The General Football Thread

[11Drogba 2,000]

 

[NikkiCFC 7,952]

 

[Jase 43,479]

Some live football to watch from the K League!

 

[Vesper 28,818]

SPFL directors hit back at Rangers, Hearts face drop with restructure off

Statement dismisses Rangers complaints as ‘self-serving’

Proposals for three-tier league system are abandoned

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/may/08/spfl-directors-hit-back-at-rangers-and-self-serving-stewart-robertson

Directors of the Scottish Professional Football League have snapped back at allegations raised in a dossier issued by Rangers and urged clubs not to back calls for an independent investigation into the handling of a vote to abandon this season.

Rangers, who last month called for the suspension of the SPFL’s chief executive and legal adviser, distributed an extensive document to fellow league members on Thursday as they seek to win the 75% support needed at Tuesday’s extraordinary general meeting to trigger an inquiry. Rangers raised a series of questions over the conduct and governance of the SPFL, whose board was firm in its recommendation the season vote should pass.

A letter signed by eight of the SPFL’s nine directors – Rangers’ managing director, Stewart Robertson, was a notable absentee – said: “The vast majority of the SPFL board members continue to have complete confidence in our chief executive and legal counsel.

“Eight of the nine members of your board of directors continue to believe the demand for an open-ended, hugely time-consuming and expensive investigation to be wholly unnecessary, inappropriate and contrary to the interests of the company and Scottish football at what is such a critical time for every club’s survival. We therefore urge you to vote against the resolution at our EGM on Tuesday.”

Robertson, who has said he and Rangers have “lost confidence” in the individuals running the organisation, was also a target for his fellow directors. “It is enormously frustrating to see one of our number launch baseless, damaging and self-serving attacks on the board,” read the letter. The directors branded the current saga as an “unwelcome, self-serving distraction”.

snip

 

 

the SPFL is in shambles

I think the EPL needs to seriously look into bringing in Celtic and Rangers into it

all the rest of the Scottish teams are jokes

hell even Hearts looks to be going down, and Hibs are shit

[NikkiCFC 7,952]

This is good for us.

[Vesper 28,818]

Pele vs Maradona

Diego Maradona and Pele are inarguably two of the great players in the history of the game. But they also have an eternal rivalry, punctuated by arguments and bitterness, and sustained by ego and vanity. In this video, James Montague charts the chronology of their unique, decades-long relationship.

[Vesper 28,818]

Are big clubs too big?

https://theathletic.com/1942252/2020/08/09/champions-league-manchester-united-city-liverpool-real-madrid-psg-barcelona-bayern/

There are two standout quotes in the film Any Given Sunday.

There is the one you will find first on YouTube, the one coaches dream about, the one that has been copied and parodied and will be played in television obituaries when Al Pacino’s fight for the inches in life is finally over. And there is another, much shorter, much simpler one, one that sums up why superstars like Pacino and Cameron Diaz make movies about the National Football League.

“On any given Sunday, you’re gonna win or you gonna lose. The point is, can you win or lose like a man?”

Drama, jeopardy, unpredictability. They are the spice of life, right? And how you react to that uncertainty is the test and the entertainment.

Released in 1999, Any Given Sunday is not just a film about American sport — it is the defining concept of American sport: built-in and refreshed competitive balance. Every year, a third of the teams in the major sports in Canada and the United States start the season thinking they have a shot while the rest will be thinking, “We could be them if we play our cards right”.

How many Premier League teams will turn up to pre-season training thinking they can win the title? How many of the rest will think they could be in that happy place in a summer or two? In the Bundesliga, La Liga or Serie A? In Scotland?

Over the past 20 years, six different clubs have won the Premier League, compared to 13 different World Series champions. Five teams have won the Bundesliga but there have been nine different NBA champions. Four teams have won La Liga while 12 have lifted the Stanley Cup. There have been four different Serie A winners, a dozen Super Bowl champions since Super Bowl XXXV. Twelve different teams have won the MLS Cup since 2001 but in Scotland next season, one half of the Old Firm will be trying to stop the other from winning 10 in a row.

Every one of those five European football leagues had fewer different winners over the last 20 years than they had during the previous 20 years and it is a similar story for the continent’s biggest prize, the Champions League. There were 15 different winners between 1980 and 1999 but just 10 clubs reached the pinnacle of European football over the next 20 seasons.

Among Europe’s five richest leagues — England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain — only the French top tier bucks this trend, with eight different teams winning the championship in the last 20 years, the same number of different winners as there were between 1981 and 2000. But even in Ligue 1, variety is declining, with Paris Saint-Germain winning seven of the last eight titles.

UEFA published its 11th annual club benchmarking report in January and it once again flagged up European football’s “polarisation”, with the “big five” leagues generating 75 per cent of the game’s combined income and the top 30 clubs being responsible for more than half of the total. These clubs also account for most of the wage growth, transfer income and transfer spend.

Portugal’s Porto are the only team not from a “big five” league to win the Champions League in the last two decades; five different teams from the Dutch, Portuguese, Romanian and Yugoslav leagues lifted the trophy in the 1980s and 90s.

Like his predecessor Michel Platini before him, UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin said the report “highlights a number of threats to continued European football stability”, with “globalisation-fuelled revenue polarisation” top of the list. Spotting the issue has never been a problem for UEFA. Doing something about it, on the other hand… well, let us not be unkind.

Not that UEFA has a monopoly on saying it really must do something about that stable door. In its 23rd Football Money League report, also published in January, financial services firm Deloitte noted that the “big five” leagues provided all of the clubs in the knockout stages of last season’s Champions League, as well as all of the clubs in its rich list.

It also observed “the continuing emergence of mini-leagues within the Money League as the largest revenue-generating clubs pull away”. Barcelona, top of the pile, earned 4.1 times as much as 20th-placed Napoli, up from an equivalent ratio of 3.8:1 a season before.

And these gaps have not just opened up in esoteric rankings like Deloitte’s list — they are growing in domestic leagues, too. Barca now earn six times as much money as Spain’s fifth-richest club, Sevilla. It is a similar story in France and Germany. The financial gaps are tighter in England, with its “big six”, and Italy, where Juventus have won nine in a row, but they are stretching, too.

“We trust that key stakeholders of the game will not underestimate the importance of unpredictability in results as a key driver of long-term and sustainable value,” wrote Dan Jones, the boss of Deloitte’s sports business group, in his introduction to the report.

So are the big clubs too big? Could football get… boring?

For European Leagues, the organisation that represents the interests of the professional leagues in 29 countries, the answer appears to be “yes”.

“The essence of exciting and valuable competitions is having sporting merit as the deciding factor in winning or losing, which leads to competitions filled with matches where unpredictable outcomes are possible and where the excitement for the fans lies in the possibility that their side could triumph,” European Leagues managing director Jacco Swart tells The Athletic.

“Financial and sporting polarisation is growing and competitive balance is decreasing in both international and domestic competitions. The trend is clear and the alarm is there.

“We can’t run the risk to kill the dreams and the passion of fans if we want prosperous football in the future. The vast majority of professional football in Europe is played in domestic league competitions, which use their position to benefit football, society and the economy. We must focus on reducing polarisation and improving competitive balances.”

But those who study football for a living are not so sure.

“I’m convinced that competitive balance matters long term,” says Sheffield Hallam University’s football finance expert Dr Rob Wilson.

