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 » Wed May 19, 2021 4:10 pm

A very informative piece from Tifosy on the broadcast deals for the big 5 European leagues - plenty of graphs and charts so providing a link rather than my preferred transcription

https://www.tifosy.com/en/insights/broa ... ce=Twitter

Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed May 19, 2021 4:21 pm

It appears that Inter Milan have found a path to resolve their short term financial woes - from City AM

Wednesday 19 May 2021 1:41 pm
Inter Milan close to €275m bailout by private equity firm Oaktree
James Warrington

Inter Milan is said to be closing in on a €275m (£237m) bailout by US private equity firm Oaktree Capital to shore up its finances following the collapse of the European Super League.

As part of the deal, Oaktree would take a 30 per cent stake in the Italian football team and provide a much-needed loan, Bloomberg reported.

The stake would be bought from Hong Kong-based private equity group Lionrock Capital, which also backs shoe brand Clarks and taxi app Hailo.

The move could lead to Oaktree taking full control of Inter from its Chinese owner Suning Holdings Group, according to the report.

An announcement is expected as soon as today, with Lionrock’s Tom Pitts resigning from the team’s board.

The bailout would come as Inter scrambles to balance its books following a turbulent period for its finances.

Some of the team’s Chinese sponsorship deals dried up at the end of last year, putting pressure on the board to secure more funding.

The challenge has since mounted after the doomed European Super League project was scrapped. The controversial breakaway league would have guaranteed at least €300m for the Serie A side.

The club has reportedly failed to pay regular salaries to its players in recent months, even asking them to give up part of their annual salaries.

If confirmed, the deal will initially see Oaktree partner with Suning to secure Inter’s financial footing.

If Suning is not able to repay its debt after three years, the loan could turn into equity. This would allow the US fund to take full control.

The deal raises the prospect of a second top-flight Italian football club passing into US ownership.

In 2018 Elliott Management took control of local rival AC Milan after its Chinese owner failed to repay debts.

All parties declined to comment to Bloomberg on the deal.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed May 19, 2021 5:20 pm

FIFPRO the international player union and KPMG have come together to produce a report on 'football players’ workload during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The research reveals that a large number of players do not get the recommended five days of rest before most of their matches. The report covers a representative group of 265 male footballers from 43 domestic leagues across six confederations and includes club and national team matches.

the report can be viewed here - https://footballbenchmark.com/documents ... 202021.pdf

it is part of a wider partnership between the two that has created a Player Workload platform that allows for analysis of players activities

https://footballbenchmark.com/library/pwm

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Wed May 19, 2021 5:34 pm

Also from KPMG is this analysis on the remarkable rise of Atalanta from small regional team to the elite of Italian football over the last 5 years, all while generating profits - it indirectly exemplifies that absolute shambles many Italian clubs had let themselves fall into

https://footballbenchmark.com/library/a ... ll_s_elite

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu May 20, 2021 1:54 pm

This should be interesting - The Athletic's Business of Sport Podcast talks to form European Leagues President Lars-Christer Olsson, including thoughts on the Champions League revamp and the European Super League


https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cH ... diNDlkYzlk

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu May 20, 2021 2:15 pm

Over the weekend the Financial Times Scoreboard column had a piece about the huge surge of corruption in sport during the pandemic

https://outline.com/VKKgHP

Here the always excellent but financially struggling Josimar (read this thread on how to contribute https://twitter.com/PhilippeAuclair/sta ... 6859884544) looks at how the game in Moldova has all but been destroyed by match fixing

How match-fixing ruined football in Moldova
19/05/2021

Players, prosecutors, F.A. leaders and club officials reveal the unprecedented scale of match-fixing in Moldova. Josimar spoke to players who took part in the fixes and they tell a hallucinating story of how football corruption killed the beautiful game in Europe’s poorest country.

By Emanuel Rosu and Dumitru Garcaliuc

In 2014, a cumulated 1 billion US dollars disappeared from Moldova’s three largest banks. The investigation on what really happened is still ongoing and involves some of the most powerful oligarchs, bankers, and political figures in the country. It is believed that more than 40 people either benefited or facilitated the fraud. Former prime minister Vlad Filat was jailed, as well as other businessmen and public workers. Much of the money was transferred through the UK and Hong Kong registered companies with unknown owners, but there were traces in Cyprus, China and Switzerland too. Facts around the “theft of the century”, as it is referred to in Moldova, are far from being clear seven years after the investigations started. Around 13 percent of the country’s GDP disappeared. The International Monetary Fund and the European Union stopped their aid, while the national currency, the leu, hit low records, with inflation growing to more than 10 percent.

With a GDP per capita of just 4 512 US dollars in 2020, Moldova leads the unwanted table of poverty in Europe. In comparison, Norway has the fourth-highest GDP per capita on the continent, with 69 989 US dollars. And football in Moldova is just another faithful image of the society it represents.

A match-fixing addiction
In December 2020, 11 people were held on match-fixing allegations. Club officials, players, and coaches coming from five of the 10 teams in the Moldovan first league were under investigation. Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, alongside UEFA, was involved in the inquiry which was conducted by the Moldovan Anti-Corruption Department (CNA). According to official documents, match-fixing started in 2017. And the scale of it was unprecedented. Players were instructed openly to manipulate results. Before the games started, they were told about the bet that was placed on the game. Sometimes coaches even told players to do the best they could for a few minutes, then, once live odds changed, to pay attention to the match ‘password’ they had set before the match or to a certain gesture. Official sources claim a club usually won between 12 000 to 25 000 dollars for a fix. Prosecutors believe that only between July 2020 and December 2020 no fewer than 20 games in the Moldovan league were fixed. Profits for those involved? More than 700 000 dollars.

Five of the people initially held for hearings were detained for 72 hours and ultimately released. Based on the Moldovan penal code, if found guilty, the match-fixers risk getting a fine or a prison sentence of between two and six years. It’s not the first high-profile match-fixing scandal in Moldova. In 2015, the U21 national team players were offered money to lose a game against Belgium.

“We have it in our blood, I believe. It was always like this in Moldova,” a former player of a club involved in the current match-fixing scandal tells Josimar. Under the protection of anonymity, two players accepted to open up to the magazine. And what they told us is shocking. You’re either good enough to play abroad or accept to be involved in match-fixing. “I believe Moldovan football will disappear in two or three years,” S.V., one of the players we had access to, says with a huge sigh.

Just how did everything start? Who ‘pushed the button’ and how? Things were done openly. As clubs told their players they were terribly poor and couldn’t pay salaries, many found themselves in an impossible situation.

“Before fixed games, we usually trained on gravel or in a park,” B.T., the other player who spoke to us revealed. “We trained harder than usual. We asked ourselves why we needed such an intense training session the day before the game or even on matchday.”

Salaries in the Moldovan league don’t get over a few hundred dollars per month. Not even those were paid on time.
“We always had to ask for our wages. They never paid. I left the club I was with at the time. They still owe me money,” S.V. says.
A fix was ‘priced’ between 300 and 400 US dollars per player. “We sometimes didn’t get those on time either,” B.T. reveals.

No fear of getting caught
The games in the Moldovan League and the Moldovan Cup were broadcast on TV, Facebook and Youtube. Online, the Football Association in Moldova was showing them live. It didn’t deter clubs from getting involved in match-fixing.

“Before games, someone in the staff told us about the ‘password’. Sometimes the password was ‘let’s play quicker’ or ‘pass the ball’ or ‘get out of defence’ a shout to some colleague. The sign was never the same, it sometimes involved a staff member putting on clothing of a different colour, an assistant getting off the bench instead of the coach or someone shouting a certain word, things like that”, the players tell Josimar.

At the fixes S.V. and B.T.’s team took part in, the ‘plan’ was announced shortly before the game. “They sometimes told us we were at a game to make money, not to win points or qualification in something,” they say. “We knew from the speech before the game that something was going to happen. That’s when the details were set.” Both players claim they only knew of a few games that were staged. “But I’m sure there were way more. I guess that the foreigners in my team knew about it. I think that some clubs only exist as businesses to make money from match-fixing, not for playing football,” B.T. judges.

If a player had something to say about the fix, coaches would usually get him out from the team. Simple as that. “I confronted the club and tried to do everything I could do to play well. I mean… I was an offensive player, so I passed the ball, tried to score, things like that. I didn’t want to make mistakes because I wanted to have a clean name,” S.V. explains. Both S.V. and B.T. have changed clubs in the past year. They say they made sure their new employers aren’t a tentacle of the ‘betting octopus’ in Moldova.

Asked if they saw suspect people around the team, in training camps, at the hotel or if they were ever approached or intimidated by an external figure, the two players say everything related to betting happened through the club. “We were told the president decided this and we must help him because we are not doing well financially, so we must act in support,” B.T. responded.

Moldovan website Jurnal.md indicates one of the games that were fixed. In October 2019, Codru Lozova had all to play for against Speranta Nisporeni, in a Moldovan Cup quarterfinal second leg. After 2-2 in the first match, Codru’s players were told they needed to lose the game and forget about playing a semifinal. Codru ended up losing 5-0. The errors leading to goals were atrocious. Codru was also down to ten men after a player intentionally stopped the ball with his hand in the box. Codru’s manager also decided to substitute his keeper in the first half.

Sometimes, fixes happened with only one team on the pitch knowing about it. There were times when both clubs were playing for the same result.

In the 2019 season, played from spring to autumn, Lozova didn’t win a single game throughout the 26 rounds of the league. They finished last, with five points, but they didn’t get relegated, as the league expanded from eight to 10 clubs. Now, they also find themselves last, with just one win in 31 games.

Prosecutors are still gathering evidence in this case. “For the time being, the Penal General Direction and the investigative officers are doing their job in finding more evidence,” the anti-corruption department in Chisinau told Josimar.

A wall of silence
“Most of the people who were questioned refuse to work with us,” a CNA spokesperson said. According to the prosecutors, Codru Lozova, FC Dinamo Auto, FC Sfintul Gheorghe, FC Floresti, and CSF Speranta Nisporeni were all involved in match-fixing. None of them suffered any consequence and are still part of the first league. “We don’t know if match-fixing is still happening,” CNA states. Four of the clubs involved firmly deny any wrongdoing when contacted by Josimar. FC Floresti couldn’t be contacted to comment.

“The games were broadcast online. The Football Association had suspicions related to many of the games. We watch every game in the integrity department and we also collect information on each match day,” Eugen Zubic, the Moldovan FA (FMF) Integrity Officer, says.

Apart from working together with the state’s authorities, FMF made ‘adjustments’ to its rules and regulations to help combat match-fixing.

“Our internal investigation on six games that we thought were fixed ended with reports sent to the Ethics Body inside the FMF. They will decide on the sanctions imposed. We conducted interviews with players and club officials, we collected evidence ourselves, we offered reports from international betting experts and players’ performance analysis,” Zubic revealed.

“We also worked with the anti-corruption prosecutors, we offered reports and official information, but we kept in contact at an informal level too,” the official added. “We weren’t surprised by this inquiry. But we were surprised by a press release on the CNA website which spread wrong information to the media. It was something meant to influence the elections at the FMF.”

FMF has an anti-match-fixing hotline dedicated to fighting the phenomenon. The FA affirms that the investigation from the state authorities started based on a plea made by them, who are in full support of the fight against ‘match result trafficking’.

Attendances in Moldova were insignificant even before the pandemic. Football, despite being the most popular sport in the country, is failing to excite the people.

“Match-fixing affects our image. It destroys competitiveness, it encourages corruption, it destroys the essence of football. It’s basically directing the new generations the wrong way. It also discourages sponsors and it alienates fans from the stands,” Zubic argues.

“Unfortunately, even after we started disciplinary action against them, clubs continue to manipulate games. These things will only stop if those guilty of coordinating them will be held responsible by the national courts and the football tribunals we have in Moldova,” Zubic says in despair.

The Moldovan national team has never been to a major football tournament. The country became independent in 1992, after 52 years in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova was formed in 1940 after a large part of neighboring Romania was annexed. The biggest players in the country’s Soviet history are Pavel Cebanu and Igor Dobrovolski. The first never played for the USSR team but was nicknamed ‘Pelé’, then ‘Ze Maria’ for his fantastic skill. Cebanu is a legend of the defunct Nistru Chisinau, for whom he played during his whole career. The former forward acted as president of the FMF until 2019.

On the other hand, Dobrovolski made a name for himself at Atlético Madrid, Marseille, and Genoa and played for both the USSR team, then Russia for a combined period of 12 years. Still, Cebanu is regarded as the biggest player by the romantics. Nicolae Simatoc, born in 1920 on what is today Moldovan territory, is also a cult name for football lovers. The midfielder went on to play for clubs in Romania and Hungary, then at Inter and FC Barcelona, before moving to Australia, where he died in 1979.

Bleak future
As an independent country, Moldova’s club football lived through the rivalry between Sheriff Tiraspol and Zimbru Chisinau. Sheriff, based in the much-disputed autonomous region of Transnistria, only lost the national title once in the past 20 years. They are on the verge of winning their 19th title and their ninth in a row. Sheriff has some of the best training facilities in Eastern Europe and currently has players of 16 different nationalities in its squad. The aim is to play European group-stage football every year. They did it on four occasions, all in the Europa League, with the last one coming in 2017. The national team, which recently appointed former Napoli and Parma midfielder Roberto Bordin as its manager, just got beaten 8-0 in Denmark at the end of March. This defeat in the qualifiers of the World Cup in 2020 is the heaviest in the history of Moldova at the international level.

“I have a good friend who was part of the U21 national team at the same time I was there. He was demotivated and stopped playing to go work in England. He hadn’t played for three years, then got back to Chisinau because he had made a new girlfriend and she wanted him close. He started playing again as nothing happened. This is football in Moldova. You can stop for years and then be at the same level. This is not professional football, it’s a joke,” S.V. smiles.

B.T. found a team himself. “I wanted to make sure nothing dodgy happens. I was straight with the people there, they knew where I was coming from. So they said I should leave the match-fixing in my past so I could concentrate on the future. They appreciated that I was honest with them,” the player tells Josimar.

Moldova will probably never get its billion dollars back. Where football is concerned, they can at least hope to. But at the moment things look bleak.

“We can’t stop them from going on with match-fixing,” says Eugen Zubic of the Moldovan football association.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu May 20, 2021 4:33 pm

Like me @UglyGame has a long held dislike (putting it mildly) of the concept of Socios fan tokens - in this thread he raises a excellent point in regard to it's indirect yet apparently consequential links to crypto currency Bitcoin - It could be that fans are being sold a pup in terms of the investment angle

https://twitter.com/uglygame/status/1395017399578112002

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu May 20, 2021 4:59 pm

I said it at the announcement of the European Super League an I keep on saying it FIFA/Gianni Infantino appeared complicit in it's formation and we keep being presented with additional evidence/support to the notion - Tariq Panja in the New York Times reports yet more detail with which to form your own opinion on the matter. I have been reporting on these kinds of relationships for a few years now on this thread

The Super League Thought It Had a Silent Partner: FIFA
MAY 20, 2021

Tucked away in the pages and pages of financial and legal jargon that constitute the founding contract of the Super League, the failed project that last month briefly threatened the century-old structures and economics of European soccer, were references to one “essential” requirement.

The condition was deemed so important that organizers agreed that the breakaway plan could not succeed without satisfying it and yet was so secret that it was given a code name even in contracts shared among the founders.

Those documents, copies of which were reviewed by The New York Times, refer to the need for the Super League founders to strike an agreement with an entity obliquely labeled W01 but easily identifiable as FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. That agreement, the documents said, was “an essential condition for the implementation of the SL project.”

Publicly, FIFA and its president, Gianni Infantino, have joined other soccer leaders, fans and politicians in slamming the short-lived Super League project, which would have allowed a small group of elite European teams — a group that included Spain’s Real Madrid, Italy’s Juventus and the English powerhouses Manchester United and Liverpool, among others — to accumulate an ever larger share of the sport’s wealth.

But privately, according to interviews with more than a half-dozen soccer executives, including one Super League club owner, Infantino was aware of the plan and knew some of his closest lieutenants had for months — until at least late January — been engaged in talks about lending FIFA’s backing to the breakaway league.

The Super League was perhaps the most humbling failure in modern soccer history. Announced by 12 of the world’s richest clubs late on a Sunday night in April, it was abandoned less than 48 hours later amid a hailstorm of protest from fans, leagues, teams and politicians. Its founding teams have since apologized — some of them multiple times — for taking part in it, and a few could still face significant financial and sporting consequences.

But the behind-the-scenes discussions that led to a week of public drama have laid bare simmering tensions between FIFA and European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, over control of billions of dollars in annual revenue; exposed a series of frayed relationships among some of the sport’s top leaders that may be beyond repair; and raised new questions about the role played by FIFA and Infantino in the project that shook soccer’s foundations.

FIFA declined to respond to specific questions related to the involvement of Infantino or his aides in the planning of the Super League. Instead it pointed to its previous statements and its commitment to processes in which “all key football stakeholders were consulted.”

The Super League’s discussions with FIFA began in 2019. They were led by a group known as A22, a consortium of advisers headed by the Spain-based financiers Anas Laghrari and John Hahn and charged with putting together the Super League project. A22 officials held meetings with some of Infantino’s closest aides, including FIFA’s deputy secretary general, Mattias Grafstrom.

In at least one of those meetings, the breakaway group proposed that, in exchange for FIFA’s endorsement of its project, the Super League would agree to the participation of as many as a dozen of its marquee teams in an annual FIFA-backed World Cup for clubs. The teams also agreed to waive payments they would have earned by taking part, a potential windfall for FIFA of as much as $1 billion each year. After their initial meetings, the advisers reported back that they had found a receptive audience.

Obtaining FIFA’s support was not merely a hedge; the organization’s consent was required to prevent the project from being mired in costly and lengthy litigation and to preclude any punishments for the players who took part.

But it was also an insurance policy for the players. In a previous superleague discussion in 2018, FIFA had issued dark warnings that players could be banned from their national teams — and thus the World Cup — for appearing in an unsanctioned league.

By the middle of last year, the advisers from A22 were telling clubs that “FIFA was on board,” according to a Super League club owner. Others interviewed, including several with direct knowledge of the meetings who spoke anonymously because they would face legal action for publicly disclosing information subject to secrecy rules, said FIFA was at least open to the idea of the new league. But they said the organization and its leaders remained noncommittal — at least officially — until more details about the structure of the project were in place.

Confident they could obtain the support they needed, the organizers discussed various concepts for their new league before landing on the one they presented to the world when they broke cover on April 18. The Super League, as it would be known, would have 15 permanent members but would allow access to five additional teams from Europe each season.

A22 had been working on iterations of a superleague for as long as three years. Laghrari, an executive at the advisory firm Key Capital Partners who has known the Real Madrid president, Florentino Pérez, since he was a child, was to be the league’s first secretary general. Pérez had long been the driving force behind a superleague, but now, as he had come to grow confident he had FIFA on board, the stars started to align for him and his friend.

In Infantino, Pérez and Laghrari had found an energetic president eager to remake the soccer business. Infantino often spoke about being open to new ventures and proposals — he has championed the expansion of both the World Cup and FIFA’s Club World Cup in recent years — as he sought to assert FIFA’s dominance over the club game in a manner unlike any of his predecessors.

Pérez and Laghrari also found kindred spirits in the men who controlled most of Europe’s top clubs. Most were drawn to a project that promised to open a spigot of new revenue while ensuring that costs would be controlled, leading to enormous profits and access to elite competition in perpetuity.

Yet even as they received assurances from the A22 advisers about FIFA’s involvement, some skeptical club owners did their own due diligence by reaching out directly to senior FIFA officials. And the word they got back, according to a team executive with direct knowledge of at least one of those conversations, was the same they were hearing from Madrid: If the plan was put together in a certain way, FIFA would not oppose it.

