By Kieran Maguire, a senior teacher in accountancy and member of Football Industries Group, University of Liverpool, and Christina Philippou, associate professor in accounting and sport finance, University of Portsmouth. Originally published at The Conversation.
When the Premier League broke away from the rest of English football in 1992, its 22 clubs generated £205 million in its debut season, and the average player earned £2,050 a week. Thirty years later, despite having two fewer clubs, the league’s revenue had increased by 2,850% to £6.1 billion and the average player earned £93,000 a week.
At the heart of this extraordinary growth is an American revolution. In the Premier League’s inaugural season, football was still in recovery from the horrors of the stadium disasters at Hillsborough and Heysel. Owners tended to be from the local area and with a business background. The only foreign owner was Sam Hamman at Wimbledon, a Lebanese millionaire who bought the club on a whim having reportedly been much more interested in tennis. The season ended with Manchester United (under Alex Ferguson) winning the English game’s top league for the first time in 26 years.
Now, if the Texas-based Friedkin Group’s recent deal to buy Everton goes through, 11 of the 20 Premier League clubs will be controlled or part-owned by American investors. The US – long seen as football’s final frontier when it comes to the men’s game – suddenly can’t get enough of English “soccer”.
Four of the Premier League’s “big six” are American-owned – Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea – while a fifth, Manchester City, has a significant US minority shareholding. Aston Villa, Fulham, Bournemouth, Crystal Palace, West Ham and Ipswich Town also have varying degrees of American ownership.
And it’s not even just the glamour clubs at the top of the tree. American investment has also been significant lower down the football pyramid, led by the high-profile acquisition of then non-league Wrexham by Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenny, and Birmingham City’s purchase by US investors including seven-time Super Bowl winner Tom Brady. American investment in football has reached places as geographically diverse as Carlisle and Crawley in England, and Aberdeen and Edinburgh in Scotland.
So why the American obsession with English football? And how real are concerns that these US owners could collude to “Americanise” the traditions of the Premier League – whether by reducing the risk of relegation, introducing some form of “draft pick” system, or moving matches and even clubs to other cities?
The Premier League’s First US Owner
Manchester United was the first Premier League club to come under American ownership – after a row about a horse.
In 2005, United was owned by a variety of investors including Irish businessmen and racehorse owners John Magnier and J.P. McManus. Their erstwhile friend Ferguson, the United manager, thought he co-owned the champion racehorse Rock of Gibraltar with them – a stallion worth millions in stud rights. They disagreed – and their bitter dispute was such that Magnier and McManus decided to sell their shares in the football club.
The Miami-based Glazer family – already involved in sport as owners of NFL franchise the Tampa Bay Buccaneers – had already been buying up small tranches of shares in United, but the sudden availability of the Irish shares allowed Malcolm Glazer to acquire a controlling stake for £790 million (around £1.5 billion at today’s prices).
The fact Glazer did not actually have sufficient funds to pay for these shares was a solvable problem. In the some-might-say commercially naive world of top-flight English football before the Premier League, Manchester United was a club without debt, paying its way without leveraging its position as one of the world’s most famous football clubs. Glazer saw the opportunity this presented and arranged a leveraged buy-out (LBO), whereby the football club borrowed more than £600 million secured on its own assets to, in effect, “buy itself” in 2005.
Despite the need to meet the high interest costs to fund the LBO, United continued winning trophies under Ferguson – including three Premier League titles in a row in 2007, 2008 and 2009, as well as a Champions League victory in 2008. Amid this success, the club felt that ticket prices were too low and set about increasing them, with matchday revenue increasing from £66 million in 2004/05 to over £101 million by 2007/08.
Commercial income was another area the Glazers were keen to increase. United set up offices in London and adopted a global approach to finding new official branding deals ranging from snacks to tractor and tyre suppliers – doubling revenues from this income source too.
But in this new, more aggressive world of “sweating the asset”, the debts lingered – and most United fans remained deeply suspicious of their American owners. (Following their father’s death in 2014, the club was co-owned by his six children, with brothers Avram and Joel Glazer becoming co-chairmen.)
Today, despite its partial listing on the New York Stock Exchange and the February 2024 sale of 27.7% of the club to British billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe for a reputed £1.25 billion, United still has borrowings of more than £546 million, having paid cumulative interest costs of £969 million since the takeover in 2005. But with the club now valued at US$6.55 billion (around £5bn), it represents a very smart investment for the Glazer family.
Indeed, while the prices being paid for football clubs across Europe have reached record levels, they are still seen as cheap investments compared with US sports’ leading franchises. Forbes’s annual list of the world’s most valuable sports teams has American football (NFL), baseball (MLB) and basketball (NBA) teams occupying the top ten positions, with only three Premier League clubs – Manchester United, Liverpool and Manchester City – in the top 50.