“Dominance of a single team, domestically or in Europe, will lead to boredom in the market. Attendances will wane and that will have an impact on broadcasting. Just look at the TV deals in Germany, Spain and Italy, where market concentration exists. It’s one of the reasons why the Premier League got so much bigger.

“I think the North American model, from a regulatory point of view, drives competitive balance and provides a stronger model long term. It’s why salary caps and unequal TV distribution could be used to enhance things domestically.

“The main issue is that the bigger Premier League clubs have lost sight of what made them big: competition against the smaller teams. It will be a disaster if the financial gap continues to increase. If it does, then there is a real chance that an EPL 2 emerges with some of the bigger Championship clubs. Maybe that would be the best result longer term?”

Dr Nicolas Scelles, the leader of Manchester Metropolitan University’s sport business, management and policy programme, agrees that the big are getting bigger but disagrees with the notion that they have got too big.

“The big clubs are far bigger than the other clubs but maybe not too big so that we will get bored and start watching something else,” Dr Scelles explains.

“They have been more and more dominant since the Bosman ruling of 1995 (which gave players the right to move to new clubs at the end of their contracts without their old clubs receiving a fee), yet fan demand for men’s football has grown over this period. Research shows fans are interested in big clubs with star players, in addition to competitive balance or intensity.

“The good thing with men’s football is that even when you have such big clubs with star players, other clubs can still hope to do better than them, either over one game, like when Osasuna beat Barcelona recently, or when Ajax beat Real Madrid 4-1 in the Champions League last season, or even over a season. Leicester in 2016 is probably the first example to come to mind of that or Montpellier (title-winners) in France in 2012.” 

And Dr Scelles is right in that there is little evidence, in terms of viewing figures, fans are switching off because they know how the story ends.

“Recent research finds there is no link between competitiveness and audience sizes,” says Julian Aquilina, an expert on sports broadcasting for Enders Analysis.

“It is likely that fans simply want to see the best players — it’s a bonus if they are evenly distributed between teams. Evidently, many fans are perfectly happy to watch a ‘super club’ take on a lesser team and probably more so than watching two evenly-matched lesser teams.

“The way in which people follow football is obviously changing but any decline in audiences is probably more attributable to the increasing cost of subscriptions, plus competition from other media for people’s time, as opposed to waning interest in the game.”

So, there is little evidence that polarisation is a problem yet — certainly not in Britain, anyway — but even Dr Scelles can see the potential for trouble.

“A key question is whether we will reach a point where upsets will not happen anymore and, if so, what would be the impact on fan demand, revenue distribution across clubs and the sustainability of European men’s football as we have known it for many years,” he says. “A European Super League would, of course, not enable such upsets to happen.”

Leeds Beckett University’s Dr Alexander Bond thinks how you feel about the growing concentration of attention, money and success in European football depends on your age.

“Are the big clubs too big? Yes, if we think about the way football used to be, when it was more of a cultural and social institution,” says Dr Bond. “But in the modern setting, the answer is no, because the competitive balance has been eroded throughout Europe over the last two decades but interest in the game hasn’t fallen away. In fact, there is growing demand.

“So traditionalists will say yes but younger fans don’t appear to care and even the smaller teams in the top leagues aren’t struggling.

“The US model is underpinned by a completely different talent-distribution system, with the draft, and then you have the other mechanisms, like hard salary caps, on top of that. I suppose you could say that Financial Fair Play is an attempt at a hybrid system but it hasn’t really worked.

“If football tried to engineer greater competition, it would have to be European-wide or the best players would just migrate to wherever the free market still reigned.

“The majority of fans seem to be OK with the status quo. There is a minority, the so-called ‘hipster’ fan, who have gravitated towards anti-capitalist clubs like Dulwich Hamlet or St Pauli, but society, in general, has shifted towards a more capitalist and hyper-commercialised approach to entertainment. That has been the story of English football since the big clubs broke away in 1992, a move waved through by the Football Association.

“There’s a generational divide now. I’m a Sunderland fan, which might explain why I’m a bit miserable about it, and I’m pretty turned off by Premier League football these days. I actually prefer the away days in League One because football is more about communities at that level.

“That is why the death of Bury last year was such a travesty. Look at the impact that had on the area. And it happened at a time when Premier League clubs had £1.6 billion in cash in their bank accounts. I’m not saying it’s their responsibility to rescue Bury but that club would have been saved if some of that money was in the FA’s coffers and not theirs. But change won’t come unless the fans change.”

That is certainly how it feels to fans of Bury AFC, the club born from the ashes of Bury FC’s sorry demise.

“As with everything, folks vote with their feet and with the money they spend,” Bury AFC board member Marcel de Matas tells The Athletic. “The likes of Leicester winning the league was the exception that proves the rule and the demise of clubs in the lower echelons of football is a direct result of rampant commercialism.

“The more global interest, the more fans, the more money, the more success… this drives the likes of (former Bury FC owner) Stewart Day and others at poorly-supported community clubs to spend extortionate levels on mediocre players to stand a chance of success, even at the lower levels.

“Most teams are not happy to play at a level commensurate with their income. Player salaries alone outstrip revenue. In essence, if we stick with the current model, football in the lower leagues is unsustainable, particularly in provincial towns like ours close to big cities with major teams. I think there are many more stories of administration, bankruptcy and liquidations to come.”

Bury’s big neighbour is Manchester, home to United, a club that has topped Deloitte’s global rich list 10 times since 1996, and City, last season’s domestic treble-winners, a team transformed by the wealth of a sovereign state.

Ian Coyle is Bury AFC’s secretary but used to support Manchester City before switching to Bury “because of the cost and lack of interaction with the fanbase”. He is now busy preparing for his new club’s first season in the North West Counties League Division One North, the 10th tier of English football.

“It seems to me that the game for smaller clubs is not to ‘do a Leicester’: that’s a once-in-a-century achievement. For smaller clubs, the target is a Burnley or a Bournemouth; to get to the top table and survive there for a few seasons, beat one or two of the big boys and have an occasional sniff at European football.”

Chester FC, 50 miles southwest of Bury, are 10 years further down the road than Bury AFC as they were the phoenix club that emerged from Chester City’s winding-up. They now play in the sixth-tier National League North but know all about life in a land of giants.

“The big clubs are definitely getting bigger,” says Jeff Banks, Chester’s fan engagement director. “There is no bigger example than at present because of the coronavirus, whereby clubs like ourselves are desperately trying to raise funds. We have no income and cannot continue unless we see people being allowed through the doors but at the top level, clubs are in the fortunate position that they can play without fans inside grounds and still survive.

“Located where we are is also difficult but we’re not alone there, as you have the same with Greater Manchester-based clubs who probably, like us, have many fans who are a United or City fan, too. At Chester, we have fans who follow those clubs, as well as Liverpool and Everton fans.

“The main difference to the big clubs is we can offer something different: the bond that has been made during testing times. We have seen players playing for free and contributing to our fundraising, too; even then they know there is a possibility they may not be at our club next season. Would that happen at a top club?

“We consider ourselves as underdogs with what we’ve had to go through and, whilst we don’t anticipate being anywhere near the Premier League anytime soon, we have a dream which fans can relate to, which is a return to the Football League, and however long that takes, it’s still a realistic dream to have.”

