The Political Economy of Football V2

I don’t know which UK TV channels the Swiss Ramble can watch in his Zurich fastness but in any event, he may not have seen a recent edition of Have I Got News For You in which it was joked that Manchester City would be deducted 45 points which would put them two points ahead of Tottenham Hotspur. I should hasten to add that I have two good friends who are Spurs fans and I feel their pain. The Swiss Ramble knows how to read a set of accounts and has an unrivaled data set on football finances.   He admits that this analysis of Spurs is ‘very detailed’ which is saying something for him.   Subscribe to his Substack page to get some fascinating detail.    But here are some highlights. Tottenham splashed out a hefty £312m this summer, the major signings being Sandro Tonali from Newcastle United for £92.5m, Mateus Fernandes from West Ham for £85m, Savio from Manchester City for £75m and Jan Paul van Hecke from Brighton for £52m, as well as Tosin Adarabioyo from Chelse...

In my opinion discussion of Manchester City's conduct has often bordered on the hysterical and it is the financial and economic press (principally the FT and The Economist) that  have attended to the geopolitical dimensions that might ultimately be influential. I was therefore interested to read an Op Ed piece by Stephen Bush in the Pink 'Un yesterday.   I must admit that I was quite surprised when I saw Bush on Sky's The Wrap the other night - not the fact of his being there but that he seemed to be to the right of the senior political correspondent of the Daily Telegraph.    He needs to remember that his paper endorsed Labour in 2024! It has to be noted that in large part the article is a pop at Andy Burnham and makes the arguably valid point that what 'Manchesterism' amounted to was selling the city to global investment capital. Bush argues: 'The fact that Manchester City have been found guilty of 114 of the 115 charges brought against them by the Premier Lea...

UK tax authorities probed Manchester City in 2018 over whether it used complex arrangements to underpay tax, nearly a decade before the club was found to have breached the Premier League’s financial rules, the Financial Times has exclusively revealed.  HM Revenue & Customs opened a civil investigation into Man City’s tax affairs in the wake of the publication of a trove of leaked internal emails by Der Spiegel in 2018, according to people with knowledge of the situation. The emails prompted a Premier League investigation, launched in December of that year, into whether the club had manipulated its accounts and disguised funding from owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family, as commercial revenue. Last month, an independent commission found that Man City had artificially inflated its financial position by more than £900mn between 2009 and 2018 by arranging “sham” commercial deals. The club allegedly paid former manager Roberto Mancini thro...

Crystal Palace have hired Raine Group as they seek investment in the club at a valuation of £900million.  The investment banking firm Raine will handle the process as they did when John Textor hired them to sell Eagle Football’s 43 per cent stake in the club, concluding a deal in July last year with the New York Jets owner Woody Johnson. Palace — owned by chairman Steve Parish, Johnson and fellow U.S. businessmen Josh Harris and David Blitzer — are looking for ways to fund the redeveopment of the club’s Selhurst Park stadium and any external investment would likely contribute towards that. Parish, told The New York Times   last week that starting meaningful and major work on the stadium had taken longer than anticipated and that was in part due to finances not being in place yet, instead being redirected towards a playing squad which saw 11 new arrivals in the summer.  “We’re looking at different ways of funding, but that will be in place,” he said. “We’re workin...

As a supporter of another Championship club, I get mildly irritated by the way in which The New York Times coverage of the highly competitive division focuses on Wrexham.  But I suppose I am just jealous. Is Wrexham a model for other clubs?  Or does it represent an unwelcome Disneyfication of football (soccer)?   In the wake of events surrounding Manchester City, the answer might be a bit different from a few weeks ago.  But, as Simon Kuper has argued, why not let foreign owners spend as much as they like on a franchise, particularly if the club is located in an area with economic and social challenges. Wrexham may be just 50 miles from Manchester, the so-called capital of the north, but it is a different world. The trend of Americans taking over British football is long established — two-thirds of Premier League clubs are now at least part-owned by US investors. But Wrexham’s new owners added an improbable twist. Using a documentary series that mixes an underdo...

Don’t think that it’s just in England that clubs are instigating legal action against each other.  In Spain the tensions between metropolitan Spain and Catalonia form the geopolitical backdrop to tensions between Real and Barca.  My great-granddaughter is taught in Valnecios which is really a variant of Catalan which in turn is closer to French than Spanish. UEFA says it has received “a substantial amount of documents” from Real Madrid in relation to Barcelona’s payments to a former Spanish referees chief.   European football’s governing body released a statement on Thursday confirming the documents will be “assessed” by its “ethics and disciplinary inspectors” as part of an “ongoing investigation”. Payments totalling €8.4million (£7.2m; $9.4m at current rates), made by Barcelona between 2001 and 2018 to former Spanish referees committee vice-president Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira, first came to light in February 2023. Back in June 2023, UEFA’s investigators decided...