Those talks gave the clubs and JPMorgan, the American investment bank that had agreed to finance the project, a level of comfort about its viability. Their confidence wavered, though, when leaks about a potential superleague emerged in news reports in January, accompanied by whispers of FIFA’s involvement in the talks.

Alarmed by the reports, European soccer’s top official, Aleksander Ceferin, the UEFA president, held an urgent meeting with Infantino at UEFA’s headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland in which he asked Infantino directly if he was involved in the plan. Infantino said he was not, but he initially demurred when asked to commit to a statement condemning the proposals. Amid intense pressure and growing requests for comment, though, he backed down.

On Jan. 21, a statement was issued in the name of FIFA and soccer’s six regional confederations. It said a “closed” European league would not be recognized by FIFA or the confederations and reiterated the threat of a World Cup ban for any participant.

The statement shocked the organizers of the Super League, as their talks with FIFA until that stage had been positive. But according to people involved in the planning, they also sensed a signal in its wording: FIFA said it would not recognize a closed competition, but the Super League was now planning to supplement its roster of 15 permanent members with five qualifiers every season.

The A22 advisers, according to the club owner, insisted that loophole meant all was not lost. “They reported that FIFA was still open to something,” he said.

The founders’ plan was to tie the Super League to FIFA’s Club World Cup, the owner said. That way the clubs would commit as many as 12 of the biggest teams in Europe to Infantino’s ambitious global competition in exchange for FIFA’s blessing of their new league. To sweeten the deal, they considered waiving $1 billion in potential payouts to allow FIFA to keep the money as a so-called solidarity payment that could be spent on soccer development projects around the world.

It is unknown if any more talks took place between FIFA and the Super League clubs in the weeks before the clubs broke cover and announced their project. But FIFA was the last of the major soccer governing bodies to issue an official statement on the proposed league after the clubs went public, and it only did so after UEFA, top leagues and politicians had made clear their opposition.

Arriving as Ceferin was calling the leaders of the breakaway league “snakes and liars,” FIFA’s statement was far more measured. Any talk of excluding players from the World Cup was quietly dropped, and FIFA instead offered nuanced, conciliatory language. FIFA said it stood “firm in favour of solidarity in football and an equitable redistribution model which can help develop football as a sport, particularly at global level.”

It also reiterated that it could only “express its disapproval to a ‘closed European breakaway league’ outside of the international football structures.”

For those engaged in the breakaway, the words — as they had in January — were vague enough to suggest that there was still hope for their project, that FIFA might still be open to providing its backing.

Within 48 hours, though, their hopes were dashed. Opposition to the plan had by then reached a fever pitch. Fans in Britain — where six of the 12 founding members were based — were protesting in the streets, and politicians had threatened to enact laws to block the league.

Infantino, just as he had in January, once again came under pressure from Ceferin to distance himself from the plans. He did so in a speech to UEFA’s congress on April 20 in which he effectively walked away from the Super League project.

“We can only strongly disapprove the creation of the Super League,” Infantino said. “A Super League which is a closed shop. A breakaway from the current institutions, from the leagues, from the associations, from UEFA and from FIFA. There is a lot to throw away for the short-term financial gain of some. They need to reflect, and they need to assume responsibility.”

Hours later, realizing that the “essential” requirement their contract had called for would not be forthcoming, the first clubs started to walk away. By nightfall, all six English clubs had announced they were out. By midnight, three other founders had followed.

Today only three teams — Pérez’s Real Madrid, Juventus and Barcelona — remain as holdouts, refusing to sign a letter of apology demanded by UEFA as a condition of their reintegration into European soccer. If they do not sign, all three face significant penalties, including a potential ban from the Champions League.

Infantino, meanwhile, faces pressures of his own, not to mention accusations of betrayal. The head of the Spanish league, Javier Tebas, openly called him one of the masterminds behind the breakaway league and said he had told Infantino as much when the men met briefly at the UEFA Congress.

“It’s he who is behind the Super League, and I already told him in person,” Tebas said this month. “I’ve said it before and I will say it again: Behind all of this is FIFA President Gianni Infantino.”

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu May 20, 2021 5:19 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Thu May 20, 2021 1:54 pm
This should be interesting - The Athletic's Business of Sport Podcast talks to form European Leagues President Lars-Christer Olsson, including thoughts on the Champions League revamp and the European Super League


https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cH ... diNDlkYzlk
This is interesting though the subsequent discussion about Basketball's experience with a breakaway European Super League is perhaps even more interesting, the parallels to the football version are rally close - it is very much worth listening too.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu May 20, 2021 5:50 pm

Football club valuation has been a regular feature on this thread down the years (which reminds me that Liverpool University's list is somewhat due) - yesterday Sportico released their valuations of the Premier League clubs (Forbes did theirs las month) - naturally their valuations differ - what may be of concern to our new owners is how much lower than the sale price that they value our club - it is is 17th just like we are in the league

Introductory article https://www.sportico.com/valuations/tea ... 234630145/

The valuations https://www.sportico.com/valuations/tea ... 234630140/
Last edited by Chester Perry on Thu May 20, 2021 6:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu May 20, 2021 5:58 pm

On the subject of that list from Sportico here are some interesting views from today's Huddle-up newsletter

https://huddleup.substack.com/p/the-mos ... vOVJIp1-2Q

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by GodIsADeeJay81 » Thu May 20, 2021 6:01 pm

Interesting that West Ham are valued higher than a team that's won the PL in recent years and just won an FA Cup.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu May 20, 2021 6:04 pm

GodIsADeeJay81 wrote:
Thu May 20, 2021 6:01 pm
Interesting that West Ham are valued higher than a team that's won the PL in recent years and just won an FA Cup.
Leicester are carrying quite a lot of debt at the moment, much of it has been spent on the new training facility/Academy - it will be a factor, as will the fact that West Ham generate more commercial income and are are London club that are on a longer continual run in the Premier League than Leicester

If you look at low valuations though what about think Tony Bloom who has chucked over £300m at Brighton and yet it is valued just above us at $200m

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu May 20, 2021 6:23 pm

Speaking of Leicester this is a really interesting thread from Simon Chadwick, which relates to old themes here re Geopolitics, sports washing and legitimisation - it looks at the owning family's beneficial relationship with the Thai government and royal family and how the clubs relative success reflects positively on Thailand but is not really tarnished by some of Thailand's more controversial activities

https://twitter.com/Prof_Chadwick/statu ... 3341728776

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by GodIsADeeJay81 » Thu May 20, 2021 6:31 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Thu May 20, 2021 6:04 pm
Leicester are carrying quite a lot of debt at the moment, much of it has been spent on the new training facility/Academy - it will be a factor, as will the fact that West Ham generate more commercial income and are are London club that are on a longer continual run in the Premier League than Leicester

If you look at low valuations though what about think Tony Bloom who has chucked over £300m at Brighton and yet it is valued just above us at $200m
West Ham rent a stadium though, shouldn't that be a negative factor?

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu May 20, 2021 6:38 pm

GodIsADeeJay81 wrote:
Thu May 20, 2021 6:31 pm
West Ham rent a stadium though, shouldn't that be a negative factor?
it is, but the costs are super low in a long term contract, with no maintenance/stewarding cost obligations and they have slowly been getting permission to increase the numbers - in non covid times they are licensed for over 60k (one of only 4 in the country to be so) - Leicester meanwhile are getting ready to spend a large chunk of money (borrowed again) to take theirs to around 47k
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu May 20, 2021 6:52 pm

Some nice and light reading for you - An academic paper for the Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance from February this year - Private Equity and Venture Capital in Sport: Who is Receiving Funding and What Factors Influence Funding

should help with the insomnia https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/c ... 0equity%22

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu May 20, 2021 7:08 pm

Much has been made by our fanbase about how much Alan Pace "gets it for an outsider" (I will reserve judgement on that idea) but here is another American investor in English Football talking in much the same way - Paraag Marathe Vice Chairman of Leeds United

Listen here (it is 30 mins or so long) https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p09j49bh

or read here https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/57190689

It is interesting how some of his commentary differs to that in the Sportico club valuation article and the commentary from Huddle Up

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu May 20, 2021 11:22 pm

I think this is good news for football in general, hopefully Serie will follow the Bundesliga's example and decide not to go ahead with their own Private Equity deal - from SportsProMedia

Bundesliga clubs break off private equity investment talks
DFL had been looking to sell 25% stake in international broadcast rights business.

Posted: May 20 2021By: Ed Dixon

- Deal was expected to value Bundesliga’s overseas broadcast rights at €2bn
- KKR, Bridgepoint and CVC were reportedly among private equity firms in running
- DFL says talks have ended ‘for now’ but vows to work with clubs on ‘accelerating international marketing’

Clubs in German soccer’s top two divisions have opted to cease talks with private equity firms seeking to buy a stake in the German Football League’s (DFL) international broadcast rights business.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported the DFL, which oversees the Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2, had drawn up its shortlist of investors. KKR, Bridgepoint and CVC Capital were all purportedly in the running for a 25 per cent stake in the business, in a deal that was expected to value the Bundesliga’s overseas broadcast rights at roughly €2 billion (US$2.4 billion).

That would mean the proposed sale would have brought in approximately €500 million (US$610 million), which would have been a timely boost for German soccer clubs after a full season playing in stadiums unable to operate at 100 per cent capacity.

However, after clubs met on 19th May to vote on the minority shareholding, the DFL announced in a statement that talks would end ‘for now’.

The statement read: ‘In order to carefully assess the opportunities and risks of an investment in the interests of the 36 professional clubs, the DFL spent the last few months examining specific offers from private equity firms and presented them to the Extraordinary Members Assembly today.

‘Having weighed up the facts, the Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 clubs decided not to continue the talks at the present time. Independent of this, there was agreement that it is essential that clubs and DFL work together on concepts for accelerating international marketing.’

Reports that the Bundesliga’s overseas media rights were attracting interest from private equity investors first emerged last November before the DFL confirmed in March that it was looking to create two new subsidiaries. A new MediaCo division would market the Bundesliga’s media rights overseas, while DigitalCo would be responsible for the DFL’s esports competitions.

The DFL said that the new MediaCo division would absorb the existing Bundesliga International unit and look to build out a new over-the-top (OTT) streaming platform.

Speaking to the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper in March, DFL chief executive Christian Seifert said that the proposal “essentially envisages a new company that will receive the licence to exploit international media rights and global marketing rights for 25 years”.

He added: “This underlines the solid long-term investment approach, which offers both clubs and investors security when entering and also when exiting. Private equity firms are usually partners on a temporary basis, and under our model an exit is possible after a few years without any problems.”

The DFL has given no indication of when, or if, talks with private equity suitors will be revisited. Investment bank Nomura had been charged with organising and guiding the initial bidding process.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu May 20, 2021 11:35 pm

Earlier today I posted Sportico's valuations of Premier League Clubs - only 9 clubs had a valuation over $280m with Leicester being the lowest of those at $450m - The $280m valuation was for Leeds United, who if you listen to their Vice Chairman's interview (which I also posted earlier today) are on course to be one of the most valuable teams in the world. So how does that equate with this sale value of MLS side Houston Dynamo - $400m for a team in a league with a terrible TV deal of only $90m per season, well the sale does include the women's team Houston Dash - Every single Premier League club gest much more than that - SportProMedia with the detail on the sale

Report: Houston Dynamo being sold to Ted Segal for US$400m
MLS franchise has been majority owned by Gabriel Brener since 2015.

Posted: May 20 2021By: Ed Dixon

- Deal also includes NWSL’s Houston Dash
- Minority shareholders James Harden and Oscar De La Hoya set to hold smaller stakes

Major League Soccer’s (MLS) Houston Dynamo are close to being sold to real estate developer Ted Segal for about US$400 million, according to Sportico.

The sports business news outlet reports that Segal, who is the founder and president of EJS Group, will purchase the franchise from majority owner Gabriel Brener, who will retain a minority stake. Brener initially invested in the club in 2008 before taking full control from Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) in 2015.

Other minority owners of the Dynamo include National Basketball Association (NBA) star James Harden and boxing champion Oscar De La Hoya. The pair will hold smaller stakes once the acquisition is completed, according to Sportico, while Jake Silverstein, a Portland-based investor, will exit the club.

Sportico also reports that Segal’s deal includes the National Women’s Soccer League’s (NWSL) Houston Dash and the team’s business relationship with BBVA Stadium, which is owned by the local stadium authority.

Segal has already invested in mixed martial arts (MMA) promotion the Professional Fighters League (PFL), for which he is also a board member.

The deal for the Dynamo would be the latest purchase of an MLS franchise. Earlier this month, Sportico reported that Orlando City were on the verge of being sold to the Wilf Family, the owners of the National Football League’s (NFL) Minnesota Vikings, for between US$400 million to US$450 million.

On the pitch, the Dynamo are sixth in MLS’s Western Conference after half a dozen games played. Their next match is at home to Vancouver Whitecaps on 22nd May.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Thu May 20, 2021 11:57 pm

An interesting podcast from SportProMedia looking at the Premier Leagues somewhat remarkable achievement of rolling over it's domestic Premier League rights deal. Once again the advantages of a longer term set of rights cycles is talked up - there is also discussion of the surprise merger of Discovery and AT&T's Warner Media to create another blockbusting major broadcast media organisation - amongst other things it brings together Eurosport and Turner Sports

https://www.sportspromedia.com/analysis ... re-podcast

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri May 21, 2021 12:10 am

LFP the French Ligue seem to think that the only way out of their low broadcast rights values - post the mediapro deal collapse is to create their own in-house channel - hmm if an experienced broadcaster (albeit new to France) could not get the required subscriptions what makes the LFP think they can do something that will provide the required values on a sustainable basis. particularly at the monthly 10 - 11 euro rate they are said to be considering- from TVBEurope

French football league reportedly considering its own TV channel
LFP said to be considering its own TV channel to broadcast 80 per cent of matches

BY JENNY PRIESTLEY
PUBLISHED: MAY 19, 2021 ⋅ UPDATED: MAY 20, 2021

The French football league is reportedly considering launching its own TV channel to broadcast Ligue 1 matches from the start of next season.

The league has been hit by broadcaster issues throughout the current season, with original rights holder Telefoot shutting down after parent company Mediapro refused to pay for its broadcast rights due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The rights then moved to Canal Plus for the remainder of the season. However, the broadcaster has said it doesn’t wish to carry on broadcasting all matches due to low audience figures.

According to L’Equipe, the LFP is now considering launching its own channel that would broadcast 80 per cent of matches, and selling the rights to two matches each weekend to Canal Plus.

The report says the league has also been in touch with beIN and DAZN as possible alternatives.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri May 21, 2021 12:19 am

I never ceased to be amazed by the abilities of the Spanish giants to find new sources of financing - it appears that Barcelona have managed to source the opportunity to help manage it's huge short term debt obligations on favourable terms - from SportsBusiness

Barcelona ‘secures €500m’ Goldman Sachs loan on ‘favourable’ terms
Ben Cronin, Europe Editor
May 19, 2021

Spanish LaLiga giant FC Barcelona is reported to have secured a €500m ($611.7m) loan from US investment bank Goldman Sachs that will help it to refinance part of its debts and ease the pressure created on the club by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The side obtained the loan yesterday (Tuesday) with club sources telling Catalan publication L’Esportiu the payment conditions were “much better than any bank could offer”.

The team’s new president Joan Laporta and its board of directors have commissioned an audit into its finances as part of the process for when a new leadership team takes over. The Spanish side is reported to be €1.173bn in debt, €730m of which needs to be settled in the short-term.

The club will receive €100m of the loan immediately to meet its contractual obligations before the end of the LaLiga season on June 30.

The loan agreement builds on the club’s existing relationship with Goldman Sachs, which is also involved in a 30-year financing plan to help pay for its Espai Barça stadium renovation project.

The financial institution is already reported to have advanced €90m to the Spanish side and will manage a part of the stadium’s commercial rights as part of an innovative funding plan for the venue renovation. Under the plan, a number of financial institutions share the cost of the estimated €815m project while deriving a share of the new revenues the rebuild will generate.

The club would return the investment over those 30 years by paying €50m a year of the additional €150m in annual revenues the Espai Barça is predicted to make. The remaining €100m in revenue would be used for the club’s regular activities and to boost its competitiveness.

The clubs said the incremental €150m would come from the new assets created via Espai Barça, such as the title rights to the stadium and new sponsorship deals (€50m), VIP boxes and seats (€50m) and new visitors to the new museum, greater revenue from ticketing, new catering, venue hire and parking (€50m).

Barcelona was one of 12 clubs to announce plans to form a breakaway European Super League in April. However, while nine of the founder members have now distanced themselves from the project, Barcelona, together with fellow Spanish giant Real Madrid and Serie A club Juventus have yet to withdraw.

Uefa has opened an official disciplinary investigation into the three clubs threatening to bar them from its competitions if they refuse to sign a Club Commitment Declaration, reaffirming their support for Uefa club and national team competitions.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Vegas Claret » Fri May 21, 2021 12:28 am

not sure if this has been posted but it's a decent watch, Neville interviewing Scudamore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0joKOIqguA

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri May 21, 2021 12:32 am

Vegas Claret wrote:
Fri May 21, 2021 12:28 am
not sure if this has been posted but it's a decent watch, Neville interviewing Scudamore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0joKOIqguA
It is an interesting watch, I posted it last month just after it first appeared - this was my take on it then
Chester Perry wrote:
Fri Apr 30, 2021 1:19 pm
Just got round to watching this - I have to say that Gary Neville comes across as a petulant child on the subject of an Independent regulator and more equitable financial distribution across the game - I thought Richard Scudamore absolutely schooled him, which was quite easy to do because he is absolutely closed to seeking to understand what other perspectives are driving different actions and having empathy for everyone else, something that has driven the thinking of Perez, Agnelli, the Glazers and FSG

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri May 21, 2021 12:52 am

Tomorrow UEFA will release a report looking at how the Pandemic has affected European Football https://twitter.com/UEFA/status/1395372448216911876 - it seems that the press have had access to advance copies, this is the way now it seems (anyone guess I have recently been watching the Mandalorian)- well the Guardian have decided to focus on one particular area the Premier League's domination of the transfer market

Uefa report claims English clubs spent 43% of global transfer total last summer
- Premier League sides spent more than £1.5bn in 2020-21
- Transfer fees and wages ‘must be reduced’, says Uefa

Paul MacInnes
Thu 20 May 2021 23.00 BST

English clubs were responsible for 43% of global transfer activity last summer, according to a Uefa report which lays bare the impact of the pandemic on football.

It underlines the financial muscle of the Premier League at the end of a season in which Manchester City and Chelsea have reached the Champions League final and Manchester United will contest the Europa League final. The Championship was the sixth-biggest spending league in Europe in 2020-21, outstripping the Portuguese, Dutch and Russian first divisions.

With head-spinning figures such as a €7.2bn (£6.2bn) loss for Europe’s top-flight clubs since the pandemic began, Uefa concludes that transfer fees and wages “must be reduced to acceptable levels” if the game is to be restored to financial health.

The financial losses are stark, with the absence of fans the greatest blow: 210 million fewer clicks of the turnstile cost clubs across Uefa’s 55 member countries €4bn in revenue, the biggest loss over the period and greater than falls in sponsorship (€2.7bn) and broadcast revenue (€1.4bn).

Those losses in turn affected the transfer market. Spending in the 2020 summer window was down 39% on the previous year, and this January’s winter window was down by 56% on 2020. That the summer total was above that of any year before 2014 was down to English clubs.

The Premier League was by far the biggest spender in 2020-21 with more than €1.8bn (£1.55bn) traded, €600m more than in the next-largest spender, Serie A. The Championship total was €400m.