With NFL teams having an average franchise value of US$5.1 billion and NBA $3.9 billion, many English football clubs still look like a bargain from the other side of the pond.
The Risk of Relegation
The latest to join this US bandwagon, the Friedkin Group – a Texas-based portfolio of companies run by American businessman and film producer Dan Friedkin – is reported to have offered £400m to buy Everton, despite the club’s poor financial state.
“The Toffees” have been hit by loss of sponsorships as well as two sets of points deductions for breaching the Premier League’s financial rules, leading to revenue losses from lower league positions. While the new stadium being built at Liverpool’s Bramley-Moore dock has been yet another financial constraint, it will at least increase matchday income from the start of next season.
A wider reason for the relative bargain in valuations of European football clubs is the risk of relegation – something that is not part of the closed leagues of most US sports. While the threat of relegation (and promise of promotion) has always been an integral part of English and European football, the jeopardy this brings for supporters – and a club’s finances – does not exist in the NFL, NBA, Major League Soccer and similar competitions.
The Premier League, with its three relegation spots at the end of each season, has featured 51 different clubs since it launched in 1992. Only six clubs – Arsenal, Spurs, Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool and Everton – have been ever present, with Arsenal now approaching 100 years of consecutive top-flight football.
Other Premier League clubs have experienced the dramatic cost-benefit of relegation and promotion. Oldham Athletic, who were in the Premier League for its first two seasons, now languish in the fifth tier of the game, outside the English Football League (EFL). In contrast, Luton Town, who were in the fifth tier as recently as 2014, were promoted to the Premier League in 2023 – only to be relegated at the end of last season.
While it is difficult to compare football clubs with basketball and American football teams, the financial difference between having an open league, with relegation, and a closed league becomes apparent when you look at women’s football on both sides of the Atlantic.
Angel City, a women’s soccer team based in Los Angeles, only entered the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) in 2022 and is yet to win an NWSL trophy. But last month, the club was sold for US$250 million (£188m) to Disney’s CEO Bob Iger and TV journalist Willow Bay – the most expensive takeover in the history of women’s professional sport.
In comparison, Chelsea – seven-time winners of the English Women’s Super League and one of the most successful sides in Europe – valued its women’s team at £150 million ($US196m) earlier this summer. While there are a number of factors to this price differential, the confidence that Angel City will always be a member of the big league of US soccer clubs – and share very equally in its revenue – will have made its new owners very confident in the long-term soundness of their deal.
A further attraction for American investors is the potential to enter two markets – one mature (men’s football) and one effectively a start-up (the women’s game) – in a single purchase. In the US, the top men’s and women’s clubs are completely separate. But in Europe, most top-flight women’s teams are affiliated to men’s clubs – with the exception of eight-time Women’s Champions League winners Olympique Lyonnais Feminin, which split from the French men’s club when Korean-American businesswoman Michele Kang bought a majority stake in the women’s team in February 2024).
While interest in, and hence value of, the WSL is now growing fast, the women’s game in England is dwarfed by viewer ratings for the Premier League – the most watched sporting league in the world, viewed by an estimated 1.87 billion people every week across 189 countries.
These figures dwarf even the NFL which, while currently still the most valuable of all sporting leagues in terms of its broadcasting deals, must be looking at the growth of the Premier League with some jealousy. This may explain why some US franchise owners, such as Stan Kroenke, the Glazer family, Fenway Sports Group and Billy Foley, have subsequently purchased Premier League football clubs.
Ironically, for many spectators around the world, it is the intensity and competitiveness of most Premier League matches – brought on in part by the threat of relegation and prize of European qualification – that makes it so captivating. However, billionaire investors like guaranteed numbers and dislike risk – especially the degree of financial risk that exists in the Premier League and English Football League.
European Not-so-Super League
In April 2021, 12 leading European clubs (six from England plus three each from Spain and Italy) announced the creation of the European Super League (ESL). This new mid-week competition was to be a high-revenue generating, closed competition with (eventually) 15 permanent teams and five annual additions qualifying from Europe. According to one of the driving forces behind the plan, Manchester United co-chairman Joel Glazer:
By bringing together the world’s greatest clubs and players to play each other throughout the season, the Super League will open a new chapter for European football, ensuring world-class competition and facilities, and increased financial support for the wider football pyramid.
The problem facing the Premier League’s “big six” clubs – and their ambitious owners – is there are currently only four slots available to play in the Champions League. So, their thinking went, why not take away the risk of not qualifying? However, the proposal was swiftly condemned by fans around Europe, together with football’s governing bodies and leagues – all of whom saw the ESL proposal as a threat to the quality and integrity of their domestic leagues. Following some large fan protests, including at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge, Manchester City was the first club to withdraw – followed, within a couple of days, by the rest of the English clubs.
