VANITY PROJECT FOOTBALL
bankrolled by a billion aire — or future of football? When our writer dismissed Salford’s rise as an ego trip by the Class of 92 while many clubs fight off financial oblivion, he drew a passionate response from Gary Neville. So, what happened when the two
‘I GET TOLD ALL THE TIME THAT I AM THE CAUSE OF BURY GOING BUST’
SOME people think the Class of 92’s stewardship of Salford City is a cash-strewn vanity project, and I was among them as recently as May 11 this year. That was when the north- west minnows — owned by Gary Neville and his five former Manchester United team-mates since 2014 — beat National League rivals Fylde at Wembley to reach the Football League for the first time.
I began a burst of tweets: ‘The romance of football: little Salford City, owned by a billionaire and six multi-millionaires, losing the thick end of £2million a year in England’s FIFTH tier while paying players up to £200,000, winning promotion to the EFL. Underdog tales.’
This was a reference to the Singaporean tycoon and philanthropist Peter Lim, plus Neville and his brother Phil, and their fellow former Manchester United golden generation members Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt and David Beckham.
My issue, as I detailed, wasn’t people investing in clubs, per se, as long as that ‘kick-starts a long-term plan of sustainable development’.
Rather, I argued, if rich owners try to sustain an unsustainable club, it will ultimately fail. ‘[Wembley] was less than nine per cent full for Salford’s win,’ I concluded. ‘This isn’t a sustainable community club at pro level. It’s a vanity project.’
As they say on Twitter: RIP my
mentions. Gary Neville himself weighed in: ‘No way it’s a vanity project. [ You] would be wise to meet our staff, committee, local fans and ourselves to see if you still think the same.’
Which is how, three months later, I’m sitting face to face with Neville in his Manchester office as he rips apart the notion that the Salford venture is an ego trip with a documentary bolted on.
He explains how it came about — and may be sustained. He is meticulous, unapologetically frank — and disarming. He reveals that Salford are losing millions a year, probably about £3m in 2019-20 alone. And, for now, it will be Lim and not the Class of 92 who will shoulder that.
This will sit uneasily with many as financial carnage unfolds at Bury, Bolton and elsewhere.
Bury are a club close to the Neville family’s heart, with Gary’s late father, Neville Neville, instrumental in saving them after a previous financial administration in 2002.
‘I get tweeted all the time that I’m the cause of Bury going bust because I’m from Bury but didn’t buy them,’ says Neville. ‘But the only people you can blame are Bury’s owners.’
This is a reference both to a former owner Stewart Day, who ‘spent eight million quid, thinking he could get to the Championship or whatever’, and Steve Dale, who bought the club for a pound last December, kept over-spending and continued the path to oblivion.
But Neville argues — with validity — that English football has always mostly been bankrolled by businessman with deep pockets, most of them not reckless and a danger to their clubs.
He says misinformation partly fuels critics of Salford. To paraphrase: yes, Salford have spent a l ot, but not at the l evel most assume.
He gives an example from the days when it circulated as fact that players Gareth Seddon and Danny Webber were on £ 800 per week apiece in the Northern Premier League Division North.
‘Actually they were on £400,’ says Neville. ‘People say we payy this, pay that, driving the markett up … the market HAS gone throughgh the roof but it’s partly throughh what people think we’re paying, not what we’re paying.’
What strikes me is Neville’s emotional, even visceral, attachment. He can watch every match live by private stream, wherever he is. ‘Even last year when I went to Qatar at Christmas on holiday,’ he says. ‘Barrow away, and I was in a Costa coffee, in a Doha shopping centre, with my father-in-law, watching Salford, on my iPad, and didn’t move for two hours. And, oh my God, we lost in the last minute.’ Barrow’s winner actually arrived in the fifth minute of added time. Neville rolls his eyes. ‘You would NOT believe how p*****d off I was.’
He continues: ‘Literally wherever I am, I’ll watch. The first game of last season I watched from Greece. We drew with Leyton Orient. The first game this season, I was in Singapore, with Peter, and streamed it from my iPad to the telly.’
He was unable to travel to the second game of this season either, a 2-0 loss at Crawley a fortnight ago. But he watched. ‘ And it ruined my weekend as much as it did when I was playing. You know what I did that night? I went and sat in a wine bar in Ramsbottom on me own, and just had a few glasses of wine and some food. I had to drink!’
As Salford lie in 15th place in League Two this morning — after one win, three draws and one defeat in five games — following a 2-2 draw at Carlisle yesterday, it is instructive to understand how Neville & Co got here. The genesis was a train ride with Giggs in 2012 as he contemplated retirement. They agreed ‘we have to do something in football. We’d made our names from opportunity and being in a youth team.’ A soccer school format was discarded. Heroes from Sir Bobby Robson to Glenn Hoddle had failed with that. ‘It essentially becomes babysitting for kids rich enough to pay £300 a week and then you send them home on Friday,’ Neville says. ‘I said “Giggsy, I don’t fancy that. There needs to be a team for them… we need to get a club.”
