The Political Economy of Football V2

Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis has reduced the club’s debt by converting another £82million of loans into share capital. The Forest owner has done this on a regular basis in recent years, but this is the biggest amount of money he has written off loans so far. In March 2023, Marinakis turned £41m of loans into share capital in the same fashion. He had converted sums of £12m and £20m in the two years prior to that. Just over a year ago, in December 2023, the sum involved was £11m. Marinakis has ambitions to see Forest make a return to European football and will sanction further business — most notably the addition of a striker — in January, to further bolster Nuno Espirito Santo’s squad.

The best managers and coaches have often not been very distinguished players.  Successful players do nit necessarily make good managers.  It's a different skill set.   If it's the path they want to go down, they might be well advised to start coaching at Academy level and then take an assistant manager role. Wayne Rooney arguably went into top level management too quickly.  I also argued in an earlier post that he was not a particularly good fit with Plymouth Argyle.  They need a coach who knows how to make the best of limited resources. The sad scenes that accompanied Rooney’s final game at Oxford felt a long way from the surge of optimism that greeted his arrival in Devon on a three-year contract in May. While some fans had misgivings over whether Rooney was sufficiently experienced to steer a squad that had finished 21st in the Championship the previous season into safer waters, the club seemed well set up. Rooney already had a relationship with Argy...

Aberdeen’s 2023/24 accounts covered a season that was a bit of a mixed bag. As chief executive Alan Burrows said, “The 2023/24 campaign wasn’t without its challenges. We finished seventh in the Scottish Premiership and had to change managers mid-season, which is not where any club ever wants to be.” On the other hand, the club played in a European group stage for the first time in fifteen years, though they did not progress to the knockout stages of the Europa Conference League. In 2019 Dave Cormack, an Aberdonian and lifelong Dons fan, replaced Stewart Milne as chairman after 22 years. Major League Soccer side Atlanta United acquired a minority stake (less than 10%) as part of a strategic alliance between the two clubs. This group provided £5m, which helped finance development of the training ground, and significant funding since the initial investment. Largely due to the European group stage football and domestic cup runs, Aberdeen’s revenue shot up by £7.8m (50%) from £15.8m...

As the finishing touches are put to Everton’s impressive new home on the Merseyside waterfront and debate continues to rage over the future of Old Trafford, it is clear football stadium design has come a long way. Giant, sweeping terraces were the most common feature of the first wave of grounds: they were cheap to build and capable of packing in as many people as possible. There was little in the way of facilities, even at the very best grounds, with Wembley barely more than a concrete bowl when first opened in 1923. Later, toilets and concourses for people to buy food or drink would become more familiar features, along with maybe a roof to keep the punters dry. But this was still as good as things had got when football grounds guru Simon Inglis started his early-Eighties travels around grounds invariably hemmed in by housing and industry due to being built in a bygone age when supporters had walked to the match. “On the whole, you were looking at the architecture of neglect...