Moneyball moguls
With their arrogance and wealth, they’re the tycoons threatening to tear English football apart — all in the name of a fast buck
FoR genuine football fans, April is the most exciting time of the year. With the season approaching its climax, it is the month when championships are won and lost, and teams battle to avoid relegation.
But last weekend, as leicester City and Chelsea supporters celebrated reaching the FA Cup final (and dreamt of being among the 21,000 allocated tickets at post-lockdown Wembley), a much less romantic game was being played out.
It was a power-game between the billionaire oligarchs, sheikhs and tycoons who have cynically bought control of England’s most iconic clubs, more interested in the bottom line on the balance-sheet than in what happens on the pitch.
not content with the fortunes they cream off from the global sale of TV rights and endorsement deals, for months the foreign owners of Manchester united, Manchester City, liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal, plus British-run Tottenham Hotspur, have been secretly plotting ways to make yet more money from our national game.
And on Saturday, unbeknown to the ordinary fans whose hard-earned wages boost the coffers of the Premier league’s ‘Big Six’ clubs, the phone lines between their mega-rich overlords were abuzz.
By Sunday they had put the finishing touches to a plan of such naked greed and arrogance that, to those of us who love the game and follow our home- town team with tribal passion, it almost beggars belief.
Indeed, the gravy train they have set in motion is so divisive and elitist that it threatens to destroy the integrity of the ‘beautiful game’ and set the leading clubs and soccer’s ruling bodies at war.
COLLUDING with the similarly grasping bosses of famous continental teams such as Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus and Inter Milan, they propose to launch their own breakaway competition.
It is to be called the European Super league (ESL) and the fact that it will be funded to the tune of £3.5 billion by JP Morgan bank, and that its founding members will share the spoils, explains why the idea seemed so appealing.
In truth, the word ‘competition’ is a gross misnomer. ‘Clique’ would be a better description.
For under the self-serving system they have mapped out, the criteria that have determined success and failure in football since organised leagues began in the 19th century will no longer apply.
By dint of their wealth and status, the 15 permanent ESL members will be guaranteed their place in perpetuity, no matter how many matches they might win or lose. For poorer and less fashionable clubs — the likes of Burnley, perhaps, or Fulham — entry into this cosy cartel will remain permanently shut, regardless of how well their players perform in our supposedly inferior domestic league.
Among outraged fans yesterday, the cry was of a ‘closed shop’.
Yet in many ways the proposed ESL is better compared to some outdated london gentlemen’s club, where the old school tie has been replaced by a replica kit. only those who can afford one should bother to apply.
leading the backlash was former England and Manchester united star gary neville. now a Sky pundit, he bluntly summed up the sentiments of all real football folk: ‘It’s an absolute disgrace.’
Having spent the best part of 60 years following the fluctuating fortunes of league Two Morecambe FC, home team of the lancashire resort where I was raised — and gladly paying a tenner a week to watch them on my laptop during the pandemic — I couldn’t agree more.
For people like us, football’s bestknown cliche, coined by the legendary liverpool manager of the Sixties,
Bill Shankly, is close to the truth. on a Saturday afternoon, when the clock is ticking towards 4.45pm and your team is striving for the winning goal, the game really can seem far more important than life and death.
For better or worse, in our increasingly secular society, it is the closest thing we have to a national religion. Football — proper, grassroots football — lifts us beyond the anxiety and mundanity of our everyday existence and allows us to dream.
If our humble team performs to its outer limits, and Fancy dan Rovers have an off day, we might just beat them . . . and then them . . . and them . . . and bring home that hallowed cup.
It happened in 2015-16 when, at odds of 5,000-1 against, leicester City emerged from nowhere to win the Premier league, steamrollering all those rich ‘Big Six’ teams.
And it happened back in 1979 and 1980 when, for two quixotic seasons, nottingham Forest tilted the towering windmills of Madrid and Milan to become the least likely kings of Europe.
The story of football is decorated with such seemingly impossible moments. They make old eyes mist over and generate stories passed down through the generations. If, heaven forbid, the ESL is formed, all this will end. Football as we know it will cease to exist. And what will all this mean to the remote billionaires behind the Super league? Absolutely nothing.
Such is their affinity with the clubs they own, some only bothered to watch their team play once or twice a season, even when international travel was allowed.
Perhaps it was too much trouble to board their private jet or moor their superyacht in some chilly Channel port.
or maybe they didn’t relish the prospect of spending 90 minutes in those cramped hospitality boxes, within earshot of the chanting hordes.
So who are the chief protagonists in this high-stakes drama, which seems destined to end in the law courts? And what do we know about their lifestyles?
Among the six Premier league club owners, the driving forces behind the ESL are all Americans, according to insiders.
This may not be a coincidence. For across the pond, ownership of major sporting teams has always been more about big business than philanthropy.
In the u.S, gridiron football, baseball, basketball and ice-hockey outfits are regarded as franchises rather than clubs. If an owner believes he can make more greenbacks by uprooting his team from one city and relocating it thousands of miles away in another, he will have no compunction about doing just that.
It would be laughable to imagine John William Henry, the principal owner of liverpool, moving the Reds away from Merseyside. But when his Fenway Sports group bought the ailing club for £300 million in 2010, it surely wasn’t a matter of sentiment.
AND in the ensuing decade, this shrewd organisation, described by the business bible Forbes as ‘the most sophisticated, synergised player in the coming age of international sports conglomerates’, has multiplied liverpool’s value about six times over.
Without, it must be said, winning too many friends, even among the club’s supporters.
