Is multi-club ownership really such a positive thing? And as so often, it is a question the game has never really faced up to, preferring to stand by and do nothing for years before finally stopping to wonder if it is now so widespread that they might as well just legitimise it.
The arguments in favour of multi-club ownership are clear.
As well as the Red Bull empire, you could just look at the success of the
City Football Group. It's a road Chelsea are planning to go down.
City are at the top of the tree, Premier League champions
for four of the past five seasons. But Melbourne City (men and women), New
York City, Mumbai City and Yokohama F Marinos have won league titles as part of
the group and Girona, Troyes and Montevideo City Torque have won
promotions, all of them benefiting from a shared network of players, coaches
and scouts as well as data, knowledge, infrastructure and strategy.
With the investment of Brighton & Hove Albion
owner-chairman Tony Bloom, Royal Union Saint-Gilloise have not only been
promoted to the Belgian top tier for the first time in 49 years but finished as
runners-up last season and are second again now. They took their place in the
last -eight of the Europa League draw alongside Manchester United
and Juventus.
The potential benefits of belonging to a multi-club network are clear for clubs that have fallen on hard times (as Royal Union had) or clubs that are newly formed (like New York City) or nearly-new (like Mumbai City, Montevideo City Torque, Melbourne City).
RB Leipzig was spawned from the
playing rights of fifth-tier club SSV Markranstadt, while the Red Bull
rebranding was nothing new for the club once known as SV Austria Salzburg but
named, at various stages, after a supermarket chain and a financial services
corporation. Some things are not sacred, particularly when Red Bull are
offering to give you wings.
The downsides
But the more entrenched and the more widespread the
multi-club model becomes, the more the success stories will come to be
outnumbered by the failures. In its annual benchmarking report on the European
club football landscape, UEFA stated that no fewer than 82 of its top-tier
clubs now have a “cross-investment relationship” with one or more clubs — and
it goes without saying that the majority of them will not be successful. The record of Everton bidders 777 is mixed. The experiment of Roland Duchatelet with Standard Liege, Charlton and other smaller clubs ended in failire.
Sacrificing your club’s identity — signing up to be a
satellite of a much bigger club in a much bigger league — might be perfectly
acceptable if a) that identity is yet to be fully established, as in the case
of some of the City Football Group’s acquisitions or b) there is the promise of
success. It will be far harder to tolerate for fans of those clubs whose
fortunes decline or even stagnate.
That is the real point here. Football clubs are not
pawns. They are socio-cultural institutions which exist to represent and bring
pride and joy to their communities (which these days can mean not just the
immediate area but a huge global fanbase).
No club, unless established for that purpose, should
be a mere satellite to another — or to a sovereign wealth fund, an energy drink
manufacturer or anything else. Nor should any club see its entire purpose
redefined for the benefit of an investment group which could easily lose
interest and allow an underperforming club to fall into managed decline.
The direction of travel is worrying, but nobody seems to
question it. The only barrier UEFA has raised relates to its own competitions —
and even that one proved easily surmountable for the Red Bull clubs. And now
Ceferin is talking about possibly removing that obstacle? Why? Why on earth
would UEFA remove rules which exist (in theory) to preserve the integrity of
their competitions?
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