where homosexuality remains illegal. Although Powar is quoted as being positive about the process, the Guardian understands that he also expressed concerns over a continued lack of guarantees over supporter safety, remarks not in the video.

On Thursday 16 organisations focused on LGBTIQ+ rights called for the SC to act on supporter safety, saying that action has been slow and that “reassurances about the safety of LGBTIQ+ people and the mechanisms in place to ensure safety have not been adequate”. The organisations said they had submitted eight requests for action to Fifa and the SC, but had yet to receive any response from the latter.

Infantino announced he was to run for a second four-year term as president.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Apr 01, 2022 1:34 am

You may remember that FIFA keeps wanting to find new ways to make money and doesn't seem to care about it effects the century+ traditions in the game, particularly if they are from Europe

this report shows what we have known for aquite some time they and football are actually making a lot of money - from France24.com

FIFA heads for record seven billion dollar revenues

Issued on: 31/03/2022 - 12:56

2 min
Doha (AFP) – FIFA is on target to reap record revenues of seven billion dollars on the back of this year's Qatar World Cup, president Gianni Infantino said Thursday as experts predicted a long-term financial boom for football.

Infantino told the annual congress of the sport's world governing body that FIFA's finances were "great" and that it would beat its target of making $6.4 billion in the four years up to 2022 by $600 million.

The governing body has seen revenues from television, sponsors and marketing take off despite past scandals and the coronavirus pandemic when spectators have turned more to television screens and other new platforms.

FIFA said in its accounts that it expects "television broadcasting rights to have set a new record" by the time of the World Cup final on December 18.

FIFA, whose finances run on a four-year cycle between World Cups, reported revenue of $766 million for 2021 -- level with 2019 and up from a pandemic-hit $266 million in 2020 -- and by the end of last year already had $6.11 billion of its target income contracted.

Most income falls into FIFA accounts in the year of the World Cup tournament. And despite the controversy over giving this year's World Cup to Qatar -- which has faced criticism over its labour rights -- revenues have boomed since the last World Cup in Russia.

The finances were so good that FIFA spent more than one billion dollars on pandemic recovery measures in football and still increased its cash and asset reserves by 21 percent to $5.5 billion.

"The financial position of the organisation remains healthy and robust," the global body's accounts said modestly.

'Withstanding effects of Covid'
Simon Chadwick, a sports economy professor at the EM Lyon Business School in France, said it had always been likely that the pandemic would make "the rich in sport get richer and the poor would get poorer".

"Organisations such as FIFA have the resources and organisational resilience to withstand the worst effects of Covid," he added.

"Secondly, the sponsors and broadcasters looked for safe havens during the Covid storm -- that is, properties proven to have stability, commercial value and an established presence."

Football's World Cup "cuts across multiple target audiences" and is more global than rival sports such as cricket or American Football, he added.

FIFA is moving into e-sports and other new platforms and Chadwick said "there is still considerable buoyancy about FIFA's prospects in generating revenues".

"Add to this the current NFT, crypto currency and metaverse frenzy, and FIFA -- like many in football -- will be anticipating revenue windfalls that will sustain it into the medium and long-term."

The organisation's finances have remained spectacular despite the scandal of seeing seven top FIFA leaders arrested on corruption charges before its 2015 congress.

More than $200 million handed over by US authorities from assets seized from regional football barons has added to the FIFA windfall.

"It's a high expectation for any global organisation to completely eradicate issues of corruption or scandal," said Chadwick. "One can only hope that FIFA will continue moving in the right direction."

"FIFA has worked hard to broaden its constituency; for instance, by bringing onboard sponsors from countries where standards of governance and levels of scrutiny are somewhat different to, say, Europe."

Chinese giants in the shape of dairy company Mengniu and consumer goods maker Hisense have become major FIFA sponsors.

"For FIFA to completely regain trust among some stakeholders, there is consequently still some work to do," said Chadwick.

The world body had to "take care not to become arrogant, lazy or sloppy in its pursuit of new revenues," he added.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Apr 01, 2022 10:13 am

I am far from sure that I agree with the premise of this article from the Independent re the Chelsea takeover - particularly as it it is expected that the government is seeking to make its own political capital out of it. It does contain a lot of useful information though

‘Massive microscope’ on new owners will help protect Chelsea’s future
The new ownership won’t match Roman Abramovich’s spending but intense scrutiny should ensure the club is kept steady and not saddled with debt

Tony Evans - 38 minutes ago

Chelsea’s fate will be determined this month. The preferred bidder to take over from Roman Abramovich will be presented to the Government in 17 days’ time by the Raine Group, a New York-based merchant bank. The future will be very different from the past 19 years of the oligarch’s tenure.

Abramovich’s alleged links to Vladimir Putin, the author of the war in Ukraine, led to sanctions being imposed on the 55-year-old. The knock-on effect destabilises Chelsea. The Independent spoke to a number of figures in football about the challenges faced by the club. They gave their views on condition of anonymity.

Of the four consortiums competing to buy Chelsea, three are fronted by Americans. Todd Boehly, who part-owns two Los Angeles teams, baseball’s Dodgers and basketball’s Lakers, is at the forefront of a bid. Stephen Pagliuca is another whose hat is in the ring and the 67-year-old is a partner in the NBA’s Boston Celtics and Atalanta of Serie A. The Ricketts family own the Chicago Cubs MLB side. Sir Martin Broughton is the face of the final group of contenders, along with Lord Sebastian Coe. Both Brits are long-time Chelsea fans.

None of the potential buyers have the capacity – nor inclination – to inject cash into the club in the way Abramovich did for almost two decades. The likelihood is that an American-led bid will succeed. What can Chelsea fans expect from the Russian’s replacement?

The shortlist should bring a semblance of relief for supporters. One of the most attractive things about Stamford Bridge is its location. A number of investors were interested in acquiring the club, moving to an out-of-town venue and redeveloping the prime real estate in SW6. All the remaining consortiums know that this is not a possibility.

The Chelsea Pitch Owners, a non-profit organisation created by Ken Bates to stop any threat of redevelopment on the site, ensures that moving is out of the question.

The CPO has more than 14,000 shareholders and owns the freehold to the Bridge and the rights to the name Chelsea Football Club. To move stadiums, it would require 75 per cent approval from members. Abramovich was unable to reach that threshold when hoping to relocate more than a decade ago. Whatever happens in the next few weeks, Chelsea are staying put.

“There were a few vultures who thought they could make a killing when the sale was announced,” a source with knowledge of the bidders said. “But the slightest awareness of the situation tells you that it would be almost impossible to go in, move the team and turn a huge profit. The Pitch Holders were a huge thorn in Abramovich’s side. He thought they would do anything he asked. But they are fans and the conscience of the club. They are not for sale.

“The stadium needs to be redeveloped but I would expect it to be done piecemeal over a period of a decade. Much the way Anfield is being upgraded gradually.”

John Terry is the CPO president and is the face of True Blues Consortium, a group who are agitating for a 10 per cent stake. They have been in contact with some of the bidders.

“I would not be surprised if they end up part of the package,” a Westminster source said. “The Government have one eye on the PR impact and this would go down well with fans’ groups – and not just Chelsea supporters.”

Another individual who has been involved in football takeovers said such a situation would be a negative for the new owners. “Having a 10 per cent block does not mean a lot in reality,” they said. “It does not provide much influence. But there’s a nuisance value. Because it’s fans, then you have got to be seen to take notice. And remember, this is not your normal takeover. There’s so much scrutiny on it. Everybody will need to be seen to be doing the right thing.”

This is a positive point for those who care about Chelsea’s future. “I don’t think anyone needs to worry about the new owners ‘doing a Glazers’ and saddling the club with debt,” a source from a London venture capitalist company said. Manchester United’s American owners financed their buyout with loans, loading the debt onto the club. Liverpool, too, were placed in a precarious position when George Gillett and Tom Hicks used the same tactics at Anfield.

“They are under a massive microscope at Chelsea,” the political insider concurred.

Everyone agrees that the biggest challenge will be adapting to a post-Abramovich world where there will be a tighter rein on spending. The Russian has written off loans worth £1.5 billion. It is unlikely that the new owners will inject cash in a similar manner.

“The American owners in the Premier League – Fenway Sports Group at Liverpool, the Glazers at United and Stan Kroenke at Arsenal – keep a close eye on spending and its relationship to turnover,” the financial expert said. “They’ll set budgets that need to be adhered to. It won’t be at the whim of one man. They are effectively institutional buyers. They are not in it to lose money.”

The main downside of American owners is their lack of experience in the football market. Sports in the United States are tightly regulated. The way the English game operates comes as a shock to those used to Stateside methods. FSG initially thought that they would run rings around other clubs and agents. Their initial experience in the Premier League convinced Liverpool’s Boston-based owners that they were much cleverer than everyone else. They soon learnt a harsh lesson: the characters who inhabit English football are not as dumb as they seem but are twice as venal as the Americans imagined. “They got their pants pulled down quite a lot in their first few years,” a source close to Anfield said.

Almost everyone agrees that the key to Chelsea’s future – whoever is in charge – is who the new owners bring in to run the club. Marina Granovskaia, who runs the Bridge, is widely respected and held to have done a superb job. Yet Granovskaia’s links to Abramovich mean that it is impossible for her to remain in charge. It is likely that Bruce Buck, the chairman, will go too. The entire executive strata at the Bridge will need to be replaced.

“If they bring in an identikit US executive to run the club the flaws will show pretty quickly,” the City source said. “It will need an experienced group of people to meet the challenges going forward.”

Which brings its own problems. As Newcastle United have shown, a consortium means that a variety of opinions need to be heard before decisions are taken. This can slow things down and force compromises. That is a far cry from Abramovich having the final say.

“It’s not just about flashing the cash,” the finance expert said. “Everton have spent more than half a billion. Bad spending gets you nowhere.

“The biggest challenge is appointing the right people to run the club. Chelsea have a great manager in place and a good squad. A sensible owner does not need to go on a spree in the transfer market. Upgrading the squad when necessary should not require massive resources. The club should be able to generate the money that’s needed.

“All of the potential buyers should be able to keep the team in the top six unless they do something stupid.”

