The Political Economy of Football V2

The attempt by The Athletic to rank Premier League clubs by the current happiness of their fans can only be intended as a bit of a laugh, although the rankings of Sunderland first, Arsenal second and Chelsea are a temporary third seems reasonable enough. And who are bottom?  Yes, it's the ever demanding and never satisfied fans of Tottenham Hotspur. The Athletic says: 'Whether it’s team-mates arguing at full time, team-mates ignoring the manager, the manager slating the fans, the fans booing the players or the players ignoring the fans, it’s not exactly sunshine, lollipops and rainbows at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium right now. Three home wins in 21 league matches will do that to you. As will charging some of the most expensive prices in the country to watch it.  It really is a shiny stadium, though.' A couple of my friends are Spurs fans and they do their best to keep their spirits up, but there is a great contrast with the mood I remember in the early 1960s.

I have always been a sceptic about the idea of fan owned clubs.  It's not just a question of the lunatics running the asylum: one can usually find well qualified lawyers and accountants to sit on the board.  However, even if fans can raise the purchase price of a club in administration, they find it difficult to sustain the losses needed to secure success on the pitch and a downward spiral on and off the pitch can often result.. Exeter City has been referred to as the glowing example of a fan owned club, escaping from the clutches of the administrators, albeit with the benefit of some lucrative FA cup games. Yet they raised their playing budget by £1m in two years while everyone else in the league was raising it by £3m or £3.5m.  The highest playing budget in League One is £19m.  The Grecians are currently fifth from bottom.   General manager Clive Harrison admitted that it was not possible to guarantee selling a player each year to fill the financial gap. ...

Milan’s 2024/25 accounts were the third set of accounts reported under the ownership of Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital Partners, who purchased the club from Elliott Management in August 2022 in a €1.2bln deal, with Elliot reportedly providing a €560m loan to help RedBird complete the acquisition. Chief executive Giorgio Furlani told the Harvard Business School, “Our goal became to stop losses, to live within our means. As important as sporting success is, we realised we shouldn’t go into a success-at-all-costs mode: the extra costs incurred in pursuing success can kill you financially.” In the previous ten years, Milan had lost around €900m, with Giorgio Furlani admitting, “Milan was not sustainable the way it is today, the club was on the verge of bankruptcy.” Milan posted a pre-tax profit for the third year in a row, though this reduced slightly from €12m to €10, reports the authoritative Swiss Ramble. This was especially impressive, given the indifferent sporting results. ...

'Crazy' soaring wages in League One have seen Northampton's losses increase from £1m to £2.5m a year:  https://www.northamptonchron.co.uk/sport/football/cobblers-open-to-more-investment-to-stay-competitive-after-crazy-rise-in-league-one-wages-5421603 The club is open to more investment, but the chairman is proud of what they have achieved over the last ten years in terms of creating a stable club:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cnv2qz98mz0o

As one of the world’s most prominent sports teams, it’s no surprise that FC Barcelona has dozens of companies lining up to associate with it. Partnerships range from headline sponsors Nike, Spotify and Philips Ambilight to local cava producer Codorníu via toolmaker Stanley and Malaysian lender Maybank.   Those commercial partners get to sell their wares to Barça’s vast fan base and bask in the reflected glamour of the club that gave us Lionel Messi. In return, they get cash. Earlier this month, Barca made a curious addition to its partnership team sheet: Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP). The previously unknown crypto company will be the club’s “official blockchain technology” partner for the next three years. “This new sponsorship deal, in a cutting-edge area of technology, is yet another example of FC Barcelona’s leadership in the commercial field,” the club said when announcing its ZKP tie-up. Yet, despite access to Barça’s digital channels and hundreds of millions of fans —...

Defeats are always difficult to accept at Liverpool, a club where expectations are enormous but the last two have been humiliations, in front of their own crowd, at Anfield, where the fate of all managers (or a head coach in this case) still tend to be determined, regardless of what people are saying on the internet. Frustration has been aimed at players and the person leading them but, so far, it has not manifested into the kind of groundswell where Arne Slot’s position has been questioned loudly enough to influence decisions at executive level. Some of his critics have suggested that Slot benefited from inheritance. All of the regulars in the squad last season were, after all, bought in the Jurgen Klopp era, but it seems ridiculous to use winning the league against Slot, particularly when Klopp was unable to achieve the feat with exactly the same group of players.  There are no indications that Liverpool, or more specifically, their owners, Fenway Sports Group, which is hea...