The Political Economy of Football V2

Finance and tech companies have piled into Premier League club sponsorship this season after a ban on gambling operators appearing on the front of shirts opened up some of football’s most valuable advertising space to new bidders. Betting firms have featured on the front of more than half of Premier League shirts over the past two seasons, but a ban agreed by clubs in 2023 came into effect this summer, prompting teams to find new deals. L Lynsey Pennie-Douglas, head of UK client strategy for Nielsen Sports, told the Financial Times that the changes amounted to “a genuine reset” for the sponsorship market. “Over the past decade, the value of that real estate has risen dramatically,” she added. For clubs outside of the league’s so-called big six — Arsenal, Manchester City, Liverpool, Manchester United, Chelsea and Tottenham — the average value of front-of-shirt deals has grown from £3.4mn in 2016-17 to around £9mn a year for the new season, according to Nielsen. Crystal Palace have s...

For years, Coventry had lived a charmed life in the top flight, pulling off a few dramatic escapes either side of a glorious FA Cup success in 1987.  I knew someone who spent a season with the club writing a book in the anticipation of relegation: they stayed up. But by May 2001, making the short trip to Aston Villa for their penultimate game, they needed a minor miracle.  It didn’t happen, but fans hoped they would soon return. Those next 25 years saw three relegations, one administration and, worst of all, two periods of exile from their own city, forced to play their home matches in Northampton and Birmingham due to a bitter rent dispute between Coventry City Council, which part-owned the stadium, and SISU Capital, the hedge fund that bought the club in 2007. Sky Blues fans had more than their fair share of setbacks For a time, Coventry became the ultimate illustration of English football’s need for governance reform: playing in front of meagre crowds 35 miles away in N...

Although the team I support Is not in the top flight, I enjoy the quality of the Premier League.  My wife takes a probably common position when she insists that football is limited to the Premier League, La Liga and the Champions League. Yet this successful global product is in danger of devouring itself by becoming less competitive. In 18 of the 33 Premier League seasons to the end of 2024-25, the club with the largest wage bill won the division (including six years out of the last eight); the second-highest payer has won it nine times, the third-highest four times and the fourth-highest on one occasion. Only once, with Leicester City’s title in 2016, has a club outside of the top four payers won England’s top tier since 1992. At their core, the different (financial) SCR rules (Premier League and Uefa) do have one through-line: they limit club spending on the above costs to a set percentage of relevant income, which in the Premier League’s case amounts to annual turnover plu...

By pushing boundaries in commerce and technology, Jeff Bezos has become the third-richest person on the planet — as of Wednesday, Forbes’ real-time online calculator estimated his fortune to be $267.4billion.  Bezos has lost $1.6bn since the markets closed on Tuesday.  An astronomical sum, but loose change to Bezos, and ultimately typical of the way water flows in the extreme world he inhabits. The volatility of the markets helps explain why Bezos has targeted Liverpool for investment.   He needed to analyse only the profits the club’s owner has made from selling a chunk of its assets to him to realise that high-end English football is a safe place to spread a small proportion of your money if you can afford to stick around over a long time. Fenway Sports Group bought Liverpool in 2011 for around $470m. Fifteen years later, it has sawn off around 38 per cent of the club to the consortium that includes Bezos for around $2.7bn.   With a new television rights deal t...

Premier League clubs are on course to break the record for transfer spending this summer as they hire and fire managers at an unprecedented rate, underscoring the increasingly cut-throat economics of the world’s richest football league. With 12 days before the transfer window closes, the 20 clubs in English football’s top flight have spent a combined €2.7bn on transfers ahead of the new season, which kicks off this Friday evening. Spending is running ahead of the rate of last year’s record summer transfer window, when Premier League clubs had spent €2.6bn at the equivalent point, according to data from Transfermarkt. The outlay also exceeds the €2.3bn cumulatively spent by all of the clubs in Italy’s Serie A, the German Bundesliga and La Liga in Spain this summer. This summer’s biggest deals include Chelsea’s €138mn purchase of Morgan Rogers from Aston Villa and Manchester City’s €135mn deal to sign fellow England international Elliot Anderson from Nottingham Forest. Chelsea ha...