These are tough times at Chelsea. They could be much worse. Much worse.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Apr 01, 2022 12:41 pm

If you think football has nothing to do with politics
-what are you doing looking at this thread?
-give yourself 5 minutes to look at this and just recognise how political is the worming response of Gianni Infantino - all that was missing was the famous smirk of Sepp Blatter https://twitter.com/garyalsmith/status/ ... eQmPMpAAAA

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sat Apr 02, 2022 6:51 pm

I have often posted about the interconnectedness of business interests how they often surface in football and how at times that appears to present a conflict of interest

this is the latest I have come across
https://twitter.com/Dr_Ulrichsen/status ... zRy_UpAAAA

"...Mubadala - whose managing director is the chairman of Manchester City - has a stake in the Raine Group, which has been charged with handling the sale of Chelsea"

This link takes you through the paywall to the article featured in the tweet
https://archive.ph/2PRqf

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sat Apr 02, 2022 7:17 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Sat Apr 02, 2022 6:51 pm
I have often posted about the interconnectedness of business interests how they often surface in football and how at times that appears to present a conflict of interest

this is the latest I have come across
https://twitter.com/Dr_Ulrichsen/status ... zRy_UpAAAA

"...Mubadala - whose managing director is the chairman of Manchester City - has a stake in the Raine Group, which has been charged with handling the sale of Chelsea"

This link takes you through the paywall to the article featured in the tweet
https://archive.ph/2PRqf
there are some interesting elements in that linked article from that Financial Times in regard to why investment in sport (and particularly) football is so high on the agenda and the seemingly outrageous belief that clubs like Chelsea will be worth $10billion within 5 years

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sun Apr 03, 2022 11:08 pm

The Culture Secretary has given a timeline for the Independent Football regulator to be in place, there is nothing here that raises my expectations of what will be done by the eventual appointee - from the Financial Times

https://archive.ph/WCYQY

English football to have independent regulator by next election, pledges Dorries
Plan for tighter supervision puts government on collision course with governing bodies


George Parker and Samuel Agini in London 22 MINUTES AGO

English football will have an independent regulator with a beefed-up “suitability test” for owners and directors before the next general election under plans set out by Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary.
Dorries’s plan, outlined in a letter to Boris Johnson seen by the FT, will put the government on a collision course with the Football Association, the game’s domestic governing body, and the Premier League over how the country’s most popular sport should be regulated.

The FA prefers the supervisor to sit within its structure, according to a person close to the governing body, while the Premier League has argued against full statutory regulation.

However, the English Football League, which runs the divisions below the top flight, is in favour of a body outside the FA, according to a person close to the EFL.

Dorries wants the regulator to be fully independent, according to her aides, although that could change in future if the FA could prove it had fundamentally reformed itself. But the plan raises the prospect of heated debate over the future of the sport.

The culture secretary argued that the abortive breakaway European Super League — a plan hatched last year with the support of the “big six”’ English premiership clubs — and recent financial troubles at clubs such as Bury and Derby County demonstrate the need for a new framework.

The sanctions placed on Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich have also put a spotlight on the need for tougher checks on the suitability of an individual to own a club, although it is thought unlikely that a new regulator would have stopped a Saudi-led consortium taking over Newcastle United last year.

Dorries accepted she would be criticised by some for delaying the legislation until after the next parliamentary session, which could give opponents hope that they can use the delay to water down the plans.

Tory MP Tracey Crouch, who oversaw a fan-led review of football governance last year, has argued that there is a case for “urgent” legislation in the next parliamentary session.

But Dorries argued that the new plan for the sport needed fuller consultation; a white paper is planned for the summer, with the intention of pushing ahead with legislation next year in the final session before a 2024 general election.

“Some will express their concern that this is the government kicking the issue of football regulation into the long grass,”
Dorries said in the letter to Johnson. “I believe that it is the opposite; it is the government committed to unprecedented regulation that protects fans, while preserving the economic value of our national game.”

Dorries said that to prove the “naysayers” wrong, the government should commit to creating the regulator in next month’s Queen’s Speech and to drawing up a road map promising to legislate in time for the regulator to be in place before a 2024 election.

The minister’s allies admit their plans will put the government on a “collision course” with English football’s existing bodies, but Dorries argued that a new regulator would help to create a “consistent and sustainable framework”, with less risk of financial crises in the game.

The Premier League, the FA and the EFL declined to comment, but last month Helen MacNamara, chief policy and corporate affairs officer at the Premier League, told the Commons digital, culture, media and sport committee that the league was against full statutory regulation.

She defended the role of the FA, while recognising the need for “more independent oversight”. “We are supportive of the FA; we think there is a natural reason why the FA would be an effective regulator.”

Mark Bullingham, FA chief executive, said at the same meeting that the body was making governance changes recommended in Crouch’s review to allow it to take on additional responsibilities, including appointing independent non-executive directors.

“Anything that we did would be a whole new body that is independently housed within the FA and would require that independence,” he said.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Apr 04, 2022 2:04 am

we have seen it with fan tokens, now we see it with NFT's in football - it is all about the currency speculation

https://twitter.com/Prof_Chadwick/statu ... 9101938696

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Apr 04, 2022 2:41 pm

A deeply interesting discussion of Everton's accounts in theesk's talking the blues podcast

https://theesk.org/2022/04/03/talking-t ... nd-laughs/

from 54:50 in - there is a fabulously interesting scenario postulated from 1:27:40 which you would imagine our new administration may consider

Give yourself the time to have a listen

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon Apr 04, 2022 5:33 pm

Interesting stuff from Tariq Panja in the New York Times
https://archive.ph/VBc6K#selection-385.9-889.12

The Biennial World Cup May Be Dead, but FIFA’s Fight Isn’t Over
FIFA has quietly given up on a plan to hold the World Cup every two years. But surrender may not mean peace for its president, Gianni Infantino.

By Tariq Panja
April 4, 2022, 7:27 a.m. ET

DOHA, Qatar — Gianni Infantino strode into the bright lights of a packed convention center alongside the emir of Qatar on Friday and declared that he expected this year’s World Cup to be the best ever. It was not an unusual boast; Infantino has made it before, in Russia in 2018, and he will surely make it again when the tournament heads to North America in 2026. But behind his beaming smile, and his bombastic words, the trip to the desert had been the setting for the FIFA president’s latest disappointment.

It was here where yet another of Infantino’s hopes for revolutionary change, the kind of bold but ultimately failed plan that has marked his presidency of soccer’s global governing body, finally came to an end. The divisive efforts to double the frequency of the men’s World Cup, to milk FIFA’s multibillion-dollar cash cow every two years instead of every four, are over.

While Infantino reminded FIFA’s members, gathered together in person for the first time in three years, that the idea of a biennial World Cup had not been his — a claim that was technically accurate — he had spent a significant amount of financial and political capital to try to engineer what would have amounted to one of the most significant changes in soccer history. Polls were commissioned to showcase support. Experts were enlisted to push back against critics. But the concept’s opponents never wavered: By last fall, European and South American soccer leaders were already threatening a boycott if it came to fruition.

In Doha, Infantino finally raised the white flag.

The reversal, yet another capitulation on yet another of his grand ideas, followed earlier blunders that have led to damaging rifts with important constituencies. In 2018, Infantino tried to force through a $25 billion deal with the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank to sell some of FIFA’s top assets and create new club and national team competitions, provoking a fight so bitter that he and the leader of European soccer did not speak for a year.

In 2019, FIFA used back-channel efforts to try to expand this year’s World Cup to 48 teams from its planned 32. The proposal was abandoned because it would have required the host, Qatar, to share games with its neighbors, including a group that was then engaged in a prolonged economic blockade of the tiny Gulf nation.

Last week, Infantino, 52, could not quite bring himself to say explicitly that the biennial World Cup, the source of so much acrimony over the past year, was not going to happen. Instead, he allowed only that it was now time to “find agreements and compromises.”

FIFA, he told delegates, needed new competitions, the kind that would produces the type of revenues needed to fulfill the promises FIFA has made to its 211 member federations. No FIFA president has been generous as Infantino, and for him follow-through is suddenly vital: He announced on Thursday that he would stand for re-election next year.

Plans for future events are already taking shape. Annual competitions for boys and girls are planned, with a 48-team youth event for boys and 24-team girls competition unlikely to face any opposition. And opposition to an expanded Club World Cup to be played every four years — another Infantino priority — is now surprisingly muted. A 24-team Club World Cup had been awarded to China for 2021 but was scrapped because of the coronavirus pandemic and then sidelined altogether as Infantino focused his energies on the biennial World Cup.

Now, with even once-reticent European officials engaging in positive talks, the Club World Cup — potentially expanded even more, to 32 teams — is likely to be agreed upon in the next few months. The new event could begin as soon as 2025. Or it could be delayed until 2027 should FIFA, in the face of resilient European opposition, find an alternative national team competition to the biennial World Cup. Some regional bodies, including Concacaf, the group responsible for soccer in North and Central America, are still pushing for a major new national-team competition.

“I think the appetite is there for change, and I think the rest of the world really wants change,” said the Concacaf president, Victor Montagliani.

Montagliani suggested a revived and expanded version of the mothballed Confederations Cup, a largely unpopular tournament held in World Cup host countries as a test event, might be an option, as could a global Nations League that could feed into a new quadrennial event for its regional winners — an idea some Europeans ridiculed as a biennial World Cup “by the back door.”

At the heart of much of the tension, though, remains a bigger fight: the battle for supremacy between European soccer and FIFA. European officials have been angered by what they perceive as efforts by Infantino, a former UEFA general secretary, to diminish Europe in an effort to bolster his popularity around the world, and signs of their rift were clear in Qatar last week. Several members of UEFA’s delegation, for example, including its president, Aleksander Ceferin, were notable by their absence at Friday’s World Cup draw, an event that took place only a day after they had taken part in the FIFA Congress.

Infantino has talked openly about breaking Europe’s stranglehold on success — FIFA last year appeared to encourage efforts to found a breakaway European Super League before walking away from the project as it collapsed — and he retains important allies who share his concerns about its dominance.

“What are the rest of us supposed to do? Just twiddle our thumbs and send players and capital over to Europe?” said Montagliani, a Canadian. “That can’t happen. I’m sorry. The reality is, they have as much of a fiduciary duty in terms of the rest of the world, and I think it is time that we all get around the table figure that out.”

The now-doomed biennial World Cup campaign saw Infantino bring other allies into the fight, including leveraging popular former players and coaches to press the issue on his behalf. The efforts were led by Arsène Wenger, the former Arsenal coach, who toured the world espousing the benefits of the competition, and members of the FIFA Legends program, a FIFA-funded group of former international stars, who also offered glowing reviews. (Current players were by and large opposed to the idea.)

At the same time, opinion polls and surveys and public relations consultants were tasked with changing minds of a skeptical news media and wary fan groups. In the end, though, the effort produced only disruption and discord. And it does not appear to have been cheap: FIFA last week reported a spike in its communications costs in its latest financial disclosure. They rose by almost $10 million — 62 percent — compared with the previous year.

Now, as he pushes ahead and makes promises for his re-election, some are waiting for, even expecting, Infantino’s next big idea, one that could deliver cash to his constituents and also the legacy as a change-maker that he craves.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Apr 05, 2022 2:05 pm

I said this at the time the Super League was announced last year - I will never forgive UEFA for voting most of this in the next day, when they could have taken stock and looked at what their members (the leagues and associations) and the fans wanted. What we witnessed was a fight for money and the maximisation of revenues, for UEFA this means that having the biggest clubs involved is a necessity, even as they cede more and more control and share. Essentially for the Super League clubs it was about partnering with UEFA or an Investment bank/Private Equity the latter offering a little more control about how much is shared to those who are not members of their cabal - Jonathan Liew in the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/football/20 ... thing-else

The European Super League has returned – Uefa is just calling it something else
Jonathan Liew
The new Champions League expansion plans could offer extra places to historically successful clubs who fail to qualify

Tue 5 Apr 2022 08.00 BST

It is probably a source of minor encouragement that the Ricketts family – currently on the shortlist of potential buyers for Chelsea – have promised sceptical fans that they will not join a European Super League. Perhaps, by way of further commitment, the Ricketts will spurn other competitions that do not exist. Chelsea will never play in a future Anglo-Italian Cup. Chelsea wants no part of the Makita Trophy. Chelsea will never enter Pop Idol.