Some €558m (£480m) went between English clubs but deals sending players from Spain, Germany and France to England were also in the top five most valuable transfer “flows”. This is not likely to continue, however, with Uefa predicting immigration changes brought about by Brexit are likely to lead English clubs to look equally at South America and Africa for recruits.

Uefa says reforms to its financial fair play rules are necessary, with controls on costs the key. Ultimately the annual “benchmarking” report concludes that football is “in essence a very stable business”, however, and that despite the pandemic “club revenue streams are fundamentally reliable”.

It does see one existential threat to the game, what it calls the “so-called” European Super League. “A closed breakaway league would destroy value across the whole pyramid,” the report says. “It is only by respecting the pyramid and the principle of promotion and relegation on sporting merit that European football will be able to continue to grow.”

Critics have argued that Uefa’s reforms to the Champions League undermine the values of sporting merit, with teams able to qualify based on historical performance rather than the position in their domestic league from 2024. Uefa sources say these proposals are subject to possible review.

In another jab at the ESL, Uefa challenges claims that the breakaway project would have given three times the money Uefa provides to clubs outside the Champions League. Calculating its future solidarity payments at €28bn compared with the ESL’s €10bn, the report observes: “Needless to say, $10bn is not three times $28bn.”

Uefa celebrates the ESL’s speedy demise and the “unanimous and resounding uproar” that brought it down. Its end may also have been hastened by an absence of expected support from Fifa. According to the New York Times, advisers to the ESL met Fifa representatives while drawing up their plans and were confident the governing body would endorse them only for Fifa to ultimately “express its disapproval” of the project in public.

Fifa says the position of its president, Gianni Infantino, was clear when he told Uefa’s Congress that he strongly disapproved of the ESL.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Vegas Claret » Fri May 21, 2021 2:05 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Fri May 21, 2021 12:32 am
It is an interesting watch, I posted it last month just after it first appeared - this was my take on it then
beg to differ, all depends which way you look at it. Neville is approaching it with far more morality than Scudamore and that's a side of the fence I will always be on. For Scudamore to try and justify 80 quid tickets is deplorable in my opinion

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri May 21, 2021 2:41 am

Vegas Claret wrote:
Fri May 21, 2021 2:05 am
beg to differ, all depends which way you look at it. Neville is approaching it with far more morality than Scudamore and that's a side of the fence I will always be on. For Scudamore to try and justify 80 quid tickets is deplorable in my opinion
that is the same Neville that incited near riots at Old Trafford. there is very little morality in what Neville is offering and absolutely no deep understanding about the implications of what he is asking for, or recognition of the hypocritical stance he has created when looking at the way Salford City steamrollered everyone in non league with an unsustainable approach to running that club, it is only when he found that approach on it's own will not work in the Football League proper that he has suddenly become more caring about the game

I find it particularly resonant that while a lot of pundits and football journalists have supported his petition the journalists that investigate the business of sport are largely agreed that an Independent regulator of football is a flawed concept from the outset. Many are voicing the same thoughts I have laid out since it was first vigorously argued for a couple of years back

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Vegas Claret » Fri May 21, 2021 3:11 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Fri May 21, 2021 2:41 am
that is the same Neville that incited near riots at Old Trafford. there is very little morality in what Neville is offering and absolutely no deep understanding about the implications of what he is asking for, or recognition of the hypocritical stance he has created when looking at the way Salford City steamrollered everyone in non league with an unsustainable approach to running that club, it is only when he found that approach on it's own will not work in the Football League proper that he has suddenly become more caring about the game

I find it particularly resonant that while a lot of pundits and football journalists have supported his petition the journalists that investigate the business of sport are largely agreed that an Independent regulator of football is a flawed concept from the outset. Many are voicing the same thoughts I have laid out since it was first vigorously argued for a couple of years back
all fair arguments CP. Scudamore's points about living within means are reasonable of course, but all that does is make the gap between the have's and have not's even larger and for me that goes very much against the "competition" side of the sport. It's a difficult problem to solve

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri May 21, 2021 2:16 pm

I have touched on the subject of monies left to play for this season on other threads in recent weeks - here the Telegraph makes it explicit as to what is still available this weekend for the final match of the season - naturally all other results have to be favourable for the highest outcomes

How much could your club win or lose in Premier League prize money this weekend?
JIMMY LLOYD MAY 21, 2021

For teams that can keep their eyes off the sun lounger, there is one major thing at stake this Sunday - money. There may not appear to be that much on the line from a sporting perspective but a small yet significant rule change in 2019 means that each place in the table is thought to be worth around £3.4 million.

For Newcastle, that means a potential swing of £16.7m in prize money is possible.

The subtle change in how the Premier League allocates its “merit money” came in when the current TV deal began in 2019.

Previously, 25 per cent of domestic TV rights were set aside for prize money based on the final league table, while international rights were split equally. The increase in those international rights meant that there was more to go round and so the league kept the equal share as it was - thought to be around £43m per club - and allocated this extra cash to the prize pot.

It means that there is more money than ever at stake this week.

Aston Villa, who will finish 11th regardless of what happens on Sunday, are the only mid-table club who truly have nothing to play for. Manchester City and Manchester United will finish first and second respectively, and bank £67.9m and £64.5m in the process, but with European finals on the horizon are unlikely to ease up, even if they rotate their best players.

The congested lower-middle half of the table is so volatile that Newcastle, who are currently 15th, could finish as high as 12th or as low as 17th. The sporting story of their season - comfortable in mid-table or one place above the relegation zone - will go down to the final day and with it the huge swing in possible prize money.

Last season the Premier League did not publish its 'final-payments-to-clubs report', but it is thought it included rebates to TV companies due to Covid. This may yet happen again for this season.

Potential prize-money swing
Based on current positions

1. Manchester City - £0m swing
Highest finish: 1
Lowest finish: 1
Current prize money: £67.9m
With the title wrapped up, City are one of the few sides who can relax this Sunday. Small matter of the Champions League final next week will help focus minds.

2. Manchester United - £0m
Highest finish: 2
Lowest finish: 2
Current prize money: £64.5m
Have been firmly ensconced in second since January and will be rewarded with a stress-free afternoon ahead of their Europa League final on Wednesday.

3. Chelsea - £6.8m
Highest finish: 3
Lowest finish: 5
Current prize money: £61.1m
Can still drop out of the top four but fate is in their own hands after a surge up the table which has seen them go into the final day in third.

4. Liverpool - £6.8m
Highest finish: 3
Lowest finish: 5
Current prize money: £57.7m
In a more precarious position than Chelsea as fourth on goal difference. Riches of Champions League qualification will add to the prize money at stake.

5. Leicester - £6.8m
Highest finish: 3
Lowest finish: 5
Current prize money: £54.3m
Have spent longer than any other team in the top four this season but there is only one time when it really matters: 5.45pm on Sunday, May 23.

6. West Ham - £6.8m
Highest finish: 6
Lowest finish: 8
Current prize money: £50.9m
In theory could still finish eighth but would require an improbable set of results such is their superior goal difference over Everton. Will be disappointed to be out of the Champions League reckoning but nearly £51m in prize money for sixth would help smooth that over.

7. Tottenham - £13.6m
Highest finish: 6
Lowest finish: 10
Current prize money: £47.6m
Would require Leeds to score an unlikely amount of goals against West Brom to be dragged back to 10th, where prize money falls to £37.4m, but the fact that they could yet finish below Arsenal points to a side going the wrong way, fast.

8. Everton - £13.6m
Highest finish: 6
Lowest finish: 10
Current prize money: £44.3m
A season of fine margins. Could yet pinch a Europa League spot but could feasibly end the season hovering around the half-way mark and with it see their prize pot shrink significantly.

9. Arsenal - £10.2m
Highest finish: 7
Lowest finish: 10
Current prize money: £40.8m
Late-season surge has seen Arsenal emerge as contenders for a dreaded Europa Conference League spot. But with £10m still to play for there is plenty at stake for a side who would welcome the extra cash.

10. Leeds - £10.2m
Highest finish: 7
Lowest finish: 10
Current prize money: £37.4m
A guaranteed top-half finish this season and with it a minimum of £37m prize money. Not feasible that they will catch Spurs but the £45m on offer for eighth will appeal.

11. Aston Villa - £0m
Highest finish: 11
Lowest finish: 11
Current prize money: £34m
On the beach with their giant novelty cheque for £34m.

12. Wolves - £10.2m
Highest finish: 12
Lowest finish: 15
Current prize money: £30.1m
Cannot move up in the table so the £30.1m for finishing 12th is Wolves’ to lose. The agents of Portugal will be hoping that they do not do so.

13. Crystal Palace - £13.6m
Highest finish: 12
Lowest finish: 16
Current prize money: £27.2m
Embedded deep in the most volatile part of the table. A goal difference of -23 does leave Palace vulnerable and with £13.6m at stake could be an expensive afternoon if things do not go to plan.

14. Southampton - £13.6m
Highest finish: 12
Lowest finish: 16
Current prize money: £23.8m
Could win as much as £30.1m or as little as £17m. All to play for.

15. Newcastle - £16.7m
Highest finish: 12
Lowest finish: 17
Current prize money: £20.4m
It is entirely plausible that Newcastle could finish as high 12th (£30.1m) or as low as 17th (£13.6m), one place outside the relegation zone. A season on a knife edge.

16. Brighton - £13.6m
Highest finish: 13
Lowest finish: 17
Current prize money: £17m
Another side wading through the congestion of the lower-middle half of the table. Best goal difference of the bottom nine gives Seagulls a good chance at chipping away at teams above.

17. Burnley - £6.8m
Highest finish: 15
Lowest finish: 17
Current prize money: £13.6m
Turf Moor accountants will be keen for a good show on Sunday with £6.8m at stake for one of the tightest budgets in the league.

18. Fulham - £3.4m
Highest finish: 18
Lowest finish: 19
Current prize money: £10.2m
Have been doomed for some time but holding on to their £10.2m for 18th would be a minor consolation.

19. West Brom - £3.4m
Highest finish: 18
Lowest finish: 19
Current prize money: £6.8m
Need Fulham to lose but could yet creep up to 18th and with it could collect an extra £3.4m.

20. Sheffield United - £0m
Highest finish: 20
Lowest finish: 20
Current prize money: £3.4m
Balance sheet has had £3.4m for finishing last inked in for some time now.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri May 21, 2021 2:40 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Fri May 21, 2021 12:52 am
Tomorrow UEFA will release a report looking at how the Pandemic has affected European Football https://twitter.com/UEFA/status/1395372448216911876 - it seems that the press have had access to advance copies, this is the way now it seems (anyone guess I have recently been watching the Mandalorian)- well the Guardian have decided to focus on one particular area the Premier League's domination of the transfer market

Uefa report claims English clubs spent 43% of global transfer total last summer
- Premier League sides spent more than £1.5bn in 2020-21
- Transfer fees and wages ‘must be reduced’, says Uefa

Paul MacInnes
Thu 20 May 2021 23.00 BST

English clubs were responsible for 43% of global transfer activity last summer, according to a Uefa report which lays bare the impact of the pandemic on football.

It underlines the financial muscle of the Premier League at the end of a season in which Manchester City and Chelsea have reached the Champions League final and Manchester United will contest the Europa League final. The Championship was the sixth-biggest spending league in Europe in 2020-21, outstripping the Portuguese, Dutch and Russian first divisions.

With head-spinning figures such as a €7.2bn (£6.2bn) loss for Europe’s top-flight clubs since the pandemic began, Uefa concludes that transfer fees and wages “must be reduced to acceptable levels” if the game is to be restored to financial health.

The financial losses are stark, with the absence of fans the greatest blow: 210 million fewer clicks of the turnstile cost clubs across Uefa’s 55 member countries €4bn in revenue, the biggest loss over the period and greater than falls in sponsorship (€2.7bn) and broadcast revenue (€1.4bn).

Those losses in turn affected the transfer market. Spending in the 2020 summer window was down 39% on the previous year, and this January’s winter window was down by 56% on 2020. That the summer total was above that of any year before 2014 was down to English clubs.

The Premier League was by far the biggest spender in 2020-21 with more than €1.8bn (£1.55bn) traded, €600m more than in the next-largest spender, Serie A. The Championship total was €400m.

Some €558m (£480m) went between English clubs but deals sending players from Spain, Germany and France to England were also in the top five most valuable transfer “flows”. This is not likely to continue, however, with Uefa predicting immigration changes brought about by Brexit are likely to lead English clubs to look equally at South America and Africa for recruits.

Uefa says reforms to its financial fair play rules are necessary, with controls on costs the key. Ultimately the annual “benchmarking” report concludes that football is “in essence a very stable business”, however, and that despite the pandemic “club revenue streams are fundamentally reliable”.

It does see one existential threat to the game, what it calls the “so-called” European Super League. “A closed breakaway league would destroy value across the whole pyramid,” the report says. “It is only by respecting the pyramid and the principle of promotion and relegation on sporting merit that European football will be able to continue to grow.”

Critics have argued that Uefa’s reforms to the Champions League undermine the values of sporting merit, with teams able to qualify based on historical performance rather than the position in their domestic league from 2024. Uefa sources say these proposals are subject to possible review.

In another jab at the ESL, Uefa challenges claims that the breakaway project would have given three times the money Uefa provides to clubs outside the Champions League. Calculating its future solidarity payments at €28bn compared with the ESL’s €10bn, the report observes: “Needless to say, $10bn is not three times $28bn.”

Uefa celebrates the ESL’s speedy demise and the “unanimous and resounding uproar” that brought it down. Its end may also have been hastened by an absence of expected support from Fifa. According to the New York Times, advisers to the ESL met Fifa representatives while drawing up their plans and were confident the governing body would endorse them only for Fifa to ultimately “express its disapproval” of the project in public.

Fifa says the position of its president, Gianni Infantino, was clear when he told Uefa’s Congress that he strongly disapproved of the ESL.
So UEFA have released their 2021 European Football Landscape report: otherwise more formally known as UEFA Club Licensing Benchmarking Report this is the 12th edition and this is how UEFA introduces it

View the interactive report here https://www.uefa.com/insideuefa/uefaeur ... landscape/

View a PDF of the report here https://editorial.uefa.com/resources/02 ... y_2021.pdf

European football shows strength and solidarity in resisting COVID shock
Friday 21 May 2021

UEFA has released the twelfth edition of The European Club Footballing Landscape report, its annual club licensing benchmarking report on European club football.

While the report again provides the most wide-ranging and precise deep delve into the European football finance landscape, this year’s edition provides the first authoritative and in-depth examination of how the pandemic has affected European football.

The report shows that clubs across all tiers of European football are forecast to miss out on €9 billion of revenue in the 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 financial years.

In the report foreword, UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin said: "In last year’s report, I said that European football was strong, united, resilient and ready for new challenges. But no one could have predicted that we would have to face the biggest challenge to football, sport and society in modern times. However, thanks to almost a decade of financial fair play regulations, before the outbreak European football could hardly have been in better financial shape."

As this report shows, top division club revenues had surged: with annual growth of 8.2%, the 711 top-division clubs added €1.9 million to their revenues in 2019, while operating profits were the second highest ever recorded and club cash reserves and balance sheets were the strongest on record.

The report shows in granular detail just how destructive the pandemic has been to club finances. But it also shows how European football worked together to avert a greater crisis. UEFA together with domestic cup and leagues completely restructured the competition calendar in 2020. With the EURO postponed and UEFA club competitions delayed, 38 top tier European leagues were able to conclude their 2020 season with all leagues able to start the current season. This saved clubs an estimated €2 billion in additional domestic TV contract penalties and rebates.

The successful return to play protocol has enabled UEFA to organise 1,432 matches with 163,844 COVID tests since the pandemic struck. More than 99% of matches have been delivered as planned.

Deep stakeholder cooperation enabled the global transfer window to be extended and Financial Fair Play rules to be adapted. So far this has prevented any contagion in the settlement of transfer debts.

Nonetheless, the report shows that the current projection of lost revenues across the 2019-21 period is €7.2bn for top tier and €1.5bn for lower tier professional football. Every level and every corner of professional football has been hit hard. Clubs with heavy reliance on supporter attendance are particularly impacted by the pandemic.

The impact of the pandemic on the transfer market is also explored in detail in the report. It shows that European clubs’ transfer spending in the summer of 2020 was down by an estimated 39% on the record summer 2019 window, and down by 30% on the average for the previous three summers.

Elsewhere, the report documents the current season and looks to the future. Despite the pandemic leading to 210 million fewer matchday supporters, overall interest in European club football remains higher than ever. Record television viewing figures, record numbers of new club investors and investment, and a rebound in club web traffic are all referenced in the report.

On a lighter note, the report analyses tens of thousands of matches to document a significant decrease in home wins, from 45% pre-COVID to 42% post-COVID and identifies other trends such as notable decreases in away team yellow and red cards.

Aleksander Čeferin said: "The whole football ecosystem, professional, amateur and youth have been heavily disrupted by the pandemic. This requires deep co-operation and a co-ordinated response across the football pyramid. Solidarity, not self-interest, must prevail and will win the day.

"This report clearly shows that we are now operating in a new financial reality, and it is becoming clear that our current Financial Fair Play regulations will need to be adapted and updated. Financial sustainability will remain our goal, and UEFA and European football will work as a team to equip our sport with new rules for a new future."
Last edited by Chester Perry on Fri May 21, 2021 2:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri May 21, 2021 2:47 pm

on the back of the European Football Landscape report UEFA have launched an initiative to discuss the future of European football following the fall out of Super Leagues collapse and the Pandemic - There is much for it to discus particularly why an administrative, regulatory body is busy organising and expanding competitions that are having a directly negative commercial impact on it's member associations that stakeholders such as fans, players and managers/coaches say has too many games

UEFA launches Convention on the Future of European Football
Friday 21 May 2021

A landmark consultation process to unite all stakeholders towards long-term reforms.


UEFA has today announced the launch of a landmark consultation process to unite European football stakeholders and strengthen the future of the game for the benefit of all. Over the next months, the Convention on the Future of European Football (‘the Convention’) will bring together representatives of national football associations, leagues, clubs, players, coaches, fans and agents to discuss long-term policy and governance reforms. UEFA intends to lay the foundations for European football’s sustainable and inclusive recovery and future together with its major stakeholders.

The move underlines UEFA’s determination to deliver long term solutions that safeguard the values-driven, solidarity based and open European sports model. The Convention’s stakeholder consultation process will ensure Europe’s collective will and determination directly impacts into the future of the game and how it is run.

UEFA is fully committed to its responsibility of protecting and preserving the structures and legacy of the game for future generations. The Convention will focus on working with all stakeholders and partners on swift concrete, collaborative and comprehensive actions that can be undertaken to ensure the short- and long-term positive development of the entire football pyramid in Europe. This will include specific focus on pre-existing and emerging issues and threats in the top professional layer, which have been exposed and exacerbated by the crisis, increasing risk for the entire ecosystem.

Concretely, the Convention will aim to secure progress on four foundations for greater stability and bolstering the strength of European football going forward:

1. Ensuring financial sustainability and responsibility within European football;

2. Strengthening competitiveness, solidarity distributions and player development;

3. Establishing more consistent good governance measures domestically and internationally; and

4. Progressing the development of women’s football and raising its status across all levels.

Based on UEFA’s longstanding partnership with the European Union and the Council of Europe, these organisations will be invited to appoint observers to the Convention. Participation from FIFA and other regional confederations will be welcomed on a similar basis.

UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin said: “As I emphasised at the recent UEFA Congress, crises will make European football stronger. They show us what we can achieve when we act together and what we stand to lose if we don’t care about each other and the greater good. With this Convention process we will talk to each other, listen to each other, and find and enact solutions together. Now more than ever people across Europe expect action and solidarity in the interest of all of football in all of Europe, and that is what we will focus on delivering.”

