How to build a super club and not a team of all-stars
hspending enormous sums on players is one thing, but funding behind the scenes and changing mindsets is the key to success
Create a culture
When Peter Kenyon was handed the keys to Stamford Bridge following Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea takeover in 2003, he found that the biggest and most important challenge was also among the hardest to measure. How to make Chelsea, their players, their employees and even their fans believe that they belonged at football’s top table.
The catalyst here was not, as Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein described it, parking their tanks on his lawn and firing £50 notes, but the arrival one year later of Jose Mourinho. Special investment also needed a special leader and Mourinho would set a culture that took Chelsea from a club who could qualify for the Champions League to one who expected to win the biggest prizes. It rubbed off across the organisation. “At [Manchester] United, it was high-performance, high-achieving, aspirational – whatever job you did,” said Kenyon. “At Chelsea, there was none of that. Jose said to me: ‘You have good players, the problem is they have never won anything’.”
Newcastle are starting from a lower base, but the essential challenge is the same. They won the last of their four league titles in 1927, and the last of their six FA Cups in 1955. No sleeping giant of English football has spent longer snoring. They need leaders, in the dugout and boardroom, who will shift mindsets. With the January transfer window rarely the easiest to do business, the starting reality will be to ensure that the rebuild does not continue next year from the Championship.
Invest in your infrastructure
There is a message on the wall from Sheikh Mansour just as you enter the City Football Academy in Manchester. “We are building a structure for the future, not just a team of all-stars,” it says. The quote is from 2008, but any doubting of its sincerity would be ended by a walk around an extraordinary £200million site that officially opened in 2014.
City’s Etihad Campus is now the club’s hub. Whether Newcastle’s owners can create anything on that scale remains to be seen, but they certainly must think not just of rebuilding a team but an entire club.
Spending rules do allow capital projects, and state-of-the-art training facilities are critical in selling a football club to prospective players (and parents). It was something that Abramovich also understood and it can be no coincidence that, of the past seven FA Youth Cup finals, four have been contested between Chelsea and Manchester City. Newcastle did release plans for a new training complex in 2013 at Darsley Park. Rafael Benitez was shown plans for new facilities when he joined in 2016, but says that it ended up with little more than a paint job.
“If you want to attract players, it’s about the facilities, the contract, the
city, the way you treat them,” said Benitez. Capital investment must also extend to St James’ Park and to staffing across every facet of the operation. City did not even have a human resources department in 2007. By 2010, they had spent more than £3million on new staff offices. Yes, the truly eye-watering sums have gone on first-team players, but the structure around them has also been transformed.
Think local and global
Kenyon will never fully live down his claim that Chelsea would “paint the world blue” and, while some of their early forays abroad garnered limited attention, the work that was put in across Asia and the United States – allied to on-field success – continues to reap rewards. When the website ispo.com aggregated combined Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Tiktok users, it was no surprise to see Chelsea in sixth on the global list of football clubs. Manchester City were ninth.
Such popularity would have been unthinkable two decades ago and, while huge questions linger over the true value of City’s sponsorship deals, their commercial income has been utterly transformed. Chelsea the same. Such growth has further inflated their spending capabilities within the framework of football’s various financial regulations.
Thinking global also extends to sporting operations. The City Football Group comprises 10 clubs across four continents. Chelsea have benefited hugely from forging sporting links abroad – notably with
Vitesse Arnhem – even if working locally will be equally important. There are already suggestions of a role at Newcastle for Alan Shearer and Kevin Keegan. City were quick to harness Mike Summerbee, Colin Bell, Tony Book and Francis Lee. Chelsea have worked similarly with past legends and both clubs have placed significant emphasis on their community projects.
Recruit well and stay patient
The suggestion is that Newcastle could have something close to £200million to spend in January and the understandable focus for fans will be their transfer strategy. The lesson from both Chelsea and Manchester City is to build for each phase while creating a group of core players around which a longer-term identity and culture can form.
“The team acceleration was like putting the roof on before we built any walls,” says Brian Marwood, managing director of City Football Group. And recruitment does not just mean players. To do that well you must implement an effective global scouting network. You must hire the right sporting director. You need the right manager. And you must hire a team of executives to put all this in place. For Chelsea, success came relatively quickly. City needed longer. “As ambitious as they are, the expectations of Newcastle fans might need to be tempered. These things don’t happen overnight,” said John Purcell, a financial analyst for Vysyble. “Good decisions will not be enough. Those decisions will need to be underpinned by patience.”