Of course, prospective owners always arrive with a lavish manifesto of pledges and blandishments, lest anybody guess what they actually plan to do once they get through the door. Mike Ashley arrived at Newcastle promising “fun and trophies”, although crucially he never actually specified who for. Meanwhile, Ken Bates would probably have received a far cooler welcome from Chelsea fans in 1982 had he disclosed that within a few years he would be plotting to electrocute them with barbed wire fences.

And so it is probably wise to treat the words of the Ricketts family – currently in smiling PR overdrive after some of their number were revealed to have said some extremely racist and homophobic things – with a few teaspoons of salt. In a way, their pre-emptive rebuff to a European Super League is less a concrete policy and more a form of robotised self-branding. Hello, fellow football lovers. We hear there is a “Super League” you dislike. We too dislike this thing, whatever it is. Be friends?

With the threat of insurrection apparently seen off, we can now chortle at the forlorn attempts of Barcelona, Real Madrid and Juventus to reanimate the original defunct Super League concept, like lonely men continuing to insist that the punctured blow-up doll sitting next to them in Prezzo is, in fact, their real girlfriend. And yet, with a devastating deftness, the Super League has indeed returned. They’re just calling it something else.

Last week, Uefa accelerated its plans to expand the Champions League from 32 to 36 teams from 2024, with two of the four additional places awarded to historically successful teams who would otherwise have failed to qualify. Based on current league positions, that would mean Roma and Arsenal, although Manchester United would also have a chance to qualify by finishing fifth in the Premier League.

And really it is these sorts of clubs that are the intended beneficiaries here: the former giants fallen on hard times, superclubs enduring a poor season, not really good enough for the elite but invited in anyway. One proposal would see big teams able to secure Champions League football by winning the FA Cup. Had this rule existed ahead of the 2016 Cup final, for example, Manchester United would have been able to earn Champions Leaguequalification with a victory. Their opponents Crystal Palace would not.

Elite clubs are being rewarded for their sedition by getting what they wanted anyway
This was, in essence, the foundation stone of the Super League. It was a way of ensuring that whatever calamity befalls them – pandemic, mismanagement, financial catastrophe, appointing Ronald Koeman –Europe’s biggest clubs must never be allowed to worry about Champions League qualification again. Look again at the Super League proposals – a 180-game group stage, guaranteed berths for historical giants, the knockout stages played in a condensed four-week window at the end of the season – and what is striking is how little they differ from the changes currently being set in motion.

The real impetus behind the reforms has been the European Clubs Association, currently under the chairmanship of Paris Saint-Germain president Nasser al-Khelaifi. Khelaifi did a rare round of interviews last week, and two major themes emerged from them. First, his unashamed envy of the American sports model with its closed shop, its sprawling and splurging fixture list, its fluff and razzmatazz. “How do we make each match an event?” he asked. Well, traditionally you sell some tickets, turn on the floodlights and start the game with a whistle. But maybe we’re just not thinking outside the box enough.

The other theme was an utter disdain for the idea that underpinned the resistance to the Super League: that football fans themselves might want a say in the running of their game. “Barcelona,” Khelaifi scoffed to the BBC. “A fan-owned club with a €1.5bn debt. Does that work?” And it was here, between the lines of well-rehearsed corporate babble, that the true purpose of Uefa’s power grab resides. They weren’t opposed to the Super League on principle. They were just annoyed it wasn’t theirs.

The real tragedy of all this is that none of it needed to happen. For the first time in decades, the big clubs were not operating from a position of strength. Public and governmental anger at the breakaway was at its height. If ever there was a moment to reform the financial model of European football, to break the stranglehold of its biggest clubs, this was it. Instead, they have been rewarded for their sedition by getting virtually everything they wanted in the first place: a virtuous circle of perpetual growth and guaranteed windfalls.

Indeed, this is largely why the Ricketts family and others are clambering over each other for a slice of the action. No pitfalls, no jeopardy, no checks and balances: just a licence to print money for eternity. You will not see any protests about this. Fans will not take to the streets in their thousands. Boris Johnson will not be addressing this in Parliament. This is why incremental change – a game being eaten away by a thousand tweaks and reforms – is so much harder to fight. For the most part, people barely even notice it happening.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Apr 05, 2022 2:24 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Mon Apr 04, 2022 2:41 pm
A deeply interesting discussion of Everton's accounts in theesk's talking the blues podcast

https://theesk.org/2022/04/03/talking-t ... nd-laughs/

from 54:50 in - there is a fabulously interesting scenario postulated from 1:27:40 which you would imagine our new administration may consider

Give yourself the time to have a listen
no guessing where this Daily Mail story came from

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sport ... e-off.html

EXCLUSIVE: Everton could be SUED over their staggering £373MILLION losses by angry rivals despite their agreement with the Premier League... as top-flight clubs scrutinise their accounts amid doubts over their Covid write-off
  • Premier League clubs are only permitted to lose £105m over a three-year period
  • Everton reached an agreement to avoid being found in breach of the regulations
  • Delayed publication of their 2020-21 accounts last week has added to ill-feeling
  • Everton’s write-offs due to Covid are above most other Premier League clubs
By MATT HUGHES FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 22:34, 4 April 2022 | UPDATED: 02:23, 5 April 2022

Several Premier League clubs are conducting a forensic analysis of Everton’s accounts amid suspicion they have breached the top flight’s spending rules for the last two years.

Sportsmail disclosed last month that Everton have reached an agreement with the Premier League in which they consult over signings and new contracts, to avoid being found in breach of the regulations.

That revelation angered many of their rivals.

Everton delayed publication of their 2020-21 accounts last week, adding to the ill-feeling, with many clubs baffled as to how they can have stayed within the spending limits after announcing losses of £120million. Their total losses over the last three years are a staggering £373m.

Under Premier League rules, clubs are only permitted to lose £105m over a three-year period, although investment in stadiums and infrastructure, women’s football and community projects are exempt from the calculations, and additional allowances have been made for the impact of Covid-19.

The unhappy clubs are considering their options, pending the outcome of their analysis, and have not ruled out suing Everton in a case that would be similar to the legal action taken against Derby in the Championship.

Middlesbrough and Wycombe began action against Derby over their accounting practices during the 2019-20 season, although Middlesbrough’s case has now been dropped.

Everton have leant heavily on the pandemic in explaining the losses in their accounts, stating that Covid has cost them £170m over the last two years with a £103m loss in 2020-21 alone.

Those claims have been met with scepticism from some rivals. Sources at several clubs have pointed out that Everton’s write-offs due to Covid are way above most of those in the Premier League, despite the fact their missing gate receipts are considerably smaller.

Everton’s published accounts have done little to allay such concerns because they only provide details of £82m of the losses, split between £67m in 2020 and a further £15m in 2021.

That £82m of Covid-related losses is broken down as £22m in match-day revenue, £9m in broadcast rebates, a £17m drop in commercial income and a further £34m missing from other sources such as player transfers.

Everton’s rivals are not convinced by their calculations, however, and have taken matters into their own hands after failing to get the answers they were looking for in Premier League shareholders’ meetings.

The £373m losses at Everton over the last three years are the highest in the Premier League by far, with Chelsea and Arsenal the next in line with losses of £222m and £213m respectively, leading to incredulity that they can be explained away by the impact of the pandemic.

Everton are adamant they are complying with the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules and are confident that their 2020-21 accounts will be signed off by the top flight.

Potential sanctions if the club are charged with a breach include heavy fines and a points deduction.

In addition to their financial problems, Everton face a battle on the field to stay in the Premier League. Frank Lampard’s side are just three points above the bottom three following Sunday’s defeat at West Ham, their fourth league loss in five matches, and relegation would be a financial calamity because the EFL’s application of their spending rules is far stricter.

Beleaguered Everton face second-bottom Burnley in a crucial match at Turf Moor on Wednesday evening.
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Apr 05, 2022 6:09 pm

I missed this last month - but it remains pretty important - Simon Chadwick for TheConversation.com

Why the ‘Putinisation’ of sport must no longer fool the world
Published: March 2, 2022 7.41pm GMT
Author - Simon Chadwick - Global Professor of Sport | Director of Eurasian Sport, EM Lyon

At the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, there were sixty-thousand Chinese fans in attendance even though their national team hadn’t qualified for the tournament. By comparison, there were only fifteen-thousand England fans, who eventually saw their team make the Semi-Final stage.

One reason for this can be traced back to events at the 2016 UEFA European Championship in France, when a group of well organised Russian football hooligans attacked England fans in Marseille. Some observers speculated that these Russians had links to the Kremlin hence many English fans subsequently feared for their safety should they head to the 2018 World Cup.

Shock and awe
Yet for the relatively small number of English who visited Russia, indeed for many other people from around the world, they left and headed for home in 2018 with very positive views of the country. Many extolled Russia’s virtues as a hospitable, safe country that had organised a very successful event.

Therein lay a number of important lessons about Russia, one of which is that the country has a very different relationship with China and with other countries from outside the Western alliance. However, it was the way in which Vladimir Putin’s government deployed sport that was more striking, seemingly a duplicitous cocktail of shock and awe combined with charm and seduction.

This template has been apparent for years indeed it has been evident even during the last couple of months. Back in 2014, Russia staged the Winter Olympics in Sochi, spending $60 billion on the stage-managed event. As the world looked on at the event’s magnitude, a matter of weeks later Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea.

Former International Olympic Committee (IOC) Jacques Rogge (L), current IOC President Thomas Bach (C-L), Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (C-R) and double-Gold Medallist and Bobsleigh pilot Alexander Zubkov (2nd R) attend the Closing Ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics at the Fisht Olympic Stadium on February 23, 2014. Damien Meyer/AFP
At this year’s Winter Olympics, most sport fans spent the first week marvelling at the performances of teenage Russian skater Kamila Valieva, then the second week snarling at and berating Russia for yet another episode of the cynical way in which the Kremlin has weaponised sport, particularly through its state-sponsored doping programme.

Sport washing?
The DNA of this cynicism has also been evident across, for example, sponsorship deals in which Russian state-owned corporations have been engaged. For example, UEFA has had a deal with Gazprom since 2013 which extends to 2024. While the gas giant has helped boost UEFA revenues and became a feature of Champions League football, the organisation has been involved in more insidious activities.

Government in Moscow long since took the decision to route Gazprom’s supply pipelines under the Baltic Sea to Germany so that Ukraine and Poland would have no influence or control over Russia’s European gas supplies. Similarly, by not crossing their territories, Russia has also avoided paying valuable gas supply transit fees to Kyiv and Warsaw.

EXPLAINER: Russia’s grip on UEFA | Gazprom, Champions League, Putin, Ukraine, Off The Ball, 25 February 2022.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXkOZlXxDPY

Some observers have referred to Russia’s activities as sport washing, a practice associated either with cleansing a country’s image and reputation or with deceiving people into believing an aggressor is something other than who or what we might think they are. But for the people of Ukraine, Poland and elsewhere, there have never been any doubts about Putin’s intentions. The strategy and the stains were always clear to see.

