The Political Economy of Football V2

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...