David Sheepshanks’s beloved club used to be run by those colourful  bon viveurs  John and Patrick Cobbold, the brothers who said their idea of a crisis was running out of white wine in the boardroom. Sheepshanks has shared his memories with The Times as he publishes his autobiography.  He has survived bowel cancer. When Sheepshanks took over as chairman in 1995 he ended decades of the Cobbolds’ benign dynasty. He tells a story of a game against Arsenal when the Portman Road boardroom was stocked with six bottles of gin, six bottles of whisky, six bottles of white wine, six bottles of red wine, and six sausage rolls. By the end of the day most of the booze was long gone but there were still five untouched sausage rolls. “And Patrick Cobbold held an inquest as to who the hell had eaten the one sausage roll.” “Ipswich was a beautifully run club. But if I draw an analogy in the nicest possible way, it was sort of like a golf club. It was all quite staid and traditional. I...

The value of English football’s biggest clubs is spiralling.  The new investment attaches a valuation of around £5.5bn to Liverpool, eclipsing the 2024 arrival of Sir Jim Ratcliffe into Manchester United, where a 25 per cent stake had valued the club at £4.3bn. The figures are stretching beyond what most industry experts — such as Forbes and Sportico — consider to be the value of these clubs. International advisory firm Football Benchmark, another to compile annual assessments of Europe’s biggest clubs, valued Liverpool at between £3.9bn and £4.2bn in its 2026 rankings, with Chelsea listed at between £2.5bn and £2.7bn. More than £3.1bn was distributed centrally among the Premier League’s 20 clubs last season, almost double the £1.63bn handed out in the 2015-16 campaign. It means the biggest clubs, including Liverpool, can now expect to generate annual revenues north of £700m, with aspirations to eventually follow Real Madrid beyond the £1bn mark in the years to come. Matchday r...

The buy out of the minority owners at Chelsea should enable the club to be run more smoothly.   Long-term challenges remain, notably whether to redevelop or replace Stamford Bridge to boost matchday revenue. No agreement is expected imminently, but the sale would provide a form of resolution to long-standing tensions among Chelsea’s owners while also potentially easing the regulatory pressure that Walter is facing in the United States. None of the principal parties are commenting, but it is very difficult to view this development as unrelated to Mark Walter’s unexpected sale of the LA Lakers to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger in a deal that valued the NBA franchise at $12.5billion (£9.2bn) last week.  That news — just 14 months after Walter had bought a controlling interest in the Lakers from the Buss family at a then-record $10billion valuation — broke against the backdrop of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice into the 66-year-old billionaire’s bu...

This week, Liverpool’s success on the pitch translated into a huge return for Henry’s Fenway Sports Group. The club, which carries little debt, has been valued at more than $7bn in a stake sale to a group of investors led by Amit Bhatia, the son-in-law of steel tycoon and billionaire Lakshmi Mittal. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin are backers. Will McDonough, founder of merchant bank Corestone Capital, made the introductions that led to the deal. Talks accelerated during the World Cup. A key moment came when Henry and Bhatia met at Zero Bond, a private club in New York, and built their rapport, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The powerful consortium has bought around a third of the club and could increase its stake over time.   The valuation sets a new record for a football club, surpassing the $6.3bn enterprise value ascribed to Manchester United when Sir Jim Ratcliffe bought a 25 per cent stake in 2024. There is a growin...

US financiers Todd Boehly and Mark Walter are in talks to sell their stakes in Chelsea Football Club to majority owner Clearlake Capital, according to the Financial Times.  Any deal would potentially help to resolve long-running tensions among the Premier League club’s ownership group, which acquired it for £2.5bn in 2022 when Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich was forced to sell in the wake of sanctions imposed on him following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since buying Chelsea, Boehly and Walter’s side of the consortium has clashed with Clearlake over strategy. While Clearlake owns more than 60 per cent of Chelsea, it shares joint control and equal governance of Chelsea FC with Boehly, who chairs the club. The talks come after years of on-and-off negotiations between the two sides, but it was not yet certain that a deal would be struck, the people said. The revived negotiations also come as Walter has sought to sell other high-profile assets as his business empire f...

Sheffield United’s former owner United World has warned current owners Helmy Eltoukhy and Steven Rosen that they will lose control of the team if they fail to pay the £35million ($47million) it is claimed they still owe for the Championship club.   United World also claimed there is also a “real prospect” of a points deduction for Sheffield United this season. The warning comes in a statement issued on Monday, two days before United World’s petition to wind up COH Sports Bidco Ltd (CSBL) — the company Eltoukhy and Rosen set up in 2024 to buy Sheffield United — is heard in a London business court on Wednesday. United World, owned by Saudi royal Prince Abdullah Bin Mosaad bin Abdulaziz bin Al Saud, filed the winding-up petition in early July, two weeks after a “board update” appeared on the club website that said the South Yorkshire-based team had a new “parent company”, 1919 Partners LLC. The club announcement continued by saying the Delaware-based 1919 Partners “sits at ...

