The Political Economy of Football V2

I t’s been a big few days for Atlético Madrid. Spain’s third-biggest club all but booked a place in the next round of the Champions League after dismantling an abject Tottenham Hotspur on Tuesday night. A couple of days later, the biggest-ever takeover in Spanish football closed, with Apollo completing its purchase of a majority stake in Atlético at a valuation of somewhere north of €2bn (how far north depends on who you ask). Success in Uefa competitions is one of the reasons the club made an attractive prospect for the US investment group The deal was a win for Ares Management, which sold down the 34 per cent stake it had acquired for €182mn in 2021. The firm will continue to be involved as a smaller shareholder in the club, and most likely as a lender for the ambitious €800mn real estate project that first sparked Apollo’s interest (and is probably still the key driver of the decision to buy the club itself). But another big beneficiary was Quantum Pacific, the investment firm of Is...

  Liverpool’s return to the summit of the Premier League last season dovetailed with a return to profitability, and the club’s 2024-25 financials, publicly released last Thursday, unveiled the platform from which they launched last summer’s £400million transfer splurge. The champions booked a £15.2million profit, their best financial result since the 2018-19 season and a first profitable year in three. Revenue shot up £89m and 15 per cent to £702.7m, easily a club record, making Liverpool only the second English side, after Manchester City, to top £700m in annual turnover. At the top line, Liverpool’s revenue grew across all three income streams — matchday, broadcast and commercial — something only Arsenal could mirror last season among the Premier League’s ‘Big Six’. On a club-accounts basis, they were England’s highest-earning team last year, though Manchester City’s situation as part of the multi-club City Football Group (CFG) blurs matters. According to figures provided to and ...

Middlesbrough rely on owner Steve Gibson to fund a return to the Premier League, but too often they have been the nearly men.  This season they are in the second automatic promotion position, but only one point ahead of Millwall Outstanding away performances have been undermined by some nervous home performances against lowly clubs, exemplified by last night's defeat to Charlton. The Swiss Ramble has been conducting his usual forensic analysis of their 2024/25 accounts and his full analysis is available on his Substack page. Middlesbrough’s pre-tax loss slightly reduced from £12.4m to £11.4m, thanks to profit from player sales improving by £9.2m from £17.1m to £26.3m. Revenue was also a little higher, rising £0.3m (1%) from £32.2m to £32.5m, though there was a steep increase in operating expenses, which rose £7.9m (13%) from £62.5m to £70.4m, while net interest payable more than doubled from £0.5m to £1.1m. Since 2011 Gibson has put £176m into the club via loans, almost all of whic...

  A group led by American businessman David Storch has been named as the preferred bidder for Sheffield Wednesday, who will start the 2026-27 season in League One with a 15-point deduction. ,The winning bid is not high enough to ensure that all of the club’s unsecured creditors receive at least 25 per cent of what they are owed, hence the points deduction. The Storch group’s bid of just under £20million beat rival offers for the south Yorkshire-based club from English retail tycoon and ex-Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley, a group led by former Charlton Athletic and Sunderland executive Charlie Methven and two undisclosed U.S. syndicates that made late bids.   Ashley was seen as the favourite at one stage but did not bid high enough. Storch, 73, retired as chief executive of aircraft maintenance firm AAR Corp in 2018, before spending another five years as the chairman of the multinational’s board of directors. He is now managing partner of Illinois-based investment firm ...

Real  Madrid file interim financials each year, and while they were again profitable in the opening half of this season, their surplus drooped notably. In the six months to the end of December 2024, Madrid made a pre-tax profit of €38.3m. A year on, the figure was just €6.1m, an 84 per cent fall. The heightened wage bill was a key driver in that, with most of the increase attributable to football staff and, within them, to first-team players.   Personnel costs there rose by €26.5m, as the impact of several new signings — Dean Huijsen, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Alvaro Carreras and Franco Mastantuono — was felt. Captain Dani Carvajal’s new contract, signed in October 2024, also had a bearing; six months of any extra cost incurred by that new deal will have been recorded in the latest figures, as opposed to just three months in those from a year ago. Wages in the club’s basketball team jumped too, up €7.8m to €25.1m, but that still meant Madrid’s football-related wage bill for...

The award of the Wimbledon 'franchise' to MK Dons has long troubled football fans and fortunately the experiment has not been repeated.   Wimbledon fans formed their own successful  phoenix club which is in a higher division. But MK Dons have had trouble filling their 30,000 stadium.  For Saturday's game they offered free admission and managed to attract 23,465, an attendance record, Their highest average attendance was 13,000 in the Championship in 2015/16, but this season it has been around 7,500. The problem is that it still looks like an artificial club in an artificial city.   Many local residents have existing affiliations to London clubs.  The city is accessible by good train services. Milton Keynes has its attractions as a place to live, but how far do residents identify with it?   Building a fan base will take time.