Other people take the view that Russia’s use of sport has been a form of soft power, whereby it has sought to attract overseas audiences by seducing them through the allure of sport. While there are some grounds for concluding that this is what Kremlin strategists have been seeking to achieve, the predisposition of Putin’s regime toward deception, divisiveness and destruction indicates that use of the word ‘soft’ is misplaced.

Putinisation
If neither sport washing nor soft power appropriately or sufficiently explain how the Russian government has deployed the likes of football and athletics, then surely a better explanation is that global sport has been ‘Putinised’. At its heart, this ‘Putinisation’ has seen state-led strategy focused on building power and exerting control across the world, executed through the divisive deployment of sport. But now, the tipping point has come and global sport must respond.

Short-term, many of the measures now being implemented by sport to sanction Russia are to be applauded. Yet ‘Putinisation’, demands that clubs, governing bodies, event owners and others more fundamentally change their ways. The Kremlin clearly doesn’t engage with sport on the basis of sport or rational economics, its decisions are much more geopolitically charged than this. As such, those sport organisations that have taken money from Russian sponsors or investors need to start thinking less about their financial coffers and more about the risks when associating with Putin and his ilk.

As for Russia, events in recent days have proved one thing: that Putin can’t be trusted nor, for the time being at least, can Russian sport. For the country to be reintegrated back into the system of global sport will require measures to be put in place that not only reassure us but also provide tangible evidence that sport is not being manipulated or exploited for geopolitical purposes.

What this means and whether it can be achieved are complex matters, though sport simply cannot afford to be fooled any longer.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Apr 06, 2022 6:12 pm

Interesting discussion on the latest Unnofficial partner podcast - Good Owner, Bad Owner

all the usual arguments and still no look at how UEFA and FIFA are distorting finances and also what it is that the parachute payments enable for the Premier League

https://www.unofficialpartner.com/podca ... -bad-owner

the blurb
The subject today is club ownership in English football and the ongoing debate about the need for an independent regulator following the UK government review in to the governance of the game led by Tracey Crouch MP.

Our guests are Nick Harris, John Scales and Niall Couper.

Nick Harris is chief sports news correspondent for the Mail on Sunday newspaper and has recently published an extensive report asking fans what they thought of their club’s owners. The results are fascinating and are available to view on Nick’s Twitter page @sportingintel.

John Scales played in the Premier League for Wimbledon, Spurs and Liverpool in a career which included winning three caps for England. He is now an entrepreneur working across sport.

Niall Couper is head of media for Amnesty International UK and is chief executive of Fair Game, a pressure group consisting of English football clubs seeking to change the governance of the game.

here is the twitter thread that Nick Harris was talking about https://twitter.com/sportingintel/statu ... 9611860995

you can find out more about Fair Game here
https://www.fairgameuk.org/

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by GodIsADeeJay81 » Thu Apr 07, 2022 7:59 am

https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/statu ... QV3cA&s=19

Some interesting financial figures coming out of Leeds.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Apr 07, 2022 12:24 pm

GodIsADeeJay81 wrote:
Thu Apr 07, 2022 7:59 am
https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/statu ... QV3cA&s=19

Some interesting financial figures coming out of Leeds.
I had expected their commercial income to be £15m - £20m higher - that is not much of a lift on what they did in the Championship - I really thought they would be best of the rest on that

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Apr 07, 2022 1:57 pm

It has been a long time it seems since we had something new from Football Leaks - This piece in Der Spiegel brings into question evidence supplied by Manchester City to CAS https://twitter.com/tariqpanja/status/1 ... 8475292673 - remember their is still a Premier League investigation into City along similar lines to that UEFA one - only been going around 3 years now

https://www.spiegel.de/international/eu ... c081cd91a4

Manchester City's Cozy Ties to Abu Dhabi
Sponsorship Money – Paid for by the State
Since the sanctions imposed on Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, links between English football clubs and authoritarian states have been in the spotlight. Internal documents show that Manchester City has received funding from a government agency in Abu Dhabi.

By Rafael Buschmann, Nicola Naber und Christoph Winterbach
07.04.2022, 14.01 Uhr

The Manchester City defensive wall is 7.4 meters (24 feet) high, 109 years old and cost around 244 million euros. It consists of defenders Rúben Dias, John Stones, João Cancelo and Kyle Walker, and it is one of the reasons why the team is currently on track to win its fourth English Championship in five years and is in the Champions League quarter finals.

No other football club in the world spends as much money on players as Manchester City. The CIES Football Observatory added up the transfer fees paid by the "Cityzens" over the last 10 years and arrived at a total of 1.7 billion euros. The team’s financial resources seem unlimited. After all, it is owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi ruling family.

After the team from eastern Manchester spent decades wallowing in mediocrity, ManCity quickly became one of the most successful clubs in the world after Mansour took over control in 2008. In the Premier League, it looks as though the team can only be caught by FC Liverpool, with the two teams, coached by Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp, set to meet on Sunday. And Manchester once again looks set to advance to the semifinals of the Champions League – one year after losing in the final to Premier League rival FC Chelsea.

But the proximity of the English club to the authoritarian nation of United Arab Emirates is a political issue. And recently, particularly since the political climate surrounding Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich changed for the worse following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the spotlight on state influence in professional soccer has shown more brightly.

Facing regular backlash, ManCity also invests significant amounts of money in defense off the field. Club leadership employs some of the best-known and most expensive lawyers in Britain in the attempt to ward off accusations made against the team’s business practices and to slow down investigations into rules violations.

And there is apparently no lack of such violations. New findings from DER SPIEGEL and the journalism network European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) show that the holding company behind Manchester City appears to have violated the rules by paying millions in fees to player agents and also orchestrated a secret, triangular deal to sign an underage player. Numerous documents provided by the whistleblower platform Football Leaks provide a deep look at the club’s inner workings and at government agencies in Abu Dhabi – sufficient to inflict a few chinks in ManCity’s juridical defensive wall.

Club owner Mansour has only attended a single Manchester City match – back in August 2010. Foto: ANDREW YATES/ AFP
Like the Qataris’ investment in Paris Saint-Germain and the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund’s purchase of Newcastle United, the billions of euros spent on ManCity by UAE is primarily, it would seem, an attempt to use success on the football pitch to improve the country’s image. The UAE, after all, allows no political dissent at home, disregards human rights and is under suspicion of having committed war crimes in the ongoing violence in Yemen – which the UAE denies. The team owners are apparently willing to pay any price necessary to appear in the best possible light on the stage of elite football. And it looks suspiciously as though one of the richest nations in the world is financing the team’s operations, using hidden payments to circumvent spending rules.

In 2020, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) banned the team from the Champions League for two years due to revelations published by DER SPIEGEL. Manchester City, represented by almost a dozen top lawyers, appealed the ruling at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). UEFA lost the case, despite the existence of clear evidence for the questionable business practices employed by Manchester City.

Money from the Government
The company Abu Dhabi United Group Investment & Development (ADUG) belongs to Sheikh Mansour and was the official owner of Manchester City from 2008 until last year, when the team was transferred to a different company owned by Mansour. Officials in UAE have consistently insisted that ADUG is a purely private company and Mansour’s involvement with the English team is a completely private investment. In testimony before CAS, a legal representative of the Finance Ministry in Abu Dhabi said that ADUG "is completely unconnected" to the government of UAE or the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.

Research in the Football Leaks documents has revealed, however, that payments from ADUG to the club were cleared by a state office. According to internal documents, the Executive Affairs Authority (EAA), an Abu Dhabi government agency focused on providing strategic guidance, obviously manages the accounts belonging to ADUG. Agency chief Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the de facto prime minister of Abu Dhabi, is head of the state investment fund and is also chairman of Manchester City. He apparently approved money flows that were controlled by the government before ending up in the accounts of the football team. Payment requests for agent fees were sent to the EAA’s general counsel, with ManCity sending an invoice for the sponsorship company Etisalat to Omar Awad, the finance director of the government agency. "Omar works for the EAA and is very important and helpful in facilitating our financial administration of City," wrote Simon Pearce, a club board member, to a colleague in January 2014.

Were such a situation to play out in Germany, it might look like this: The state-owned railway company Deutsche Bahn would be FC Bayern Munich's main sponsor, but the club would send invoices for sponsorship money to a senior official in the Chancellery before then writing emails praising the financial services provided to the club by the government official. A rather absurd idea.

At Manchester City, the dividing lines between an authoritarian government and a private football club have become almost indistinguishable. Neither Manchester City nor the EAA officials responded to a DER SPIEGEL request for comment. The new revelations could create significant problems for the Premier League leaders. Already, the English football league has spent years investigating Manchester City, largely out of the public eye. According to information obtained by DER SPIEGEL, that investigation is focusing on three primary allegations.
  • Underage players were allegedly pressured to sign contracts with Manchester City through monetary payments, in violation of the rules.
  • Club sponsors in Abu Dhabi are suspected of having provided only a portion of their payments to the club themselves, with the majority apparently coming from Sheikh Mansour himself.
  • Roberto Mancini, who is currently the trainer for the Italian national team but who spent the years from 2009 to 2013 as the trainer for ManCity, is thought to have received a significant portion of his compensation secretly by way of a fictitious consultancy contract.
The Premier League declined to answer questions about its investigation. Past requests for comment sent by DER SPIEGEL to Manchester City have consistently been responded to with a statement that does not address specific issues, and which claims that material and quotes from the Football Leaks trove has been taken out of context. In response to this blanket claim, DER SPIEGEL has chosen to provide comprehensive and contextual information for each of the allegations.

Evidence of Manchester City's close ties with the Abu Dhabi government can be found in this file: https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/media/8 ... b/ADUG.pdf

1. Dealing with Underage Players
There are special rules in place for the protection of underage football talents. Clubs are forbidden, for example, from transferring players under the age of 16 across international borders. And they are not allowed to provide monetary payments to underage players, their parents or their agents.

Numerous clubs have spent years routinely ignoring these provisions. Indeed, FIFA even temporarily banned FC Chelsea and Real Madrid from the transfer market due to such transgressions. Manchester City has had to pay both the English Football Association and FIFA at least 300,000 pounds for violations of the youth protection rules.

DER SPIEGEL has in the past reported on hidden payments apparently made by Manchester City to the agent of Jadon Sancho, who was 14 years old at the time. In a case that has thus far flown under the radar, the club transferred 14-year-old Brahim Díaz from Málaga CF to Manchester in late 2013 and apparently trained him in their academy for two years before being officially allowed to register him.

When a player is transferred, training compensation is normally due for the original home club. However, Manchester City brought Brahim to England at a time when no official transfer was possible. Accordingly, it would likely have been difficult for the club to explain why they transferred money to the club in Málaga.

In club leadership emails, it becomes clear that ADUG was prepared to take care of the training compensation relating to Brahim’s transfer, but apparently wanted to conceal its involvement. According to the documents, the Sheikh’s company agreed to pay a 360,000-euro bill owed to Brahim’s youth club through an intermediary agency. The documentation indicates that ADUG paid the money to a company in Barcelona, which then forwarded the money onward to the Spanish club. Apparently Manchester City, like many other top clubs, used creative tricks to circumvent the rules protecting minors.