Under the terms of the ESL proposals, founding member clubs would have been guaranteed participation in the competition forever. Guaranteed participation means guaranteed revenues. The current financial gap between the “big six” and the other members of the Premier League, which in 2022/23 averaged £396 million, would have widened rapidly.
For example, these clubs would have been able to sell the broadcast rights for some of their ESL home fixtures direct to fans, instead of via a broadcaster. All of a sudden, that database of fans who have downloaded the official club app, or are on a mailing list, becomes far more valuable. These are the people most willing to watch their favourite team on a pay-per-view basis, further increasing revenues.
At the same time, a planned ESL wage cap would have stopped players taking all these increased revenues in the form of higher wages, allowing these clubs to become more profitable and their ownership even more lucrative.
American-owned Manchester United and Liverpool had previously tried to enhance the value of their investments during the COVID lockdowns era via ProjectBig Picture – proposals to reduce the size of the Premier League and scrap one of the two domestic cup competitions, thus freeing up time for the bigger clubs to arrange more lucrative tours and European matches against high-profile opposition.
Most importantly, Project Big Picture would have resulted in changing the governance of the domestic game. Under its proposals, the “big six” clubs would have enjoyed enhanced voting rights, and therefore been able to significantly influence how the domestic game was governed.
Any attempt to increase the concentration of power raises concerns of lower competitive balance, whereby fewer teams are in the running to win the title and fewer games are meaningful. This is a problem facing some other major European football leagues including France’s Ligue 1, where interest among broadcasters has dwindled amid the perceived dominance of Paris St-Germain.
So while to date, American-led attempts to change the structure of the Premier League have been foiled, it’s unlikely such ideas have gone away for good. The near-universal fear of fans – even those who welcome an injection of extra cash from a new billionaire owner – is that the spectacle of the league will only be diminished if such plans ever succeed.
And there is evidence from the women’s game that the US closed league format is coming under more pressure from football’s global forces. The NWSL recently announced it is removing the draft system that is designed (as with the NFL and NBA) to build in jeopardy and competitive balance when there is no risk of relegation.
Top US women’s football clubs are losing some of their leading players to other leagues, in part because European clubs are not bound by the same artificial rules of employment. In a truly global professional sport such as football, international competition will always tend to destabilise closed leagues.
Why Do They Keep Buying These Clubs?
Does this mean that American and other wealthy owners of Premier League clubs seeking to reduce their risks are ultimately fighting a losing battle? And if so, given the potential risks involved in owning a football club – both financial and even personal – why do they keep buying them?
The motivations are part-financial, part technological and, as has always been the case with sports ownership, part-vanity.
The American economy has grown far faster than that of the EU or UK in recent years. Consequently, there are many beneficiaries of this growth who have surplus cash, and here football becomes an attractive proposition. In fact, football clubs are more resilient to recessions than other industries, holding their value better as they are effectively monopoly suppliers for their fans who have brand loyalty that exists in few other industries.
From 1993 to 2018, a period during which the UK economy more than doubled, the total value of Premier League clubs grew 30 times larger. And many fans are tied to supporting one club, helping to make the biggest clubs more resilient to economic changes than other industries. While football, like many parts of the entertainment industry, was hit by lockdown during Covid, no clubs went out of business, despite the challenges of matches being played in empty stadiums.
Added to this, the exchange rates for US dollars have been very favourable until recently, making US investments in the UK and Europe cheaper for American investors.
So, while Manchester United fans would argue that the Glazer family have not been good for the club, United has been good for the Glazers. And Fenway Sports Group (FSG), who bought Liverpool for £300 million in 2010, have recouped almost all of that money in smaller share sales while remaining majority owners of Liverpool.
Despite this, the £2.5 billion price paid for Chelsea by the US Clearlake-Todd Boehly consortium in May 2022 took markets by surprise.
The sale – which came after the UK government froze the assets of the club’s Russian oligarch owner, Roman Abramovich, following the invasion of Ukraine – went through less than a year after Newcastle United had been sold by Sports Direct founder Mike Ashley to the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund for £305 million – approximately twice that club’s annual revenues. Yet Clearlake-Boehly were willing to pay over five times Chelsea’s annual revenues to acquire the club, even though it was in a precarious financial position.
Clearlake is a private equity group whose main aim is to make profits for their investors. But unlike most such investors, who tend to focus on cost-cutting, the Chelsea ownership came in with a high-spending strategy using new financial structuring ideas, such as offering longer player contracts to avoid falling foul of football’s profitability and sustainability rules (although this loophole has since been closed with Uefa, European football’s governing body, limiting contract lengths for financial regulation purposes to five years).
Chelsea’s location in the one of the most expensive areas of London, combined with its on-field success under Abramovich, all added to the attraction, of course. But there are other reasons why Clearlake, along with billionaire businessman Boehly, were willing to stump up so much for the club.
