Moneyball

It is not an original statement to say that money is corrupting football, but for a long time I thought that this perspective came from a naïve view that football could somehow be held separate from the wider economy.

Footballers are the key actors in what has become a multi-billion pound industry. One may regret this ‘perversion’ of sport (as some people see it), but as the most talented people in their industries, it seems only normal that the top footballers earn their fair share of the revenue generated.

The world’s top CEOs earn hundreds of millions of dollars per year, because they have highly sought-after skill-sets and there is a limited pool of people to draw from; it is a function of supply and demand. Meanwhile the best player in the best team in the best league in the world, Erling Haaland, earns a measly £19 million per year. Inter Miami are reportedly going to pay the legendary Lionel Messi $54 million per year, but it is likely they will earn that back in shirt sales alone.

It may seem shocking that there is so much money in football, but this is a market-driven phenomenon that is a direct consequence of consumer demand. It seems hypocritical to watch football on television and deplore the impact of our subscription fees on the sport. Right?

OK, football fans may never have explicitly acquiesced to the pay-walling of top-flight football, but it is hard to argue that the money generated by selling football rights to the highest bidder has spoiled football as a spectacle. When a group of the top English clubs formed the breakaway Premier League in the early 1990s, Sky Sports helped to market it in the most tantalising manner for football fans; the advertising material extolled its peerless coverage, and certainly the quality of football (not to mention the production values, the pitches and the stadia) has continuously improved.

However, as sociologist Anthony King says, the explicit goal of the Premier League was to entrench the top clubs' position by preventing them "from losing income to the lower leagues". There is no doubt that it has been a success in this respect, with the immediate consequence of the formation of the Premier League being a reduction of the number of teams capable of winning the top trophies.

When I expressed misgivings about Sheikh Mansour’s acquisition of Manchester City in 2008, a friend challenged me; if we block the acquisition of clubs by new, super-rich owners, he argued, aren't we just enabling the usual suspects to protect their dominant position? Why shouldn't other clubs have an opportunity to upset the apple cart? When Sir Alex Ferguson referred to Manchester City as “noisy neighbours”, he unwittingly demonstrated the condescending attitude of ‘old money’ to the nouveau riche; he was Tom Buchanan sneering at Manchester City’s Jay Gatsby for his newfound wealth.

The dominant teams have always changed from one generation to the next, and the number of clubs actually capable of winning the league at any given time is always fairly small; however, in my opinion, there is a difference between the quasi-oligopoly that has always existed in competitive football and the current crop of elite clubs. In the early days of professional association football, the dominance of certain clubs was a function of their large population centres, club culture, institutional intelligence, and learned success. Although some historically successful clubs like Preston and Huddersfield found it difficult to maintain their early success when professional football became a bigger industry, it was possible to imagine a new club from a large town disrupting the status quo. The dramatic shift in club ownership from wealthy local benefactors to foreign billionaires (and later, nation states) – investing functionally infinite sums of money that distort the competitive environment and the market itself – means this is increasingly unlikely.

Sheikh Mansour obviously wasn’t the first super-rich owner. As early as 2007, historian Matthew Taylor wrote about the replacement of “so-called ‘traditional’ directors who viewed the club as a ‘public utility’” by “entrepreneurs who were interested in football purely as a profit-making business.” The original ‘sugar daddies’, Jack Walker at Blackburn and Jack Hayward at Wolves showed to a limited extent that heavy investment can buy success, but the two Jacks were really just an extension of the historic model. It wasn’t until Roman Abramovich rolled up in London and, to paraphrase David Dein, started “firing £50 notes” at his Premier League opponents that we saw a real paradigm shift.

In just under 20 years, Abramovich spent over £2 billion on hiring and firing players and managers, and it is debatable whether he ever expected to break even. According to journalist Matthew Syed, Abramovich acquired Chelsea as a very deliberate act of self-preservation, believing that Vladimir Putin was less likely to come after the owner of a high-profile British organisation.

One might reasonably ask whether the profit motive should be the right objective for a sports organisation, but the obvious consequence of an owner spending their (virtually limitless) resources with no expectation of a return on investment was rapid inflation in transfer fees and player wages, creating a vicious circle whereby clubs were forced to pay more for players to remain competitive, thereby also inflating season ticket prices and the overall cost for match-going fans. A situation that fans didn’t agree to, even implicitly.