The internal documents also show that Brahim’s case wasn’t the only instance in which ADUG jumped in to cover the bills. Between 2010 and 2015, the Sheikh’s company apparently paid at least 4 million euros and 4 million pounds to a company belonging to the agent of club legend Yaya Touré. According to the emails, the payments were apparently cleared by ManCity CEO Ferran Soriano and team chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak. The board member Simon Pearce apparently guided the payments from the Abu Dhabi government agency.

None of the clubs, companies and managers involved in these deals have provided comment on the allegations.

A dossier with evidence on this topic can be found here:
Jadon Sancho - https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/media/f ... Youth1.pdf
Brahim - https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/media/f ... Youth2.pdf

2. Sponsorship Money Provided by the Club Owner
Pearce played a leading role when it comes to a main accusation leveled against Manchester City by UEFA and the Premier League – the secretive financing of sponsorship payments by club owner Sheikh Mansour. As a member of the board, he controlled club business while also acting as a special adviser to agency head Mubarak. Pearce managed communications with numerous club sponsors headquartered in UAE and was also the contact person for members of the ManCity finance department when it came to contractual details and payments from Abu Dhabi.

In 2018, DER SPIEGEL published a series of articles about back-dated contracts, sudden cash injections and "alternative sources" pertaining to the sponsorship payments. Those articles described how Sheikh Mansour was apparently circumventing rules by disguising direct funding to the club as sponsorship payments. The money in question was apparently sent to the companies based in Abu Dhabi, which would then wire the money onwards to the club. The system supposedly allowed the club to claim a low volume of direct investment by the owner and a higher total of marketing revenues – in direct violation of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules. Those rules were designed to prevent clubs from spending more than they earn and thus sliding into financial difficulties or distorting competition on the pitch. It has since become clear that the rules have failed, and they are now to be replaced by a new set of regulations.

As a consequence of that series of articles, UEFA banned the club from the Champions League for two years. But the club managed to successfully appeal the ban before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which ruled that some of the accusations fall under the statute of limitations and that UEFA was unable to provide any evidence beyond that published by DER SPIEGEL. Furthermore, Manchester City had supplied witnesses who vehemently denied the UEFA accusations. CAS noted in its verdict that it saw no reason to believe these witnesses were lying.

One of those witnesses was Simon Pearce. The court asked him if he had "ever arranged any payments to be made to Etihad in relation to its sponsorship obligations of Manchester City Football Club?" His answer: "Absolutely, categorically not."

An email that Pearce wrote in December 2013 to the COO of Etihad at the time, Peter Baumgartner, stands in direct contradiction to that claim. In the mail, Pearce told the Swiss executive the precise sum that Etihad was to provide, how much he – Pearce – had wired to Etihad for that purpose and what he still owed the airline. DER SPIEGEL has already reported on this telltale email. Manchester City labelled the DER SPIEGEL story "a cynical attempt to publicly re-litigate and undermine a case that has been fully adjudicated." The club has not responded to a renewed request for comment from DER SPIEGEL. Etihad stated that "all financial obligations" related to the Man City sponsorship were the "sole liability and responsibility of Etihad Airways."

Nevertheless, it is instructive to take a closer look. A comprehensive file with documents from the Football Leaks database provides evidence of a system that was apparently used for several years:
  • In 2012, a portion of the sponsorship money coming from Abu Dhabi was booked internally as "owner investment" – a sum of 150 million pounds.
  • In 2013, Pearce asked CFO Jorge Chumillas to provide an overview of ADUG payment obligations and asked that they be divided up according to "club direct payments" and "partner supplements." The documents clearly illuminate the importance of the additional supplements. In an email to Chumillas, Pearce made it clear that Etihad only had to pay 8 million pounds of the total sponsoring sum of 67.5 million pounds. According to the mail, the remaining 59.5 million pounds was extra – presumably paid by Sheikh Mansour.
  • For the 2013-2014 season alone, the supplements from Abu Dhabi added up to 92.5 million pounds. The information pertaining to these supplements was not meant to be shared with outsiders: "We mustn’t show the partner supplement if it is going outside the club," warned Andrew Widdowson, who was head of finance at the time, in early 2013.
  • In 2014, Chumillas and Widdowson discussed money that was still to be paid by Abu Dhabi-based sponsors Aabar and Etisalat. Here, too, they differentiate between the amount being paid by ADUG and the sums for which the companies themselves were responsible. Chumillas wrote: "But actually, formally, we want all of these amounts to be paid by Aabar and Etisalat right?" The answer came: "Yes if they can."
  • In September 2015 as well, club representatives differentiated between a payment of 60.25 million pounds and the 8 million that Etihad "should be funding directly." Chumillas and Pearce again exchanged emails about the share of sponsorship money that was to come "direct" from the company. The rest was apparently to come out of the budget of shareholder ADUG – Sheikh Mansour.
  • In March 2016, the 8-million-pound payment relating to Etihad’s sponsorship made yet another appearance.
Neither Manchester City nor Aabar and Etisalat responded to a request for comment.

You can download these and many other examples from the Football Leaks database here:

Dossier: Manchester City and the Financial Fair Play Rules
https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/media/b ... 30/FFP.pdf

Whereas the last two years of pandemic-related financial difficulties created significant problems for professional soccer teams across England and Europe, Manchester City actually managed to increase its marketing revenues in the first corona season. At the beginning of the year, Manchester City was also able to add three new sponsors to its portfolio, all of which are headquartered in UAE. The Premier League has now decided to take a closer look at such deals.

3. The Apparently Fake Contract Between Roberto Mancini and Al Jazira FC
When it comes to financial trickery, Manchester City seems to have exhibited a surpassing amount of creativity. In 2009, club leadership turned to the Abu Dhabi-based football club Al Jazira – which is still today backed by Sheikh Mansour – to help conceal hidden salary payments to ManCity manager Roberto Mancini. And the payments were processed by a familiar cast of characters: Simon Pearce and the Manchester City financial department.

The Italian coach was signed by Manchester City on Dec. 19, 2009. According to a preliminary agreement hammered out by the two sides, Mancini was to be paid a base salary of 1.45 million pounds per season, with another 4 million pounds in performance-based bonuses on top of that. On that same day, Mancini signed an apparent consultancy contract – part of which contained identical language to the main contract – with Al Jazira. That deal promised him an annual salary of 1.75 million pounds for his services: "The Fees will be paid to an account nominated by your company and will be paid without deduction of any taxation."

The company initially named by Mancini to receive those fees was an entity called Sparkleglow Holdings, based in the tax paradise of Mauritius. One year later, he switched to a company registered in Rome called Italy International Services (IIS), which began issuing quarterly invoices. But those invoices were only seemingly paid by Al Jazira: IIS would send its invoices to Manchester City, the club would wire the money to ADUG which would then send it onward to Al Jazira before it was eventually paid to IIS. The system was described by a ManCity employee in July 2012, with Simon Pearce confirming the procedure from the emirate's perspective.

Those involved declined to provide comment when approached by DER SPIEGEL.

The contract and the emails can be read here:
Dossier: Roberto Mancini and Al Jazira
https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/media/5 ... 38b/RM.pdf

DER SPIEGEL was the first to report on the case, and it caused quite a commotion in England. Much to his consternation, Pep Guardiola was even confronted at a press conference and asked if he had a similar arrangement with the team. He did not answer the substance of the question.

The Premier League has been investigating Manchester City since December 2018. The league maintains financial rules similar to those of UEFA. But the club has been doing all it can to fight the investigation – and the club has apparently been just as hostile to investigators as it has been to UEFA. CAS fined ManCity 10 million euros for impeding the UEFA investigation and refusing to cooperate with the body’s Investigatory Chamber.

A case focused solely on the question as to whether the Premier League investigation may be reported on was pursued all the way to the second-most senior judge in the UK judiciary. He ruled that reporting on the case was very much in the public interest. "It is surprising, and a matter of legitimate public concern, that so little progress has been made after two and a half years – during which, it may be noted, the Club has twice been crowned as Premier League champions," the court ruled.

The outcome of the Premier League investigation and the possible consequences for Manchester City remain to be seen.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu Apr 07, 2022 3:42 pm

I have been talking about this financial measure as a means of FFP for quite a while now, UEFA have made it official - it is an admission that the wages being 70% of turnover means a club is alright is just wrong - under this new scheme wages are likely to be less than 50% of turnover for a club to meet the guidelines - or producing a lot from their own Academy/farm set-up.

Uefa introduces 70% squad cost rule as part of new financial regulations
By Simon Stone
BBC Sport
Last updated on17 minutes ago17 minutes ago.

Uefa has brought in new financial regulations which will limit clubs' spending on wages, transfers and agents' fees to 70% of their revenue.

Permitted losses over a three-year period have also risen from 30m euros (£24.98m) to 60m euros (£49.96m).

The new rules will come into force in June and clubs will have three years to implement them.

Uefa said "breaches will result in pre-defined financial penalties and sporting measures".

It is thought new reinforced punishments, including points deductions, demotion to lower-ranking competitions and potential exclusion from European football completely, will be introduced as part of the new regulations.

Clubs are expected to be allowed to spend 90% of their income in 2023-24, reducing to 80% in 2024-25 and 70% a year later.

The new "financial sustainability regulations" have been put together by Uefa and the influential European Clubs Association (ECA) and "are the first major reform" of the financial fair play (FFP) rules introduced in 2010.

"Uefa's first financial regulations, introduced in 2010, served its primary purpose," said Aleksander Ceferin, president of European football's governing body.

"They helped pull European football finances back from the brink and revolutionised how European football clubs are run.

"However, the evolution of the football industry, alongside the inevitable financial effects of the pandemic, has shown the need for wholesale reform and new financial sustainability regulations.

"These [new] regulations will help us protect the game and prepare it for any potential future shock, while encouraging rational investments and building a more sustainable future for the game."

In a statement, Uefa added: "While the acceptable deviation has increased from 30m euros over three years to 60m over three years, requirements to ensure the fair value of transactions, to improve the clubs' balance sheet, and to reduce debts have been significantly strengthened.

"The biggest innovation in the new regulations will be the introduction of a squad cost rule to bring better cost control in relation to player wages and transfer costs.

"The regulation limits spending on wages, transfers, and agent fees to 70% of club revenue."

What are the current FFP rules?
Currently, clubs can spend up to 5m euros more than they earn per three-year assessment period. However, they can exceed this level to a limit of 30m euros, if it is entirely covered by a direct contribution/payment from the club owner(s) or a related party. According to Uefa, the idea of this was to "prevent the build-up of unsustainable debt".

Uefa has a wide-ranging list of potential punishments for clubs which break these rules, from a warning to loss of European titles. In 2020, Wolves were fined 200k euros and given a 23-man squad limit instead of the usual 25 after breaching Uefa's FFP rules.

However, given the financial impact of Covd-19, which has seen European top-flight clubs lose £7bn, Uefa felt the rules needed to be changed.

