The Political Economy of Football V2

Javier Tebas rarely pulls his punches, and the president of La Liga was in fiery form, ripping into Paris Saint-Germain president Nasser Al-Khelaifi and the Premier League as part of a stout defence of the Spanish game at this week’s Financial Times Football Business Summit. Tebas took issue with the Premier League’s new “squad cost ratio” system that is replacing the profitability and sustainability framework, saying it would not end the financial imbalances he has long lamented between the English top division and continental European competitions. The Premier League’s new regulations will penalise clubs if they spend more than 85 per cent of revenue on transfers and wages, but Tebas faulted it for excluding other costs from the calculation. “They’re going to have more inflation and more problems,” he predicted. “A rule that does not take expenses into account is useless.” Premier League boss Masters later dismissed this criticism, insisting the squad cost ratio would ...

Perhaps the newsiest moment of this week’s Financial Times Football Business summit came when Richard Masters, Premier League chief executive revealed that the league is finally building a direct-to-consumer streaming platform, which will debut next season in Singapore. The idea has been floating around since before the pandemic, with most people referring to it by the rather tongue-in-cheek moniker “Premflix”. Its real name, we now know, will be Premier League+. Masters called it “an important step” and a “big change” for the world’s most popular football league. So, what does this all mean? Firstly, the Singapore move should be viewed as an experiment. The Premier League is doing this in a small but mature market and in partnership with a willing broadcaster, StarHub. The stakes, therefore, are relatively low. It gives the league the chance to test its capabilities in all sorts of things it hasn’t had to do before — such as taking subscription payments and pricing its own product...

Snoop Dog’s appearance at the Swansea v. Preston North End midweek match is one of the most surprising, if not bizarre, events of the Championship season. Indeed, the only thing that surprised me more was when one of my granddaughters told me she had discovered her inner Welsh woman and was moving to Swansea (Abertawe) despite not speaking a word of Cymraeg.    Swansea City do not seem to particularly emphasise their Welshness as much as Wrexham.   Paradoxically, I did some consultancy for a Swansea client.   They were happy with what I did, and asked me to do more, but I didn’t get paid until I got one of my Welsh speaking nephews to draft an email in Cymraeg. In some ways, it’s hard to make sense of the Swansea and Snoop Dogg story. But maybe this is just how the Championship rolls these days. Wrexham have their Hollywood owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac, the seven-time Super Bowl winner Tom Brady is a minority investor in Birmingham City, and if Snoop had hu...

One group of beneficiaries from modern big business football are the legal profession. West Ham United are considering launching an appeal at the Supreme Court after being ordered to pay £3.6million ($4.86m) to their landlords at the London Stadium. As part of West Ham’s rental agreement with the London Stadium, which has been their home ground since leaving Upton Park in 2016, an ‘anti-embarrassment clause’ required the club to pay their landlords a share of any profit they received from selling shares. The clause has been active after Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky bought a 27 per cent stake in 2021, which made him the second-largest shareholder at West Ham, after David Sullivan, the majority shareholder who owns 38.8 per cent. In 2021, West Ham’s landlords informed the club that share transactions within their company meant the London Stadium was owed a significant payment. The club paid £2.6m but challenged the additional £3.6m. The matter was referred to expert determina...

The withdrawal of the preferred bidders for Sheffield Wednesday is not a great surprise as rumours about  the crisis ridden historic club had been circulating for weeks.   There were doubts about where their money was coming from. T he shock is that the group has walked away claiming that it has only just discovered that a League One club with very few players under contract, a dilapidated stadium and a threadbare academy is not worth the £40 million it bid for Sheffield Wednesday two months ago. The good news is that Sheffield Wednesday are still one of the biggest and most famous clubs in the land. Investors will still want to take on the huge and very expensive challenge of turning the club’s fortunes around. They just will not want to do it having paid more than maybe £15m to buy the stadium and settle the tax and football creditor bills. That, of course, will mean Chansiri and any other unsecured creditor is not getting 25 per cent of what they are owed. The Thai bus...

The chair of England’s new football regulator has told Premier League clubs to view money passed down to lower divisions as an “investment” in the game, as he urged the sport’s bosses to strike an agreement on how cash is redistributed. In a stern warning to the Premier League, David Kogan, who chairs the Independent Football Regulator, said that clubs “enjoying the good times at the top must surely see that any money passed down through the leagues is an investment”. “My message today is that it can’t just be about the clubs at the top. It has to be about ensuring the whole pyramid can survive,” Kogan told the FT’s Business of Football Summit on Thursday.   He cautioned that the lack of a new deal on how money was redistributed from the top flight “creates uncertainty that is detrimental to the pyramid and to growth and investment in the English game”. Talks between the Premier League and the English Football League — encompassing the Championship, League One and League Tw...