From Hollywood to the Metaverse
While some British football fans may have viewed the Ted Lasso TV show as an enjoyable if slightly twee fictional account of American involvement in English soccer, it has enhanced the attraction of the sport in the US. So too Welcome To Wrexham – the fly-on-the-wall series covering the (to date) two promotions of Wales’s oldest football club under the unlikely Hollywood stewardship of Reynolds and McElhenney.
The growth in US interest in English football is reflected in the record-breaking Premier League media rights deal in 2022, with NBC Sports reportedly paying $2.7 billion (£2.06bn) for its latest six-year deal.
But as well as football offering one of increasingly few “live shared TV experiences” that carry lucrative advertising slots, there may also be more opportunity for more behind-the-scenes coverage of the Premier League – as has long been seen in US coverage of NBA games, for example, where players are interviewed in the locker room straight after games.
According to Manchester United’s latest annual report, the club now has a “global community of 1.1 billion fans and followers”. Such numbers mean its owners, and many others, are bullish about the potential of the metaverse in terms of offering a matchday experience that could be similar to attending a match, without physically travelling to Manchester.
Their neighbours Manchester City, part-owned by American private equity company Silverlake, broke new (virtual) ground by signing a metaverse deal with Sony in 2022. Virtual reality could give fans around the world the feeling of attending a live match, sitting next to their friends and singing along with the rest of the crowd (for a pay-per-view fee).
Some investors are even confident that advancements in Abba-style avatar technology could one day allow fans to watch live 3D simulations of Premier League matches in stadiums all over the world. Having first-mover advantage by being in the elite club of owners who can make use of such technology could prove ever more rewarding.
More immediately, there are some indications that competitive matches involving England’s top men’s football teams could soon take place in US or other venues. Boehly, Chelsea’s co-owner, has already suggested adopting some US sports staples such as an All-Star match to further boost revenues. Indeed, back in 2008, the Premier League tentatively discussed a “39th game” taking place overseas, but that idea was quickly shelved.
The American owners of Birmingham City were keen to play this season’s EFL League One match against Wrexham in the US, but again this proposal did not get far. Liverpool’s chairman Tom Werner says he is determined to see matches take place overseas, and recent changes to world governing body Fifa’s rulebook could make it easier for this proposal to succeed.
The potential benefits of hosting games overseas include higher matchday revenues, increased brand awareness, and enhanced broadcast rights. While there is likely to be significant opposition from local fans, at least American owners know they would not face the same hostility about rising matchday prices in the US as they have encountered in England.
When the Argentinian legend Lionel Messi signed for new MLS franchise Inter Miami in 2023, season ticket prices nearly doubled on his account. And while there is vocal opposition to higher ticket prices in England, this is not borne out in terms of lower attendances for matches against high-calibre opposition – as evidenced by Aston Villa charging up to £97 for last week’s Champions League meeting with Bayern Munich.
Villa’s director of operations, Chris Heck, defended the prices by saying that difficult decisions had to be made if the club was to be competitive.
For much of the 2010s, with broadcast revenues increasing rapidly, many Premier League owners made little effort to stoke hostilities with their loyal fan bases by putting up ticket prices. Indeed, Manchester United generated little more from matchday income in the 2021-22 season, as football emerged from the pandemic, than the club had in 2010-11 (see chart above).
However, this uneasy truce between fans and owners has ceased. The relative flatlining of broadcast revenues since 2017, along with cost control rules that are starting to affect clubs’ ability to spend money on player signings and wages, has changed club appetites for dampened ticket prices. This has resulted in noticeable rises in individual ticket and season ticket prices by some clubs.
However, season ticket and other local “legacy” fans generate little money compared with the more lucrative overseas and tourist fans. They may only watch their favourite team live once a season, but when they visit, they are far more likely not only to pay higher matchday prices, but to spend more on merchandise, catering and other offerings from the club.
Today’s breed of commercially aware, profit-seeking US Premier League owners – pioneered by the Glazer family, who saw that “sweating the asset” meant more than watching football players sprinting hard – understand there is a lot more value to come from English football teams. The clubs’ loyal local supporters may not like it, but English football’s American-led revolution is not done yet.
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Chelsea FC of course was a forced-sale for political reasons and the owner was alienated from the sale consideration by government action
Chelsea are the perfect example of why you can’t just throw money at a club and expect success.
I’m not sure there is much more to this than US companies being particularly good at making sports teams profitable, and the strong dollar making overseas investments attractive. The Premiership is astonishingly popular around the world. There seem to be a lot of different types of US investor, from extractive corporate raiders like the Glazers, to solid data driven investors like John Henry (who is generally very popular with Liverpool fans), to outright egotistical idiots like Boehly.
