The Finances of Football

Further progress from this level will depend on the new management team's ability to sign secondary sponsors. This is the area where United has proved so adept in recent years. United's secondary deals (Turkish Airlines, EPSON, DHL etc) will bring in around £44m in the current year, equivalent to all Arsenal's commercial revenue.

blimey

http://www.arsenal.com/news/news-archive/wenger-city-deal-is-platini-s-biggest-test?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arsenal-news+%28News+Feed%29

We always knew that this would happen. But Platini is powerless, right? No way Uefa are actually going to stand up to billionaires of any kind.

not sure what they could do that wouldn't run into EU legislative difficulties, but i may be underestimating the power of footballing bodies to implement a sectoral agreement type inhibition

Now i'm writing like it's an exam and i'll stop

idk ffp seems pretty hardline so far tbf?

i think rather than finding big blatant loopholes clubs will be looking to find enough small grey areas to dispute long enough to gum up the legal works until it collapses; in this case it'll be an argument about how "market price" of sponsorship is deemed

then it'll be a holding company buying 2 million shirts, etc

that was half laughable half terrifying, but can't help but feel that eejit sim was just a bluffer on an ego ride.

Huh what? What are you talking about?

panorama investigation into the sale of english clubs to unknown/shady/foreign consortiums.

Light on exactly what was wrong with any of it, tbh, just came across as v little england imo.

But the dude liaising as the front for this consortium was a real blowhard. Though tbf there was a lot of pics and evidence of a reasonably close relationship with jason ferguson's dad, which obviously raises questions

This was the Bryan Robson thing, right? I dunno, these programmes should set about uncovering real actual criminality or not bother imo. Breaking football-specific rules, why would anyone who isn't a footballer care about that? Might as well run a splash on breaches of solicitors' accounting protocols or something.

That programme a few years back that failed to uncover bungs and ended up with Harry admitting, casually in ordinary conversation like, that he'd be interested in signing a player who was under contract to another club was the worst.

'these clubs have hundreds of thousands of dedicated fans but are bought and sold like *playthings*'

smh

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/14490740.stm

^^^ This is important.

There will always be loopholes. I understand the desire to link spending to turnover etc but surely someone with a bottomless pit of cash should be allowed to spend it? If this sponsorship deal falls foul of the rules they can just do a "buy a brick" sale and sell Sheikh Mansour a brick for £400m.

In a free market? Fair enough. In a closed system like a professional sport? Maybe not.

I can't find the link just now, but Swiss Ramble analysed the deal recently and basically okay'ed it as not especially outlandish in a footy context.

It's here. It *is* outlandish in a footy context simply because it's so big, although maybe not in a global sports context. That said I'm not sure why Etihad would part with hundreds of millions more than they need to just because Sheikh Mansour was calling in a favour.

That's why the piece was an interesting read - the deal's so obviously a scam, I thought, that I was amazed to *almost* be convinced otherwise.

http://e-comlaw.com/sportslawblog/template_permalink.asp?id=448

In the 2009-10 season, the most recent for which accounts are available, Stoke's turnover was £58.98m, the Premier League's 14th highest. Yet Stoke are afforded many luxuries unavailable to their peers, thanks to being a subsidiary of an organisation with a turnover of £5.4bn a year. Stoke belong to bet365, and in the 2009-10 season were given a parent-company subsidy of £15.42m, serving as bet365's tax write-off – the company has been applauded, however, for keeping its entire betting operation in the UK, whereas most of its competitors' online and telephone-betting departments are offshore to avoid all tax.

It means Pulis was able to invest £20.58m, net, in new players in 2009-10 as the Potters spent £12.2m more than they earned that season, making their total subsidised expenditure £71.2m. Indeed, Stoke's parent-company structure gives them another great advantage: access to interest-free finance. That season Stoke's bank debt was a negligible £175,000, costing them £6,000 in interest fees. Everton, by contrast, must foot an annual interest bill of close to £4.5m – equivalent to two players earning £43,000 a week.

TV rights, anyone?

ta

it's coming to something when man utd and chelsea look askance at our greed

I'd be interested to know if Liverpool's proposal is defensible from any POV whatsoever besides "let the big dogs eat"

i think fergie was broadly - all the clubs in epl should get way more for overseas tv rights
LFC- Us, Utd, Chelsea, Arsenal should get way more for overseas tv rights.

I'm ignoring any nuance that underlies this i know.

yeah fuck that pool shit. 'can we plz have a monopoly - look at how well spanish clubs do!'

I think Ayre tried to frame it as part of 'competing' with European clubs who sell their rights differently. But don't think he came up with any plausible reason as to how this wouldn't make the epl even less competitive than it is now.

It's not about a monopoly though - it's about a European league sometime in the next decade.

The likes of Dave Whelan are right when they say this will kill half the Premier League, but their mistake is to think the big clubs care - they'd rather be playing among themselves every week, not spending time playing filler like Wigan. And anyway, he's not proposing everyone go back to the pre-1992 arrangements is he?

