Thursday briefing: How football sold its soul and was devoured by global capital | American football

Good morning. I hope you had a great Christmas. If you love football, and even if you hate it, an unavoidable feature of Boxing Day is the festive schedule, and a look at today's matches on the first division tells a familiar story of a game that has been swallowed whole by international investors.

Ten of the 20 top-flight clubs are owned by the United States and many others are linked to nation states or private capital. When the Premier League was formed in 1992, 21 of 22 clubs were majority English-owned; Today, only four are. But if these owners expect to make money, they have chosen a terrible economic model. Only five of the 20 clubs currently in the league made profits in the 2022-23 season, with a total loss of £685 million.

Why has this happened and why is it important? For today's newsletter, the first in a series of conversations leading into the new year, I spoke with Nick Miller, Athletic writer and author of Who owns football? The changing face of club ownershipabout how the beautiful sport was devoured. Here are the headlines.

In depth: 'It has become an investment vehicle for people with no real connection to the club or the game'

Thank you so much for doing this, Nick. in the bookyou expose the transition in the ownership of football clubs in the Premier League from caravan park owners and package holiday traders to public investment funds and private equity. Is it fair to say that 20 years ago the property was folly, an exercise in vanity or romance or something in between, and at the top level that has essentially disappeared?

Well, there is definitely still vanity at the top level, but a different kind of vanity. The strange thing about football is that there is a lot of money floating around, but almost no one wins anything. So sometimes people outside the game look at it and think: these guys must be idiots, I could do better.

But romance? No, it's too expensive. People who now have access to the funds you need to buy a big club aren't going to waste it on a full-size game of Subbuteo. There are two Premier League owners who are fans of their clubs, Brentford and Brighton, but they have been successful because No run it like fans. There is no owner like Jack Walker at Blackburn, a local boy who did good and spent enough money on his club to win the title in 1995. From that perspective, a kind of innocence is lost.

When did that start to change?

Twenty years ago, as a fan, you knew who owned your own club and some of the biggest media owners, but you didn't care about anyone else. Now you're almost forced to worry and wonder: if my club had one of these giant owners, would we be doing better?

The first such deal I noticed as a fan was when Sky tried to buy Manchester United. which was finally blocked by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission in 1999. That was when we saw football becoming an investment vehicle for people with no real connection to the club or the game. Before that, it didn't really exist as a financial mechanism.

What happened was that there was a curious decade in the '90s when huge amounts of money were coming into the Premier League through TV deals and everything else, and the league's profile was skyrocketing. But there were still the lingering effects of a view of football as, in the famous words of a Sunday Times editorial“a slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people.” So the authorities had canceled it and there wasn't much thought given to who should have the right to own a football club: just, if you could afford it, you were fine.

Then change starts to happen pretty quickly as people like roman tobramovich in Chelsea and sheikh mansur Manchester City comes into play. And now with Everton sold last week to a US-based consortium, half of the Premier League clubs it's us-property. You talk in the book about how Clubs should be seen as community assets, which are fundamentally different to a paper clip business. Is it possible to be a community asset and be owned by a set of opaquely structured financial institutions thousands of miles away?

No. A football club is a community asset: it's about giving people something to be proud of, but it's also about its impact locally. An investment fund linked to an oil state, for example, simply has a different agenda, and the club's purpose becomes something else.

The price of success?

there is a There is tension there, though, because I guess you have to recognize that an essential part of the definition of a community asset is what the people in the community think. Newcastle fans, for example, are definitely much happier with their club than they were five years ago, although there is a huge moral issue there.

But you still have to accept that what the club is supposed to do now is different. I don't blame any fan who supports their team, and the emotional and sentimental ties make it very difficult to change that, but then there will be some who will defend their owners at any cost and claim that their investment in the area and the team does everything good.

You have to think about what the fundamental purpose of this is, which is to change the conversation about what kind of state Saudi Arabia is, and in the end that will be more important than what the club means to the community. If you show up to a game wearing a Saudi shirt, you are fulfilling their intentions, not the other way around.

YoIt's worth saying that this is part of a larger problem. Football fans have been forced to accept that the game is a predatory, dog-eating world, and that the only way to survive or thrive is to participate fully.. Whereas if you had a structure Based on a more egalitarian idea of ​​what football should be, there could be more room for fans to have a more skeptical response towards these owners.

Exactly. The attitude that as long as you spend money and make my team successful, we're not going to look closely at anything else, is a product of not being able to compete at the top without the backing of billionaires or a nation. state. But it's hard to say what that structure would actually look like.

The clubs themselves would have to support it, and there are enough owners like that that that is not going to happen. I suspect that the football regulator, that will arrive soonIt won't have much impact because it's unclear what real powers it will have and because the teams at the top have become very good at navigating the rules and regulations.

He also writes about American owners who want to buy players in the lower leagues because they are captivated by the idea that you can reach the top, which is impossible in the closed sphere of American sports. But at the same time it seems as if the gap to the top was now unbridgeable for a rising club, and all the big clubs had already been the target of these acquisitions. Does that mean we're going to see a slowdown in big international money coming into the English game?

Everything is still very volatile and I wouldn't want to make confident predictions about how it will work out at the top. But I do believe that we will see more clubs devouring the smaller ones to form groups of various clubs. There is so much money at the top now that you can't buy your way in and expect to suddenly transform things. What you wonder is whether more people will start to become disillusioned with the game at that level because it has become so remote and start rooting for their local non-league team, and there are a few examples. But I've been waiting for something like this for about 20 years, and it never seems to happen in a big enough way to change the game.

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