Perhaps that is the reason why fans have not switched off. European football, with its laissez-faire economics but open leagues, provides more opportunities for relative success — be it European qualification, avoiding relegation, a cup run or climbing up the pyramid — than North America’s “just win, baby” ethos.

“I think the key word is relevant and what fans want is as many relevant games as possible,” says Charlie Marshall, the chief executive of the European Club Association, the group that lobbies on behalf of Europe’s 230 or so richest clubs.

“We know a contest when there is something at stake is a very different ball game to a summer friendly or meaningless end-of-season fixture. The real question is whether we want to try to engineer that competitive balance into the structures we’ve got or if we are open-minded enough to evolve those structures in order to deliver competitive balance?

“Do we try to squash the successful teams down and boost the unsuccessful, with heavy regulatory interventions, or do we think about new structures, new formats, that will deliver more of the relevant games we want to see?”

Marshall knows this kind of talk will immediately set breakaway league warning systems beeping and flashing — and debates about an NFL-style European Super League populated by the teams in Deloitte’s Money League come around as often as scandals at FIFA, rows about the offside rule or managerial vacancies at Watford — but he rejects the idea that is the only logical outcome of a quest for relevance.

“A really simple idea that works are play-offs,” he says. “Take the Premier League as an example. You have a contest at the top for the title, one for the European places, and then another a bottom.

“But what about the teams that finish between sixth and 17th? I don’t think fans of Premier League clubs are particularly bothered that each place is worth £2.5 million but what if finishing sixth really mattered more than finishing seventh or eighth? The Belgian and Greek leagues have moved to end-of-season play-off systems and play-offs are pretty popular in the US!”

The Champions League, the competition that has provided so much of the rocket fuel that has allowed the elite to distance themselves from the field, resumed this week with 10 teams still in it. All of them are from one of Europe’s five richest leagues and all bar Atalanta and RB Leipzig are in the top 20 biggest-earning clubs. In fact, five of Deloitte’s top six are still involved.

“Are you not entertained?” was the question posed by Gladiator, another film about sporting contests with just enough uncertainty to keep fans guessing.

For football fans the answer appears to be yes — but only if the barbarians get to win the battle of Carthage every now and again.

[Vesper 28,818]

The ‘(Club X) Way’ delusion

https://theathletic.com/1973440/2020/08/05/arsenal-tottenham-west-ham-liverpool-way-premier-league/

Football fans are deluded. We are deluded that our team will win — when they won’t — and that it doesn’t matter when they’ve lost — when it does. Those delusions can be tiny and particular (a throw-in that’s ours, when it isn’t) but they also exist as giant, comforting myths. None come bigger, warmer and more mythical than your club’s Way.

Deciding quite who qualifies for a capital-W “Way” and who doesn’t probably requires a doctorate in football history, plus some immaculate objectivity. The Athletic has neither of those but, guided by a few invested voices, we can attempt to navigate through one of the vaguest footballing jungles of all.

The Arsenal Way, the Liverpool Way, the Tottenham Way, the West Ham Way… are these self-defining badges of honour or self-sabotaging burdens still being carried from decades ago? Before we get into that, we should establish something: what the hell is a Way?

Broadly speaking, that’s quite straightforward. Most of these Ways, from the footballing hotbeds of the north east to the bragging-rights battles of north London, are founded on subtle variants of one thing: playing attractive, attacking football. The curiously English, low-key awe for Getting the Ball Down and Playing (a concept most famously shoved down the FA’s throats by Ferenc Puskas and Hungary at Wembley in 1953, and now reserved almost exclusively for televised FA Cup third-round giantkillers-elect, as if their default setting should be to hoof the ball repeatedly into a nearby tree) persists in 2020, nearly 30 years after the nadir of “can we not knock it?!” and “hit Les over the top!”.

Mercifully, clubs’ claims over their footballing Ways rarely become a turf war with other traditionally self-proclaiming passing sides. Ways seem to exist mostly for internal, commercial pride rather than philosophical point-scoring.

The latest club to publicly declare their Way were Arsenal, having strung together no fewer than 18 passes* between 10 players** to provoke and then penetrate Manchester City’s press in an FA Cup semi-final at Wembley before scoring a goal that, ultimately, didn’t look like it needed 18 passes and 10 players at all.

(*What’s the minimum number of passes in a goalscoring move for a social media team to start counting them? Fifteen seems about right, so Arsenal are safe.)

(**Meanwhile, spare a thought for Ainsley Maitland-Niles, who remains in redundant monochrome at the bottom as the only Arsenal player not to touch the ball, apparently not yet fully licensed in The Arsenal Way™️)

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There can never be a Way without someone happy to perpetuate it through the ages. For many clubs, that process began with influential managers. Take the Tottenham Way, for example. “You can trace that lineage back through Spurs’ history to a guy called Peter McWilliam,” explains Alan Fisher, who sat on White Hart Lane’s famous Shelf for 50 years and is now undertaking a PhD on the changing relationship between the club and its supporters.

“He was a Spurs manager before and after the First World War. He brought success to the club and his coaching centred around attacking, flowing, passing football.” Then, once the Tottenham Way was truly woven into the club’s fabric by Bill Nicholson’s double winners of 1961, it became the responsibility of supporters to pass the concept down through generations.

“It’s part of the romantic notion,” says Chris Paouros, a Spurs season ticket holder since 1980. “That is the romance, the hope that fills you as a football fan.”

It’s at that point when ownership of the Way starts to become a little hazy. Alex Hurst, chair of the Newcastle United Supporters Trust and editor of the True Faith fanzine, is already halfway through a heavy sigh by the time The Athletic has finished pondering the perennial sky-high “expectations” at St James’ Park. Somewhere in the club’s recent history, the Newcastle Way — whatever it is — has been turned back upon them.

“Yeah, it’s just not true. It doesn’t bother me so much from other fans but from the football media. Newcastle being rubbish isn’t new. It’s pretty standard. Why would so many people turn up year after year, decade after decade, to support the team if they had such high expectations that keep getting dashed almost without fail?

“It’s massively patronising. It’s also weaponised by the current owner: in one of his rare interviews (with the Daily Mail last summer), he talked about stuff like, ‘I’ve finally got them a Geordie in Steve Bruce’. Well, that’s not how anyone thinks, Mike. Literally no one.”

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If you’ve been around long enough — and caused enough hysteria or heartbreak among your fanbase — the chances are you have a Way.

Liverpool? They have a Way, which was briefly a “groove”, but is well on track to becoming a Way again. The Manchester United Way spent a good 50 years cultivating itself, then being lamented in the immediate post-Ferguson years before Ole Gunnar Solskjaer — a first-hand witness of the Way — came roaring back as manager to verbally reinstall the Way with 18 months’ worth of “this club” and “this shirt” and “these fans” and “these nights”.

In his fast-track mission to Just Get It, a straight-faced Solskjaer even went as far to demand his team “get the ball in the box and the strength of the Stretford End will suck the ball in”, which — as all keen Way students will know — sounds eerily like the old Liverpool Way.

If the Arsenal Way felt clear-cut with those 18 passes and 10 men (Maitland-Niles just watching), it’s not. It is, of course, the complete opposite to the grand old outlier of the original Arsenal Way, built on successful teams who were perceived as dour, defensive and pragmatic — most notably under George Graham — and whose fans literally, gleefully sang about winning 1-0.