Greenock Morton have sought to reassure supporters that although they face financial challenges they will not forfeit matches:  https://gmfc.net/club-update-16-08-26/ The club has been winless since March and has been reliant on teenagers brought in from school to fill the benches. East Kilbride's manager who own the Black Rooster chicken chain has offered to sponsor some shirts for the Championship side at £200 a go. One of Scotland's oldest clubs, Greenock Morton went into administration early in the current century and were relegated to the 3rd division/

Optimistiaeth yn yr awyr yn Abertawe I was surprised when one of my granddaughters announced that she had discovered her inner Welsh woman despite not speaking a word of Cymraeg.   I was even more surprised when she applied for a job at Swansea City given that she has no interest in football.   She didn’t get it, but she soon landed a similar backroom finance role at a firm of solicitors.   She is now completing on an immaculate three-bedroom property with garden and parking for a figure in the low £100ks.  Meanwhile her cousin has moved Into a two bedroom property in Oxford costing over £300k. What follows draws on analysis by the Swiss Ramble and far more detail is available on his Substack page. There’s been little for Swansea City fans to get excited about in recent seasons, but there is just a hint of optimism in the air this summer.   The initial 2-1 win away at Stoke should boost morale.   Perhaps most excitingly, Swansea have part...

The Sunday Times magazine carried a long article yesterday on Arsenal including a rare interview with manager Arteta and other key figures at the club.  It was clearly a public relations exercise designed to put the club in the best possible light ahead of the new season, fair enough.   However, it did contain some interesting statistics and comments for the neutral (I should mention that my stepdaughter and her husband are Gooners). 'Following last season's triumphs, analysts expect a 15 per cent bump [in revenue] for Arsenal, pushing the club beyond £790m.  That would place them firmly in the global financial elite ...it would make Arsenal third in the world behind the mighty Real Madrid and Barcelona.'  [The actual placing would depend on how much PSG grew their revenue]. The article points out that there are now four Basque managers in the Premier League: Arteta, Emery at Aston Villa, Iraola at Liverpool and Alonso at Chelsea.  The Basque population is ...

The consortium including U.S. billionaire Jeff Bezos that has purchased a minority shareholding of Liverpool will hold the option of buying a controlling stake in the club per the terms of the agreement with current owners Fenway Sports Group (FSG). And sources on both sides of the deal have confirmed to The New York Times there is a mechanism that could see the consortium purchase a controlling stake in the club in the next 12 months. Those sources stress, however, that the language around this element of the transaction does not constitute a commitment, so it is merely an option that could lead to further investment as opposed to something that is set in stone. As part of the deal, FSG will continue to be majority shareholders in Liverpool and are retaining operational control of the club, with sources telling  The Athletic  on Friday that there will be no change to the leadership or day-to-day running of the Merseyside club.

The UK’s financial watchdog has fined and banned a British financier over bids he made to buy a bank and Reading Football Club, during which he falsely claimed to own a €200mn bond portfolio.  Paul Taylor, who has been involved in several large deals over the past three decades, “acted dishonestly and with a lack of integrity” during both sets of negotiations, the Financial Conduct Authority said on Friday, fining him £489,000.  Taylor, a former bricklayer turned financier who has previously been linked to the Qatar royal family, made “false and misleading statements” while he was chief executive of the London-based firm Blue Horizon Asset Management, according to the FCA. He has also been barred from working in financial services. In December 2023, during negotiations over the £37mn purchase of a UK bank, Taylor supported his position with documents claiming he was the ultimate beneficial owner of a €200mn bond portfolio, the FCA said. The claims triggered an exclusivity ...

The British-Indian businessman Amit Bhatia leading leading the deal to buy a third of Liverpool does not possess the profile of his fellow syndicate members Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder of Facebook. He is the one, however, with a background in English football. He was involved with the fan advisory board, supporters’ groups and was chairman of QPR in the Community Trust. It was through those connections that he is said to have developed an understanding of what football clubs mean to people, something that will soon be put to the test again. The announcement last month that he was transferring his shareholding in QPR, a clear sign that the discussions to buy into Liverpool were progressing, produced something of a rarity in modern football. There were a slew of positive messages about Bhatia on social media rather than simply opprobrium. This was despite Bhatia’s promotion to QPR chairman in August 2018 failing to ...

