Challenges for football debated at Pink 'Un summit

Movers and shakers from the world of football gathered in London this week for the annual Financial Times Business of Football summit.   Here are a few highlights.

The long-term prospects for football’s broadcast model is always a hot topic of debate, but Chelsea chair Todd Boehly floated one idea: sell global Premier League rights to Netflix.  Boehly’s interests in sports include stakes in the LA Dodgers baseball team and the LA Lakers in the NBA, and he has a history of making moves when it comes to media rights. So he’s someone worth listening to. His point was that the Premier League is a rare beast: content that is in demand globally.

“If you really think about what it could do to unlock a global media platform, there’s nothing like this. I’m not saying that is the direct answer right this minute, but I think that’s where we’re headed,” he said.

Illegal feeds have long been a big problem for football rights holders and their partner broadcasters. Some of the frustration the issue generates is now being directed at Silicon Valley.  Javier Tebas, president of La Liga, took aim at Google, saying the company was benefiting from hosting URLs that direct users to pirated feeds. He said the Spanish league had taken legal action. “We are going to go right to the end with Google. We have had lots of meetings with Google related to this subject and they just ignore us.”

Meanwhile Sky warned that illegal streams were costing the industry hundreds of millions of dollar a years, and called on Amazon to do more to tackle the use of Fire Sticks to tap into unauthorised live match broadcasts.

A luxury tax?

Most US sports have some form of cost controls. But to handle the issue of “aspiration” — teams that want to spend a lot more to improve performance — some also have a luxury tax system. That means there’s a spending limit, but if a team wants to go over it there’s a toll rather than a sanction.

Private equity executive Steve Pagliuca, who owns Italian club Atalanta and co-owns the Boston Celtics in the NBA, said that such a framework could be worth looking at in European football. “It’s something they should consider”, adding that the experience in the US sport with luxury taxes and salary caps had made sure that “it’s fair and everybody has a shot at winning a title”. Pagliuca called for salary caps in football at the same event two years ago.

Fight back against regulator

The spectre of a new independent regulator and the growing number of legal cases in football have left the Premier League in a state of “complete paralysis”, according to Crystal Palace chair Steve Parish. Uncertainty about the impact a new watchdog will have had made it far harder to find consensus on some of the questions facing the sport.

And English clubs have their troubles too. Nottingham Forest, owned by Greek shipping tycoon Evangelos Marinakis, may have the big advantage of Premier League broadcast revenues, but chief executive Lina Souloukou cautioned that financial regulation could work against the club’s efforts to maintain this season’s remarkable showing. Forest are third in the table, competing for a spot in the lucrative Champions League.

“It’s really important to understand the purpose of regulation,” Souloukou said. “Are we really solving a problem or are we actually sometimes artificially creating a rule to block investment?”

But Premier League chief Richard Masters rejected the idea that decision making at the league had ground to a halt. “The Premier League feels like the wind in its sails rather than being paralysed,” he said.

Players at breaking point?

The question of whether the demands on players have reached breaking point became a topic of debate after research from the FT data team showed that the number of minutes played per season and the distances travelled per game have barely budged for top flight men’s footballers over the past 20 years. Instead, it is the speed at which players move and the number of times they pass the ball in a single game that have soared. Matches are simply more intense rather than more frequent.

Even so, former Italian international Giorgio Chiellini - now an executive at Juventus - said the calendar was “completely full”. “What is not easy is to find a solution in which all the stakeholders are happy. What I think we should do is to at least sit at the table and try to figure out something that could work better.”

Away from the top leagues

The football arms race is that much harder when you compete in a smaller league. And that’s why clubs often have to part not just with playing talent, but key staff too. Feyenoord Rotterdam had to bid farewell last summer to Arne Slot. Now at Liverpool, he looks increasingly likely to win the Premier League at the first time of asking this season.

“The median income for our whole league in the Netherlands is approximately the same as for one club in the Premier League,” said Feyenoord Rotterdam boss Dennis te Kloese.

Of course it doesn’t help when your league is busy shooting itself in the foot. In Ligue 1, where clubs are projected to lose €1.2bn this season, Olympique Marseille chief Pablo Longoria lamented the state of play, and called for the game’s decision makers to come together to plot a way forward.

“How is a league so competitive, with so much spectacle, big stadiums, a huge pipeline of talent, so [badly] commercialised?” Longoria said.

The Pink Un’s chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch has been taking a closer look at the current travails of Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Manchester United in his weekly data-driven column.

“On the surface and given his business record, Ratcliffe might have seemed a sensible choice. But his strategy so far suggests a fundamental misdiagnosis of the club’s problem. Rejuvenating ailing chemicals companies is about streamlining industrial processes and trimming fat. Rejuvenating a dysfunctional football team requires fundamental change.”