Elsewhere, the increasingly vague but comforting notions of stylish football abound.

Fisher cites a quote from Danny Blanchflower, captain of Nicholson’s double-winning Spurs side, as the basis of the Tottenham Way.

“The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning. It is nothing of the kind. The game is about glory. It is about doing things in style and with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.”

“There’s something about style,” says Paouros. “In the 1990s, Gerry Francis was our manager. I remember chatting to my uncle, who said: ‘It’s never gonna last. He’s not a Spurs manager. His clothes are ill-fitting and he’s got a bad haircut’. He looked a bit dishevelled and that wasn’t how we operate.” The Newcastle Way continues to wrestle with how it is depicted outside of the north east and Hurst is keen to rein in the caricature of Kevin Keegan’s mid-1990s Entertainers.

“There’s a massive affection for Keegan and Bobby Robson’s teams. I think Keegan’s teams are a little bit harshly regarded. The team of 1995-96 had the fifth-best defensive record but it’s characterised as this joke, with defenders ending up ahead of forwards. It wasn’t like that. It comes from outside more than anything.”

Sue Watson is the chair of the West Ham United Independent Supporters’ Association and admits the most consistent pillar of the West Ham Way is… inconsistency. “We’ve been up and down, and it builds a bond. Sometimes I watch them and I think, ‘Oh my god, you’re absolutely on fire’ and then I go to the next game and I think a kids’ school football team could do better.

“For my generation, the West Ham Way was fast-paced, passing, on the ground, control; a team playing forward to score. It depends on which generation you’re from: some will cynically say the West Ham Way is to go up and down with five relegations.”

From the proudly monolithic footballing Ways of Manchester United and Tottenham, the emphatically flip-reversed Arsenal Way, and the charmingly inconsistent West Ham Way, we arrive at perhaps the most unfathomable Way of all: the Chelsea Way.

“I think, largely, these ‘ways’ are myths,” official club historian Rick Glanvill tells The Athletic. “They help define a relationship with a club’s fans because the fans buy into it and say, for example, ‘Well, he’s not our type of player’.”

After a history of an almost, dare we say it, Tottenham-esque preoccupation with “style”, the Chelsea Way has latterly given way to 25 years of erratic but very successful short-termism. That modern era has seen a meta-Way of various short-lived Ways: after all, the watertight first season under Jose Mourinho (15 league goals conceded) was followed just five years later by Carlo Ancelotti’s Chelsea side setting a Premier League goalscoring record of 103.

Finally, 14 managers into the Roman Abramovich era, Frank Lampard arrived last summer to begin ushering in a new Chelsea Way that, with its promotion of young talent combined with unpredictability at either end of the pitch, looks alarmingly like a deluxe version of the West Ham Way. It might appear as if there isn’t an overarching mentality at Stamford Bridge but Glanvill insists each of these short-lived mini-chapters are, in fact, all part of a consistent Chelsea Way.

“Chelsea’s model, if you like, is to use brilliant coaches as far as the message still works and, when it stops working, to replace them with another brilliant coach. A formative tradition of Chelsea FC is to spend to accumulate. Since 1905 to the present day, Chelsea have been criticised for being a ‘moneybags’ club. In their early years, the biggest crowds in England were coming to Stamford Bridge and that money was ploughed into buying stars to fill the stadium.”

As a newspaper headline from the 1920s declared, “To grow strong at any cost is the maxim of Chelsea FC”. Perhaps the Chelsea Way isn’t so erratic after all.

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If the average (Club X) Way was born in the 1920s, came into footballing flower sometime between the 1950s and 1970s, only to be reappropriated as in-house marketing slogans by the 2010s, what do the 2020s have in store?

The era of schadenfreude — in which celebrating your rivals’ mishaps is just as much of a sport as celebrating your own glories — has brought some second-hand Ways into the mainstream — it’s no longer how the club identifies itself but how the outside does it for them.

Take, for example, the playful concepts of “Typical City”, a regular reminder of the blue half of Manchester’s historical habit of shooting themselves in the foot. Or “Spursy”, the definitive universal footballing put-down. Both are valid sub-Ways of the Manchester City and Tottenham Ways, particularly because they are stuck in an endless cycle of being thrown at their fans… and then being ironically reclaimed by them.

And that’s the inherent pomposity of having a Way: if you don’t declare one for yourself, somebody else almost certainly will.

In 2020, Ways are more mobile than ever before. They belong more to managers than clubs. The Liverpool Way, you sense, has been usurped by Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool while, more jarringly for the traditionalists, Jose Mourinho has set about shoehorning the Tottenham Way into his own, almost against its will.

“He’s just about winning,” says Paouros, before calling upon that Blanchflower quote once more. “He doesn’t care if the other side die of boredom.”

But does it matter if these Ways no longer apply — or even if they never have?

“Football support is about myths,” says Fisher. “This is what we do. We don’t support Tesco or Sainsbury’s. We support our heritage, a way of being. We congregate with people who believe the same things we do. That is the essence of identity and belonging for football supporters.”

[Vesper 28,818]

Nicola Sturgeon warns Scottish football could be shut down after latest breach

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/aug/11/scottish-football-warned-of-halt-in-season-after-coronavirus-breach

Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, has warned Scottish football matches could be shut down after she condemned Celtic and Aberdeen players for breaches of coronavirus safety rules that have led to both clubs having their next two games called off.

The first minister said the Celtic defender Boli Bolingoli was guilty of a “flagrant breach” of the UK’s quarantine rules after he flew to Spain. He returned to his club within 24 hours without self-isolating, and then played on Sunday against Kilmarnock. Last week, eight Aberdeen players broke the sports lockdown rules by visiting a bar together; two of those have since been diagnosed with Covid-19.

Scottish football’s Joint Response Group (JRG) confirmed on Tuesday afternoon that Celtic’s weekend match against Aberdeen along with the two clubs’ midweek fixtures – against St Mirren and Hamilton respectively – had both been postponed.

Sturgeon said: “Some football players seem incapable of living up to their responsibilities. I very much regret that. This is just not acceptable. Every day I stand here asking members of the public to make huge sacrifices in how they live their lives and the vast majority are doing that, and it’s not easy. We can’t have privileged football players just decide they’re not going to bother. So this can’t go on.”

She added: “Let me put this as clearly as I can in language that the football world will understand: consider today to be the yellow card. The next time it will be the red card, because you will leave us with absolutely no choice.”

Sturgeon said she did not want football fans and those clubs who were living up to their responsibilities to “pay the price” of those teams who were ignoring them. She said there had to be very clear penalties imposed by the game on players who broke the rules. “I don’t want the season to be in jeopardy,” she said. “I don’t want people who are not responsible for this to pay the price but we have to be very clear: this situation is not acceptable.”

Sturgeon said Jason Leitch, the Scottish government’s national clinical director, and Joe Fitzpatrick, the Scottish sports minister, had held two long phone calls with the footballing authorities on Tuesday to discuss “how they were going to put their house in order”.

Sturgeon disclosed that news of Bolingoli’s quarantine breach had emerged on Monday during a meeting between Leitch and the managers and captains of Scottish Premiership clubs, organised to underline the Scottish government’s anxieties about last week’s Aberdeen breaches.