There had been speculation around the implementation of an actual salary cap, but this idea has now been abandoned.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by cblantfanclub » Fri Apr 08, 2022 4:46 pm

Saw this on the BBC today don't know if it's old news re. Man. City.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/61017887

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by cblantfanclub » Fri Apr 08, 2022 4:50 pm

Sorry a few days behind just gone through previous 3 days though is a concise summary

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Tricky Trevor » Fri Apr 08, 2022 5:03 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Thu Apr 07, 2022 12:24 pm
I
Apologies Chester just using quote facility to contact you.
I was watching PFT, an American Football discussion, on Sky last night and they were discussing the latest salary cap in the NFL. It came up that the teams get an enormous amount of revenue from the gambling industry. This set me wondering do PL and EFL clubs receive anything for their fixtures being used, worldwide, for gambling?
Hope you can help.Cheers.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Apr 08, 2022 5:13 pm

Tricky Trevor wrote:
Fri Apr 08, 2022 5:03 pm
Apologies Chester just using quote facility to contact you.
I was watching PFT, an American Football discussion, on Sky last night and they were discussing the latest salary cap in the NFL. It came up that the teams get an enormous amount of revenue from the gambling industry. This set me wondering do PL and EFL clubs receive anything for their fixtures being used, worldwide, for gambling?
Hope you can help.Cheers.
In short no but this is one of the things American ownership groups are looking at - it has come up in a number of discussions about how Chelsea are being valued - see the piece about the Raine group above and their expectation of future value also the the most recent 'The Bundle' podcast from Unofficial Partner also above on this page.

In certain overseas markets - and certainly the US as of now there is this massive tie up with gambling and there is an expectation that betting companies will bid for the broadcast rights as they need to generate stories and round the clock betting opportunities - they are not allowed to run online casinos/bingo like we have here.

I have long thought it strange, with all the variation of betting we now have on football now, that there is no version of the Tote or a betting levy for football - the betting on NFL is effectively a tote variation for the teams.
This user liked this post: Tricky Trevor

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri Apr 08, 2022 6:13 pm

This should be right up GIADJ's street - from WorldFootballSummit.com

https://worldfootballsummit.com/seven-l ... c39189b4fc

SEVEN LEAGUE’S RICHARD AYERS ON FOOTBALL’S DIGITAL REVOLUTION
07/04/2022

World Football Summit speaks exclusively with Seven League’s Richard Ayers about the third digital revolution and its impact on sport. 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. You can subscribe to WFS Digest HERE.

“We’ve seen this before… a bunch of people excited about something that they don’t really know what it is yet, and which relatively speaking isn’t too difficult to do. What’s difficult is to get to the point of being a successful business.”

Richard Ayers, a former journalist, is an international authority in sports fans engagement through his work first as Manchester City’s Head of Digital and afterwards the creation of Seven League, an award-winning consultancy and agency management now part of IMG. He never liked football too much, ‘but now, after so many years’, he holds season tickets at his local club (Arsenal): ‘My wife and I love the fact that our neighbours have seats a few rows behind us and how on match-day everyone walks down the road. It is beautiful. I now don’t just intellectually understand football’s power, but I can also emotionally understand it too’.

His explanation of the process by which sports properties have lost the battle for the audience against the GAFAs is a must-read lesson for anyone interested in the sports industry.

World Football Summit: The pandemic has contributed to a very transformative moment for the sports industry, which places companies like Seven League at the heart of this second (or third?) digital revolution. However, communication and content initiatives are always among the first to fall in times of crisis. What has been the overall effect on business these two years?

Richard Ayers: It has been a strange time indeed. In the first year of the pandemic there were a number of times that we saw clients go into crisis mode. There were upsides, because people needed digital more than ever before, and they accelerated their transformation – which is broadly a positive thing. However they also cancelled contracts left, right and centre, because they needed to cut costs. It was really fascinating to watch different organisations react in different ways.

I’ve been doing this for 11 years now, and during the first five years it was all communication and marketing. Those guys really understood that the internet was powerful and that something could be done with it, but the commercial directors resisted for those five years. Then, for two years, they started to believe they should pay some attention, as it could make them some money (although some didn’t really understand it). In the last few years they have been asking how they can make more money and revenue from it. The shift has been very positive for the Seven League business; digital is no longer a separate weird thing done by the communication guys – it’s now right at the core of a business strategy.

WFS: The facts are there for everybody to see… Sorare, for instance, has become the fastest startup in history to reach a unicorn valuation in France (in less than 3 years). Socios is UEFA’s global partner.

Ayers: I lived through all the ‘dotcom’ days back around 2000, and people have lately been describing me as ‘the voice of reason’ (which makes me worry)… But I do feel like we’ve seen all this before. A startup manages to get a bunch of people excited about something that they don’t really know what it is yet, and which relatively speaking isn’t too difficult to do. What’s difficult is to get to the point of being a successful business.

Some sports organisations have to sign the big deals with these startups , because of the stress football has endured with COVID-19. Their responsibility, even if they think it might not work in the long run, is to take the cash and use it to their benefit. They’re probably not thinking about the long term; the commercial guys often only focus on the short term , so we have the risk of getting excited by short-term opportunities and jumping in too early. I say to them: let’s not do what we did with social media and wake up to realise that they have all the audience and all the money.

WFS: As of 2022, what percentage of clubs would you say have really made money with social media after a decade of work?

Ayers: 50% of sports clubs have made some money, but only 15% are in profit from social media. In football that’s probably more like 5%.

If it’s direct e-commerce, then of course it takes you straight to a purchase – the American’s do that a lot, they sell a lot of merchandising through social. But how do we count ticket revenue, after a lot of the promotion is done on social? What about sponsorship revenue, if it’s heavily predicated on a social media profile? Either way, football is still lagging behind the American sports, which are pulling that number up. Looking at just football, it’s still small numbers.

It’s a very complicated calculation, however; because, for example, what is the average revenue per user? If you are looking at that, you then ask the question if getting them in my database is worth five dollars and the lifetime value. You end up with a complicated equation because social media is the wide end of the audience acquisition funnel and the impacts are much wider than just direct revenue.
.
WFS: After this recent wave of professionalisation within the football industry, where clubs have been buying talent to improve their business performance and fan engagement strategies, are properties already prepared to enter the metaverse?

Ayers: No. It’s as simple as that. I have been asking them all for ten years now, after having somehow led the way with Manchester City, “why did nobody catch up, move fast and even copy what I did there?” There’s no point in doing it now, though, because it has moved on, because when I’ve worked with clubs like Tottenham Hotspurs or AS Roma I see the landscape has changed so much in the last decade.

It’s all about the fundamental digital DNA. It’s the DNA of the organisation: understanding the attention economy and technology focus.

When we work with sports organisations, it’s very much about helping them have the capability to think and behave like a media business. That means that we start by auditing them and thinking about their strategy, but also teaching them how to understand the strategy – so that when the next crazy tech thing comes along, they can react more quickly. Otherwise it’s not for the good of sports, which is what a lot of consultants and agencies will do: they will solve the problem in front of the clients, fully knowing there will be another problem in five minutes’ time.

I think that much of the success of Seven League has been not behaving like that, and the good reputation we have comes from people knowing that we will look at the whole business and try and help. We look at it as a whole, not piece by piece to take consultant or agency fees.

WFS: How would you describe in one sentence that major accomplishment at Manchester City that the rest did not learn from?

Ayers: The organisational change and the digital DNA were the key to it. The brand and team were on the rise, and although this is ancient history now, the support for what we were doing from the management team, from the most junior all the way up to the CEO and owners, was crucial. Manchester City still has a reputation for being the most innovative football club, and that is because of the agenda we set 10 years ago. Some organisations have followed that: look at what NBA did with Top Shot last year: by being forward-thinking, seeing an opportunity, getting onto it early and having digital DNA means you are the first out of the gate and make huge progress. Now, in this world of blockchain and crypto, brands will trust the NBA more than they may trust others, because they were the first through the door.

WFS: So your precaution towards the possible crypto bubble is compatible with the advice to get into the metaverse as soon as possible…

Ayers: In these cases, whatever the new technology is, it is a balancing act of understanding if there is a really fundamental opportunity. If you are talking crypto, blockchain and metaverse, I really fundamentally believe that there is a huge opportunity. However, that does not mean that you jump at the first thing that comes your way. It is about having the maturity to make the careful and right decisions. Sometimes people think about the American phrase ‘Fail fast, fail better’, but in Europe people are scared by the word ‘fail’, so I say ‘Test and learn’. Either way, that does not mean you can do random stuff and it’s ok if it does not go well; you do it fast, strategically, with maturity, knowing that if it goes wrong, you learn from it.

WFS: Is the sports industry really facing its greatest challenge in the last decades?

Ayers: There is a really important change going on, or at least an opportunity for change. In Seven League we call it the Third Age. The First Age of sport was amateur sport, with people playing for the love of it, social cohesion, etc. The Second Age was ‘Let’s sell some tickets, let’s commercialise, let’s sponsor, let’s sell TV rights’… And we have pushed that as far as we possibly can; we have rampantly commercialised most of sport. So the third age is ‘Let’s just swing the pendulum back a bit and get some better balance’, because at the moment the money is going into the same few hands, and football can do a better job at distributing wealth and gaining a more healthy balance, both for business and society.

WFS: How do you see the European Super League in this context?

Ayers: The Super League’ challenges of last year are not going away. ESL was not a crazy new idea – it has been around for 10 years, and it is going to come back again. If you invite very rich billionaires into your party and they have a clear sense of commercial desires and need return on their investment, then it is not really a surprise. I was not surprised, even though everybody was surprised by how they did it; but the desire from them is in a way very reasonable.

A senior rights holder recently said to me: ‘Our strategy is that we sit back and let the tech companies do their thing, and in 10 years time they will have to come to us for the rights.’ The problem is that these tech companies that own and build the audiences do not care – they do not need you. They will go and get the audience through games, social, messaging apps, etc., and you are going to become irrelevant then. Sport is damaged too, because in 10 years time these tech companies will not need you, and there will be no cheque.

WFS: Do you think that automated broadcasting might save less popular, midsized sports from financial breakdown?

Ayers: I like what MyCujoo did because of the transfer of the data back to the rights holder and the monetization as a group. I also like what Recast is doing; it will handle the streaming service for small rights holders that cannot monetize themselves, but can do their own filming. I think there are some good and interesting projects that are helpful, but I still worry that the heads of those organisations feel that signing up to one of those services is a tick in the box, so they don’t have to worry. I am interested to see what happens with FIFA’s ott streaming service which is said to be almost out of the box. UEFA.TV as a service was actually really successful, and they had some really good growth numbers. As always, the change will happen with the small and the medium sized, and then it will eventually have a bigger impact. As ever, the good ones will be fine and thrive, but the others will not – and it could be very sad for sport.

WFS: So content is no longer ‘the only marketing left’?