The first round of consultation will take place in July 2021, in conjunction with the final week of the UEFA European Football Championship. A second consultation round will take place in September 2021.

Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri May 21, 2021 3:36 pm

This may interest some of you, particularly as it is an area that the new owners of our club will be targeting - it is a replay of a webinar on Fan relationship management from SportsBusiness there is a caveat that it is focused on Asian (as in the Confederation) club football but there will be many elements that are transferable I am sure

https://www.sportbusiness.com/2021/05/w ... -football/

Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri May 21, 2021 4:14 pm

Some interesting stuff coming from Gianni Infantino's opening address to the 71st FIFA congress this afternoon - courtesy of @TariqPanja

the good stuff that you would want FIFA to be looking at
- reiterates FIFA’s efforts to take on the transfer market providing data showing agents secure 10 percent of transfer fees, 10x more than clubs where players are formed.
- briefly mentions a pan-African schools program which actually sounds like a great program. Should be focussing a lot more on those activities. This development work should be the core of its focus.

the stuff that continues to be deeply troublingl
- Infantino making clear his wish to reshape global football. New competitions, new ideas, new football is on his agenda. Wants FIFA at the centre of major changes to game at club and national team level.
--------------------------------------------------------------------

I have been waiting for an opportunity to get this thought in in the last couple of days

It wasn't that long ago that FIFA showed little interest in club football, under Blatter his power base was through the distribution of monies from the World cup - of course that and the bidding process is much more deeply scrutinised now and more difficult for gratuity to be easily taken following investigations and convictions around the world.

now FIFA's president needs to find additional revenues to concentrate his power base, which can be redistributed to associations under legally proscribed means (including salaries and expenses) to those who not not normally have access to such funding - some countries will find prestige in attending a 48 nation world cup, others including TV audiences will just find it a slog. This is where Club football plays it's role, UEFA's financial success from it's club tournaments made it financially stronger than the rest of FIFA combined, they do not like that particularly as the next strongest federation (South America's CONMEBOL) is more closely aligned with UEFA than it is with FIFA.

So we have a 24 team Club World Cup that initially looked like it was to be financed by Saudia Arabia, but at the moment appears to be by China, Gianni Infantino has publicly talked up both an African and North American Super League, and has been heavily linked with supporting a European Super League. Not forgetting that he was very supportive of a global super league and the World Clubs Association - both fronted by Florentino Perez and both designed to destroy a relationship between UEFA and the continents major clubs.

Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Fri May 21, 2021 4:27 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Fri May 21, 2021 12:52 am
Tomorrow UEFA will release a report looking at how the Pandemic has affected European Football https://twitter.com/UEFA/status/1395372448216911876 - it seems that the press have had access to advance copies, this is the way now it seems (anyone guess I have recently been watching the Mandalorian)- well the Guardian have decided to focus on one particular area the Premier League's domination of the transfer market

Uefa report claims English clubs spent 43% of global transfer total last summer
- Premier League sides spent more than £1.5bn in 2020-21
- Transfer fees and wages ‘must be reduced’, says Uefa

Paul MacInnes
Thu 20 May 2021 23.00 BST

English clubs were responsible for 43% of global transfer activity last summer, according to a Uefa report which lays bare the impact of the pandemic on football.

It underlines the financial muscle of the Premier League at the end of a season in which Manchester City and Chelsea have reached the Champions League final and Manchester United will contest the Europa League final. The Championship was the sixth-biggest spending league in Europe in 2020-21, outstripping the Portuguese, Dutch and Russian first divisions.

With head-spinning figures such as a €7.2bn (£6.2bn) loss for Europe’s top-flight clubs since the pandemic began, Uefa concludes that transfer fees and wages “must be reduced to acceptable levels” if the game is to be restored to financial health.

The financial losses are stark, with the absence of fans the greatest blow: 210 million fewer clicks of the turnstile cost clubs across Uefa’s 55 member countries €4bn in revenue, the biggest loss over the period and greater than falls in sponsorship (€2.7bn) and broadcast revenue (€1.4bn).

Those losses in turn affected the transfer market. Spending in the 2020 summer window was down 39% on the previous year, and this January’s winter window was down by 56% on 2020. That the summer total was above that of any year before 2014 was down to English clubs.

The Premier League was by far the biggest spender in 2020-21 with more than €1.8bn (£1.55bn) traded, €600m more than in the next-largest spender, Serie A. The Championship total was €400m.

Some €558m (£480m) went between English clubs but deals sending players from Spain, Germany and France to England were also in the top five most valuable transfer “flows”. This is not likely to continue, however, with Uefa predicting immigration changes brought about by Brexit are likely to lead English clubs to look equally at South America and Africa for recruits.

Uefa says reforms to its financial fair play rules are necessary, with controls on costs the key. Ultimately the annual “benchmarking” report concludes that football is “in essence a very stable business”, however, and that despite the pandemic “club revenue streams are fundamentally reliable”.

It does see one existential threat to the game, what it calls the “so-called” European Super League. “A closed breakaway league would destroy value across the whole pyramid,” the report says. “It is only by respecting the pyramid and the principle of promotion and relegation on sporting merit that European football will be able to continue to grow.”

Critics have argued that Uefa’s reforms to the Champions League undermine the values of sporting merit, with teams able to qualify based on historical performance rather than the position in their domestic league from 2024. Uefa sources say these proposals are subject to possible review.

In another jab at the ESL, Uefa challenges claims that the breakaway project would have given three times the money Uefa provides to clubs outside the Champions League. Calculating its future solidarity payments at €28bn compared with the ESL’s €10bn, the report observes: “Needless to say, $10bn is not three times $28bn.”

Uefa celebrates the ESL’s speedy demise and the “unanimous and resounding uproar” that brought it down. Its end may also have been hastened by an absence of expected support from Fifa. According to the New York Times, advisers to the ESL met Fifa representatives while drawing up their plans and were confident the governing body would endorse them only for Fifa to ultimately “express its disapproval” of the project in public.

Fifa says the position of its president, Gianni Infantino, was clear when he told Uefa’s Congress that he strongly disapproved of the ESL.
This is the Times take on the same UEFA European Club Football Landscape report - hence today's announcement of the Convention on the future of European Football

Lower fees and wages in revamp of Financial Fair Play rules
Martyn Ziegler, Chief Sports Reporter
Friday May 21 2021, 12.01am, The Times

Uefa says it will completely overhaul its Financial Fair Play rules and that it wants to reduce wages and transfer fees to “acceptable levels” rather than obliging clubs to break even.

The financial crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has cost European football £7.5 billion over two seasons according to Uefa’s new report, The European Club Football Landscape.

The organisation accepts that the old FFP rules, which required clubs to break even, are no longer viable given the level of losses. Instead the focus is likely to be on cutting wages and reducing transfer fees.

The report does not explore the kind of wage reductions that Uefa will consider but accepts that it will be “complex” to agree new rules. One form of wage cap could involve clubs being permitted only to spend an agreed percentage of their revenue on player salaries.

The report states: “There is no understating the ongoing financial distress caused by the pandemic, but it has also created an opportunity for deep stakeholder co-operation to reshape financial and sporting regulations.

“Many clubs are fighting for survival; it is not just about overspending. This is a revenue crisis that urgently requires costs to be brought under control.

“Rules are not set in stone and must continuously adapt. Our rules will need to have a much stronger focus on the present and the future . . . Wages and transfer fees represent the majority of football clubs’ costs; they must be reduced to acceptable levels.”

The report also ridicules claims by the European Super League’s founder clubs that their competition would provide better protection for the football pyramid. It had promised more than £7 billion in solidarity payments to clubs outside the competition over the initial 23-year commitment period.

The Uefa president, Aleksander Ceferin, said that the ESL had “wildly misleading claims of tripling of solidarity” when Uefa’s existing system would generate £20 billion over that time.

Ceferin added: “Competitions that destroy value, offering to give with one hand while taking away with five hands, are not the answer. The whole football ecosystem has been disrupted by the pandemic. This requires concerted efforts and a co-ordinated response. Solidarity, not self-interest, must prevail.”

The report said that the ESL would also have inflicted “severe commercial damage” on domestic leagues.

Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Sat May 22, 2021 6:08 pm

I have been posting about the tiered nature of the Premier League for quite some time now, and also about how the depth of squads would see out this season the strongest. this article in the Telegraph laments that what seemed like a great leveller in the early stages of the season is now looking more like an opportunity for the four riches clubs to pull away

The Premier League's big four are back - and we'd better get used to it
OLIVER BROWN MAY 22, 2021

Nature is healing, it seems. After all those bizarre autumnal incongruities, of Liverpool shedding seven at Aston Villa and Manchester United succumbing 6-1 at home to Tottenham, we wind up in late May with what looks likely to be the same Premier League top four as last year. Leicester City, having spent 242 days gamely gatecrashing this quartet, risk being bundled out at the last moment by the champions of 2020. The reality is that we can expect this reassertion of power to become a pattern, as much a rite of the English spring as the blossom being bashed off the trees by a pitiless Atlantic squall.

It is grimly ironic that a campaign marked by the resistance of would-be cartels, from Project Big Picture to the European Super League, culminates in the entrenchment of a familiar clique. Having been thwarted in their underhand schemes to go it alone, the top four are well-advanced in a quest to create their own little coterie at the summit of the Premier League. While their vanity might have been punctured in recent weeks by the ferocious ESL backlash, their hegemony is here to stay.

Liverpool will, in the deathless words of Steven Gerrard, “go again”. Desperate to slough off their description by Roy Keane as “bad champions”, they will rebuild their title challenge from the back, around the return of Champions League-winning centre-backs Virgil van Dijk and Joe Gomez, both of whom have been missing through injury for over six months.

Manchester City will not linger long on the poignancy of Sergio Aguero’s farewell on Sunday afternoon, as they prime themselves to be first to the signature of Harry Kane. Such a move would leave the path clear for a rival – most likely Chelsea, given Thomas Tuchel’s assurance of a summer war chest – to prise Erling Haaland from Borussia Dortmund. In their constant status anxiety, these clubs are seeking to add not just reinforcements but rocket fuel. If they are successful, what possible hope is there for anyone else?

Increasingly, the Premier League resembles a flotilla of tall ships thrashing around helplessly in the wake of four giant aircraft carriers. Even Arsenal and Tottenham, those absurd interlopers at the ESL feast, risk being capsized by the swell. Tottenham, adrift in seventh, can ascribe their failure partly to Daniel Levy’s chronic under-investment in the squad, partly to his blindness to the truth that any project entrusted to Jose Mourinho tends to collapse within three years in toxic recrimination.

As for Arsenal, their pattern of top-flight finishes – sixth, fifth, eighth, ninth (for now) – suggests less a drift than a perhaps terminal decline. It is a lesson to any club, even the most traditionally pre-eminent, in being careful what you wish for. How those once agitating for Arsene Wenger’s departure would mock his pride at qualifying for the Champions League 19 years in succession, as if consistency were a poor substitute for silverware. Since he left in May 2018, they have not managed it once. Next season, for the first time since the Bruce Rioch era in 1995, they will be out of Europe altogether.

Vinai Venkatesham, Arsenal’s chief executive, tries to talk soothingly of rebuilding and re-balancing, but this ignores the fact that the four juggernauts ahead are all doing the same, at much faster a rate. City, with three titles in four years, would happily dip further into Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund to grant Pep Guardiola whatever he desired as a replacement centre-forward, be it Kane, Haaland, or even Robert Lewandowski. Roman Abramovich, having been rewarded in his faith in Thomas Tuchel, could yet be convinced to equal last summer’s £220 million spending splurge at Chelsea.

To think, we were all briefly seduced into believing that the pandemic could recast the hierarchies of the European game. For one intoxicating spell last September, Everton led the Premier League, Real Sociedad sat atop La Liga, while Juventus trailed humble Sassuolo in Serie A. It all smacked of a descent into chaos, where a combination of financial emergency and absent crowds clipped the wings of an entitled elite. But it turned out merely to be a glorified pre-season, where unpredictable results where frivolous novelties, rather than signifiers of any deeper malaise. No sooner had City slumped to 10th, after a 5-2 home defeat by Leicester, than they reeled off a record 21 victories in a row.

For all that dynasties rise and fall, there is a creeping sense of permanence about how the top four are consolidating their power. City, in particular, appear hell-bent on setting a standard to which no one beyond their nearest rivals can even aspire, never mind aim. Take the example of West Ham, where David Moyes has extracted every last drop of potential from his players this season. And what will they have to show for it, beyond a place in Uefa’s newly-minted Europa Conference League? It sounds like a worthy consolation, until you realise that the fans’ prize will be, at best, a fraught amber-list away day against the ilk of Albania’s Partizani or Belarus’ Torpedo Zhodino.

Supporters of clubs outside the ruling cabal deserve to have a higher ceiling of ambition than this. But the picture is unmistakeable: while the Premier League might assume it has hauled the dastardly ESL secessionists back into line, with threats of huge fines against them for their April plot, they are pulling further away from the chasing pack than ever.

The impression that the Covid calamity would dislodge the privileged few was persuasive, but wrong. In Spain, it is true that the foundations of those twin behemoths, Real Madrid and Barcelona, are creaking. But in England, there is just a calcifying of inequality. After Leicester’s wondrous title in 2016, owners of the top four shared a resolve that such a miracle should never happen again. Five years on, their mission is all but accomplished. They are escaping from their competitors’ orbit at such an exit velocity that their supremacy could last for a generation.

Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Mon May 24, 2021 5:12 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Fri May 21, 2021 2:47 pm
on the back of the European Football Landscape report UEFA have launched an initiative to discuss the future of European football following the fall out of Super Leagues collapse and the Pandemic - There is much for it to discus particularly why an administrative, regulatory body is busy organising and expanding competitions that are having a directly negative commercial impact on it's member associations that stakeholders such as fans, players and managers/coaches say has too many games

UEFA launches Convention on the Future of European Football
Friday 21 May 2021

A landmark consultation process to unite all stakeholders towards long-term reforms.


UEFA has today announced the launch of a landmark consultation process to unite European football stakeholders and strengthen the future of the game for the benefit of all. Over the next months, the Convention on the Future of European Football (‘the Convention’) will bring together representatives of national football associations, leagues, clubs, players, coaches, fans and agents to discuss long-term policy and governance reforms. UEFA intends to lay the foundations for European football’s sustainable and inclusive recovery and future together with its major stakeholders.

The move underlines UEFA’s determination to deliver long term solutions that safeguard the values-driven, solidarity based and open European sports model. The Convention’s stakeholder consultation process will ensure Europe’s collective will and determination directly impacts into the future of the game and how it is run.

UEFA is fully committed to its responsibility of protecting and preserving the structures and legacy of the game for future generations. The Convention will focus on working with all stakeholders and partners on swift concrete, collaborative and comprehensive actions that can be undertaken to ensure the short- and long-term positive development of the entire football pyramid in Europe. This will include specific focus on pre-existing and emerging issues and threats in the top professional layer, which have been exposed and exacerbated by the crisis, increasing risk for the entire ecosystem.

Concretely, the Convention will aim to secure progress on four foundations for greater stability and bolstering the strength of European football going forward:

1. Ensuring financial sustainability and responsibility within European football;

2. Strengthening competitiveness, solidarity distributions and player development;

3. Establishing more consistent good governance measures domestically and internationally; and

4. Progressing the development of women’s football and raising its status across all levels.

Based on UEFA’s longstanding partnership with the European Union and the Council of Europe, these organisations will be invited to appoint observers to the Convention. Participation from FIFA and other regional confederations will be welcomed on a similar basis.

UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin said: “As I emphasised at the recent UEFA Congress, crises will make European football stronger. They show us what we can achieve when we act together and what we stand to lose if we don’t care about each other and the greater good. With this Convention process we will talk to each other, listen to each other, and find and enact solutions together. Now more than ever people across Europe expect action and solidarity in the interest of all of football in all of Europe, and that is what we will focus on delivering.”

The first round of consultation will take place in July 2021, in conjunction with the final week of the UEFA European Football Championship. A second consultation round will take place in September 2021.
Inspired by this announcement from UEFA for a Congress on the Future of Football SportBusiness.com are running a series of interviews this week looking into what could be achieved - first up is the EFL's Rick Parry - though I a get the impression he thinks he is talking about the governments fan led review

EFL’s Parry: ‘We want all our clubs to survive without owner funding’
Ben Cronin, Europe Editor
May 24, 2021

- EFL chairman wants member clubs to survive without owner funding
- Says new Premier League deal ‘a missed opportunity’ for government to fix solidarity model
- Calls for more transparency from governing bodies

Last week, Uefa announced it was launching a “Convention on the future of European football’ to discuss the long-term policy and governance reforms that would “lay the foundations for a sustainable and inclusive recovery” for professional football on the continent.

To coincide with the consultation, SportBusiness has conducted a series of interviews with senior figures from across the game, asking them to define a ‘sustainable’ economic model for the sport in the region. Over the course of this week, representatives from leagues, federations, clubs and confederations, as well as independent economic experts, will outline the challenges facing the industry and the remedies that they would like to see implemented.

In the first article in the series, Rick Parry, chairman of the English Football League (EFL) and a former chief executive of the Premier League and Liverpool FC, offers a three-point plan to bridge the gap between the Premier League and EFL, and calls for more transparency from the game’s governing bodies.

A three-point plan
Despite there being a wide range of clubs in the EFL, the concept of sustainability is relatively simple. What we want to achieve is a system where all our clubs could survive without the need for owner funding.

As it stands, our 72 member clubs rely on approximately £400 million (€463m) a year in owner support. And even in our lowest tier, League Two, owners are having to put in an average of around £0.5m each per year.

The owners might be perfectly happy to do that, and they have done a magnificent job of getting their clubs through the pandemic, but is it sustainable in the future?

I think sustainability has three elements: 1) It consists of providing clubs with a fair share of revenue, and clearly that is very much at the top of our agenda in terms of our relationship with the Premier League. 2) It relates to cost control, because you can’t have revenue and then simply spend it on transfer fees and increasing wages. And 3), if there is to be owner funding, there have to be checks to make sure that it is secure.

A fairer share of revenues
We believe there are a number of elements to creating a more equitable distribution model between the EFL and the Premier League.

The first thing we’re calling for is an abolition of parachute payments from the top-flight – that’s really important. If you look at the 2019 season, the last season before Covid, parachute payments represented approximately a third of the total turnover of all 24 Championship clubs and that was shared among seven clubs. That is a huge imbalance. Or, put another way, a parachute club receives around £44 million in its first year out of the Premier League and all the other clubs in the Championship would be receiving about £4.8m. We get around £120 million in solidarity each year from the Premier League shared among non-parachute clubs, and that’s incredibly helpful – it’s almost on a par with what we distribute from our own commercial sources. But the parachute payments are worth around £230m a year to just that handful of clubs that have been relegated. We think that’s crazy – it’s just a total distortion and that leads to irrational financial behaviour in the Championship.

We need to stop seeing this as being about the Premier League versus the EFL – we have to see everything as part of the same system. I would say it’s not about 72 clubs, it’s really about 92 [the total number of EFL clubs and Premier League clubs]. Two thirds of the clubs currently in the Premier League have been in the Football League; two thirds of the clubs in the Championship this season have at one time or another been in the Premier League; 10 clubs in League One and three in League Two this season have been in the Premier League; 49 different clubs have been in the Premier League – six permanently and 43 not so. So it really is about recognising that flow upwards and downwards and realising that we’re all in the same boat.