The overall fault is the ownership structure of English clubs, which makes them very open to takeovers, unlike German or French clubs which have much stronger rules to ensure fans and local interests dominate. I think most club fans would prefer a sensible profit driven US owner over a Gulf State or the range of millionaire oddballs who have long seen clubs as ego extensions and have destroyed many clubs. Attempts by supporters at big clubs to take control have almost always foundered. Exeter, in League One, is a rare good news story about community ownership.
Another big problem is the organizational structure of the game in general.
The article focuses on US investors in the EPL, but it overlooks the larger problem that is money in the game. Which has been killing it at an accelerating rate since about the time of the fall of the USSR, once “globalization” began in earnest.
The result is on one hand a handful of superclubs completely dominating everything, and on the other, the EPL dramatically pulling away financially from the other leagues.
The superclubs are Real Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, Bayern Munich in Germany, to an extent PSG because of Qatar money (but that has not yet translated into real success on the pitch, and might not last), and then it used to be the Big Four/Six in the UK.
That elite used to be much larger — in the late 90s a G-14 was established and that featured Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester United, Liverpool, Inter, Juventus, Milan, Olympique Marseille, PSG, Bayern, Borussia Dortmund, Ajax, PSV, Porto, and then they later added four more clubs. Because in the 1980s and 1990s Dutch clubs were still competitive and the Italian Serie A was actually the dominant league in that period.
But if you noticed in my list above there were no Italian clubs — those faded from the ranks of the true superclubs at some point in the first decade of the 21st century.
Now differentiation is starting to develop even within the current much smaller elite — Barcelona is nearly bankrupt (it is on the rise again this season on the field, but that is built on the academy, not on being able to buy players, and in the long term it has been proven unsustainable to primarily rely on the academy to remain among the very best), but in the UK Manchester City has been so dominant that is debatable how many true superclubs there really are left now. The teams that enter the CL every year with truly realistic chances of winning it have been less than five for a while now, realistically just three — City, Madrid, Bayern.
And yet even Madrid is also in long-term danger of dropping out because if there is another major leap in revenue for the EPL, English clubs will pull away to such an extent that even Madrid and Barcelona won’t be able to compete for the top players. The latter already fell in that trap – spending more than their means — and is nearly bankrupt as I said above. It is already the case that the bottom feeders in the EPL are easily outspending once elite European clubs in Italy and Spain. This is why Madrid, Barcelona and the Italian clubs were pushing for the Superleague — for them it was either that, or the EPL irreversibly becoming the Superleague and everyone else being reduced to feeder clubs for it.
All of this is the natural consequences of letting capitalism run the game. Just as the logical end outcome in capitalism is monopoly in each sector of the economy, which then evolves further into one corporation owning absolutely everything, unless government steps in and breaks it up before that happens, so it is in soccer without the mechanisms of US leagues for maintaining competitiveness.
US sports have several huge downsides:
1) There being no relegation and no pyramid
2) There being no “clubs”, but “franchises”, which can pack up and leave at any moment.
3) There being no real true fan loyalty. With some rare exceptions, but attachment to one’s club is nowhere near the same as it is in Europe or South America. A direct consequence of the franchises being able to pack up and leave at any moment (which they have done so many times)
4) Everything is completely commercialized to the most vulgar level imaginable.
But in the same time they have this internal (quite socialist if you think about it) system of maintaining competitive balance — salary caps, drafts biased towards the underperforming teams, etc.
You don’t have that in soccer, so once the money came in and it all became globalized, the virtues of having a deep pyramid and the game being a social phenomenon just as much as it being a sport became irrelevant, and the relentless capitalist logic of the rich becoming richer kicked in.
The end result of which is what we have been witnessing — the hollowing out of most of the formerly successful leagues and clubs and extreme concentration of power and success at just a few (and getting fewer) places. Some of them almost entirely manufactured out of thin air (City, PSG, to some extent Chelsea further back in time).
The solution to this problem was for the bodies that administer the game to take the money out of the game. There were and still are ways to do that, but they require really radical action.
But that is where the organizational structure of the game sabotaged any such possibility — because FIFA, UEFA and the national federations get a cut of the overall revenue, and they are all extremely corrupt organizations in which money is siphoned off into the pockets of the people running them in any way you can imagine. So nobody whose job it was to keep the money out of the game and maintain competitive balance had any interest in doing so. And there is absolutely no mechanism to bring such people in, clean house, and institute the needed reforms. Which requires awareness of the need to do so in the first place, and even that is completely lacking.
So the future is very bleak…
I’ve often heard that the reason football/soccer didn’t make it in the US was because of the lack of time-outs for TV advertising. I suppose pay-per-view solves the problem?