Ayers: Definitely not. Content and marketing merged 10 years ago, and it has just taken this long for some people to understand that this is the same thing. The data behind it is the real battleground. Companies need to have content and data, and I am very happy to say that now we have become part of the IMG Endeavor we have that. We used to be able to do the consulting, the content generation, the publishing, the data collection… But we could not commercialise, because we did not have that capability and we could not do the scale, as we were a relatively small operation based in London. Now we are part of a much bigger organisation, with much more data coming in and capability to monetize, so we can go to our clients and help them with the whole journey,. I fully believe in the power of sports to help society and I fully believe that IMG can do that, as can Seven League now that we are part of it. I really believe their vision to help lead sports as we go into what I call this Third Age.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by brexit » Sun Apr 10, 2022 4:18 pm

Now that we are relegated, are there warning signs that would indicate financial turmoil next season?

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sun Apr 10, 2022 8:09 pm

brexit wrote:
Sun Apr 10, 2022 4:18 pm
Now that we are relegated, are there warning signs that would indicate financial turmoil next season?
If the EFL get their way and implement their revised profit and sustainability rules - designed to be along the lines of the new UEFA ones based on the wages + amortisation to revenue ratio, the target is for a ration of 70% but that is unlikely to occur immediately (UEFA are phasing it at 90% year 1, 80% year 2 and 70% from year 3 onwards) - we have not been near 80% for a few years now.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue Apr 12, 2022 9:58 pm

this might run for a while - article in today's Times, the link bypasses the paywall

Premier League accused of ‘unacceptable conflict of interest’ over use of law firm run by interim chairman

https://archive.ph/0VX5Z

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Newcastleclaret93 » Wed Apr 13, 2022 9:51 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Sun Apr 10, 2022 8:09 pm
If the EFL get their way and implement their revised profit and sustainability rules - designed to be along the lines of the new UEFA ones based on the wages + amortisation to revenue ratio, the target is for a ration of 70% but that is unlikely to occur immediately (UEFA are phasing it at 90% year 1, 80% year 2 and 70% from year 3 onwards) - we have not been near 80% for a few years now.
Chester, can you clarify how this would affect us?

I understand that our wages and amortisation stand at around 110%. Surely if we are relegated that figure is going to increase exponentially?

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by aggi » Wed Apr 13, 2022 9:59 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Sun Apr 10, 2022 8:09 pm
If the EFL get their way and implement their revised profit and sustainability rules - designed to be along the lines of the new UEFA ones based on the wages + amortisation to revenue ratio, the target is for a ration of 70% but that is unlikely to occur immediately (UEFA are phasing it at 90% year 1, 80% year 2 and 70% from year 3 onwards) - we have not been near 80% for a few years now.
Have you got any links around this? I know the rules were amended a little in the past few months but didn't see any mention of these proposals. Is it the EFL pushing it or the chairmen? There are enough ambitious clubs in the championship that I wonder if it would get two-thirds approval.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by aggi » Wed Apr 13, 2022 10:32 am

Newcastleclaret93 wrote:
Wed Apr 13, 2022 9:51 am
Chester, can you clarify how this would affect us?

I understand that our wages and amortisation stand at around 110%. Surely if we are relegated that figure is going to increase exponentially?
Last set of accounts it came out at roughly 100%.

Wages will obviously drop a lot (probably more than revenue) if we get relegated. Amortisation will likely drop if we sell expensive players and replace them with cheaper options/frees. Realistically though we wouldn't need to do anything too drastic with parachute payments for the first year or two.

However, look at other Championship teams and they are way off. I picked a few at random (ones that were around for a while and weren't getting parachute payments).
Preston ~ 215%
Millwall ~ 200%
Nottingham Forest ~ 230%

This is why I have doubts about the introduction of this measure.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Apr 13, 2022 11:18 am

aggi wrote:
Wed Apr 13, 2022 9:59 am
Have you got any links around this? I know the rules were amended a little in the past few months but didn't see any mention of these proposals. Is it the EFL pushing it or the chairmen? There are enough ambitious clubs in the championship that I wonder if it would get two-thirds approval.
This is far from the only one - The Telegraph, link takes you through the paywall

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

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Newcastleclaret93 » Wed Apr 13, 2022 11:30 am

aggi wrote:
Wed Apr 13, 2022 10:32 am
Last set of accounts it came out at roughly 100%.

Wages will obviously drop a lot (probably more than revenue) if we get relegated. Amortisation will likely drop if we sell expensive players and replace them with cheaper options/frees. Realistically though we wouldn't need to do anything too drastic with parachute payments for the first year or two.

However, look at other Championship teams and they are way off. I picked a few at random (ones that were around for a while and weren't getting parachute payments).
Preston ~ 215%
Millwall ~ 200%
Nottingham Forest ~ 230%

This is why I have doubts about the introduction of this measure.
Crazy that clubs can operate at that kind of level

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Apr 13, 2022 11:59 am

Newcastleclaret93 wrote:
Wed Apr 13, 2022 11:30 am
Crazy that clubs can operate at that kind of level
we were at wage to revenue of 107% in 2006/07 114% in 2007/08 and 120% in 2008/09 - we just got lucky

- you also have to remember that our net debt and director loans was at their highest ever level in 2012/13 with parachute payments - that was the year the EFL introduced FFP and our wage to revenue ratio was 100%

we were never quite the basket case that some clubs are now but we have certainly been down those roads and may have gone much further if the directors had deeper pockets

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by aggi » Wed Apr 13, 2022 12:56 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Wed Apr 13, 2022 11:59 am
we were at wage to revenue of 107% in 2006/07 114% in 2007/08 and 120% in 2008/09 - we just got lucky

- you also have to remember that our net debt and director loans was at their highest ever level in 2012/13 with parachute payments - that was the year the EFL introduced FFP and our wage to revenue ratio was 100%

we were never quite the basket case that some clubs are now but we have certainly been down those roads and may have gone much further if the directors had deeper pockets
Yes, under Cotterill (and obviously the directors at the time) the position just got worse and worse financially. We were very fortunate that Coyle came in and did what he did or else the past 10-15 years would have been a lot different.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by aggi » Wed Apr 13, 2022 12:59 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Wed Apr 13, 2022 11:18 am
This is far from the only one - The Telegraph, link takes you through the paywall

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fw ... y-sight%2F
Cheers. From that it seems to be driven by the EFL (which I'd expect) which does leave me wondering whether it would get through.

Also, a bit of a strange, although honest, last line in that article from Parry:

"We will be therefore refining in conjunction with the Premier League our own profit and sustainability rules, which don't work in the Championship because clearly clubs are neither profitable nor sustainable,"

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Apr 13, 2022 1:15 pm

aggi wrote:
Wed Apr 13, 2022 12:59 pm
Cheers. From that it seems to be driven by the EFL (which I'd expect) which does leave me wondering whether it would get through.

Also, a bit of a strange, although honest, last line in that article from Parry:

"We will be therefore refining in conjunction with the Premier League our own profit and sustainability rules, which don't work in the Championship because clearly clubs are neither profitable nor sustainable,"
I agree that it will be difficult to get the votes but momentum is certainly building particularly with the FairGame group and the push from Tracey Crouch re the independent regulator

Two things that Parry line
- he is in negotiation with the PL over distributions and Parachutes
- EFL FFP/P&S have to be agreed with the PL as part of the solidarity/academy funding agreements

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed Apr 13, 2022 3:17 pm

Interesting piece in the Guardian from Grimsby Town owner Jason Stockwood
/www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2022/ ... -to-answer

Is football enjoyable? As a club owner it is surprisingly difficult to answer
Jason Stockwood
Grimsby’s owner says running a club presents many challenges, much depends on luck and moments of joy are rare but intense

Wed 13 Apr 2022 10.05 BST

Ten months into football club ownership and the question that comes up with most frequency is: “Are you enjoying it?” Normally this would be a straightforward question to answer and yet it struck me as surprisingly difficult until I had the time to think properly about it.

Football is both of and for our communities, holds up a mirror to our society and gives us a unique window into human behaviour and psychology. On occasion it offers a powerful metaphor for the things in life worth striving for and an opportunity to be part of what Jon Yates, in his book Fractured, calls the “common life”: moments of shared experience that are not dependent on class, education, race or any other variable but become the moments that allow us to see beyond the boundaries and prejudices that our politics are often reinforcing. Football has the ability to remind us of our collective power and the sense of community.

But when I am asked whether I am enjoying the experience of football ownership, the short answer is “no”, in part because of the lack of rationality in the game. It’s not enjoyable on a day-to-day basis but neither should it be. In the same way that some people have an obsession with “happiness” or “success” as a goal in life, consistent enjoyment is unattainable and undesirable as a permanent state. As Viktor Frankl stated in his seminal work, Man’s Search For Meaning: “Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue.”

The last 10 months have been a massive opportunity to learn, to connect, to be challenged and to be part of a community’s story that is bigger than our own. The moments of joy are rare, but intense. Jordan Maguire-Drew’s last-minute equaliser against Halifax, John McAtee’s absolute peach of a volley against Altrincham later in January, Gavan Holohan’s perfect first goal for the club versus Chesterfield earlier this month.

The intensity and frequency of these emotions often hijack our rationality and undermine our long-term thinking, the parts of our brain that are underdeveloped compared with our emotional, intuitive brains. In this way, the game offers an important way to think about the biases, our search for certainty and the place for our emotions in decision-making.

We know much more about decision-making from recent advances in evolutionary biology and modern psychology. I really like the analogy by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who stated that our rational mind is like a rider on the back of an elephant, where the elephant represents our emotions and intuitions and the rider represents our rational thought. When you lose 1-0 at home, that runaway elephant insists we sack the manager, while the rider tries to hold on and whispers in the elephant’s ear that we worked hard, played well and there’s always next week.

At Grimsby we had the best start to the season since 1982 and then, from late October, we went 11 games with only one win. “Attribution bias” is falsely crediting capabilities retrospectively to actions. It assumes that when you are winning you are skilful and capable but as soon as you start losing you suddenly become a failure and you are talentless. The attribution of talent and then its inverse in such a short space of time clearly makes no sense, particularly for people who have years of experience in the game. When we looked at the differences in performances between 10-game blocks of the season there was not a lot of difference in work rate and goal chances. We lost most games by a single goal and failed to score.

Whether we choose to admit it or not, luck and chance play a more significant role in our lives and we often underestimate their impact. Yet, in the space of 90 minutes of play it should be clear to anyone who has ever watched a game that there are multiple possible worlds that play out differently if a player is not injured, if a decision goes a different way or if a goal goes in rather than a ball hit the post. It is a constant reminder of the fragility of reality that small changes in variables can affect massive differences in outcome.

Alongside the acknowledgment of the multiplicity of life we need more empathy and perspective. I normally sit high in our largest stand and watch the game from a vantage point where you can see the whole game’s mathematical possibilities – all of the spaces and options available at all times to all players. The following week I was on the opposite side of our ground, five rows back, almost pitch level, experiencing the game close to as a manager would see it. The difference was staggering. Closer to the action there was a much more singular view of the play and I felt much more empathy for the players and staff because your perspective dictates the amount of actual space you can see rather than possible options. We hardly ever think of what the manager, player or – dare I say it – referee is actually seeing rather than all of the options we can see in a stadium or on TV. Perspective is everything and yet we hardly ever consider that.