Not every club that receives a parachute payment succeeds. If they don’t succeed quickly, then it can be incredibly challenging, and we’ve seen a number of them go through the Championship and down into League One. Given a very substantial proportion of the 14 clubs in the Premier League, outside of the top-six, have a feasible chance of being relegated in the next three years, you would think that there would be as much interest from those 14 clubs in having a softer landing as there is from our clubs. As I said, it’s not an ‘us and them’ scenario, it is this constantly changing pool of clubs and it just makes eminent sense to have that softer landing.

The counter argument to abolishing parachute payments is that there’s a gulf and that it’s really challenging when clubs are relegated. Well, there’s a gulf because the distribution is unfair. Parachute payments tackle the symptom, not the problem. If you had fair distribution, you wouldn’t need them, and you would have fair competition.

There is a very good study on parachute payments by an academic called Rob Wilson from Sheffield Hallam University. It found that clubs in receipt of parachute payments are actually twice as likely to get promoted from the Championship as the others and that is the point of it. It’s protectionism – protecting the clubs who are going to get relegated from the Premier League.

Media distribution
The second thing we’re calling for is for 25 per cent of English football’s pooled net media revenues to be distributed to the EFL. By that we mean Premier League revenues and EFL revenues should all be put in one pot and then split 75-25.

Whether that means we assign our media rights to the Premier League and it sells them on our behalf is an additional detail that needs to be worked out. But we believe a 75-25 formula is fair. That was the formula that applied prior to the formation of the Premier League. That’s how the Football League revenues were distributed then, albeit they were a lot smaller.

We want to halve the gap between the top of the Championship and the bottom of the Premier League. The club that’s bottom of the Premier League will receive something between £92m and £100m in centralised revenues. The top club in the Championship – unless it’s a parachute payment club – is going to receive, at current levels, about £8m in central revenues. That’s too big a gap; there’s a chasm between the top of the Championship and the bottom of the Premier League that’s almost unbridgeable.

We’ve actually been consistent throughout in what we believe the right remedies are – this isn’t something we’ve just concocted. Since I sat before the [UK parliament] Select Committee 12 months ago, we’ve been talking about the need for a reset, the need to abolish parachute payments. Even if the Premier League did nothing other than give us the parachute payments to distribute and share equally, that would itself have a major impact upon the EFL.

Owner funding
The opposition to the European Super League has shown the football pyramid, ambition, hope and aspiration are absolutely fundamental to football, so you don’t want restrictive measures that limit that. That was always the negative argument about Uefa’s Financial Fair Play rule: that it preserves the existing order and doesn’t allow people to invest. And the conundrum is how you get that balance, because you want to encourage investment – we want big and successful clubs coming up through all levels of football.

We have wealthy owners in League One and the Championship and League Two who want their clubs to be successful and who want to be able to invest. But at the same time this owner funding needs to be consistent and secure.

Look at a club like Bolton Wanderers, who did brilliantly in the Premier League, thanks largely to the support of Eddie Davies, who was phenomenal for the club until he died and it very nearly went bust. They have great ownership now, but they went all the way down to League Two. Blackburn Rovers had brilliant support from Jack Walker who delivered the fairy tale of winning the Premier League, but then when the money dried up, they went down as far as League One at one stage [they’re now back in the English Championship].

You can’t have a model that is dependent upon owner funding; you can’t just rely on empty promises. You have to have evidence that that funding is going to be forthcoming.

Cost controls
When it comes to cost controls, I think the balance is some form of cash break-even and restrictions on player spending, which probably has to be a percentage of revenues rather than a hard cap. We did introduce a salary cap for a year, and it probably proved a factor in helping clubs to get through the pandemic, but it was challenged legally, so we’ve had to revisit it. We also have overall wage restrictions through our SCMP [Salary Cost Management Protocol] rules in Leagues One and League Two, and we’re happy that those are in place.

I don’t think you can say debt is bad in football. Debt is a perfectly legitimate part of running any business, particularly, for example, where it is attached to long-term projects. If you’re building a stadium or a new training ground, then it’s perfectly responsible to use debt. What is more challenging is when you’re using long-term debt to try to buy short-term success.

There are different motivations in football. People are not necessarily driven by profit motive. And because it’s ultra-competitive, the measure of success is different – there is only one winner. And clearly people overstretch and overspend in order to achieve success.

Financial Fair Play has been criticised, but it has definitely made a very substantial contribution at a top European level because, prior to FFP, clubs were racking up enormous losses. You get the whole debate about competitive balance but that’s not what FFP was about – FFP was about keeping clubs going and stopping them behaving irresponsibly.

That said, I’m not sure a salary cap would work in the Premier League. We never seriously debated them when I was chief executive of Liverpool because it was always viewed as being impractical, too difficult to implement. If you implemented them domestically, how would you then compete with the Spanish and Italian teams? I think we all thought it would disadvantage English clubs and it was too difficult to implement internationally, because of the different systems, the different tax regimes. But I don’t think we’d ever have been against the principle if we found there was a workable system that was going to be properly enforced.

What will bring about change?
For there to be any change in the current English revenue distribution model, there will need to be a consensus from Premier League clubs. Or it will have to come out of the government’s review into football (the Tracey Crouch-led review).

We put out a statement complaining about the government’s decision to approve the new Premier League TV deal, and by extension the existing revenue distribution model, because we felt that would have been the perfect time for them to address the issue – the government had maximum leverage at that stage.

We have no problem with the Premier League TV deal at all – it’s a perfectly sensible thing for the Premier League to do. It preserves solidarity payments at existing levels, which is important, and we would have done exactly the same thing, so we applaud the Premier League for its success in pulling that off. But we were pretty annoyed with the government statement that talked about it securing £1.5bn in solidarity payments for football, with parachute payments accounting for almost half of that figure. You can attempt to justify parachute payments but what you cannot do, by any stretch of the imagination, is to pass them off as some form of solidarity because they’re not – they’re the opposite.

Governance
Aside from Covid, I think the biggest challenge facing professional football is to address its governance. I still think there are major challenges there, including financial regulation. Strides have certainly been taken, but a lot more could be done.

I don’t actually think the European Super League was just about greed and I don’t think it was necessarily driven by money. I actually think that it was a symptom of a deeper concern about the need to improve our governance and be a lot more professional and transparent in everything that we do.

There are definite weaknesses in Uefa and Fifa’s abilities to regulate the game, but who else is going to do it if they can’t? Are governments any better placed to run sport? I’m not sure they are.

With the Crouch-led review we’re facing the idea of there being a regulator for football. I would prefer sport to govern itself and I think sport can. But equally, I’m not necessarily terrified of the idea of a regulator because there are other industries that operate perfectly well with regulation. The question is, who are the regulators? Are they going to be any better than the people we’ve already got? And then, how would you replicate that on an international level?

Ironically, the rapid demise of the Super League has strengthened bodies like Uefa and Fifa, so where would any challenge to the status quo come from anyway?

I think it’s pretty simplistic to say you just have to separate the organisation of sport from regulation, because there’s no clear way of doing that. I certainly think sport could do a lot more to introduce independence, clarity, and transparency. Transparency, for me, is fundamental to good governance. You have transparency to show that your processes are fair and to show that, if there is wrongdoing, it will be properly exposed. Why not hold disciplinary hearings in public? Why not ensure that every single decision is published as a matter of routine? That introduces much more accountability, but generally sport seems pretty afraid of it.

The Uefa Champions League
The Champions League has been a phenomenal success, it has generated a lot of money for clubs and certainly when you get to the knockout rounds, the standard of football is fantastic. The quality of the semi-finals this year, was breathtaking; there were phenomenal games that you certainly wouldn’t see bettered in club football, arguably even in international football.

But there are challenges in other respects. If you look at the teams that have won the European Cup in the past, Ajax and Celtic for example, will they have a chance of winning again? It is a function of the Champions League that, once teams are in it, they’re likely to stay. There is a pool of clubs that will qualify time and again.

You could hardly say the competition creates all of the uncertainty that was so important to everybody who opposed the European Super League. And certainly, the changes post-2024 are going to make it even tougher to rise up the pyramid and challenge.

Those reforms are certainly going to have an impact on domestic competitions. From a narrow EFL point of view, having more European games poses an existential threat to the League Cup. The Premier League and all the other major European domestic leagues also have their own concerns.

Let’s not forget that in 2019, Uefa and the European Club Association were promoting something that looked very suspiciously like a European Super League with very little qualification from domestic competitions. Fortunately, that has been superseded, but even in the latest set of reforms they are talking about creating four additional places based on some form of historic performance.

Any system that bases revenue distribution or participation on anything other than current season performance for me is a bad thing. We’ve already got that now, in a way, with the Champions League financial distribution model. The fact that a big chunk of the money is distributed on the basis of 10-year performance is making it ever more challenging for anybody to break through.

Beyond this, there are some really valid debates about whether we actually need more European games and whether we are getting the balance wrong. But those questions have almost vanished in the wake of the ESL, on the basis that anything is better than that.

Rick Parry was speaking to Ben Cronin.

Chester Perry
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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue May 25, 2021 12:11 am

Chester Perry wrote:
Wed May 19, 2021 4:21 pm
It appears that Inter Milan have found a path to resolve their short term financial woes - from City AM

Wednesday 19 May 2021 1:41 pm
Inter Milan close to €275m bailout by private equity firm Oaktree
James Warrington

Inter Milan is said to be closing in on a €275m (£237m) bailout by US private equity firm Oaktree Capital to shore up its finances following the collapse of the European Super League.

As part of the deal, Oaktree would take a 30 per cent stake in the Italian football team and provide a much-needed loan, Bloomberg reported.

The stake would be bought from Hong Kong-based private equity group Lionrock Capital, which also backs shoe brand Clarks and taxi app Hailo.

The move could lead to Oaktree taking full control of Inter from its Chinese owner Suning Holdings Group, according to the report.

An announcement is expected as soon as today, with Lionrock’s Tom Pitts resigning from the team’s board.

The bailout would come as Inter scrambles to balance its books following a turbulent period for its finances.

Some of the team’s Chinese sponsorship deals dried up at the end of last year, putting pressure on the board to secure more funding.

The challenge has since mounted after the doomed European Super League project was scrapped. The controversial breakaway league would have guaranteed at least €300m for the Serie A side.

The club has reportedly failed to pay regular salaries to its players in recent months, even asking them to give up part of their annual salaries.

If confirmed, the deal will initially see Oaktree partner with Suning to secure Inter’s financial footing.

If Suning is not able to repay its debt after three years, the loan could turn into equity. This would allow the US fund to take full control.

The deal raises the prospect of a second top-flight Italian football club passing into US ownership.

In 2018 Elliott Management took control of local rival AC Milan after its Chinese owner failed to repay debts.

All parties declined to comment to Bloomberg on the deal.
Some really intriguing detail in this report on the rescue package for Inter Milan that has apparently been concluded

U.S. Investment Firm Oaktree Capital Signs $336 Million Financing Deal With Serie A Champions FC Inter
Giacomo Galardini

On Thursday, Italian soccer giant FC Inter have officially agreed to a $336 million deal with U.S. based Oaktree Capital Management Group.

The club majority shareholder — Chinese retail giant Suning Holding Group — hopes the deal will help the team’s troubled finances, badly damaged by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Following a process of due diligence and with a collective long-term vision of the project, Inter have today finalized a financing deal with funds managed by Oaktree Capital Management,” the Nerazzurri told Italian news agency ANSA.

“With this financing deal, the shareholder will continue supporting Inter to overcome their difficulties and the opportunities lost during the COVID-19 period.”

To avoid burdening the club troubled assets with further debt, the American fund will grant the loan to Great Horizon Sarl - the Luxembourg-based holdings company through which Suning controls FC Inter, soccer finance website Calcio e Finanza reports.

As part of the deal, Suning have pledged their 68.55% majority stake in the club as loan collateral.

This means Oaktree could take full control of FC Inter, should their president Steven Zhang not be able to repay the debt after three years.

The ownership of the Milan-based club is currently shared between Suning, which has owned FC Inter since 2016, alongside Singapore venture capital LionRock Group, which currently owns a minority of 31,05 % share.

It is yet to be seen whether Oaktree will only partner with Suning to ease the club’s financial woes - leaving the corporate structure intact - or if the U.S based firm will replace LionRock Group as the club’s minority shareholder, as Reuters reported.

A possibility that is being widely reported as very likely.

According to La Repubblica, Suning would only need $40 million from the deal to buy out LionRock, as the minority shareholder took over their stake with a $163 with a loan directly from Suning, obtained through their subsidiary Great Horizon.

Italian daily La Stampa also cast some shadow of doubt regarding the communication of the deal.

The Nerazzurri did not issue any official statement about the operation, and the report claims that the “odd lack of transparency” is a plan to keep a much-needed low-profile in the club’s board.

FC Inter’s new investors Oaktree Capital are one of the largest ‘distressed securities’ manager in the world, and already have experience working in soccer.

Last year, the Los Angeles-based firm purchased 80% of French Ligue 2 side Caen, and they also have links to English Championship side Swansea City.

Additionally, the group has a strong interest with the Qatar Investment Authority, which has French giant Paris Saint-Germain among their partners.

Suning has been seeking fresh investment to shore up their finances, especially after last January, when changes in economic planning made by the Chinese government further complicated the owner’s liquidity.

The club has been in financial dire straits due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as matches are played behind closed doors and several companies cut sponsorship budgets.

On top of that, Il Sole 24 Ore observes that Suning will be looking to refinance two bonds worth $456 million due to expire in 2022.

To further complicate the strained situation, only last month FC Inter saw the collapse of the European Super League project, a breakaway competition that the Nerazzurri founded hoping to secure an initial $367 million injection.

Lately, FC Inter failed to pay regular salaries to its players and asked them to give up a part of their annual wage, Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera reported.

Last week, FC Inter CEO Giuseppe Marotta said the club must reduce its wage bill to keep its business sustainable, hinting at possible player transfers.

Giacomo Galardini

I am a football (soccer) journalist passionate about everything related to the beautiful game, from live matches to football business and stadiums. I am the Senior… Read More

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue May 25, 2021 12:35 am

With both the governments fan led review of Football and UEFA's congress on the Future of Football in the offing it is starting to feel that shifts we have seen over the last year (from Project Big Picture, the Super League and the attempts by Private Equity to gain stakes in leagues and governing bodies) we are starting to see the status qui on sports ownership and governance being challenged relentlessly. This article from SportsProMedia looks at the issue in some great detail

Who runs sport now?
As modern media and cultural trends place a strain on the operations of traditional rights holders, many federations and governing bodies are having to rethink their function. Taking the sports industry through this decade, however, may well demand a collaborative approach.

By Eoin Connolly Posted: May 21 2021

The question of who runs sport has always been a complicated one. Its progression has been, if not haphazard, then informal.

The industry is a patchwork of federations and national governing bodies formed as early as the 19th century and before, private leagues and promoters that have thrived amid the media conditions of the last 50 years, and a whole coterie of public interests and external financiers.

In discussing, then, whether the organisations that run sport are ready for the trials of the 2020s, it is almost worth asking which ones.

Sport has approached another stage in its history where a compelling event idea can come from outside its recognised structures. Overtime is a youth-oriented sports media company founded in 2016 by former WME executives Dan Porter and Zachary Weiner. They saw sport losing traction with Generation Z – those now aged around 13 to 24 – simply because it was not focusing enough attention on where those young people were congregating.

The Overtime approach was to design a viewership experience around that cohort, with its fluid attitudes towards media consumption and preference for participative content, rather than trying to draw them towards linear and pay-TV. It built a tech stack that, put simply, provides a place for young people to upload and watch videos of themselves and their peers playing sport.

Investors liked it: the late National Basketball Association (NBA) commissioner David Stern was an early backer; basketball superstars Kevin Durant and Carmelo Anthony have also given their support. Over US$60 million has been raised in total in the past five years, with funds like Spark Capital, Sapphire Sport and Andreessen Horowitz also pitching in.

Fans seem to be enjoying it as well. By March, according to its own figures, Overtime had an audience of 40 million followers across Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok, and was generating 1.7 billion video views a month. It has expanded into different types of content, including interviews and longer-form programming, and moves its own line of branded apparel, but its boldest step will come later this year.

In September, it will launch Overtime Elite (OTE), a startup league that aims to attract some of North America’s most promising basketball talent. 30 players aged 16 to 18 will compete in a single location in a rotating team setup and, unusually for student-athletes in the US, they will be paid. Basic US$100,000 a year salaries have been promised, along with a range of personal commercial rights, and training and education benefits.

The vision is in part a challenge to the NCAA model of amateur talent development – graduates of OTE would be eligible to join the NBA soon afterwards, at 19. Yet it is also a different take on the media model. While Porter has been reported as saying rights sales are a possibility in the medium term, right now Overtime owns its event and its audience.

Conventional federations are not in the same position and it is the threat to the media rights income that has applied the most transformational pressure. Declining revenues will prompt a commercial rethink, as many look to monetise their fanbases through direct-to-consumer platforms and more data-led sponsorship propositions. Still, plenty could be lost in the transition without bridging investment from, say, venture capital and private equity. Any shortfall in funding, even if only temporary, would impinge on the activities any rights holder has historically led on.

The sports ecosystem is based on a set of behaviours and media consumption patterns that are disappearing very, very fast.

Other companies are coming to similar conclusions to Overtime on the importance of owned audiences, though they are building them differently. One example is Aphetor, an event promoter that is adjacent to the sports industry but very much inspired by its lessons. For co-founder Carsten Thode, the former director of strategy at Synergy and Engine Sport, the roadblock facing rights holders partly arises from an “ironic and paradoxical” business phenomenon called “the innovator’s dilemma”.

This happens, he says, when companies “become so profitable, and they become so optimised for a certain state of the world, it becomes good management to try and optimise for that state of the world”. In those conditions, pursuing other strategies – even those that will one day solve eventual problems – comes to look inefficient and potentially reckless.

“The sports ecosystem has been dominated by incredibly good management,” adds Thode, speaking to SportsPro in March. “And so they have created this ecosystem where they have created enormous amounts of value through the rights, through how they package up sponsorship to deliver value to brand partners, and that whole ecosystem has been incredibly successful and incredibly profitable.

“But the problem is, it’s based on a set of behaviours and media consumption patterns that are disappearing very, very fast and are not being taken up by a born-digital generation.”

The innovator’s dilemma, Thode continues, is usually solved by a startup unbound by cultural expectations and with no revenues to protect. Aphetor’s own version of the answer – trialled in a Covid-safe pilot in Wales last year – is a multi-event activity challenge in which the competitors are digital content creators.

The hypothesis is that they will bring their own followings to Aphetor challenges then scale up and multiply engagement through their interactions. Revenues will initially come through brand partnerships but the long-term intention, again, is to build an owned audience. It is not strictly an elite sports event but its maxims, like non-exclusivity, might be transferable.

Competition for attention is everywhere and that will affect the tension between the interests of athletes and rights holders. The way in which digital media foregrounds prominent individuals ahead of organisations has been evident for years and its effects are intensified by more recent consumption trends. Increasingly, athletes have broadened their appeal with nearby audiences – like those in gaming and music – and further developed their profile away from parent teams and governing bodies.

The relative leverage they accumulate could be affected further through the development of intellectual property and, potentially, the rise of digital products like tradeable non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. That will prompt a constant reassessment of what it is athletes bring to the table compared to the teams and competitions they appear in. There will be rights holders who are well aware of those trends, and might be in a position to benefit, but that will not always make them any easier to navigate.

The nimbleness of startups and upstart promoters in this disintermediated space can have other implications. World Chase Tag (WCT) is the upshot of a homebrew version of the children’s game created in a back garden by British brothers Christian and Damien Devaux. It has been formalised into a series of 20-second, one-on-one encounters between a ‘chaser’ and an ‘evader’ across a 12 square metre obstacle course called a Quad, with a point awarded to the winner’s team.