Leitch said the Aberdeen and Celtic breaches raised serious questions about allowing the sport to set up “bubbles” which allowed players and staff to remain in much closer proximity than other workplaces. He said he was furious at the Celtic and Aberdeen breaches, since he and Fitzpatrick had worked very hard to persuade Sturgeon the distancing and safety protocols used by clubs justified restarting competitive matches.

“They put at risk principally the health of the population [and] they put at risk the return of elite sport; not just their own sport but golf, horse racing, rugby, swimming, everything else,” Leitch said. “We’ve designed a bubble system because they are privileged. They’re getting to do extra things that the rest of the population aren’t and they have put that at risk.”

Bolingoli said he wanted to apologise to his manager, teammates, supporters, “and so many others for letting them down so badly”. He added: “I am guilty of a major error of judgment. I know what I did was wrong and I know that I must now deal with the consequences.”

A strong statement from Celtic added: “[This] club unreservedly condemns and apologises for the behaviour of the player Boli Bolingoli in travelling to Spain without informing the club and in failing to observe quarantine restrictions. It is difficult to imagine a more irresponsible action in current circumstances and we find it beyond explanation. The club will take immediate action through our own disciplinary procedures.”

“Celtic are in touch with every SPFL club today, and with all relevant authorities, to apologise for the fact that one of our employees has created so much additional difficulty through his actions. All of our playing and backroom staff have been tested twice for Covid-19 since this incident and all, including the player in question, have tested negative. While this comes as a relief to all concerned, it in no way diminishes the seriousness or stupidity of the player’s actions.”

[Vesper 28,818]

Referee punched in face by footballer during London amateur friendly match

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/aug/11/referee-punched-in-face-by-footballer-during-amateur-friendly-match

An amateur football referee was left bleeding after being punched in the face by a player who was sent off during a friendly in London.

Satyam Toki, 28, a father-of-one, said he was unsure whether to press charges after the attack in Acton, which left him with cuts to his face. The attacker, who was playing for Sunday league side Sporting Club de Mundial – based in east London – has not been named but is believed to work in a school.

Mr Toki, a train conductor who lives with his wife and one-month-old daughter in west London, said he had asked the player several times to control his language and stop complaining, eventually giving him a 10-minute sin bin.

“He started walking towards the bench and while walking away he threatened me to see me after the match,” said Toki. “That was the point where I showed him the red card and got punched immediately in the face. I almost lost my vision for a couple of seconds, followed by excessive bleeding.”

In a statement, Sporting Club de Mundial said: “We as a club would like to publicly state that we categorically condemn the horrific actions by one of our players towards the referee.” It added that the player had been “completely removed” from the club, which was formed last year by popular football publisher Mundial.

Police and ambulance workers attended after the Acton attack, which saw the match suspended, but Toki said he was unsure whether he wanted to pursue the incident any further. “It has been reported to the FA and they are dealing with this matter as a matter of urgency,” he said. “I have had the suspect contacting me apologising for his actions and begging me not to press charges as he will lose his job as a school teacher.

“Though he assaulted me I am still thinking about his career and don’t want anyone to lose his job. But on the other side if I don’t press charges in the future he might do the same thing to another referee. Or even to school kids where he is a teacher.”

Wasim Khan, manager of Mundial’s opponents NW London FC, said he was shocked by the violence, but praised his players for gathering to support the referee afterwards. “We respect the referees at this level, they take their time out and without them football doesn’t run. It was just shocking,” he said. Khan added that Mundial had apologised and paid the match fee after the game was called off.

[Vesper 28,818]

I want to preface this by saying I do not give a fuck about Shitty other than the illegal money laundering and then their buying an acquittal with CAS. I truly do not care if they or PSG spend shitloads, and also truly couldn't care less about purist nobs in Germany whingeing on about Leipzig.

Moaning about Man City, PSG and Leipzig is mostly just jealousy

https://theathletic.com/1991254/2020/08/15/man-city-leipzig-psg-money-buy-champions-league/

 

You might have seen it. That familiar shade of red, held up in Rome and Istanbul and Madrid and on all sorts of other European assignments. Liverpool fans have always known how others see their club. The banner shows a picture of their European Cups. Five to begin with, and now six. “No wonder you hate us,” it reads.

In another time, it was Manchester United with so much haughty self-worth they had a picture in their programme showing a skip, directly outside Old Trafford, overflowing with empty cans of silver polish.

Sir Alex Ferguson used to say there was always someone waiting to jump off London Bridge when his team won a football match. And there were times, as they swept up the silverware, when it inspired something bordering on genuine hatred. “There’s a tremendous amount of jealousy towards this club,” was Ferguson’s take. “I don’t understand why.”

It was pretty simple, really. Every team that routinely wins trophies tends to encounter animosity in some form. It is part of football, it is unshakeable and, as Manchester City have found out, the teams at the top are generally obliged to live with it. A haul of 11 major trophies in the last decade tends to make it worthwhile. Or 14 if we include Community Shields, as Pep Guardiola says we should, with the possibility that the biggest and most important trophy of all could follow in the next week.

City winning the Champions League? It feels a little strange even typing those words as someone who can remember covering the club in the old third division, with Macclesfield Town as their local derby, and then the move from Maine Road when nobody even thought about putting a trophy cabinet in the new stadium.

It all makes sense, of course, to picture them as European champions when you think about the money they have spent to reach this point. I will come round to the idea. It’s like watching Joey and Rachel hooking up on Friends… they all seem very happy. It just takes a bit of getting used to, that’s all.

But it’s a real possibility and we can probably guess the way the narrative will turn if they make it past Lyon tonight to join a list of semi-finalists that, more than ever before, reflects the state of modern football.

Paris Saint-Germain, for starters. Some people will look at the team from Parc des Princes and see their shiny kit and Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and their other glamorous names, and consider them a worthy winner of European football’s premier club competition.

Others will see something profoundly depressing in it.

They will see a club, like City, that have been bankrolled on Middle Eastern money for a political purpose. The perception of both clubs is that, if they have a problem, they will throw enough money at it until it goes away. The only real difference is PSG’s wealth comes from Qatar rather than Abu Dhabi, as it does with City, but fundamentally it all comes back to the same thing. The rich ultimately beat the poor, the super-rich beat the rich.

It is old money versus new money. But it also goes deeper than that. PSG versus City in the final, anyone? Roll up, roll up, for what will be billed as the sportswashing event of the year. What a football match it would be. What a line-up of category-A footballers. Just don’t expect all the headlines to be about the actual football.

The volume might be turned even higher if RB Leipzig are impudent enough to put their ribbons on the trophy. Bayern Munich, the most successful team in Germany, had been in existence 74 years before they did it for the first time. United took 90 years. Liverpool needed 85, Barcelona 93 and Real Madrid 54. Yet Leipzig are threatening to do it only a few months after their 11th birthday. And, again, it is tempting to think some of their many critics must be straying dangerously close to the point of spontaneous combustion.

In another sport, or another part of life, it would be described only as a fairytale, a brilliantly uplifting story of what can happen when talented people get together with a shared ambition. “That’s not progress,” one interviewer pointed out to Leipzig coach Julian Nagelsmann after his team had beaten Atletico Madrid in Thursday’s quarter-final. “It’s a rocket launch.”

In football, however, a lot of people don’t like it when the nouveau riche — a term that is rarely used flatteringly — take a position of power. The establishment, in particular.