In football and in life, when emotions are high it’s hard to detach from our passion and engage rationally. It’s even harder to have empathy for those actually in the game observed from high in the stands. Ten months in and it seems clear that if we want to build something that will last then ownership requires a more rational element to match the emotion that the game generates. I also believe we need to think about our individual perspective and have more empathy for those around us. If we can do that, maybe we could all enjoy the game a bit more.

Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sat Apr 16, 2022 1:48 am

The fight over who controls European Football is not just being fought out in Europe or European Courts, and as always there are others wanting a share for themselves - from the New York Times

https://archive.ph/9WxIv#selection-297.0-751.171

Super League Bitterness, Now Playing in a New York Court
A lawsuit filed by an American soccer entrepreneur says the head of European soccer declared “war” on him for working with three top soccer teams.

By Tariq Panja - April 15, 2022 - Updated 12:58 p.m. ET

It has been a year since the European Super League was born and collapsed in a two-day soccer supernova of angry statements, legal threats and bad blood. But the project’s repercussions are far from over.

In a court filing this week in New York, a prominent American entrepreneur accused the president of European soccer’s governing body of “declaring war” on him to prevent him from organizing a series of exhibition games in North America featuring three teams — Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus — who remain committed to the idea of a breakaway European league.

The exchange between the promoter, Charlie Stillitano, and the president, Aleksander Ceferin, emerged as part of Stillitano’s employment dispute with Relevent Sports, an events and marketing company owned by the billionaire Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross.

Stillitano had been Relevent’s executive chairman until his departure last spring, when he left the company amid a dispute about a pandemic-related pay cut and a noncompete clause that Relevent had demanded.

In his lawsuit, Stillitano and his lawyers offered details of a text message he received in which they said Ceferin warned Stillitano that working with the three teams would effectively render him an opponent of UEFA, the governing body for European soccer that Ceferin leads.

The message, Stillitano said, came after he had texted Ceferin telling him that Relevent, which for a decade under Stillitano’s leadership had organized exhibition tournaments and games for top European clubs, had forbade him from working with any of the event company’s former clients. Stillitano asked Ceferin, whose organization is part of a partnership with Relevent, for a meeting, telling him that several teams “including the three that have caused issues with UEFA” had approached him to arrange games.

Those teams remain a toxic subject for many European soccer leaders. Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus have sued UEFA in Spain over the Super League failure — an action that forced UEFA to suspend disciplinary actions against the teams — and they are also trying to persuade European regulators that UEFA is abusing its monopoly position to block their efforts.

The implications of the court rulings could lead to a significant change in the decades-long organization of soccer in Europe, and to new legal fights: UEFA has insisted it will resume its efforts to punish the clubs once it has the legal right do so.

Ceferin reminded Stillitano of that in his reply.

“I have heard about your ‘business’ with the three clubs,” Ceferin said in the text message, which was included in Stillitano’s lawsuit. “Those clubs didn’t ‘cause issues with UEFA.’ They tried to destroy UEFA, football and me personally. It’s a shame that you don’t understand it. The fact that you work with them means that me, UEFA or anyone I can have influence on will not have any business or private relation with you until you’re on the other side.”

Stillitano’s lawyers described Ceferin’s message as “threatening.”

“It became clear that Ceferin and UEFA — and by extension their new partner, Relevent — were declaring war on Stillitano for considering an affiliation with the three teams,” the lawyers wrote.

UEFA recently negotiated a contract with Relevent, picking the company as a commercial partner to sell broadcast rights to competitions like the Champions League in North America. The organizations are also discussing the possibility of Relevent’s arranging an off-season competition that would be endorsed by UEFA.

In an interview on Friday, Ceferin said he was not interested in whether or not Stillitano worked with the three clubs. But the mere idea that he would, Ceferin said, was enough to end their relationship.

“When I realized that he is actually cooperating with them at the same time I decided to finish any relationship with him,” Ceferin said. He was more angered, he said, that a private text message had been disclosed in a public filing. “I never spoke with anyone about this because I have more important things to deal with than dealing with Stillitano,” Ceferin said. “By using the private correspondence publicly, Stillitano showed what his moral values are.”

The case is the latest example of ongoing bad blood between UEFA and the three teams, who are among the wealthiest and most powerful in world soccer, and the peripheral damage that the Super League fight continues to cause. It has already destroyed the once-close relationship between Ceferin and the Juventus president Andrea Agnelli; the men have not spoken since last year, even though Ceferin is godfather to Agnelli’s youngest child. Now it is Stillitano who has been cut off.

For years, Stillitano moved easily among European soccer’s elite, building Relevent’s soccer business by using connections and friendships to arrange matches for top teams, strike multimillion-dollar deals and rub shoulders with legendary players and coaches. But he has for months been embroiled in a dispute with the company over payments and conditions related to his departure last May.

Stillitano contends that Relevent owes him about $1 million in salary and severance payments. Relevent has countered that it ended the payments only after Stillitano breached terms of a noncompete agreement by contacting its clients.

According to the lawsuit, Relevent had been paying Stillitano $650,000 a year until the pandemic, when, citing reduced revenues, it moved to reduce his base pay to $200,000. The company said Stillitano agreed to the reduction; Stillitano’s filing contends the pay cut was actually a deferment, and that he would be repaid at a later date.

But after Stillitano disputed the deferment, his relationship with the company deteriorated to the point that Relevent terminated his contract in May.

Stillitano had little choice but to find new work after that, his lawyers argued. He was “not a wealthy man,” they wrote in the filing, and was therefore required to work.

Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sun Apr 17, 2022 12:18 pm

Sam Wallace in the Telegraph making many of the same points I did (up this thread) last year when UEFA sanctioned these changes the morning after the Super League announcement - link takes you through the paywall

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

Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sun Apr 17, 2022 12:37 pm

This is depressing because it is no longer surprising - plenty of positive doping tests in the Premier League but no suspensions/sanctions - From the Mail - the linked article has a table of the illegal substances found

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sport ... hheld.html

SPECIAL REPORT: FIFTEEN top-flight stars fail drug tests but not ONE is banned, as 88 footballers in Britain return positive samples – but details of cases are withheld
  • Fifteen Premier League footballers failed drugs tests between 2015 and 2020

  • Twelve of those tested positive for banned performance-enhancing substances

  • One is still being investigated five months after the initial test, with no sanction

  • The Mail on Sunday can reveal this after Freedom of Information requests


By EDMUND WILLISON FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

PUBLISHED: 22:34, 16 April 2022 | UPDATED: 22:42, 16 April 2022

At least 15 Premier League footballers failed drugs tests between 2015 and 2020, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, and none of them was given any kind of ban.

Twelve of those tested positive for banned performance-enhancing substances, with one still being investigated five months after the initial test and no sanction having been issued.

In total 88 footballers from England, Wales and Scotland failed doping tests, returning 'adverse analytical findings', when drug-tested between 2013 to 2020.

The revelations can only now be published after The Mail on Sunday made a series of Freedom of Information requests which took three times longer than they should have to be processed by the UK Anti-Doping agency (UKAD).

The dozen cases of performance-enhancing drugs included one positive test for an amphetamine and three findings of triamcinolone, the corticosteroid that Sir Bradley Wiggins used to treat hay fever before his Tour de France victory.

The Premier League cases also included four positives for the stimulant Ritalin and one for the testosterone booster Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG), a hormone often abused in cycling and mixed martial arts.

The remaining top-flight positives were for the steroids prednisolone and a derivative, as well as the diuretic indapamide, which can aid weight loss and serve as a masking agent for other banned substances.

None of the cases led to doping bans, with UKAD saying a decision not to sanction was typically down to accidental ingestion or the player having a Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE).

Only 39 of the 88 positives were itemised by UKAD in response to a Freedom of Information requests by The Mail on Sunday. Fifteen of the 24 non-Premier League players ended up with bans ranging from three months to four years.

UKAD declined to itemise the other 49 cases for a variety of reasons, including the Football Association telling UKAD 'it would not be acceptable' to release details on cases involving social drugs that are banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency but not by the FA.

Other reasons cited for withholding details included protection of minors, and that the release of other information might compromise UKAD's investigative functions.

The Premier League finding for HCG came in the second half of the 2019-20 season. A sportsman can test positive for this as result of a tumour, such as testicular cancer.

When an athlete is informed they have tested positive, they are advised to undergo tests to 'promptly' rule out a medical condition as the source of their failed drugs test.

But The Mail on Sunday understands that UKAD and the FA were still investigating this player at least five months after the positive drugs test. This player has not been sanctioned.

In October 2019, a 15-year-old child registered to a Premier League club was found with a banned human growth hormone-dispensing pen and was banned for nine months.

It must be assumed the three players who tested positive for triamcinolone had TUEs in 2017 and 2018. None was sanctioned.

Triamcinolone is an anti-inflammatory drug that can, for example, be injected locally to treat knee injuries. However, it can be used as a performance-enhancing drug by a non-injured athlete.

Wiggins used the drug legally after acquiring a TUE, although a parliamentary investigation found the Briton had crossed an 'ethical' line.

Players tested positive for Ritalin in 2018 and 2019. It is used to treat ADHD — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — but it can also enhance performance.

The positive result for indapamide was returned in 2020 while those for prednisolone and the derivative methylprednisolone came a year earlier, and the amphetamine case was in 2016.

The Mail on Sunday submitted the Freedom of Information request in January and it should have taken 20 working days to be processed. The findings actually came back last week, after 60 working days.

UKAD worked with the FA to provide this newspaper with a six-page explanation of what they could and could not share, plus an itemised list of 39 cases.

The Premier League are understood to be comfortable that all 12 'performance-enhancing' cases had innocent explanations, hence no punishments from UKAD or the FA, the bodies that police drug testing.

Corticosteroids such as triamcinolone have led to bans in other sports despite athletes claiming they had taken them to treat an injury. One such case in 2004 involved a low-ranking Spanish tennis player Luis Feo Bernabe, who tested positive for the corticosteroid betamethasone.

His defence was that he had been given the substance to treat 'muscular pains' while 'under the supervision' of a Spanish doctor, Ramon Cugat. Bernabe was eventually informed he had ingested the prohibited substance and was banned for two months by tennis authorities.

Dr Cugat was described by Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola as the 'best doctor in the world' after treating Kevin De Bruyne for a knee injury in 2018, and has also treated Barcelona and City players including Sergio Aguero and Xavi.

Like corticosteroids, ADHD medications have therapeutic uses but, because they are stimulants, they can also be used to increase performance. The case of two US gymnasts highlights how difficult it is to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate use.

In 2016, it was revealed that Simone Biles, the four-time Olympic gold-medal-winning gymnast, had a medical exemption to take Ritalin to treat her ADHD.

Yet in 2020, her fellow US gymnast Shawn Johnson, a 2008 Olympic gold medallist, said she had been prescribed Adderall, another ADHD medication, by the USA Gymnastics official doctor to help 'lose more weight, have more energy' and be more successful at gymnastics.

UKAD did not reveal if the four Premier League players who tested positive for Ritalin were ever charged with an anti-doping offence. They were not sanctioned.

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