That’s been solved by ticker-tape and screen-in-screen ads (like the ones used in IndyCar and F1). Companies can also get field-side adverts which are all fancy changing LED things now. Soccer presents too much of a continuous, chess-like experience when compared the north American sports like (American) football, basketball and to a lesser extent, baseball. There are mandated changes of possession (4 downs) and quicker chances to score (shot clock) that keep the games moving and this has created a different kind of watching from soccer, where teams can “park the bus” (keep most players back in defense) and play for the counter-attack, or play keep-away-passing like the Spaniards of a decade ago during their glorious run. To derive pleasure from watching soccer, you have to be able to relish things like a “beautifully weighted pass”, or a “deft first touch” to control a ball passed like a high looping forehand in tennis. So much happens outside of just the scoring, and I think this is where soccer fails to ignite with many American viewers who are used to sports where “something important is happening all the time”.
This is a rather complicated story, but after starting a detailed explanation, I thought it would be better to summarise the main points:
a) The 1920s American Soccer League (ASL) was competing more directly with baseball than the NFL/collegiate football for a mass audience. It’s too cold to play soccer through the winter in its hotbeds back then. Baseball was the biggest sport in terms of paritcipation and audience at that time, and remained so into the 1960s.
b) The dispute between the ASL and the US FA was resolved by the US FA appealing to FIFA, so baseball/football were seen as the ‘American’ sports, and immigrants (who made up an important part of the ASL’s playing and audience core) seeking to assimilate were best advised to take up other sports.
c) The NFL had wealthier backers than the ASL/US FA, as it is rooted in a sport played by the elite at the collegiate level in the later 19th and early 20th centuries.
d) Americans don’t like playing games with rules that they can’t change. American football evolved out of a dissatisfaction with rugby rules. Baseball rapidly overwhelmed cricket in the second half of the 19th century because the kind of ‘slogging’ that American cricket players and crowds liked was better suited to the rounders’ descendant. Both the NHL and the NBA play under local rules. In the1970s the NASL attempted to bypass FIFA’s control by introducing a pair of ‘blue line equivalents either side of midfield. Thankfully, MLS has spurned that aspect, although simultaneously abandoning the pyramid league structure generally accepted as the international standard.
The TV time-out thing better explains why proper football couldn’t engage with a mass audience once Americans began to take a mass interest in it again. (Which, incidentally, came after the 1966 World Cup, illustrating the very close cultural relationship between Britain and the US, which Americans like to hide so very much.) So while it is very much a factor, I think it is more important that the culture of soccer had been extinguished by the Depression/Cold War. The US FA had to rebuild it totally from scratch, and the resource tap wasn’t really turned on until after 1966.
Financialization strikes again! And Yanks are a bit better at that game. It’s easy to celebrate American-infused success, but there have been some sad failures over the decades. Some big clubs have gone into receivership/administration (nee bankruptcy) and with that, have taken their towns’/cities’ fortunes with them.
The way I look at the English leagues now is that it’s really the two-tier Championship+Premiership with 15 – 20 clubs or so outside the big six that can be top flight and the rest are aspirational participants that keep the game vibrant for the smaller towns, which I see as still culturally relevant to life in the UK (outside of London, Liverpool, Manchester & Birmingham).
The first American to buy an English club was Bruce Osterman (Tranmere Rovers) in 1984, but the current spree really started with Roman Abramovich (Chelsea) in 2003. Prior to then, football clubs were invariably owned by local businessmen, but the cost of supporting any club (specifically players’ wages) escalated during the 1980s and then exploded from the mid-1990s once Sky had bought into the Premier League in 1992. Our average provincial businessman or syndicate could not possibly hope to keep up with this. However, a few could do so – for example the property developer John Hall – who picked it up in 1992 after a bitter battle, adding it to his other local trophies, such as Wynyard Hall (which he had bought in 1987 from the Vane-Tempest-Stewarts), but Hall sold it off to the egregious Mike Ashley in 2007, who in turn sold it off to the Saudis in 2021.
Why did the great sell off to foreign interests occur? It was all part of a wider pattern, and may be seen from the UK’s net international investment position. The UK slipped into almost continuous deficit from the mid-1990s and those deficits tended to grow: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/united-kingdom/net-international-investment-position. Any country which runs a current account deficit must run a corresponding capital account surplus, as capital and current accounts add up to zero to balance. Therefore, the UK pays for its excess of imports over exports (i.e., its deficit on current account) by selling its ‘silver’ (i.e., yielding a corresponding capital account surplus) in order to pay its way in the world.
English fans may complain about high ticket prices, indifferent venues and general ill-treatment, but they are mere turnstile fodder: a revenue stream, much of which is now diverted to imported players (who may remit their earnings home) or to foreign owners. Many of these same fans will also be very satisfied with the unearned capital gains generated from their own homes which they then spend on imported cars or white goods. However, they invariably have little understanding of cause and effect. The UK’s subsidence into near-permanent deficit has coincided very precisely with a near permanent-house price bubble; the two phenomena are, in truth, different sides of the same coin. A country which lives well beyond its means, like the UK, must perforce prostitute itself to international finance capital, and should scarcely be surprised by the ‘Wimbledonisation’ of its ‘national game’.
