The Political Economy of Football V2

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 ...