When Leipzig were “born” as the German branch of Red Bull’s burgeoning sports empire on 19 May, 2009, completing their buyout of fifth-tier SSV Markranstadt, it was eight days before Guardiola won his first European Cup as Barcelona’s manager. It has all happened absurdly quickly. And the backdrop to Leipzig’s story is that, wherever they have been in Germany, there has been hostility.

Now we are told Leipzig are such football pariahs the German football magazine 11 Freunde intends to ignore their semi-final against PSG. “RB Leipzig isn’t a football club, but an imitation,” the magazine says. “It’s a marketing project, established solely for strengthening the Red Bull brand. It never intended on just playing football.”

In football, it appears to be a sin to be successful when you don’t have any “real” history. But is that really fair?

It gets thrown at City, too, and that’s when you know the argument is getting really silly.

No history? City won their first FA Cup 61 years before Liverpool. City’s first League Cup came 17 years ahead of Arsenal. Their first European trophy, the 1970 Cup Winners’ Cup, arrived before any of Liverpool’s. They broke the attendance record for the first time in 1924 and there are 116 years between the first and last of their major honours. Blackburn Rovers are the only club, on 118 years, with a longer span of success.

I could go on. Did you know King George V picked Hyde Road, City’s first ground, when he became the first monarch to attend a football match? That’s history, isn’t it? Or you could go even further back into the news archives to 1902, for example, when City were raising money to help a club called Newton Heath. Because if you know your history, you will know what became of Newton Heath (clue: they changed their name and moved into some place called Old Trafford).

The same was said about Chelsea when Roman Abramovich took control of the club. Chelsea were another plastic new-age club, apparently, even though they lifted their first European trophy in 1971 and had English football’s highest average attendance in 10 different seasons from 1908 to 1955.

There was the famous line from David Dein, then Arsenal’s vice-chairman, that Abramovich “has parked his Russian tank in our front garden and is firing £50 notes at us”. Chelsea, Ferguson said, seemed “hell-bent on ruining football”, to go with his later accusation that City were guilty of “kamikaze spending” and ruining the transfer market for everybody else.

Yet that is hypocritical in the extreme. No other club in England has broken the British transfer record more frequently than United. Ten times, in total. Half of them while a sign for “Ahcumfigovin” (I come from Govan) was hanging on the manager’s wall. Two more while Ferguson was a director.

For a bit of context, Chelsea and City have broken the record a combined four times.

There are so many double standards in football sometimes. Often from the strangest sources, too. Did you see that Wolverhampton Wanderers were one of the Premier League clubs — aka the Gang of Nine — who had written to CAS to ask them to stop City playing in the Champions League while the appeal against their two-year ban was ongoing? That’s Wolves, who have just been punished by UEFA for breaching financial fair-play regulations.

Or how about Jurgen Klopp expressing his displeasure about City winning that appeal and being found — to the obvious disappointment of many people within the sport — not to have cheated the system, after all? Klopp described it as “not a good day for football”. Was it a good day for football when Liverpool paid City an out-of-court £1 million settlement because of the alleged hacking scandal, involving three senior members of Anfield’s recruitment department, that involved City’s scouting system being unlawfully accessed on hundreds of occasions from June 2012 to February 2013?

Unfortunately for City, there are not many people who are willing to stick up for them these days. But I suppose I have a bit of a soft spot for the club, having covered them for 20-odd years.

I don’t often admit it, though, and that probably sums up City’s diminished popularity these days. I imagine it will inspire angry comments beneath this article. I know the reaction on Twitter. I know the frothing, incandescent rage City can inspire. And that’s just some of my companions in the press box.

It is still true, though. I know plenty of good people at the club. I have seen, close-up, the way City embrace their local community. I have watched the entire journey from the old League One. I have laughed at them, and with them. I can still remember the scene on Blue Moon Rising, the 2010 film about City, when they were rattling around a broom cupboard to find some of the things they had won over the years and eventually brought out a porcelain cow. I haven’t forgotten the days when City were so overwrought about United they would not let staff have red company cars.

Blue tomato sauce? That was true, too.

Sergio Aguero’s title-winning goal, with the final kick of the 2011-12 season, is the single most extraordinary sporting moment I have ever witnessed. Kevin De Bruyne is the most gifted passer I have seen in the Premier League. I also know it was a myth that City’s fans enjoyed their status as loveable losers in the lower leagues (there’s nothing enjoyable about losing, home and away, to Lincoln City).

At the same time, I have to accept it was easier to embrace the old City rather than the modern-day version.

Let me tell you a little story, for example, about a man by the name of Mike Corbett.

Corbett was a former bombardier who used to sit in the cabin at the entrance to City’s old training ground and provide the first welcome for visitors. He was old-school. He had tattoos on his hands, a rasping Glaswegian accent and the inside of his cabin was decorated with posters and newspaper cuttings of Ricky Hatton, the world champion boxer and City fan.

It was Mark Hughes, the manager at the time, who asked Corbett to take them down and understand that the new-look City had to conform with a certain kind of image. Corbett was at City for so long that when he was moved out he received a personal letter of gratitude from Cook. But he was still moved out. Today it is a small battalion of security guards on every corner, looking very officious with their walkie-talkies and blazers and dangling earpieces.

“Manchester City has long been perceived as a ‘friendly’ club,” Mark Hodkinson wrote in Blue Moon, published in 1999 and arguably the best book written about the club. “In stereotypical terms, United is your out-of-town hypermarket, faceless, homogenised and shamelessly avaricious, while City is your friendly corner shop, all ‘how are you?’ and ‘nice to see you, love’.”

It was probably inevitable some of that would be lost when the money came in and the club started to expand. City have had to take a crash course in what it took to be a big (or bigger) club and then a superpower. It hasn’t always been a smooth ride. The nice-to-see-you club has become, in the eyes of some, a sticking-up-their-middle-finger club.

And, yes, I’m very aware that if you join up all the dots, it will take us to Abu Dhabi and some pretty hideous things linked to the regime that bought City because they wanted a “proxy brand”, as former chief executive Garry Cook acknowledged in an interview with The Athletic.

Some of City’s critics are experts on the human-rights issues in Abu Dhabi and so knowledgeable on the subject that you have to listen and try to educate yourself. Others… well, let’s just say I’m dubious that so many fans of other clubs have a genuine interest in these politics. It is a handy way to score some points on Twitter. It is a good opportunity to belittle and criticise City’s achievements.

Far more likely, however, is that a lot of this antipathy from rival supporters is because City are richer and more successful than their own teams. Jealousy? Yes, I suspect that’s exactly what it is.

[Vesper 28,818]

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“I can tell you about Koeman from my personal experience. He provided me absolutely nothing” – another happy customer from Big Ron’s time at Everton, in the form of Gerard Deulofeu.

[communicate 2,703]

3 hours ago, Vesper said:

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“I can tell you about Koeman from my personal experience. He provided me absolutely nothing” – another happy customer from Big Ron’s time at Everton, in the form of Gerard Deulofeu.

Barcelona problem is not manager though. Whoever handle player recruitment is the problem. I understand if they are cheap or poor team but not sure Barca is either of that. 

They spend 100 m on griezman which make 0 sense. Get a young winger who make tons of run maybe like richarlison or Werner. Use the rest of the money for a young athletic box to box and you are golden. 

 

[Valdo 583]

Always sad to hear/read such things, hope he recovers soon.