Thank you and well said.
Is there much, to quote Super Mac, family silver left to sell, other than, say, the NHS?
Many thanks again, Colonel! Yes, Macmillan’s 1985 speech to the Tory Reform Group: “First of all the Georgian silver goes, and then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go.”. Given that he spent much of his premiership fretting about the balance of payments, I strongly suspect he is slowly spinning in his now-very-mossy grave at Horsted Keynes (surprisingly neglected the last time I looked). I should also have mentioned, of course, that Hall picked up Newcastle United. A silly drafting error on my part.
Thank you.
The Vane Tempest Stewarts of Wynyard Hall etc. What a family.
Indeed, Colonel. Not always a very creditable family, though… The ‘Londonderry Herr’ and all that!
Thank you.
That’s what I was getting at / to.
Also up until the 1990s owners were not legally allowed to extract money from clubs, other than ‘expenses’. A London club, Tottenham Hotspur, got round this by creative accounting, to form two companies, one of which was floated on the LSE, this opened the floodgates, Manchester United soon followed but most English directors were laughably naive. For example, Manchester United directors thought running a club debt-free, developing the stadium to become the largest in England etc., would be enough for them to be seen as good custodians. They had no poison pill in place when the greedy Glazers marched in with their LBO. Today the team is mediocre, the stadium is falling apart, and the debt they imposed on the club is not much less than the time of the LBO. Part of the purchase was a high risk PIK payment in kind arrangement. The club sold what was then the best player in the world Ronaldo (the 2nd) for a world record fee £80 million or so, and the Glazers trousered that money to cover the PIKs, and the club signed mediocre replacements at much lower costs.
Froghole: An explanation requested for your fine comment:
https://www.chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/584312
May 28, 2024
China is a socialist market economy
By Ho Lok-sang *
* https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html
Fun anecdote: I was working at UK football apparel manufacturer Umbro during its takeover by Nike, around 2008-09. Umbro was based in Cheshire, just south of Manchester, and had a long association with the English leagues. Manufacture of the apparel had at one time been local (a carryover from the days when Manchester was a major textiles centre) but had been outsourced overseas sometime in the 80s or 90s. However, all of the design and (crucially, as it turned out) account management remained in Cheshire.
Umbro produced football kits for many Premiership teams, with various shifts in customers over the years (the bidding with rivals apparel manufacturers could be highly competitive). Most notable was a long-standing association with Manchester City, e.g. you can see local rock-pop phenomenon the Gallagher brothers of Oasis emblazoned in the Umbro kit in many of their early photos – they were big Manchester City fans. However, the crown jewel of Umbro’s contracts was for the England national football kit. They had held this contract seemingly forever, and continuously since 1966 when England won the World Cup. This is the very pinnacle of English football pride.
There was much excitement at Umbro about the takeover, because they thought Nike would treat them as a boutique brand, much as they had done with Converse a few years earlier. So, much of the work in preparation for the takeover was in building up Umbro’s history. This was really quite impressive, and there was some great heritage material. There was also, even prior to the takeover, collaboration with Nike’s design teams, and the resultant work was truly impressive – very tasteful and well-considered designs, mainly for the England team, that built strongly on Umbro’s heritage.
Shortly after the takeover, the CEO of Nike, who at the time was Mark Parker, flew into Manchester in his private jet. He visited the Umbro headquarters, which was perhaps 200 people working in a fairly nice business park, and he introduced himself to all employees. He was literally glad-handing people. He offered to shake my hand at one point, but I refused demurely. Anyway, everyone was really excited. There was a bit of a dark cloud, in that the entire footwear design team of Umbro had been made redundant, but people told themselves that of course Nike already knew how to make a football boot and this was no big deal in the grand scheme of things.
I left shortly after – I’d only been there in a freelance role. A few years later, I saw the England national team on TV. They were in Nike kits. This had, of course, been the play all along. The value of Umbro was entirely in its business relationships. Nike had cherry-picked what it needed for an instant foothold in the British football apparel market.
There is a postscript. After Nike had what they wanted, they span off the carcass of Umbro as a going concern, and it was picked up by a branding conglomerate. Amazingly, they paid not much less than Nike had done. I went back for a few days to their new headquarters, which were in a textiles heritage building in Manchester’s trendy “Northern Quarter”, with maybe 30 employees. Nike had left Umbro with one Premiership team contract, and repositioned it as an “authentic football” brand that would specialise in Futsal, which is a kind of five-a-side game originating in South America. Several of the Umbro managers had not made the jump to Nike – they were surplus to requirements. I remember distinctively the Umbro brand manager, who prior to the takeover had enjoyed a fancy office next door to the Umbro boardroom and who had a virtually unlimited budget and as many staff resources as she liked. She was relegated to a desk in the open plan area, and had to go to the supermarket to buy her own lunch. The company at that point remained viable, but seemed destined to be forever a bit player in comparison to its former glories.