If Stoke get in on that league we can finally see what Messi's really worth on a rainy Tuesday evening in Stoke.

spurs are a big club

I think Messi will have to sign for Wolves before he and Stoke are in the same division of it.

i can't remember if this is true or if i made it up but were liverpool not also at the forefront of the 92 premier league breakaway?

getting a bit sick and tired of this myth that the epl is competitive unlike spain. Been the same 2 teams for the last 6 or 7 years winning the league. Short of a billionaire who can flush millions down the toilet with nary a pause buying a club that's not going to change.
Wonder if malaga finish top 3 this year.

The big 5 as it was then - Utd, LFC, Arsenal, Spurs, Everton?

xp

Overseas rights have always been shared equally, and while in 1992 they were almost nonexistent, the current deal, reflecting the game's global popularity, especially in the Middle and Far East, is worth £1.4bn over the next three years. So last season Blackpool received the same as United: £17.9m.

^ tbh i can sympathise with ayre a teensy bit when you see it like that. fuck it tho

Spain is in a pretty sick condition though by any standards xps. It just seems to me that most other leagues heading the same way, it's totally obvious that the elites in each will band together in one really good competition, rather than put up with half-a-dozen dysfunctional ones.

That said, Serie A's opening this year has been old-school.

I've really enjoyed Serie A this year after ignoring it for a decade.

spain sick as anything, only world champions, euro champions, current world #1, champion's league holders, yadda yadda

Nothing would be more boring than the top clubs from Europe in a top competition. I'm already half bored once the Champion's League qf are on because it's basically the same 8 clubs all the time. Bring back the 90s Champions League where you'd get IFK Goteborg and AEK Athens and Galatasaray and so on actually being competitive.

getting a bit sick and tired of this myth that the epl is competitive unlike spain. Been the same 2 teams for the last 6 or 7 years winning the league. Short of a billionaire who can flush millions down the toilet with nary a pause buying a club that's not going to change.
Wonder if malaga finish top 3 this year.

― pandemic, Thursday, 13 October 2011 13:55 (50 minutes ago)

I don't think anyone said the whole league was competitive. But in the premiership the tv rights are collectively bought and shared amongst the teams, so all the clubs are on a kind of equal footing when it comes to the money they receive, meaning there is more of a chance for a well run club to be competitive. In Spain where Real and Barca gobble up all that money and no-one else sees a dime compared, it is impossible to compete - look at the past couple years, any team that looked good enough just had those two teams buy their best players, essentially nullifying them (Alves, Villa, Albiol etc.) In theory, that shouldn't happen here considering the only real difference is sponsership, gate receipts and the money you receive for how well your team does and hopefully FFP can kick the billionaire system out*, leaving a closer financial playing field where a team like Newcastle or whoever, if well run, could break the mould. In Spain however, stadium revenue etc. may be similar but having Barca and Real earn 200m+ more than every other team from TV rights means there is nowhere near the balance, to the point where they are looking at Malaga oil to compete!

*lol

You know Spain's situation is shit when you realise how hard it is for all the other clubs to actually find sponsorship deals. Real and Barca both get something like 30M/yr, the third highest deal is around 5M/yr iirc

I think it was Valencia to whom Ashley Madison (the online dating site for married ppl) proposed a sponsorship deal like a few M/yr + money everytime one of their players cheats on his wife

I'm already half bored once the Champion's League qf are on because it's basically the same 8 clubs all the time. Bring back the 90s Champions League where you'd get IFK Goteborg and AEK Athens and Galatasaray and so on actually being competitive

I wanted to come back to this because the national league system is EXACTLY what's killing these clubs now imo. IFK can't compete because they have fairly small crowds and Swedish telly income is negligible. Even if they did make the CL they only get the Swedish portion of the pot, not the portion that comes from selling rights to Germany or Italy.

If we do get a proper European league, those clubs will have to resurrect to some extent because a proper league would want to take in the Scandinavian etc. markets too. Scandinavia's rich, it wouldn't make sense to have no teams there.

surely it would make more sense to transplant a franchise that is already popular in scandinavia to a central location like stockholm? northwest england is already saturated with one global alpha level team and another that is quickly approaching that status

therefore the answer is for john henry to make that bold move

Scandinavia's rich, it wouldn't make sense to have no teams there

I think a lot of Scandinavians follow English football anyway. There's certainly a hell of a lot of Norwegian Man Utd fans.

i can't remember if this is true or if i made it up but were liverpool not also at the forefront of the 92 premier league breakaway?

Yeah, think it was a combo of Liverpool and David Dein at Arsenal.

Tons of Scandinavians at Liverpool too.

But what I mean is: what's the future for football? You'd like to think big populations would support big clubs. It can't just be the best players going to the same half-dozen lucky clubs, whom everyone watches while local clubs wither. Right now half of Europe is in the position the Irish league's always been in.

Just in case there's any doubt about this: I think a European league is a terrible idea and individual TV deals would be disastrous for all but a few clubs.

Maybe, but I can't see them not happening idc.

there'll be a deal concluded with a bigger share of the cash going to the clubs that generate it, do again in a few years