The Political Economy of Football V2

As one of the world’s most prominent sports teams, it’s no surprise that FC Barcelona has dozens of companies lining up to associate with it. Partnerships range from headline sponsors Nike, Spotify and Philips Ambilight to local cava producer Codorníu via toolmaker Stanley and Malaysian lender Maybank.   Those commercial partners get to sell their wares to Barça’s vast fan base and bask in the reflected glamour of the club that gave us Lionel Messi. In return, they get cash. Earlier this month, Barca made a curious addition to its partnership team sheet: Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP). The previously unknown crypto company will be the club’s “official blockchain technology” partner for the next three years. “This new sponsorship deal, in a cutting-edge area of technology, is yet another example of FC Barcelona’s leadership in the commercial field,” the club said when announcing its ZKP tie-up. Yet, despite access to Barça’s digital channels and hundreds of millions of fans —...

Defeats are always difficult to accept at Liverpool, a club where expectations are enormous but the last two have been humiliations, in front of their own crowd, at Anfield, where the fate of all managers (or a head coach in this case) still tend to be determined, regardless of what people are saying on the internet. Frustration has been aimed at players and the person leading them but, so far, it has not manifested into the kind of groundswell where Arne Slot’s position has been questioned loudly enough to influence decisions at executive level. Some of his critics have suggested that Slot benefited from inheritance. All of the regulars in the squad last season were, after all, bought in the Jurgen Klopp era, but it seems ridiculous to use winning the league against Slot, particularly when Klopp was unable to achieve the feat with exactly the same group of players.  There are no indications that Liverpool, or more specifically, their owners, Fenway Sports Group, which is hea...

The final battle to secure ownership of Championship club Sheffield Wednesday is set to feature six bidders, as administrators prepare to name their preferred option in the next two weeks. Wednesday have been in administration since October 24, when former owner Dejphon Chansiri, a Thai businessman, marked the end of a 10-year reign with an ignominious exit from Hillsborough. Five formal bids have now been tabled in the last week, with the expectation of another still to come.   Among those still in the running are U.S. businessman John McEvoy and former Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley. The latter’s opening bid, in the region of £20million, has not met the administrators’ desired threshold of £30m, but at least two of those other suitors’ bids have. Multiple sources, granted anonymity by the New York Times to protect working relations, do not currently consider there to be a clear frontrunner in a process that is now likely to go beyond the initial target date of next Frid...

The replacement of PSR by SCR by the Premier League from 2026/27 may seem to be a highly technical matter: indeed it is.   It needs someone with the forensic skills of the Swiss Ramble to unravel what it all means for the competition and individual clubs.   I recommend subscribing to his Substack page to get the full analysis by the Zurich-based football finance guru.  Even so, I had difficulty in getting my head round some of the complexities, but here are some highlights. First and foremost, PSR and SCR differ in what they measure. PSR evaluates a club’s overall profit by including all revenues and costs, while SCR focuses specifically on on-pitch spending. Under PSR, clubs were assessed based on their financial performance over a rolling 3-year period, whereas the SCR sets clear spending limits for each season Compliance is monitored in-season as well as at the end of the season, allowing for earlier intervention if a club is breaching the rules. This s...

Chelsea understandably feel constrained by having a smaller stadium than London rivals Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham.   Match day revenue is smaller and there is little opportunity for the kinds of alternative uses pursued by Spurs. The possibility of Chelsea building a new stadium at Earl’s Court has hit a setback after an alternative plan for the land was approved by one of the councils involved.   Personally I never thought it was viable. At a meeting on Wednesday night, Hammersmith and Fulham council approved proposals for a development on the site of the old Earls Court Exhibition Centre which will include a mix of new homes, retail and hospitality, and workplaces. The plans are led by the Earls Court Development Company (ECDC). The land had also been mooted as a potential site for a new stadium for Chelsea, who are looking at future options to develop or move away from Stamford Bridge. The ECDC’s plans do not include a football stadium. Hammersmith...

From next season, Visit Rwanda will not appear on the sleeve of Arsenal’s shirts.  The club announced that they will end their eight-year partnership with the Rwanda Development Board in June 2026. Many Arsenal fans will be relieved to see the association with Visit Rwanda conclude, with the relationship coming under considerable scrutiny due to the Rwandan government being accused of serial abuses by multiple human rights groups. Rwanda’s backing of M23 militia in neighbouring Congo has amplified those concerns. A recent survey among the Arsenal Supporters’ Trust showed that more than 90 per cent of respondents wanted the partnership to end, with 67 per cent voting to negotiate an immediate exit from the deal. A further 23 per cent were prepared to wait until the contract’s expiry next summer. An early termination was never particularly likely for Arsenal — extricating themselves from the Visit Rwanda agreement would have been incredibly complex, as well as po...