Thanks for sharing! Fun indeed. You bring up another great point – merchandising! This is a huge revenue stream, and to the point of UK soccer teams being relatively cheap, this represents a source of quick profit, since the Premier League has a global audience that the NFL and MLB cannot match today. A “small” city side can pick up a couple Latin American and Asian players on the cheap, and immediately harvest revenue from far-flung (from the UK) places where passion for soccer exists and the populations following the games are larger than the domestic UK market.
It was a beautiful thing to watch one large team after another abandon the proposed EFL project. Fans were having none of it. It will be interesting to see how they’ll try to bring that type of deal again. Funny the fans regard relegation as an integral part of the game.
Is pro sports the only arena where high rolling investor types took over and dramatically raised salaries for the key employees?
I suspect the actual members of a soccer team are deemed the equivalent of an eleven-man CEO squad, thus deserving vast pay.
Actually, since they are necessarily good at their jobs, they are more deserving than CEO.
In the Renaissance great craftsmen became superstar artists, appropriately rewarded, (though Cellini would disagree with that).
Minor technical point but whilst yes only the top four teams normally go through to champions league (newly revamped (as a sop to the threat of the super league) this season to the Swiss model, forgoing group stages and having one giant league where each treat will play the same number of differently seeded teams which means now tops seeded teams rather than being separated into group also play each other adding an extra two matches to the group stage), there is a European coefficient system so the top performing European teams get an extra slot so in theory of English teams perform the top 5 teams will go through, in theory of a team won the champions league but finished out of the qualifying spaces in their league they will also go through, so AFAIK 6 teams could hypothetically enter the champions league in such (unlikely) circumstance.
This article is interesting, and timely.
I have been noticing more people around here (Houston, TX) with Arsenal or Manchester United decals on the big stupid pickup trucks they like to drive.
I figured it was British transplants from the oil industry (there are a fair amount of those here), but last year at kid’s soccer practice, another dad -native Texan -was telling me how they love EPL soccer because with the time zone difference, they can watch their team play and be done with sports for the day by 11am, rather than having football take up their whole day.
Simply NOT watching sports apparently isn’t an option I guess.
anyways, I figured somebody must be promoting soccer to these people through some channel I’m not attuned to.
As an Everton fan, I’d like to point out that the six “ever-present” clubs in the Premier League, and the “big six” clubs in favour of a European Super League are not quite the same six.
Everton are in the former group (although we have been flirting with relegation for several seasons, so who knows for how much longer) and Manchester City are in the latter group. Ironically, it was the last time Everton was bought out by a “wealthy saviour” that resulted in financial irregularities, points deductions and near bankruptcy. I’m sure this time will be different …
The way the “top six” clubs all endorsed the ESL and the “bottom fourteen” all condemned it makes me wonder how many of them were making a moral stand, or whether it was just a financial one. Once the cracks started to appear, most of the 6 were all quick to say they were not really in favour of the ESL, they’d just signed up to it to avoid being left behind by their rivals.
The ESL would be a massive leap into the unknown. Home-grown fans have made it absolutely clear they want nothing to do with it, but would they really stop watching? And how would the massive TV audiences in Asia and elsewhere react? Do Liverpool fans in China care who Liverpool play? Would they prefer guaranteed games against Barcelona and Real Madrid each and every season to whatever opposition the vagaries of the promotion / relegation system throw up? I have no idea.
The ESL was not really pushed for by the six EPL clubs.
They joined the project in order to not miss out, but they would be fine regardless, because if there is no ESL, then the EPL will be the de facto Superleague.
Which is why the ESL was pushed primarily by Spanish and Italian clubs, who are the big long-term losers of staying on the current course.
The Italian league has already faded into irrelevance, Spain is going down too (yeah Madrid has been very successful, but that is just one club), France has always been irrelevant, the Bundesliga is a great spectacle but only Bayern is competitive, and now with the German economy’s long-term collapse, who knows how long even the current level will last. The Netherlands and Portugal have long been reduced to feeder leagues.
The economics of globalization dictated that — English is the global language, so that’s a natural advantage, plus the EPL was first to seize the opportunity to commercialize its product, and here we are.
The ESL was more of a desperate move to stay relevant by the non-EPL clubs, at the cost of destroying the game as a whole. That wealthy investors were immediately available to back the project should not distract from that more fundamental motivation.
as a former footie fan, this was an excellent read that explained very clearly the motivations of the people buying the clubs.