Perhaps improbably, and despite the effects of Covid, coverage of its events has been picked up by broadcasters like NBC Sports Network and Channel 4, while it has over 1.5 million subscribers across its social media channels and has racked up tens of millions of digital video views. Tellingly, and unlike in most historic sports, the league’s official rules, layout and timing systems are copyrighted and only officially available under licence.

What is also significant is where WCT gets its athletes. Many come from freerunning and parkour. If it succeeds, the league could soon become one of the more viable career options for elite practitioners of those disciplines. The official recognition of parkour itself, meanwhile, has become mired in controversy.

In December, members of the group Parkour Earth petitioned the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to reject a bid by the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) to include it as a medal event for the Paris 2024 Games. FIG members voted to adopt parkour as an official discipline in 2018 and it is planning a world championship, though that has twice been postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Parkour Earth, meanwhile, views itself as the rightful international representative body and, together with a string of national associations, has accused the FIG of a ‘hostile takeover’. The Paris 2024 bid was not successful.

That divergence in who is viewed as responsible for a sport’s development could grow further amid changing philosophies to developing grassroots participation. In January, the publicly funded Sport England unveiled a new ten-year ‘Uniting the Movement’ strategy aimed at tackling inactivity and addressing inequality within sports participation.

“We feel it’s extremely important that we centralise playing sport and being active in people’s lives as a means of improving their physical and mental health,” said Sport England chief executive Tim Hollingsworth, speaking to the BBC in January. “When has that ever been more important than it is now? And we also believe very powerfully in the role that community and grassroots sport in particular can play in connecting us, in bringing us together, and we’re missing that as well and it needs to return.”

It’s extremely important that we centralise playing sport in people’s lives. When has that ever been more important than it is now?

Some UK£50 million of additional resources will go to help grassroots clubs and organisations rebuild financially after repeated lockdowns, but the broader initiative is based as much in creating spaces in which any kind of exercise is possible, and local networks that support it.

The added urgency of the pandemic has accelerated any debate about where participation is best managed centrally through federations and national governing bodies, and where others are best placed to serve that function. The right solution may vary, not least where talent pathways are involved, but new combinations are emerging.

In June 2020, for example, World Athletics announced a partnership with the hugely successful community organiser Parkrun, which stages free weekly 5km or 2km runs in 20 countries – public health restrictions permitting. As those runs resume at full scale, that will allow the federation to engage with over three million active runners and counting, while changing perceptions of what athletics actually means to people. Parkrun, meanwhile, receives the benefit of World Athletics’ visibility around major events.

The implications of ‘connected fitness’ platforms like Peloton and remote event enablers like Zwift might further change the dynamics between formal bodies and the grassroots. The International Bowling Federation (IBF), which relaunched last November, aims to use digital technology provided by Spark Compass to harness the sizeable casual participant base for its sport.

Showcased during the SportsPro OTT Summit USA in early March, it is designed to capture some of the activity of the 250 million people who bowl at least once a year worldwide – allowing users to record their scores and share video, challenge other users remotely, watch IBF events and order concessions at participating venues. Its success will be dependent, in part, on the buy-in of venue operators, but it is a clear reframing of how an official body can interact with fans.

Other organisations aim to level up on the back of third-party investment, amid wider interest from private equity and venture capital funds in unrealised potential in sport. Notably, CVC has made a US$100 million commitment to the International Volleyball Federation (FIVB) to fund a new commercial entity – Volleyball World – that will focus on areas like events and media while exploring new opportunities in data, digital, and sponsorship growth. The intention is to capitalise on the possibilities of volleyball’s sizeable global following, while the FIVB concentrates more fully on its obligations as a regulatory and developmental body.

There are strengths to the federation model and benefits to the environment that sustains it. Where it functions well, it allows bigger organisations to mitigate financial risk on behalf of those further down the hierarchy. In the US, where NGBs do not receive public funding and have been facing the twin threats of Covid-19 and uncertainty around Tokyo 2020, US Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) chief executive Sarah Hirshland has said that the body will ensure none of its members will fall away.

“The good news is we are financially a very strong organisation, so we do have assets and we do have the ability to draw on those assets to ensure some continuity,” she told Sports Business Journal in March. “You think about things like taking on debt, borrowing against the endowment. You think about all of those possibilities. We are incredibly fortunate we haven’t had to deploy any of these measures at this point and it’s looking right now that we may not have to, but we are prepared.”

At their best, these systems offer other shared advantages, like the chance to pool best practice. For newer or less prominent federations, preparing a bid for the Olympic programme, for Olympic recognition or for membership of umbrella groups like the Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF) can be an exercise in reinforcing structure, purpose and coherence, and can unlock funds that strengthen their communities at the base.

They also tap into the existing value that comes from sport’s decades-old social role. Ralf Reichert, who founded esports promoter and production company ESL in 2000, made this point about what traditional sport is drawing on in an appearance on the Unofficial Partner podcast in February.

“If you think about it, all of those franchise leagues in traditional sport are based on a huge, at least local, mostly global traditional sports platform,” he said. “That means American football in the US works as a franchise sport because there is college sport and there is high school sport, and they have paved the way.

“Without that system – which, by the way, is government-funded, which is interesting – there would be no NFL, there would be no new players, there would be no new fans. So it’s all institutionalised through the education system in the US. And that goes for basketball, that goes for football, that goes for actually, virtually every sport. In Europe, it’s institutionalised through clubs – so different, but still similar if you really think about it. And by the way, [the construction of] all of those football pitches in the world – not all of them, but a majority – is actually funded by local governments.”

Esports is becoming an interesting prism through which to view governance priorities. Broadly speaking, its approach is always going to be different from traditional sport because of the stake held by video game publishers, who as owners of the IP of each title have effective control over the field of play. Nonetheless, esports organisers are facing problems that will be familiar to sports federations.

In many cases, the response is similar but bespoke. The emergence of not-for-profit membership bodies like the Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC) speaks to the rising spectre of fixing and betting-related corruption within competitive gaming. Yet the vulnerabilities are distinct – players might be exploiting, and not disclosing, glitches in code or quirks in in-game mechanics. Information-sharing frameworks and guidelines have to be built with that in mind.

By the same token, anti-doping initiatives in esports can take a cue from the activities of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) but the sector is working out policy on its own terms, judging on internal merits what constitutes a banned substance, and where education and protection are more appropriate for its player base than sanctions.

Not every decision that comes out of these processes will be adequate but it does serve as a reminder that the role of organising bodies is always changing. Governance is an active process. Some of the problems it addresses will be intrinsic to sport. The slow-burn implosion of the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) came over years in which former president Tamas Ajan had presided over paid-for doping cover-ups, vote buying and missing funds.

The IWF’s Olympic status has come under threat this year as the IOC pushes the organisation to tighten its reforms and complete elections for new leadership before Tokyo 2020. Historically, a lack of proper oversight has allowed malpractice to fester at a number of international federations. Independent scrutiny, more and better specialist expertise, and structures that minimise conflicts of interest will improve matters. The part played by new investors will also be significant – the more scrupulous will insist on better practices, others will flood weak systems with cash.

Certainly, there are some challenges that sports bodies will struggle to overcome alone. The tragic pattern of dementia and other brain illnesses among former soccer and rugby players is the subject of urgent investigation in the UK. Those inquiries will uncover whether that was exacerbated by past negligence and whether those sports have failed to provide for afflicted former professionals in retirement. Moving forward, however, sports associations will need to form a coordinated effort alongside public health authorities, researchers and charities to identify any and all causes, implement rule changes and improve the wider understanding of those conditions.

Sports bodies have also had to reconsider their duty of care in child protection in the wake of a horrifying series of historic sexual abuse scandals. Here, the importance of collaboration with lawmakers and other expert groups is especially apparent. Cultural change within sport must be made in tandem with legislative action.

In March, the UK’s Ministry of Justice announced the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which will amend the Sexual Offences Act of 2003 to make it illegal for sports coaches to form sexual relationships with 16 and 17-year-olds in their care. Advocated by former sports minister Tracey Crouch, Labour MP Sarah Champion and Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, the multiple Paralympic champion who is now a cross-party representative in the House of Lords, the move closes a loophole in the law – the British age of consent is 16, but the responsibility of coaches towards young people is now recognised alongside those of doctors, teachers and social workers.

“It's huge, it's about resetting and reframing sport and the responsibility of sport to participants,” Grey-Thompson told The Telegraph. “The coach is in a position of power, of trust, and [young people] are being coerced into relationships. That’s one of the reasons why my Duty of Care report [commissioned by Crouch in 2017] recommended a sport ombudsman, because I don’t think governing bodies are set up to deal with some of these issues. This is a really important step forward.”

Grey-Thompson also acknowledges the importance of knowledge-sharing within sports communities as vital in breaking cultures of fear and exploitation. Any one of these tools will not be enough on its own.

Episodes like these may seem far removed from the commercial transition that sports organisations are managing elsewhere but they are all happening in the context of the same industry. In their different ways, they all confirm the need for governance that is responsive, transparent and subject to continuous evaluation.

What happens in this period might reveal less about the federation model than about how sport has always been run: collectively, by public and private stakeholders with different areas of influence and expertise. It is the balance between those parties that may be changing most, as each actor in that system gets a new sense of their possible role and responsibilities.

Through all of that, together, sport can reinforce its ability to cope with new pitfalls and face a new era in the right shape.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Paul Waine » Tue May 25, 2021 9:49 am

The Times admits they got it wrong about Premier League tv money.

New report in today's Times.

Big clubs paid more despite every game being televised

Martyn Ziegler, Chief Sports Reporter, Tuesday May 25 2021, 12.01am, The Times

The bigger Premier League clubs will be paid up to £18 million more than the smaller teams for live TV matches despite every game of the season being televised because of the absence of crowds.

Facility fees of about £1.2 million are usually paid each time a Premier League club appears in a live TV game, with every club guaranteed a minimum of £12 million, but for teams such as Liverpool and Manchester United that can total more than £30 million.

The Premier League confirmed that facility fees would be paid only for the 200 matches that were contracted to be broadcast in the usual TV slots. The other 180 games, such as those shown at 3pm on Saturdays, did not qualify. As the bigger clubs are more in demand from the broadcasters, they have more contracted live TV matches and so earn more in facility fees.

The estimated earnings for the season show the champions Manchester City with about £167 million and the bottom side Sheffield United on £93 million. Apart from the facility fees, prize money is allocated based on where a club finish in the table, as is a portion of the overseas TV rights, and all the clubs receive an equal share of about £76 million from domestic and overseas rights.

The clubs will all have their total reduced as part of a scheme to pay the £330 million broadcasters’ rebate resulting from the disruption caused by Covid. The 2019-20 champions Liverpool must pay £17.3 million over the next two seasons, with other clubs having reductions on a sliding scale of £7.1 million for the bottom club, who also face up to £2.3 million less in parachute payments.

Each club promoted for the 2020-21 campaign — Leeds United, Fulham and West Bromwich Albion — must pay £8.4 million towards the rebate over two seasons.

Premier League estimated earnings 2020-2021

Team, Equal share TV money, Merit Payment, Facility fees, Overseas TV money, Total (£ million)

Manchester City 76, 35, 28, 28, 167
Manchester United, 76, 33, 30 , 27, 166
Liverpool, 76, 32, 31, 25, 164
Chelsea, 76, 30, 27, 24, 157
Leicester City, 76, 28, 20, 22, 146
West Ham United, 76, 26, 20, 21, 143
Tottenham, 76, 25, 25, 20, 146
Arsenal, 76, 23, 25, 18, 142
Leeds United, 76, 21, 19, 17, 133
Everton, 76, 19, 18, 15, 128
Aston Villa, 76, 18, 15, 14, 123
Newcastle United, 76, 16, 15, 13, 120
Wolves, 76, 14, 14, 11, 115
Crystal Palace, 76, 12, 13, 10, 111
Southampton, 76, 11, 13, 8, 108
Brighton, 76, 9, 13, 7, 105
Burnley, 76, 7, 13, 6, 102
Fulham, 76, 5, 13, 5, 99
West Brom, 76, 4, 13, 3, 96
Sheffield United, 76, 2, 13, 2, 93


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

Obviously, these figures are very different to the table in The Times on Monday - and, also the S.Times on Sunday.
Today's print edition includes a note that the table has been corrected. I imagine that maybe someone at the Premier League called the Times to explain how they'd got it wrong.

Chester Perry, do the new figures align better with the information you have?

I'll also post this on the tv money thread from the w/end.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue May 25, 2021 1:32 pm

The Guardian's David Conn writes about Manchester City and how the ambitions of it's owners are being realised - Conn is a lifelong City fan, but has been outspoken about the owners from the off

Manchester City’s rise from stumbles of old to fine-tuned global product
The Abu Dhabi-owned club have become an exercise in how to construct the supreme modern football team with vast money

David Conn - Tue 25 May 2021 08.00 BST

When Sergio Agüero won the Premier League for Manchester City in the 94th minute of the last match of the 2011-12 season, the emotional extremes, how nearly they cocked it up, made a fevered connection with all the stumbles of the old club. City fans are pinching themselves again now at the prospect of a Champions League final within touching memory of a League One play-off final with Gillingham, but there can no longer be any illusion that this is the City of old.

Since 2008, after the takeover by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, Manchester City have become an exercise in how to construct the supreme modern football club with vast money available for the project. And in the first season, as Mansour’s men and his multimillions rescued City from the chaos of ownership by the ousted Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the ideal to replicate, Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona, was winning the Champions League.

It has taken 13 years to cross that gulf, and £2.5bn or so of Abu Dhabi money, and from the start, unlikely as it may have seemed, this was the target of the new ownership: relentless, shimmering success.

As City and their dream teams have come to dominate, Amnesty and other human rights groups have taken to calling such mega-projects “sportswashing”, regimes laundering their reputations through the irresistible allure of football. That has never felt quite how Abu Dhabi sees itself, because although campaign groups have focused on the conditions for migrant workers, the suppression of internal dissent and the horrific war in Yemen, the state’s rulers appear to believe they are a relatively liberal regime, doing what they need to in a hazardous region, not in need of public relations cleansing.

The wealthiest of the seven United Arab Emirates because of its oil fortunes, Abu Dhabi is courted by western countries including Britain, which sells the country large stocks of arms. In December Boris Johnson hosted Abu Dhabi’s de facto ruler, Mansour’s brother, the crown prince Sheikh Mohamed, and the Downing Street communique enthused about “the long-standing friendship and shared history between our two countries and peoples”, before huge investment was announced in March.

Manchester City are, however, undoubtedly part of Abu Dhabi nation-building, woven into the strategy for diversifying its economy beyond the flows of oil prices, and projecting a modern, classy image to the world. City’s chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, is responsible for key strategic government and business investment roles in Abu Dhabi, where he works principally not for Mansour but for Sheikh Mohamed.

Mubarak, appointed chairman within days of the shock takeover, was and still is the chairman of Abu Dhabi’s executive affairs authority, responsible for advising on the state’s direction and image, as well as a member of the governing executive council, and founder member of the supreme council for financial and economic affairs. In his official biography, the chairmanship of Manchester City, his most visible (and probably most enjoyable) role, comes low down, a part-time responsibility after being chief executive of the $243bn sovereign wealth investment company Mubadala, being on the board of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, and chairman of the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and Emirates Global Aluminium.

When the UAE made its accord with Israel last year brokered by Donald Tump, Manchester City’s chairman was with Sheikh Mohamed in the official government party hosting the first US-Israeli delegation. That is a sentence no City fan of any vintage can have imagined being written, when they were nursing pints in Moss Side’s Parkside pub, dreaming of one day forcing Peter Swales out.

The total reconstruction of City has been achieved like many industrial and prestige projects fashioned by Abu Dhabi in its few decades of compressed development, by employing the best resources and human expertise that money can pay for. Management consultants brought in immediately in 2008 to assess the task had Barcelona as the industry standard, and in 2012, just after the first title, City’s owners hired the know-how of Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain, the former Barcelona chief executive and director of football respectively.

Waves of players had been bought to elevate the team, then the former Barcelona pair set their own imprints: acquiring a global network of clubs for the “City Football Group”, a worldwide commercial and youth development empire with the £200m academy “campus”, opened in 2014, at its apex. They knew to their fingertips that Guardiola was a coach on a different planet from his rivals, and City’s owners waited, putting everything in place, throughout the three title-winning seasons at Bayern Munich, before securing him in 2016.

One figure that records the cost of the City project is £1.3bn, the amount directly invested into the club as share capital by Mansour’s ownership vehicle. But that leaves out the vast sums from Abu Dhabi in sponsorships from other state-owned entities, principally the airline Etihad, whose £67.5m annual value became known through the fateful leaks of internal emails by the German magazine Spiegel. As early as 2013, when City began to face difficulties with Uefa’s financial fair play regulations, the sponsorships from three other Abu Dhabi entities, the investment firm Aabar, telecommunications giant Etisalat, and the country’s tourism authority, which had billboards around the Etihad Stadium inviting people to visit Abu Dhabi, were understood to be £15m, £16.5m, and £19.75m respectively: more than £50m in total. The breakdown of City’s huge annual commercial revenues – £246m last year – is not published, but if the Abu Dhabi sponsorships were to average £100m for every year of Mansour’s ownership, that would put the investment from the country at £2.6bn.

City, of course, have made the final in a year when they would have been banned, had their lawyers not succeeded in overturning the penalties at the court of arbitration for sport. The regime, mostly classy in all areas including relations with supporters and investment in the community, lost that sure-footedness in its war with Uefa, raging that FFP rules and their enforcement by properly constituted internal bodies were a kind of European conspiracy against them. The counter-evidence, that owners pumping money in to inflate players’ wages and transfer fees is potentially ruinous, lies around Manchester for all to see, in the ruin of Bury and the traumatic administrations of Wigan and Bolton.

City’s owners misstepped again last month when they opted to join the toxic European Super League, and this time they quietly accepted the rebuke and sanctions from Uefa, and the welcome from Aleksander Ceferin back to the “European football family”. The short-lived breakaway uproar served as a reminder to the whole of football, City’s owners included, that the game’s historic governing bodies, imperfect as they will always be, are all a sport has to protect itself from being just a business, driven only by the impulse for revenues and global domination.

Yet Uefa’s Champions League final will broadcast to the world how far the game is from being a collection of sports clubs in any kind of even competition. Manchester City, the grand old club of latter-day cock-ups, are now the fine-tuned product of a country, playing oligarch-owned Chelsea for football’s ultimate prize.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue May 25, 2021 1:36 pm

of course Manchester City and their owners still have grand plans - as this piece from SportsProMedia on the Indoor Arena (still being built at the Etihad campus) Co-op Live an arena foisted on a city that already has one of similar capacity owned by the council and which the council's own viability study says was not needed

City Football Group named as joint venture partner for Co-op Live
Manchester City owner to invest in UK£350m project alongside Oak View Group.

Posted: May 24 2021 By: Ed Dixon

- Pair will coordinate on jobs, sustainability and advancing the Etihad Campus as a global sport, leisure and entertainment destination
- Venue looking to rival Madison Square Garden, The Forum and The O2 arena

City Football Group (CFG), owner of newly crowned Premier League champions Manchester City, has joined US-based venue development and management company Oak View Group as an equal joint venture partner and investor in the new Co-op Live venue.

The UK£350 million (US$495 million) indoor music and entertainment arena is being built on the campus next to City’s Etihad Stadium and the deal will see OVG and CFG work together with the goal of delivering ‘one of the world’s most advanced and sustainable venues’.

The collaboration will also aim to strengthen the Etihad Campus’ standing as an entertainment and leisure destination for visitors to Manchester from the UK and around the world.