  British-Indian businessman Amit Bhatia is to become Liverpool’s new vice-chairman and take a place on the board in return for a minority stake in the 20-times English football champions.  He is to be joined on an expanded board by Elaine Saverin, the wife of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, and Bryan Baum, who is representing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos rather than Bezos becoming a board member himself. The transaction documents provide options and flexibility for how a relationship may evolve over time, which effectively means that Bhatia would be in the driving seat to purchase a larger shareholding should FSG wish to sell more of the club in the future.  For now, FSG will retain majority ownership and there is to be no change in the day-to-day operation of Liverpool. The transaction is not a direct capital raise for the club, or an indication of a change in transfer strategy.  The deal remains subject to approval from the new Independent Football Regulat...

John Henry just cashed in. A group of investors backed by Jeff Bezos has put a $7bn valuation on Liverpool Football Club. Amit Bhatia — son-in-law of steel tycoon and billionaire Lakshmi Mittal — a Bezos-backed fund and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin are buying more than 30 per cent of the English Premier League team. It’s a huge return for Henry’s Fenway Sports Group, which bought Liverpool for about £300mn in 2010 when the club was in crisis. Shrewder still, considering Henry bought Liverpool five years after the Glazers took control of Manchester United for £790mn in a leveraged buyout. The new shareholders say something about the future of Liverpool and elite football. They’re globally minded, have deep pools of capital, with insights into key geographies and business trends. Under Fenway, Liverpool’s revenues surged from about £184mn in 2010-11 to north of £700mn in 2024-25. But Premier League clubs aren’t going to grow by fixating on their home market.   Broad...

A brochure detailing the sale of Leicester City and all its assets has been sent to potential investors. Global investment bank Citigroup has drafted the brochure, seen by  The New York Times , titled Project Lineup, which details Leicester’s assets, including its women’s team, academy, King Power Stadium and the £100million Seagrave training base they moved to six years ago.   Belgian sister club OH Leuven is also featured in the list of assets available. A source close to the process has told  The Athletic  that the Srivaddhanaprabha family, Leicester’s owners, are looking for $300m (£222m) for the entire portfolio, but a deal is more likely to be done at closer to $200m (£148m) due to the club’s recent drop into League One — English football’s third tier — and heavy recent losses. Over the last four accounting reports since 2021, Leicester have recorded losses of £92.5m, £89.7m, £19.4m and most recently £71.1m as the club has slipped from the top eight of th...

Bruno Guimaraes’ £75million move from Newcastle United to Arsenal gives more supporting evidence to several recent themes. At 28 years old, the sizeable outlay on the Brazilian midfielder continues Arsenal’s ploy of spending big money on players who can immediately improve their first team. A year ago, their roughly £185million in fees on players aged over 24 was the most ever spent on that cohort by an English club in a single season. A first Premier League title in 22 years comprised proof of concept. In the 12 years to the end of June 2025, Newcastle generated £352million from player sales. A reasonable estimate, even after sell-on clauses and solidarity payments to former clubs, has them matching that figure inside the past 12 months. Such statistics say lots about where Arsenal and Newcastle are as clubs, but the Guimaraes deal also underscores what is fast becoming a Premier League motif: the richest teams are ever more frequently plucking the best players from the rest of ...

  Much interest has been generated by a group of wealthy investors wanting to take a stake in Liverpool FC.   Why would they want such a stake and would the club benefit? Bhatia, a former co-owner of Championship side Queens Park Rangers, is joined by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and co-founder of Facebook Eduardo Saverin as part of the group interested in purchasing a stake in the English Premier League side. Bezos, 62, is one of the richest people in the world, best known as being the founder of the largest e-commerce company, Amazon.    Bezos launched Amazon from his own garage in 1994 after he had left his role at New York Investment Bank D.E. Shaw, where he had risen to senior vice-president. It was initially an online merchant of books before growing into the global technology company it has become today. He stepped down as the company’s chief executive officer in 2021. Bezos is also the owner of the Washington Post and founder of space technology company...

Derby County have been left stunned after Saudi Arabian boxing powerbroker Turki Al-Sheikh backed out of a proposed deal to buy a majority stake in the Championship club at the 11th hour. The Times revealed in May that Al-Sheikh, an adviser in Saudi Arabia’s royal court who serves as the head of the General Entertainment Authority, was in advanced talks to purchase Derby from David Clowes, who saved the club from liquidation in 2022. Al-Sheikh satisfied the Independent Football Regulator (IFR) and the English Football League (EFL) that his wealth was separate to that of the Saudi Public Investment Fund and was cleared to complete the deal last week. However, in an about-face that shocked Derby chiefs, Al-Sheikh abruptly called off the takeover on Monday, five days before the beginning of the season. A statement from Derby read: “The club can confirm discussions with Lion Sport [the group headed by Al-Sheikh] to buy a controlling interest in Derby County will no longer proceed...