Simon Kuper is an outstanding football journalist who has co-authored one of the best books on the economics of football. So it is interesting to read his controversial views on the Manchester City affair in the Financial Times.
He is not saying that City should not be sanctioned if, at the end of the process, it is established that they have broken the Premier League's rules. But he does think the 'misguided' rules should themselves be scrapped.
'Owners should be free to spend their own money on football. Their funding has made the Premier League better and more competitive. English football has a different problem: brutal regimes and people owning clubs.
The English game has been uniquely successful at attracting foreign buyers. Foreigners own the vast majority of Premier League clubs.
Some — notably Sheikh Mansour and the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who owned Chelsea until 2022 — put their own money into football, especially in the era before restrictions tightened.
Coupled with the boom in TV rights and sponsorship since the 1990s, owners’ funding has made the Premier League the world’s richest and best football league.
It’s a domain of English excellence that pulls in tourists, supports an estimated 104,500 jobs, boosts British soft power, has helped improve England’s national team and makes life more fun.
Spendthrift owners have increased the competition for trophies. Chelsea and City only began winning after Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour splashed cash.
Well-funded upstarts took on the game’s aristocrats — Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal, the clubs that have won the most English titles.
If the league’s financial rules had more bite, they would be damaging.
Had they succeeded in limiting Abu Dhabi’s spending, City couldn’t have become competitive, and the clubs with superior revenues — United, Liverpool and Arsenal — would have dominated. That would have suited these clubs’ American owners, who are in football to make profits — that is, to take money out of the game.
Football should prefer owners, like Mansour, who want to put money in.
The league says its spending restrictions make clubs financially sustainable, but it worries too much about that. Football clubs are extraordinarily sustainable.
Almost every English professional club that existed in 1926 still exists today — unlike most companies of 1926.
True, many small clubs have had spells in administration, but they almost invariably survive. The only Premier League club to enter administration since the league’s 1992 creation was Portsmouth in 2010. It’s now doing fine.
We know what happens when a big league rejects rich owners. Germany’s is second rate even though the country has Europe’s largest economy and a world-class football tradition.
English football should welcome donors, just as charities, universities and museums do.
But it must tighten one rule: the Owners’ and Directors’ Test, previously called the Fit and Proper Person Test.
This rule is supposed to stop bad actors from buying English clubs. It doesn’t. Mansour’s United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, whose sovereign wealth fund is the majority owner of Newcastle United, have dire human rights records, while Abramovich has close links to Vladimir Putin.
Admittedly almost all British institutions have welcomed brutal regimes, but there is a limit: the government blocked an Abu Dhabi-backed bid for the Telegraph newspaper. Football, an inessential leisure activity of great symbolic importance, can thrive without foreign states or their rulers or proxies owning clubs.
The Premier League lets undesirable owners buy clubs, seemingly for sports washing purposes, and merely restricts their spending. It should screen for fit and proper owners, then encourage them to burn fortunes on funding brilliant football.'
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