The Political Economy of Football V2

The 17 th century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes defined the state of nature as a war of all against all.  This is what looks like happening on football.  As rival fans relish the prospect of Manchester City playing in the non-league, clubs in the Premier League and outside it try to work out how much compensation might come their way. What sanctions should be applied to City are a matter for the relevant decision-makers, but I am interested in the consequences for football mote generally.   I am going to post separately on the somewhat neglected geopolitical dimension. One Premier League owner told the New York Times that it would be wrong for just the current top-flight teams to split the pot equally. Why, he argues, should a club such as Coventry City, who were not in the Premier League at all from 2009 to 2018, receive a financial windfall, while those including West Ham United, Southampton, Stoke City and Leicester City, all now outside of the Premier Leagu...

The Friedkin Group (TFG) is open to a full sale of Everton as it seeks external investment in the Premier League club.  The New York Times reported in September that Everton’s American owner was looking for fresh investment into the club. The idea had been to find strategic investors who could help push the club forward through a minority sale, but sources with knowledge of the situation, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships, said a sale of TFG’s majority stake is now also being considered. TFG is only open to selling full control of Everton if it is convinced the new owner is the right person or group to take the club to the next level. The Houston-based group is completely happy to hold onto and support the club for as long as it takes for such an owner to appear. Despite the openness to selling Everton less than two years into its ownership, TFG has a feeling of pride at stabilising the club and putting it in a position to be attractive to a buye...

The events at Manchester City have led to some strange reactions, but the prize must go to Simon Jordan on Talksport who has suggested that the Premier League should be disbanded. We need to remind ourselves that the Premier League is one of England's few successful products, providing soft power around the world.   The clubs I support are in the Championship and the third tier of the non-league, but I enjoy seeing some of the world's best players compete in the top flight.  It should, however, be seen more as a branch of the entertainment industry rather than a sporting contesrt One of the difficulties with bringing this unhappy episode to a reasonably prompt close is that so many actors are involved apart from the Premier League itself: The Football Association The Department of Culture, Media and Sport and Lisa Nandy as secretary of state The prime minister HMRC The independent football regulator (whose credibility is said to be at stake, but in many ways it is above h...

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...