The joint venture builds on the 2019 pre-planning collaboration that saw CFG, as lead developer of the Etihad Campus, support OVG's feasibility studies and community consultations in advance of the planning approval in September 2020.

Musician Harry Styles, best known as a member of boyband One Direction, has also taken a minority stake in Co-op Live.

The venue is currently in the main construction phase, with UK£150 million (US$212 million) of orders already placed with local firms. The project is supporting 3,350 jobs during construction and a further 1,000 once the venue opens. Co-op Live is scheduled to open in December 2023 at the earliest.

“The Etihad Campus was always a clear choice due to its proximity to the city centre and the opportunity to be part of a growing visitor destination with excellent existing transport links,” said Tim Leiweke, co-founder and chief executive of OVG. “With CFG as a JV partner, we can push the boundaries on how Co-op Live delivers for artists, every single fan, the UK's music industry and the city by creating a magical intersection of sports, community and entertainment that will be the envy of the world.”

CFG’s involvement represents its latest investment in the local area. The group says it has overseen more than UK£700 million (US$989 million) of public investment into the Etihad Campus and East Manchester since 2008.

Marty Edelman, board director at CFG, added: “Co-op Live unlocks the potential for the Etihad Campus to grow as an entertainment destination that creates more reasons for the nation and world to visit Manchester.

“The chairman and the board's priority has always been to ensure Co-op Live seamlessly integrates with the Campus and compliments Manchester's city centre offer. As a joint venture partner and investor, we will ensure the Co-op Live becomes part of the fabric of East Manchester and delivers the fullest community and economic impact as Manchester, and the wider region builds back from Covid.”
Last edited by Chester Perry on Tue May 25, 2021 3:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue May 25, 2021 2:07 pm

The second of a series of interviews by SportsBusiness.com related to the UEFA's announcement of a Congress on the future of European Football features Alex Phillips, a former head of strategic affairs and head of governance and compliance for Uefa - There is an awful lot to take in, which is as it should be given the years he has had to think about it.

Breakaway ESL owners ‘need to be re-educated’ says Uefa’s former head of governance Phillips
Frank Dunne - May 25, 2021
  • Cap on player contracts ‘easier to understand and police’ than FFP
  • Governing bodies need to focus seriously on women’s football
  • Federations need to be broken up into separate organisations
Last week, Uefa announced it was launching a “Convention on the future of European football” to discuss the long-term policy and governance reforms that would “lay the foundations for a sustainable and inclusive recovery” for professional football on the continent.

To coincide with the consultation, SportBusiness has conducted a series of interviews with senior figures from across the game, asking them to define a ‘sustainable’ economic model for the sport in the region. Over the course of this week, representatives from leagues, federations, clubs and confederations, as well as independent economic experts, will outline the challenges facing the industry and the remedies that they would like to see implemented.

In the second article in the series, Alex Phillips, a former head of strategic affairs and head of governance and compliance for Uefa, delivers his roadmap for the game. Phillips is currently an adviser to Fifa, football’s world governing body.

A New Deal for European football
I believe it is time for a global package of measures to overhaul European Football. Let’s call it a ‘New Deal for European Football’. There should be something in it for everyone, enough to find a consensus on positive change. It should include the following measures:

1. A cap on the number of professional player contracts any club can have.

The precise number should be the result of detailed analysis and consultation but, for the sake of argument, let’s say a maximum of 25, plus another three loans out. This would stop the current arms race which stockpiles the world’s best young players in a few big clubs.

The measure would address several problems in European football. It would:
  • help address the decline in competitive balance between, and within, leagues;
  • allow talented young players to actually play competitive league football, thus improving their development in the critical development phase up to the ages of 21-23;
  • allow the public to actually see these young talents play;
  • increase (restore) the incentive to small and medium-sized clubs to develop players;
  • increase financial distribution down the pyramid via the resultant increase in transfer fees to those clubs that develop players; and
    allow young human beings to grow up, at least in their childhood and teenage years, in their local or national community, with their family, friends and school.
It is easy to understand and to police, unlike, for example, Uefa’s Financial Fair Play. It has operated (legally) in the past in some countries, and would have a far greater impact on competitive balance than changing financial redistributions. Fifa has started to take positive steps in this direction with regards to loans.

Perhaps the most effective solution to rebalance competitions would be a nationality limit, like the old Uefa 6+5 rule (a maximum of five foreign players in the starting 11). However, this is currently still illegal, at least within the EU, following the Bosman judgement of 1995.

2. Performance-related contracts for players.

To increase financial stability football needs a standard player contract that foresees player salary increases or decreases broadly in line with forecast revenue changes.

If a team qualifies for the Champions League or gets promoted, then why shouldn’t the players get a salary increase in line with the club’s expected revenue increase? Conversely, if a club gets relegated then why shouldn’t the players take a pay cut? Today, agents and players want fixed salaries, and most clubs give it to them.

Performance-related pay is common across many other industries. This would eliminate most of the financial instability in club football, but it would only work if everyone did it, requiring a global agreement.

3. A true league and a true cup for European club competitions.

Operating a league and a cup in parallel currently happens in every country and is something every fan (and journalist) understands. Currently in Europe it’s a fudge. What we have now is a hybrid: a tournament format but run over a season – a mini-league followed by knockout.

The fudge gets tweaked every three or six years. To truly improve it requires radical thinking, a quantum leap.

I would propose switching to either (a) a Nations League type system but for clubs, or (b) a divisional league system. Both would require qualification from national competitions to maintain their level in the pyramid, to preserve the value of the national leagues. Both options would have a pure knockout cup in parallel.

For example the Nations League, Uefa’s new national team competition, uses promotion and relegation to sort teams into groups of equal playing quality, thus eliminating most dead matches and allowing any team to rise on merit. A similar system could be used for club football.

Let’s remember why European club competitions exist: because people, like the former editor of L’Equipe, Gabriel Hanot, wanted to know who the best team in Europe was. To answer that question you need a league – but it doesn’t have to be a closed ‘super league’.

Before redesigning competitions, a definitive study is needed on the optimum number of matches that a top player should play. Only with that information can you design a match calendar to balance, and limit, club and national team competitions.

4. Regionalise club competitions, with a new level of club competition between national and European.

When Red Star Belgrade were European champions in 1991, the former Yugoslav and USSR championships were extremely strong – but they are now 22 separate national championships. The clubs there cannot compete with the biggest Western European clubs, whose TV revenue also exploded in the 1990s.

In regions where there is a geographical and cultural logic, such regionalised club competitions could raise football on and off the field in those regions. This could work for the former Yugoslavia, the Eastern Balkans, the Benelux countries, Ireland, the Nordics and the Central and Eastern European countries, with entry based on sporting merit from the national championships.

5. Structure national team competitions on football not politics.

Football politics – as opposed to sport or business – still determines competition structures, especially in national team football. In 2021, fans of big football countries like England or Poland will have four of their 10 competitive matches against either Andorra or San Marino – whose combined record in World Cup/Euro qualifiers is: played 257, won 3, drawn 7, lost 247. That’s not sport – or business for that matter. It’s just politics. Yet everyone just accepts it as the way it is.

The Nations League – a concept based on sporting merit – is a big step in the right direction and will hopefully evolve and gradually eliminate more of the political structures. If the federations don’t re-structure these types of mismatches themselves, then the clubs will wake up one day and tear them down.

6. Focus seriously on women’s football.

Whether your goal is to increase participation or to make money (or both), women are half the world population and by far the biggest future market open to football. New markets are not only geographical. The NBA promotes the WNBA throughout the world, bundling it with the men’s NBA, even if it may not make money today. They have a vision. It’s an investment.

7. Improve player and coach behaviour.

Federations have always had the tools to change player and coach behaviour: refereeing and disciplinary rules. To which can now be added media rights, because the kids of today copy and imitate what they watch. Why should it not be a target for football to reach on-field standards of behaviour like in rugby? It is not easy, but it can be done.

People across the world are educated about football primarily by what they see and hear via media and marketing. Right now, media and sponsors are in control of that education. Football bodies should take less money and exert more control.

8. Reform governance structures.

The major federations need to be broken up into separate organisations responsible for their main activities: judicial/regulatory, competitions, development and marketing. A real separation of powers. The long-overdue creation of a world/European football integrity and governance agency would be essential for oversight and to provide a check and balance.

The ESL fiasco also means that the time has come for supporters to be, as a minimum, represented on club boards, and ideally holding 50+1 of voting rights (if not of equity).

9. Scrap bidding for major events.

Bidding is a relic from the pre-TV era when federations needed to find hosts who would cover the event costs – yet it is retained because it is good for politics.

If the mega-events really do develop sport, as is claimed, then the organisers should go to the regions where they want to develop sport and say to the governments and FAs there: “We are bringing you the biggest show on earth – take it or leave it, but if you take it you have to do X, Y and Z.”

Only with the leverage of such a big event can you effect major, structural, lasting change in many countries. A good example of such a proactive approach would be to introduce a merit-based club pyramid system (including promotion and relegation) in North America as a legacy of hosting the 2026 World Cup.

10. Redefine football development.

Currently everyone is following their own path across the world. Whereas the NBA already had 150 people in their Beijing office in the 1980s, neither the Asian Football Confederation, Fifa nor Uefa has a single person based in China today. The individual clubs and leagues are each doing their own thing. It’s a Wild West (and East).

There needs to be a co-ordinated approach, and the clubs closely involved to oversee – it is after all ‘their’ players that play in the World Cups and the Euros that generate the money. It is in everyone’s interest that football develops in, say, China, but it’s not happening today as the approach is uncoordinated. And federations should sometimes take less money but exert more control.

11. Re-educate the breakaway owners.

After the Super League announcement, when the project was still alive, I spoke to someone senior involved in ESL clubs. He gave me a long list of gripes, about how poorly the biggest clubs were treated, and so on, but also a lot of valid points. Those 12 clubs have a different outlook. They need to be re-educated.

Whoever happens to own, or be president of, those 12 clubs today has huge revenues, but not thanks to their business acumen – it’s thanks to over a century of passion, investment, talent and hard work of previous generations of players, fans, owners, managers and others.

Fans across Africa, Asia and the Americas were watching, and falling in love with, European football as soon as they could get to a TV set in the 1970s – decades before most of the current owners turned up.

Some of the current owners, contrary to what they may believe, are not wealth-creators – they are wealth-extractors. The real wealth-creators and risk-takers are the small and medium-sized clubs and countries further down the pyramid: where jeopardy does exist, and they quite simply cannot afford to waste £40m on a bad signing.

Healing after the split
The biggest single challenge facing European football right now is dealing with the wreckage of the European Super League car crash. We need to get the driver and passengers out and healthy again and get them back on a train with all the other European football stakeholders. They’ll be in first class, of course, but at least they’ll be in the same train, and hopefully chastened, not embittered, by their experience.

The challenge is first to devise a new modus vivendi, a settlement, to bring stability for the coming period, including the measures I outline above.

Michel Platini achieved this after his election as Uefa president in 2007, together with leaders on the club side like Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Joan Laporta, and a Uefa official called Gianni Infantino, who always delivered. The hostile G14 and its court cases were closed down, the European Club Association was created, some new money was given to the clubs, and a memorandum of understanding signed. I was lucky enough to have worked on delivering all that.

A few years of peace were bought. But that is all it ever is – a few years of stability, until the people either stagnate or change and there is new turbulence, such as we are experiencing now.

Change is needed to ensure long-term stability and sustainability in European football. But who is best placed to deliver that change?

Antiquated structures
Theoretically, that falls to Fifa and Uefa. They are the only bodies that – on paper at least – have a responsibility to listen to all stakeholders and to work for the good of football overall. Most of the stakeholders – clubs, leagues, players unions – have a narrow responsibility to their members’ or shareholders’ interests, not to the overall interests of football. Even supporters’ groups are, by definition, focused on in professional football.

Fifa and Uefa therefore have the powers to make positive change. They could implement the 11 measures I proposed above – it would be even better if they could work together.

IOC, Uefa and Fifa structures are, today, essentially the same as those of a Swiss village yodelling club: not-for-profit, tax-free, unregulated associations based in low/non-regulation Switzerland.

Yet they operate as multi-national corporations, doing billion-dollar media and sponsorship deals, deciding on the hosts of the biggest events on earth, while simultaneously issuing judicial sanctions that can end an athlete’s career or cost a club hundreds of millions, handing out billions in development funds, dabbling in geo-politics, not to mention the rules of the actual game itself.

How can such an array of global tasks be done under one central command, in one HQ, often effectively controlled by just one man?

Football’s antiquated structures mean the chances of Fifa or Uefa solving European football’s problems appear remote. Fifa has made progress post-Blatter, but for Fifa and Uefa leaders to stay in power, they are trapped by the structures, and always have to think through the prism of the politics of the national football associations. This does not always coincide with what is good for football (it also consumes a vast amount of time).

Which means that any real, fundamental change will probably have to come from outside.

The European Union is the only body left, apart from perhaps the US Department of Justice, that can hold behemoths such as the tech giants accountable. It may be required to play a role in delivering the New Deal for European Football.

Different notions of sustainable
Football is the most popular sport in the world and European football has its best players, its biggest clubs, most of its biggest national teams, a long history and a strong, embedded football culture, a giant and loyal fan/customer-base at home and around the world; commercial partners and investors who have hooked up their bottom lines to its content; and politicians desperate to be associated with it. All in one of the richest regions of the world, with even more money, and talent, flowing in from outside Europe.

Given all of this, you would have to make seismic mistakes for it to become unsustainable. Or there would need to be a cataclysmic black swan. So, is it sustainable? Most definitely, yes. All of the noise is just the sound of fighting over slices of an incredibly tasty and ever-growing cake. European football’s problems, on a macro level, are luxury, first-world problems.

But from the top of the tree and its beautiful fruit, dig down into the roots of European football, where most of its value originates, and you will find: a player who has not been paid for months; a talented female player weighing up a one-year contract in a new professional league; a promising referee in a country that has decided its top referees need to be full-time; a semi-pro player offered more money by a local entrepreneur; the same local entrepreneur calculating whether it’s possible to continue subsidising the local clubs’ losses for just one more year – all of them are calculating whether it’s sustainable to risk their day job, and career.

Or the single parent with no car trying to get their child prodigy to far-flung training sessions several times a week; a volunteer coach at a kids club agonising over having to stop (to start earning money); a small club hoping that their young star can go to a big club, the transfer fee keeping them afloat for a year or two; or the fan knowing that they can’t really afford their season ticket or pay-television subscription.

So sustainability is different for every stakeholder in football, and all of these are daily questions that individuals face: can I continue with my passion, football?

The real sustainability issue medium term, however, is the one with a capital S. Some sports, like cricket, are seriously worried whether matches may even be playable outdoors in a few years’ time due to climate change. It is likely that major environmental sustainability issues will have impacts on economic sustainability in football that we cannot even imagine today.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue May 25, 2021 2:20 pm

Newly crowned La Liga Champions Atletico Madrid are joining Barcelona and Real, in seeking new funding it seems, though not being a members owned club they can do it via a share issues, rather than go to the banks - from Junipersports.com

Atlético prepares a capital increase
May 24, 2021

One day after celebrating with the team the league title won on Saturday in Valladolid, the board of directors of the Atlético de Madrid met this Monday to agree to the convening of an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders to submit for approval a capital increase of 181.8 million euros.

The current shareholders of the entity will have preferential subscription rights to acquire new shares, and as reported by the rojiblanco club through a statement, the purpose of this capital increase is due to two factors.

One is “mitigate adverse economic effects caused by the pandemic in the income of the club during this season ”. Other, reduce the “Level of indebtedness motivated both by the investment in the new stadium and by the player acquisition to maintain the level of competitiveness of the first team ”.

The rojiblanco club already closed a capital increase in 2014, forced by a Supreme Court ruling that declared a 2003 capital increase void and demanded the amortization of 489,059 shares, equivalent to 15% of the club, and another in 2017 for the entry of the Israeli Idan Ofer in the shareholders of the Madrid entity.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue May 25, 2021 4:39 pm

This has not been widely reported, though I do remember posting about it somewhere on this board - from the Mail

'Greedy, selfish and self-centred' Real Madrid make a grab for an extra £20M of TV rights money from LaLiga... even though they made £135M last year, which was 3.5 times more than their lowest paid rivals, Mallorca
- Real Madrid have objected to the collective selling of media rights in LaLiga
- Spanish giants also demanded an additional £20million for the top flight
- But Madrid made £135m in TV money last year, while Mallorca made just £38m
- Analyst says Los Blancos are 'greedy' and 'selfish' for their money-grabbing

By CHARLIE WALKER FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 08:24, 21 May 2021 | UPDATED: 14:38, 21 May 2021

Real Madrid have suffered another embarrassing setback after the club failed in a bid to grab an extra £20million from LaLiga in TV rights money.

Los Blancos and their Catalan rivals, Barcelona, are already the biggest beneficiaries of broadcast revenues in Spanish football with the pair pocketing 20 per cent of the total TV income last year.

In 2019-20, Madrid alone scooped £135 million, compared to Mallorca, who earned just £38m, finishing second bottom in the league.

But that did not stop the Spanish giants from taking legal action against LaLiga in an attempt to squeeze out even more cash to ease their financial woes. And to challenge the way the league divvies up the money between all 20 top-flight clubs in Spain.

However, a judge in Madrid was having none of it and rejected all of the club's claims, according to the news agency, AP.

The ruling compounded a dismal few weeks for Real Madrid, who were comprehensively eliminated from the Champions League by Chelsea and failed in their attempt to launch a highly lucrative European Super League.

'It is very greedy and short-sighted approach,' said Dr Rob Wilson, an expert in sports business management at Sheffield Hallam University.

'But it is hardly surprising. We know Real Madrid and Barcelona have got financial challenges.

'You only need to take a look at the European competition this year to see they are not really competing with the elite.

'They simply can't afford to keep pace, but they are putting themselves ahead of the football pyramid in Spain. It is selfish and self-centred.'

Real Madrid could do with some financial respite. The club is reportedly £700m in debt and would have benefited from a windfall payment of £300m, if the Super League had gone ahead as planned.

The latest skirmish can be viewed in the context of tensions between Florentino Perez and LaLiga president, Javier Tebas, as well as Madrid's desire to return to selling its media rights independently, which was previously the case.

Tebas and Perez are bitter rivals, with the LaLiga chief accusing the Bernabeu boss of being 'clueless' after the Super League debacle, and he will no doubt have enjoyed this comprehensive court victory.

As well as claiming an additional £20m, Madrid had demanded access to details of LaLiga's TV rights sale and sought to reverse some decisions made by the top flight in relation to TV contracts.

Rancour over the issue of broadcast rights goes back to a Royal Decree of 2015 that imposed collective selling of matches to TV and sharing of the proceeds.

Wilson argues that Madrid and Barcelona have undermined the competitive balance of LaLiga by scooping so much TV income in the past. Finally, some balance is being restored, he says, as clubs like Atletico Madrid and Sevilla obtain a bigger share following the Royal Decree.

'If they have to take five or six years out of the limelight to provide more financial stability, they should do that,' added Wilson.

'They should put La Liga first and concentrate on the integrity of the competition so it sells for a higher value. [A better competition] will fuel the value of La Liga over the longer term.'

The only other country in Europe which allows the individual sale of media rights is Portugal, which also has a large disparity in earnings between the top and bottom.

Before the decree came into force in the 2016-17 season, the top two clubs made almost 12 times as much money from broadcasting rights as the least profitable teams in LaLiga.

Real Madrid and Barcelona were soaking up almost 40 per cent of the total TV income, with even Atletico Madrid and Sevilla trailing far behind in their wake.