When Henry, 71, and his business partner, impresario Tom Werner, first arrived at Anfield with aspirations of winning the Premier league trophy for the first time and reviving the glory
years of the 1970s and 1980s, they were hailed as saviours. But since then, their apparent overeagerness to generate capital from any situation has seen their popularity wane.
For example, they proposed raising ticket prices to an eye- watering £ 77, a sum way beyond the budget of salt-of-the-earth Scousers. And when the first lockdown closed football grounds last year, Liverpool — the world’s fifth highest- earning club — was among the first Premier League Clubs to furlough its staff.
It hardly went unnoticed that Henry (the son of Midwestern soya bean farmers who flunked his university degree to play in a rock band) spent his downtime reclining on a £68 million yacht with a classical French interior and silk carpets. His personal fortune was recently estimated at £2 billion and in 2019 he reportedly sold his Asian-style custom-made mansion in Boca Raton, Florida, for a knockdown £11 million.
Equally keen to form a lucrative breakaway league are the Glazer family, owners of Liverpool’s sworn rivals Manchester United.
In 2005, when the little-known clan from upstate New York stunned the football world by acquiring Britain’s most famous club in a controversial £790 million deal, I went to their home town of Rochester to investigate their background.
Their story made the purchase even more remarkable. The patriarch, Malcolm Glazer, was a reclusive man of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who was known as ‘the Leprechaun’ by virtue of his diminutive build and bushy red beard.
Having started out selling watches as a boy, he had bought scores of low-rent properties and trailer parks, where some tenants I spoke to were unhappy with the conditions.
His reputation among Manchester United fans was lower still. He was accused of saddling the club with debt, failing to invest in top players, and having scant regard for United’s history and traditions.
The fans’ loathing was so deepseated that many boycotted the team’s matches — and a group of fans formed a new club which, they said, would preserve its values: FC United of Manchester.
Malcolm Glazer died in 2014 and the club is now run, almost always from afar, by his equally secretive sons Joel and Bryan.
The brothers are among the major shareholders in First Allied Corporation — the family’s £3.6 billion holding company, which has a portfolio that spans from real estate to natural gas and oil. outwardly, it must be said, the Glazers appear rather unlikely tycoons, dressing down and wearing baseball caps on their rare forays to old Trafford.
Among the many gripes of Manchester United fans, however, is the claim that they still spend too little and take too much.
They have also been attacked for failing to give a solitary interview about their plans for the club; an irony, given Joel’s vocal support for the new ESL.
The third member of the U.S contingent is another habitual absentee: Arsenal’s owner Stan Kroenke, 73.
A real estate developer and sports mogul worth an estimated £ 6 billion, he is dubbed ‘ Silent Stan’ by disgruntled Gunners fans because he, too, prefers to shun the spotlight.
Supporters of the team, who are currently languishing in ninth place in the Premier League and only narrowly avoided defeat by lowly Fulham at the weekend, bemoan Kroenke’s lack of ambition.
This has seen them fall far below their expected standards, and makes something of a mockery of their pretension to be among the biggest clubs in Europe.
A financial analysis of Premier League clubs in 2020 found he had invested nothing in Arsenal over a five-year period. Yet the club had paid out a £100 million servicing debt and £6 million to his company for ‘advisory services’.
Missouri-born Kroenke also owns a string of top American sports teams and enraged fans of the St Louis Rams gridiron team by moving them to Los Angeles and calling them the LA Rams.
He and his wife, walmart heiress Ann walton Kroenke, own
America’s biggest ranch, a 535,000acre Texas sprawl so large that the cities of Los Angeles and New York would fit inside its borders.
Although this trio are said to be among the ESL’s ringleaders, they are not alone in believing they ought to be squeezing more from their ownership of some of the planet’s most recognisable footballing ‘brands’.
we know all about Chelsea’s Roman Abramovich, now 54, who once lived in Knightsbridge but has not been seen in Britain since withdrawing his visa application renewal in 2018, when ministers were raising concerns about Russian influence in the UK.
Before then, he, at least, appeared to be a genuine football enthusiast who enjoyed attending Chelsea matches (though he dismissed managers with ruthless haste if they failed to win him trophies).
He also ploughed a huge slice of his estimated £12 billion fortune into the club, which he took over in 2003 when it was on the brink of bankruptcy.
The owner of Manchester City, Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Mansour, has been, if anything, even more generous still.
By pouring more than £1.3 billion of his reputed £20 billion fortune into the team that former United manager Alex Ferguson once dismissed as ‘ noisy neighbours’, he has turned them into Manchester’s top dogs, with a futuristic new stadium thrown in for good measure.
WHICH brings us, finally, to the lone Briton among the group, Cockney businessman Joe Lewis, the 84-yearold owner of Tottenham Hotspur, who is now preserving as much of his £4 billion fortune as possible as a Bahamas-based tax exile.
Not too bad for a boy who was born above the Roman Arms pub in the East End borough of Bow, and left school at 15 to join the family catering business.
The story behind his fortune is the stuff of legend.
Having moved into currency trading, in 1992 he allegedly teamed up with a group of speculators, including billionaire George Soros, who won a colossal amount by betting on the pound crashing out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism on ‘Black wednesday’.
Quite a clever geezer. A man of the Tottenham people, however, he certainly isn’t.
For in almost two decades of owning the club, he has only been spotted in the stands a handful of times, spending much of his time on his superyacht, a £113 million, 220ft dream boat.
Lewis also owns an art collection reputedly worth more than £700 million and keeps sprawling estates in Florida and Argentina.
All of which raises one obvious question: why are these six men, who have more money than they could ever wish to spend, hell- bent on forming a new league that is blatantly financially motivated?
They will doubtless claim to have football’s best interests at heart.
Millions of fans, who can foresee the demise of the game they love, will take a different view.