 

[Vesper 28,818]

Exit China, enter the US. Who wants to own a European football club?

https://theathletic.com/1887653/2020/09/23/chinese-america-money-european-football/

Sergio Aguero has made a career out of audacious shots but the selfie he took on October 23 2015, was perhaps the boldest, cheekiest and most lucrative of the lot: Aguero, flanked by Chinese president Xi Jinping and British prime minister David Cameron, all grinning.

President Xi was visiting Manchester City’s Etihad Campus as part of a state visit to the UK and Cameron was in full “Suits you, sir” mode, eager to demonstrate just how open Britain was to Chinese investment. Just over a month later, two Chinese companies, with close links to the state, bought a 13 per cent stake, worth £265 million, in City’s parent company.

Within 18 months, Chinese owners would be in charge at AC Milan, Aston Villa, Auxerre, Birmingham City, Espanyol, Granada, Inter Milan, Parma, Slavia Prague, Sochaux, Southampton, West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers. There were minority stakes, too, investments in stadiums, bumper broadcast contracts and Chinese firms on the front of teams’ shirts around Europe.

As Xi’s predecessor Chairman Mao once put it, the direction of the wind in the world was changing and the east wind was prevailing over the west.

But now, nearly five years after Xi’s visit to City’s football factory, the weather vane has swung around again.

China’s money is blowing home and Europe, not for the first time, needs the New World to fill the breach.

Chinese owners have already sold to Americans at Parma and Villa, and the Chinese investors who popped up out of nowhere at Northampton Town, have popped back again, leaving no trace.

At least their disappearing act did no lasting damage, unlike the abrupt and mystifying decision Wigan Athletic’s former owner Au Yeung Wai Kay took when he cut the Championship side off, condemning them to administration, a fire sale and relegation.

Li Yonghong’s short-lived reign at AC Milan ended when he defaulted on loan repayments to a US hedge fund, while property giant Dalian Wanda Group sold most of its shares in Atletico Madrid and bought Dalian Yifang FC back home instead.

Birmingham City, Reading, Southampton and West Brom are all available to whoever is willing to meet whatever their current owners require to save some face, and Inter’s owner Suning has just seen its broadcast deal with the Premier League ripped up over missing payments from its digital streaming service PPTV.

For European football, the financial equation is simple: China is out, America is in.

“The years from 2014 to 2016 were peak ‘Chinese football dream’ in China,” says Dr Jonathan Sullivan from the University of Nottingham’s Asia Research Unit and a co-founder of the China Soccer Observatory.

“Three major policy reform packages were put forward, designed to revolutionise — industrialise, really — Chinese football at all levels. It was a time of great excitement and was one of Xi Jinping’s projects, with a lot of political will and big amounts of money behind it.

“There were already a fair number of big Chinese companies involved in football, but now more had the green light to get in on the action, whether domestically with the Chinese Super League as international sponsors, media partners or investing overseas.

“But not all the companies rushing in were the most solid or transparent. It is said that some were motivated to invest overseas in order to evade government controls to get money offshore. Others had state owners, or close state links, and were more strategic, investing in clubs near ports and transport hubs.

“Some made sensible investments, with good-looking long-term prospects. Others overpaid, were over-leveraged or didn’t appreciate how much it costs to run a football club. And some were castigated and then legally constrained for making ‘irrational’ investments.”

For Sullivan, the Chinese government’s primary interest in overseas football was the platform it potentially provided for raising the country’s profile as a global player and promoting Chinese brands. Buying foreign clubs did not do much for its main sporting goals of strengthening the China national team, improving public health and building a leisure industry. Once it became clear that these investments were not working as “soft power plays” either, it was time to pull the plug.

“If we fast-forward to today, the football dream has lost some of its momentum,” says Sullivan. “Private companies are seeing their freedom of movement from Chinese Communist Party (CCP) oversight eroded and the pandemic has made everything less certain, including the broader issue of a growing backlash against China in most of the western world.

“So, from a political perspective, there are no incentives to make investments in foreign football, and lots of restrictions and risk.

“This may change. Chinese political winds are changeable. But the pandemic, the deterioration of US-China relations and souring relations elsewhere, the CCP deciding to become more demanding of private firms and domestic economic uncertainties, make football investments overseas not that attractive right now, and for the foreseeable future.”

Peter Stebbings is a sports reporter for the AFP news agency in Shanghai, which makes him the only accredited and dedicated western sports journalist in mainland China.

“As with everything in, or related to, China, it’s a guessing game,” says Stebbings, when asked why Chinese investors are pulling out of European football. “China has definitely not cooled on football but the ambition was always about making China good at the game, not helping anyone else.

“It’s possible those investors naively jumped on the bandwagon, thinking it might somehow buy some goodwill or credibility with the Chinese government. But they misread the signs and later realised their mistake.

“I’m not convinced by the argument it can be linked to worsening relations with some western governments. While there’s a lot of bluster, for example between the UK and China, things are apparently chugging away not too badly in the background, and that includes trade.”

An example of this “chugging away” would be the Chinese broadcast deal the Premier League was able to patch together for this season with Tencent.

In cash terms, it is understood to be worth about 15 per cent of what PPTV promised to pay, once a profit-sharing element is included, but the Premier League is relatively relaxed about the drop as it has already banked half of what PPTV committed to for the full three-year term of its deal and Tencent was the broadcast partner English football’s “big six” wanted in the first place, only for the other 14 clubs to opt for the bigger cheque on offer from the smaller company.

For Stebbings, the real sign that rows over COVID-19, China’s human rights record, Hong Kong or Chinese telecoms firm Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s 5G network have really poisoned the well would be Wolves.

“They’re the one to watch in the UK because their owners are the real deal and have serious money, which is the opposite to Gao Jisheng (at Southampton) and (former Villa owner) Tony Xia,” he says.

“If Fosun start pulling funds and making noises about leaving, I’d say something bigger is afoot.”

David Hornby, vice-president of sports at Shanghai-based marketing firm Mailman Group, agrees.

“This decrease of Chinese investment into European football doesn’t mean the Chinese are less interested in football,” Hornby tells The Athletic. “It’s simply a pivot in terms of where the money is going.

“This is in part due to recent government efforts to restrict large amounts of capital leaving China through international investment into sports teams, particularly football clubs. The investment focus has shifted towards the growth of grassroots football domestically, typically into the development of facilities, training infrastructure and football curriculum.”

A key factor in President Xi’s call for investment in Chinese football was his desire to see a competitive national team at the 2022 World Cup, with a longer-term ambition of hosting, and doing very well at, a World Cup eight years later.

Sadly, national teams are like investments in that they can go up and down. China’s national sides, both the men’s and women’s, have been drifting south for decades. The men’s team is currently ranked 76th, sandwiched between Bolivia and Uganda. A disappointing return for the world’s most populous nation.

Cameron Wilson has been writing about Chinese football since 2000 and is the founding editor of Wild East Football.

“It’s hard to imagine that the worsening of relations between China and Europe is completely unrelated to the withdrawal of investment,” says Wilson. “Investment anywhere is often an indication of which way political, entrepreneurial or wider development winds are blowing and there does seem to be a change in direction recently.

“But I also suspect that in some cases investors may have found out that owning a European club is a totally different proposition to doing the same in China. Fans have to be satisfied, local communities listened to and the pressure to produce results on the park is much greater.