Witnessing this unhealthy dynamic, and apparently concerned that this price war would ultimately bankrupt certain teams, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) rolled out its financial fair play (FFP) plan at the start of the 2011–12 football season. Fast forward to the 2020s and not only has FFP not prevented run-away transfer price inflation, it has accelerated in part due to the acquisition of certain European clubs in moves widely seen as ‘sportswashing’ operations; following the aforementioned takeover of Manchester City (whose parent company also owns stakes in clubs in the USA, Australia, India, Japan, Spain, Brazil, Uruguay, China, Belgium, France and Italy), Qatar Sports Investments (QSI, which is a subsidiary of Qatar's sovereign wealth fund) acquired French club PSG in 2011; in the meantime the two clubs have spent nearly €1.5 billion each on transfers alone.

PSG (Paris Saint-Germain), Inter Milan and Juventus along with five other clubs have since been penalised for not complying with FFP rules, but the horse has already bolted; FFP seems more likely to achieve what the Premier League was never able to: consolidate the advantage of a few super-rich clubs. The money invested pre-FFP had already distorted the market so much that the dynamics are now impossible to reverse.

It wasn’t a huge surprise when Manchester City were accused this year of 115 breaches of the Premier League's financial rules (Der Spiegel had reported on Manchester City's alleged financial malfeasance back in 2018), but the charges seem all the more credible given that the Premier League itself brought them. They are effectively impugning the sporting integrity of their own competition, so they must believe that allowing Manchester City to flout the rules is more damaging than airing their dirty laundry in public.

It was in this context that, in 2022, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) led a consortium of partners to take over another Premier League club: Newcastle United. Somewhat surprisingly, Newcastle United (for now) has taken a somewhat prudent approach to investment despite their new-found riches, although they did predictably follow Manchester City's lead in signing a shirt sponsorship deal with a Saudi event management firm. Again, the most shocking aspect of this deal is that they are being so brazen about it considering the charges Manchester City are facing. Newcastle clearly must feel confident that they are not in breach of the regulations... or that they will be able to get away with it.

This is a shame, but it is just more of the same; the upshot is that the Premier League will just boast another super-rich team, hoovering up all the best talent on the continent and making the chances of another Leicester City even more remote. What really gives me pause are more recent developments, starting with the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s acquisition of a majority stake in four teams in the Saudi League: Al Nassr, Al Hilal, Al Ahli, and Al Ittihad. I wonder about the sporting integrity of a competition where four different teams are effectively controlled by a single entity, but if that’s the way the Public Investment Fund (PIF) wants to run their football league – leaving aside philosophical issues around how a sovereign wealth fund should be spending the wealth of the country and its people – that's their prerogative.

However, the Saudi league doesn't exist in a vacuum, and while this doesn’t actually qualify as multiple ownership in the traditional sense (because the clubs are in different leagues), it is not hard to see the risk of conflicts of interest. And so it came to pass that Newcastle Utd sold Allan Saint-Maximin to Al-Ahli for a reported €27.2 M despite reports earlier in the year that Newcastle would struggle to sell the player for a reasonable fee based on the length of his contract, his fitness issues and his on-field performances.

It has also recently emerged that the PIF has billions of dollars under management by Chelsea’s majority shareholder Clearlake Capital; meanwhile, Chelsea have mysteriously seem to have found willing buyers in Saudi Arabia for Edouard Mendy, Kalidou Koulibaly and Hakim Ziyech. While there is nothing irregular per se about these transfers, it does look a lot like the PIF protecting its investment in Clearlake by helping its partner offload some distressed assets; simultaneously helping Chelsea escape FFP breaches while also bolstering their domestic league with some high-profile signings.

It is not unreasonable to assume that some of these deals got done because of existing relationships and lines of communication between the different organisations, and I suspect that some of the reports are just clickbait, but the fact that Chelsea and Newcastle are not subject to normal market dynamics when trying to sell unwanted players gives them a clear advantage; in short, this system of trading between clubs with the same owners enables the clubs involved to bypass FFP regulations in a way that makes it difficult to prove any wrongdoing.

Of course, none of this necessarily guarantees success; one need only look at the issues that Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea have faced over the last 10 years despite heavy investment. Manchester City are an incredibly well-run club, and Newcastle would do very well to imitate their success, but it is hard to escape the feeling that this new ownership model sounds the death knell for the Premier League as ‘the most competitive league in the world.’

Maybe undermining the Premier League is even the endgame for the PIF. Personally, I think it's a bit of an own goal in terms of sportswashing; how can you be credible when your practices are so obviously contrary to norms around fair competition? But I also feel like I'm in the minority. And anyway, in a few years’ time, when the Saudi league is competitive and Al-Nassr are facing off against Newcastle in the Super League© final, no one will remember this.