In the latest figures, for 2019-20, the pot was bigger and the share claimed by Real Madrid and Barcelona was down to 20 per cent.

While the reduced share for Real Madrid may be frustrating for a club that desperately needs revenue, they are actually making more money than they were before.

The new rules include a clause that says they cannot make less than they did prior to the decree, but since the overall TV income for the league has doubled, they are actually above this threshold.

'This was an attempt by Real Madrid to get back to individual rights sales before the Royal Decree.' said Pierre Maes, media consultant and author of the book 'Le Business des Droits TV du Foot'.

'Talking about being greedy or not, is not the point. They want to maximise their revenues. They think that individual sale of rights is a better idea than the collective sale.'

'But the way to get there should be more politically correct, that's for sure. And it should take into consideration the interest of fans.'

In the Premier League last year, the best paid club, Liverpool, received 1.9 times more than the lowest paid club, Norwich City, according to Statista.

The payments are based on increasing amounts for finishing position and the number of TV appearances. The overseas broadcast deal also factors in performance.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LA LIGA'S TV DEAL
A Royal Decree in Spain means that since 2016-17, TV rights have been sold collectively by La Liga.

Fifty per cent of La Liga's television money is distributed equally between clubs, with the remaining half divided in two equal parts and allocated based on sporting results over the past five seasons and 'social influence', which includes the number of fans.

The system still favours Barcelona and Real Madrid - there is a clause that says they cannot earn less than they did before – but it limits their potential earnings growth and there are signs that gradually La Liga is beginning to rebalance.

Before the decree, Barcelona and Real Madrid could earn 12 times as much money from broadcasting rights as the least profitable teams. The pair claimed almost 40 per cent of the total TV income

In 2019-20, Real Madrid pocketed £135m and Barcelona £143m out of £1.6 billion. This was a total share of the broadcasting income of 20 per cent. In addition, the biggest earner, Barcelona, received 3.5 times more than the lowest earners, Mallorca.

At the same time the total pot is getting bigger. Since 2013/14 it has more than doubled, but the value of the broadcast rights in Spain are still way behind the Premier League.

The total money disburses in La Liga in 2019-20 was £1.6 billion compared to 2.6 billion in the Premier League.

The English top flight also distributes the money throughout the league more fairly with the top club, Liverpool, receiving 1.9 times more than the bottom club, Norwich City, last season.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue May 25, 2021 9:21 pm

UEFA open formal disciplinary proceedings against the remaining super League rebels Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus, who have all qualified for the Champions League next season

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/57249562

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue May 25, 2021 9:29 pm

The BBC with a report that looks at what would happen if football had a ban on gambling sponsorship

Betting in football: Could a gambling sponsorship ban ruin clubs?
By Alistair Magowan
BBC Sport Last updated on 3 hours ago

Former footballer and gambler Paul Pettigrew, who talks to school children about the dangers of betting, says he recently asked a class of 15-year-olds how many firms they knew of - and they replied with 13 different names.

As the former Morton player, who lost £32,000 by the age of 19, says: "The advertising works - 100%."

The UK government is considering whether to ban gambling sponsorship in football as part of its review of the Gambling Act, but English Football League chairman Rick Parry says such a ruling could cause some of its 72 clubs "to go under".

He also told BBC Sport that as part of the EFL's submission to the review, it commissioned research that suggests there is "no evidence" advertising increases the number of problem gamblers, of which there are 245,000 in England according to a 2018 study by NHS Digital.

Campaigners, who want an end to betting sponsorship in football, have questioned that claim and say adverts are ubiquitous, target vulnerable gamblers and normalise the practice for children.

How damaging could a ban be to clubs? And is it possible to strike a happy medium?

What is gambling sponsorship worth to teams?
Parry says a gambling sponsorship ban would cost the EFL, which is sponsored by Sky Bet, £40m a year in lost revenue. He has warned that the pandemic had left a "£250m hole" in clubs' finances based on gate receipts alone.

This is particularly apparent for shirt sponsorship where teams in the lower reaches of the Premier League or the Championship are offered more money by gambling firms than alternative brands.

One club director told BBC Sport that can amount to another £5m or £6m a season. West Ham's shirt deal with Betway is worth £10m a season, the most lucrative gambling sponsorship deal in the top flight.

The director of the Championship club, speaking anonymously, admitted he was "desperate" to move away from having a betting sponsor on their shirts because of the club's values. But he said the difference in income could fund the purchase of an extra player and justifying the alternative to his owners would prove difficult, especially after a year without crowds.

"If we are talking multi-million pounds less over the course of a contract, it does add up," he said.

Parry said: "At the margins, a betting sponsorship ban could be the difference between some clubs going under or not. It's not easy finding new sponsors at the moment."

Shirt sponsorship is only part of the story, however.

In the Premier League, eight clubs have betting firms on their shirts but 17 have betting partners, which advertise around the pitch, on training kit and on social media. In the Championship, 10 of 24 clubs have shirt sponsorships but that number also increases when partners are considered.

That is why the EFL - among others - is lobbying the government to try to prevent a blanket ban - and believes it has a strong case.

The moral argument
As part of its submission to the Gambling Act review, the EFL commissioned what it claims is "independent" research by Professor Iain McHale at the University of Liverpool.

Parry says McHale found gambling participation in sport had remained flat at about 9% of the population between 2010 and 2018 and that, over the same period, the rate of problem gambling in sports had halved from 6% to 3%.

"I'm not saying 3% is an acceptable number or should be ignored," Parry told BBC Sport. "But the point is that the rate of problem gambling in relation to sports betting has significantly reduced."

The Big Step, a campaign group which wants a ban, says the research should not be classed as independent given the EFL's agenda and says problem gambling figures are often inaccurate.

Yet the Gambling Commission, which regulates the industry, says its latest figures show a drop in problem gamblers in England, although it warned they could be skewed because of Covid-related reasons.

Parry added: "Rather than saying there should be a blanket ban on commercial arrangements, maybe it's much more relevant to say, if there are issues with the volume of advertising, if there are issues with the use of social media, and, for example, getting sportsmen to endorse betting, then that can be addressed. I think that it's much better to address those problems if we're involved."

Pettigrew, who set up his own charity GamTalk to talk to children about gambling, also believes the number of adverts should be reduced.

"Football is the national sport and the adverts have been subconsciously ingrained into kids from a young age," he said. "They are bright and colourful and catch your eye.

"I'm a football fan as well and the last thing I want to see is any clubs going under, but there are plenty of other sponsors they could get.

"Clubs are already not allowed gambling sponsors on kids' shirts, which almost admits there is something wrong."

'Football can wean itself off gambling money'
Tranmere Rovers chairman Mark Palios believes "football can wean itself off" gambling revenue.

The League Two club is one of many in English football - including Chelsea, Liverpool, Sheffield United, Luton and Forest Green Rovers - not to have betting sponsors.

He told a parliamentary group which discussed football's relationship with betting in March: "In our case, shirt sponsorship income might be £100,000 in a budget of £1.5m, so it's not massive and it's not a zero-sum game. Clubs can find other sponsors to replace what they have already."

In the same discussion, Palios also suggested that part of the problem was down to "a thirst to spend money" because "player wages are out of control".

Parry agrees about football's sustainability, but does not think football has become over-reliant on gambling money to the point it ignores the dangers associated with the industry.

"If you look at the Championship for example, repeatedly over the last decade, wages have been more than 100% of turnover," he said.

"That clearly is not sustainable and we are looking to address that, but I don't think it demonstrates in any way that we are over-dependent on gambling or one particular sector.

"It wasn't us that liberalised the gambling market and caused the explosion of internet betting, it was the 2005 Gambling Act.

"Our submission to government, we believe, is very robust, we believe that the evidence is robust, and we believe that there is no logic behind the blanket ban."

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue May 25, 2021 10:29 pm

Chester Perry wrote:
Wed Jul 29, 2020 8:19 pm
It is that time again the Brand Finance Football 50 - the 50 most valuable football brands in the world

you have to pay for the full report (tells you all the reasons for the valuations) but there is a preview version here

https://brandirectory.com/download-repo ... review.pdf

there is an introduction here https://brandirectory.com/rankings/football

we come in at 31 squeezed between Napoli, Olympic Lyonais, Sevilla and Eintract Frankfurt (i included the 1st and last becasue of the history we have with them)

This is the strength we have, with our current approach and Dyche we have a very clear identity to take to the marketplace, let's hope whoever takes up the recently advertised global relationship still has this all in place to work with

For those who want to understand more about how this works the people behind it talked to the Tifo Football podcast last year (it was referred to in the Tifo podcast about Burnley this week

- you can listen to the Brand Finance one here: https://tifo-football-podcast.simplecas ... d-EUAEMv42

- or watch it here on you tube https://tifo-football-podcast.simplecas ... d-EUAEMv42
I have been caught out by the release of Brand Finance's release of it's Brand Finance Football 50 - the 50 most valuable football brands in the world

you have to pay for the full report (tells you all the reasons for the valuations) but there is a preview version here

https://brandirectory.com/download-repo ... review.pdf

there is an introduction here https://brandirectory.com/rankings/football/

we have slipped a few places to 37th with both Aston Villa ans Southampton climbing above us, I expect Leeds to do the same next year

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by Chester Perry » Tue May 25, 2021 11:02 pm

NBC the Premier Leagues longstanding broadcasting partner in the US has issued its broadcast review for the 2020/21 Premier League season, there is some really interesting information in there to particularly on which areas in the country are most interested in watching the PRemier League

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, May 25th, 2021

NBC SPORTS COMPLETES MOST EXTENSIVE AND COMPREHENSIVE PREMIER LEAGUE PRESENTATION EVER IN U.S.
NBC Sports’ 2020-21 Coverage Included 900+ Live Hours of Studio Shows and Match Windows — Most Ever in Single Season – Including 90-Minute “Championship Sunday” Post-match Show as Manchester City Lifted the Trophy

Peacock’s First Full Season Featuring Premier League Highlighted by 175 Live Matches, Studio Shows, On Demand Replays and Premier League TV Channel

Matches on NBC Averaged Total Audience Delivery of 879,000 – up 2% from 2019-20

8 Matches Averaged More Than 1 Million Viewers (TAD) this Season – Tied for Most in 5 Years; NBC Sports Has Presented 28 of the 30 Most-Watched Live Premier League Matches U.S. TV History

Philadelphia Tops Local Market Ratings for Full Season, Followed by Washington, D.C., Seattle, Baltimore and San Diego

STAMFORD, Conn. — May 25, 2021 – NBC Sports’ presentation of the 2020-21 Premier League season was its most extensive and comprehensive ever – featuring 340 match windows and 914 hours of live match and studio coverage on the networks of NBCUniversal and Peacock. Both of those figures are the largest for a Premier League season ever in the U.S.

For the eighth consecutive year, all 10 Premier League matches on the season’s final Sunday were presented live, simultaneously (11 a.m.-1 p.m. ET) across the platforms of NBCUniversal, highlighted by games that determined a pair of Champions League berths. In addition, NBC once again broadcast a 90-minute “Championship Sunday” post-match show, highlighted by champions Manchester City lifting the trophy, interviews, and final thoughts and analysis on the 2020-21 season.

The five Championship Sunday matches on television registered a combined Total Audience Delivery of 1.4 million viewers (does not include the 10 matches streamed on Peacock).

Premier League matches on NBC, featuring Sunday’s Liverpool-Crystal Palace match on Sunday in which the Reds secured a Champions League berth, averaged a Total Audience Delivery (TAD) of 879,000 viewers this season – up 2% from last season.

In addition, eight NBC and NBCSN matches averaged a TAD of at least 1 million viewers – tying for the most audiences of 1 million in five years, since the 2015-16 season.

NBC Sports Group averaged a Total Audience Delivery of 414,000 viewers per match window for the 2020-21 season (does not include Peacock streaming or Spanish-language telecasts).

Premier League Viewership Highlights

Since kicking off its Premier League coverage in August 2013, NBC Sports has presented 28 of the 30 most-watched live Premier League matches ever in the U.S. across all platforms.


NBC Sports posted its most-watched Boxing Day (Dec. 26, 2020) ever with a Total Audience Delivery average of 664,000 viewers for four matches across NBC and NBCSN.
NBC’s 12:30 p.m. ET Arsenal-Chelsea match was the most-watched Boxing Day match ever with a TAD of 1.2 million viewers.


NBCSN registered a Total Audience Delivery average of 1.06 million viewers for the Feb. 7 Liverpool-Manchester City match – ranking as the second-most watched Premier League cable match ever in U.S. TV history (Manchester Derby, 1.16 million viewers on Apr. 12, 2015 on NBCSN).


In 2021, NBCSN delivered the two most-watched February cable matches in the history of the Premier League on U.S. TV: Liverpool-Manchester City on Feb. 7 (1.06 million viewers) and Chelsea-Manchester United on Feb. 28 (828,000 viewers).


The Dec. 12, 2020 Manchester Derby posted a Total Audience Delivery average of 1.2 million viewers across NBC, Telemundo and NBC Sports Digital, ranking as the second-most watched fall Manchester Derby on record in the U.S.


More than 1 billion minutes of NBC Sports’ Premier League coverage was consumed on the NBC Sports YouTube channel– a single-season record.


The seven most-engaged posts (and eight of the top 10) in @NBCSportsSoccer Instagram history came during the 2020-21 season.


The 2 Robbies and Premier League on NBC podcasts delivered a season-record 127 episodes and had a 21% increase in downloads from last season.


The free-to-play game Premier League Pick ‘Em continued to help grow the NBC Sports Predictor app userbase to more than 1.7 million fans, who have made over 27 million contest entries since the platform’s launch in December 2018.


Throughout the season, NBC Sports’ Premier League coverage featured a wide range of innovations and milestones. Among the highlights:

PEACOCK DEBUTS FIRST FULL SEASON OF NBC SPORTS’ PREMIER COVERAGE: Peacock featured 175 live matches, studio shows and replays. For the first time ever, U.S. viewers had access to the Premier League TV channel on Peacock. In February, Peacock streamed its first-ever live Spanish-language sporting eventwith the Arsenal-Manchester City match. Throughout the season, Peacock presented multiple matches live in both English and Spanish, as well Premier League Goal Rush, featuring live whip-around coverage.

SPECIAL “PREMIER LEAGUE: UP FOR THIS PRESENTED BY BARCLAYS”: NBC Sports produced special “Premier League: Up For This presented by Barclays” which celebrates the passionate, American Premier League supporter. Featuring interviews with fans from across the country and from the PL on NBC team, the 30-minute show told the stories of how fans fell in love with English football, what watching Premier League Mornings means to them and how the Barclays Fan Fest has become the next best thing to being at a match.

INCREASED SKY SPORTS INTEGRATION: NBC Sports increased its content and operations integration with Sky Sports, in front of the camera and behind-the-scenes, including collaborating on breaking news with Sky Sports News. During Black History Month in February, NBC Sports presented Sky Sports’ Micah Richards: Tackling Racism documentary focusing on areas of the game that are affected by racism with the objective of seeking real answers, solutions and achievable targets moving forward, making the game safer and more inclusive for all. For the October and February transfer deadlines, Sky Sports News’ 11 hours of international deadline day coverage was available in the U.S. exclusively on Peacock and was followed by NBCSN’s Premier League Live: Transfer Deadline Special. Sky Sports’ and NBC Sports’ Premier League talent appeared across both presentations.

WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH HIGHLIGHTED: Throughout Women’s History Month in March, NBC Sports’ Premier League coverage featured vignettes, profiles and interviews highlighting women’s soccer in the U.K. Among those interviewed: USWNT star Rose Lavelle; Premier League Assistant Referee Sian Massey-Ellis; and Leeds United defender Olivia Smart, who is also a nurse, and discussed administering the COVID vaccine at Elland Road, where Leeds United play their home matches. Women’s History Month content is also available on the On Her Turf blog at NBCSports.com/OnHerTurf.

SEASON #7 OF THE MEN IN BLAZERS SHOW: Hosted by popular soccer personalities Michael Davies and Roger Bennett, THE MEN IN BLAZERS SHOW returned for a seventh season with big-name guests including John Oliver, Green Bay Packers QB Aaron Rodgers, USWNT defender Crystal Dunn, Arizona Cardinals DE J. Watt, Los Angeles Lakers G Alex Caruso, Wu Tang Clan’s RZA, Liverpool star Mohamed Salah, musician Big Boi, legendary Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, musician Niall Horan, U.S. Women’s National Team’s Sam Mewis, Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp and Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr.

NBC SPORTS GOES INSIDE THE MIND SERIES WITH TOP PLAYERS & COACHES: Hosted by NBC Sports’ Premier League commentators, the Inside the Mind interview series has featured one-on-one chats with the Premier League’s top players and coaches including Christian Pulisic, Pep Guardiola, Paul Pogba, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Thomas Tuchel, Kevin De Bruyne, Bruno Fernandes, Brendan Rodgers, Wilfried Zaha, Jordan Henderson, Heung-Min Son, Jose Mourinho, Jamie Vardy, Carlo Ancelotti, Marcus Rashford, Jurgen Klopp, Marcelo Bielsa, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, and Frank Lampard.

MORE SPANISH-LANGUAGE COVERAGE THAN EVER: Miami-based Telemundo Deportes – the exclusive Spanish language home of the Premier League in the U.S. – presented more live matches than ever before across Telemundo, Universo and Peacock. In February, Telemundo Deportes’ Andres Cantorand Manuel Sol called the first-ever live Spanish language sporting event on Peacock (Arsenal-Manchester City).

A LOOK AT STORIED CLUB LEEDS UNITED RE-JOINING PREMIER LEAGUE: Promoted: Leeds Unitedoffered an in-depth look at the history and tradition of one of English football’s biggest clubs. Featuring interviews with Leeds players both past and present, club owner and chairman Andrea Radrizzani and lifelong supporters, the show explored Leeds’ journey back to the Premier League after 16 years away and spotlights head coach Marcelo Bielsa as one of football’s living legends.

ON TO THIS SUMMER’S TOKYO OLYMPICS: NBC Sports’ Premier League voices Rebecca Lowe, Arlo White, Robbie Earle, Robbie Mustoe, and Tim Howard will all serve as commentators for this summer’s Tokyo Olympics. Lowe will serve as NBC’s daytime Olympics host, while White, Earle, Mustoe and Howard will work on Olympic soccer matches.


Local TV Ratings

Following are the U.S. TV markets with the highest average season-long ratings on Premier League telecasts on NBC/NBCSN, and NBC only (note: all NBC games, other than on “Championship Sunday,” started at 12:30 pm ET/9:30 am PT or later, while some NBCSN games kicked off as early as 7 am ET/4 am PT):

Top 15 Local Market Ratings, NBC/NBCSN

1. Philadelphia
2. Washington, D.C.
3. Seattle
4. Baltimore
5. San Diego
6. Cincinnati
7. New York
8. Norfolk
9. Minneapolis
10. Chicago
11. New Orleans
12. Las Vegas
13. Tampa
14. San Francisco
15. Hartford


Top 15 Local Market Ratings, NBC only

1. New Orleans
2. Seattle
3. Las Vegas
4. Greenville
5. Cincinnati
6. Fort Myers
7. Washington, D.C.
8. San Diego
9. Norfolk
10. Baltimore
11. Philadelphia
12. Albuquerque
13. San Francisco
14. Houston
15. Chicago


The 2021-22 Premier League season kicks off on the weekend of August 14.

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Re: Football's Magic Money Tree

Post by GodIsADeeJay81 » Tue May 25, 2021 11:49 pm

Apologies if I've missed it, but what's happening at Wolves?

Reports are they're willing to let Neves go for the right price to help fund rebuilding due to Covid.
The right price varies from £35-45 million.

Have Fosun got issues due to China gov?

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