“Outside of bragging rights, there’s not so much in it if they can’t make money out of it. There’s nowhere near the same kind of political brownie points that can be scored in China with city governments when propping up a club.

“But I don’t think the powers that be in China have cooled on football — there is some rational thinking behind some of the development here which is aiming to make it more sustainable. We will need to wait and see where the Chinese money that was going into overseas football is diverted. I’ve a feeling that it won’t end up in China, as many entrepreneurs don’t regard Chinese football as a good investment.”

Some might say the same about European football, of course, but those voices are currently being drowned out in the virtual HQs of family offices, hedge funds, private equity firms and any other variety of sports investor in North America.

“The European football economy is in good shape — its commercial revenues are growing, club valuations are growing, the players’ values are growing, the TV ratings are up,” explains American sports business expert Bruce Bundrant, who has worked for Liverpool and Monaco, and now runs Riviera Sports Marketing.

“American interest in European football isn’t new but it’s ramped up recently because some organisations are struggling and existing owners are trying to get out. Another factor is it’s hard to get into US sport — the valuations are astronomical and minority stakes are rare. But for £200 million, you could buy Southampton, for example. The prices are appealing.”

John Purcell is the co-founder of Vysyble, a London-based financial consultancy that has been analysing football’s finances since 2016.

“We’ve sold a lot of reports in the US, on both coasts, with family offices (firms set up to invest the wealth of rich individuals) quite prominent,” says Purcell.

“But the track record of US investors in British football isn’t that great. Crystal Palace, Fulham and Swansea are three recent examples where American investment has come in, with some fanfare, but has so far failed to deliver much in the way of success or a return on investment.

“Randy Lerner’s experience at Aston Villa is another cautionary tale, as his time at the club was an absolute disaster in financial terms. Villa’s economic efficiency declined every year under his ownership and he appeared to be a good example of what happens when a businessman leaves his common sense in the car park and gets emotional about his club.

“In many ways, (Liverpool’s owners) Fenway are the exceptions. They’re top of the pile now but Liverpool were a basket case when they bought them. The lesson there is they’ve learned from their mistakes and hired the right people for the right jobs. Fenway deserve credit but it’s hard to imagine Liverpool’s success without Jurgen Klopp.”

Steve Horowitz is a partner at Inner Circle Sports, a New York-based “boutique investment bank focused on the global sports industry”, and has been at the heart of some of the more successful North American takeovers in European football. But even he starts his relationships with investors by issuing a warning.

“The first thing I say to any of these guys is, ‘Why would you do this?'” explains Horowitz.

“If you are coming into this industry thinking about returns on investment, go do something else. If you are here because you like competition and want to have some fun, fine, I can help. And if you do it really well and have a bit of luck, you might make some money on the way out, too.

“Look at Liverpool. Those guys are killing it. They paid about £280 million for that club but it’s probably worth £2 billion now.”

Bundrant agrees.

“John Henry and Fenway took five years to get it right at Liverpool, but they didn’t come over thinking they knew everything,” he says.

“They learned that you can’t just plug in American ideas. They stayed, they adapted. European football is tougher than US sports because of the threat of relegation and there’s no salary cap. It’s not for the faint of heart.”

Paul Conway has learned this the hard way. He and his business partners have now bought four clubs in four different European countries — “we have high and lows almost every day” — and they are looking for more.

Having been part of a consortium that bought Ligue 1’s Nice in 2016, Conway was a central figure in the group that bought Yorkshire side Barnsley in 2017 and has since added Swiss club FC Thun and Belgium’s KV Ostend to the portfolio, although France’s Nice were sold, for a tidy profit, to one of Britain’s richest men, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, last year.

“European football is not as professional, from a business point of view, as American sport, but many Americans make the mistake of thinking that must mean it’s easy,” says Conway. “Let me tell you, it’s not. You cannot manage these investments remotely — you have to spend a lot of time on site.

“The upswing in interest from the States is almost entirely driven by valuations. Even the worst teams in US sport make money, which makes them very valuable. The cheapest NBA (basketball) team would cost you $1.5 billion, which is five or six times their annual revenue. That multiple is even worse in Major League Soccer, where the minimum price is $250 million — 10 times revenue — but in Europe you can buy a football club for one times revenue.

“The other thing to remember is that, apart from the NBA, the world isn’t watching American sports: it’s watching European football. OK, COVID-19 has knocked things back, but the trend is positive. Broadcast rights were experiencing double-digit growth and I think we’ll get back to that.

“So, we have just bought 72 per cent of Ostend, a Belgian first division club that was in the Europa League in 2017 (getting knocked out in the qualifiers by French giants Marseille), for €4.2 million. The cheapest investment you can make in an NBA team, a three per cent stake to become a limited partner, costs $50 million — and you don’t even get a season ticket.”

Oliver Finlay is the chief executive of Beautiful Game Group, a private equity firm based in Delaware, USA, but with an international make-up. It is planning to build a multi-club model similar to the one pursued by Conway and City Football Group and is currently doing its due diligence work on what it hopes will be the first of several investments in European football in the coming years.

Having trained as a physiotherapist, Finlay has spent the last 20 years working in elite sport as a physio, sports science consultant and sporting director, including stints with the FA, Hearts in the Scottish Premiership, the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres and UK Athletics. He describes the changing weather in global sport as “two perfect storms”.

“First, you have the changed political position in China,” explains Finlay. “They had hoped to be a force in world football by now but have realised that is way off. Never underestimate how important it is in Asia not to lose face and China have just been through that with the Basketball World Cup. It was held in China last year and the home team were disappointing.

“So now it’s very hard to get money out of China or, if you’re a foreign investor, do much in China yourself. There’s a lot of uncertainty.

“And then you have the States, where sports franchises have been through this period of exponential growth. Between 2015 and 2020, the enterprise values of NBA teams have risen by an average of $300 million. So you have a saturated market, with a high price of entry, driven by scarcity value.

“But in Europe, you have thousands of clubs, with a much lower entry point, and you can also make money on player trading, something which appeals to US sports investors, as they have all been using data for their recruitment for years and think they can do it better than Europeans.

“My concern, though, is that too often all these private equity firms, whilst very clever at investing, do not know how to manage sports teams, particularly European ones. They repeatedly underestimate the risks and fail to understand the culture. We have probably been offered 90 different teams to look at in the last two months but we’re very careful to say we’re an international fund, not an American one.”

Finlay’s observations raise some interesting questions.

Having pinned its hopes on Chinese money for so long, why is European football now so convinced US-based private equity is the way to go? Isn’t a blend of all human experiences usually best?

And having been buffeted by one wind for so long, why are our clubs so keen to be blown the other way? Aren’t we better off enjoying a period of calm?

Questions for another day, perhaps.

In the meantime, the new American owners at Parma, Roma and Toulouse have lessons to learn, while the Americans circling Bournemouth, Burnley, Crystal Palace, Southampton and a dozen other English clubs have decisions to make.

China had its turn. It’s time to make American-owned football clubs great again.

[NikkiCFC 7,952]

 

[Blues Forever 1,232]

8 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

 

Maldini will win easily, no idea why they put Breitner in the list when he was better as a CM.

[Blues Forever 1,232]

Beckenbauer or Baresi will win this easily. Ramos, Koeman, and Desailly shouldn't belong in the list. Shocking omission on Nesta, Figueroa, and Kohler.