‘So the five of us sat in a room [Beckham only signed up in 2019] and agreed to take on a club. But it needed to mean something to us.’
Oldham, Rochdale, Bury, Macclesfield and others were thus discounted. Lim, not involved at this point, suggested Salford. ‘We players all grew up there, football-wise,’ Neville says. ‘Scholesy was born there. Giggsy lived there for 30 years. Salford was one of England’s biggest cities without a league club.’
Talks began with Salford president David Russell and chairman Karen Baird — both still in those
positions almost six years later. Also there in 2013-14 and still there: club secretary Andy Giblin, burger maestro Barbara ‘ Bab’ Gaskell, Buck the barman, groundsman George Russell, Bill the odd-job man, the turnstile operators, and on and on. One difference is they get paid these days. Another — pivotal to it all — is annual spending isn’t thousands but millions.
Once a takeover was agreed in 2014, Neville and Baird went on an extensive fact-finding mission to clubs who had or were making ‘the journey up the pyramid’. They visited FC United of Manchester, Fylde, Fleetwood, Morecambe and AFC Wimbledon and spent ‘hours with each of them, asking “How do you do this?”.’
Neville says: ‘They had different experiences, fan-owned, entrepreneur-owned, different models all with their challenges. They told us everything they’d done wrong and we were like sponges … we spoke to owners, sporting directors, technical directors, commercial managers, and we wrote it all down and came back and wrote our plan.’
That plan, running to 40 pages of forensic, budgeted detail, included: four promotions in eight years (four in five achieved), a new stadium fit for League One (done) a women’s team (done), a development squad (done), an academy ( done), new training facilities (done), increased gates (done, from 200 fans to 3,500 this season), the cheapest prices in the top five divisions (done, from £100 season tickets with £10 per game walk-up and £ 5 concessions). Gate receipts could be higher with higher prices but are still the second biggest revenue stream (at around £500,000) after ‘TV money’, aka redistribution cash from the Premier League of £1m. Commercial income and earnings from an ongoing documentary project add to the coffers.
On the flip side, player wages, as everywhere, are the biggest cost.
Neville and Baird reveal their blueprint set a policy that Salford would have a player budget 30 to 50 per cent higher than the average in any given division. In other words, not t he biggest, but likely within the top six, to give them a solid promotion shot in any given season.
Neville and Baird won’t disclose precisely their finances for this term but the Mail on Sunday calculates — given player costs elsewhere — that Salford’s will be in the region of £2.5m, so inside the top six but not top.
Including transfers and running expenses, they will spend about £3m more than they earn — barring lucrative FA Cup draws or player sales for big sums.
Lim is the loyal, bullish, wise, supportive constant in the background. Neville says Lim’s key piece of advice throughout has been that spending more on getting promoted quickly will ultimately save money versus getting promoted slowly.
Lim also, since the start of last season, has taken responsibility for all the club’s losses, injecting equity to cover them. Up until then Lim and the Class of 92 funded the club 50-50.
‘Yeah, we’ve thrown a load of mmoney at it. We built a stadium. We’ve now got a Football League team. But it’s been done with our personal money and Peter’s money,’ Neville says. ‘We know we’ll have significant losses for the next few years. A lot of clubs in League Two and League One have significant losses subsidised by owners.’
Neville says ‘not a day goes by’ when he doesn’t spend time thinking how Lim may one day recoup his investment.
Salford have two routes to sustainability, Neville says. ‘We either row back [cutting budgetsets and perhaps falling back down the divisions], which we’re not goingoing to do, or we jump forward. And that’s it. In between leaves you in a position where you’ve got a subsidised loss. As long as you’re prepared to subsidise that loss, you’re fine.’
As our graphic above shows, the wealth divide in wage terms between England’s top and bottom divisions has become an abyss. A wage cap for the Football League was mooted recently at a meeting of chairmen and will be formally proposed at next year’s AGM, with different levels for League Two, League One and the Championship.
Even if that were in place, the higher Salford go, the more it will cost before — big if—they reach the riches of what Neville describes as ‘ t he promised land’ — the Premier League.
Lim’s portfolio includes La Liga club Valencia, Cristiano Ronald o ’s image rights and a stake in McLaren F1 team. Neville says Lim invests just because he enjoys it. ‘He built himself into a self-made double billionaire. He’s got a point where he’s does things he enjoys and he does things he can afford. It’s that simple. He loves football.’
As for the critics, Neville says: ‘We could have put our money into anything: our bank accounts, cars, holidays, shops, restaurants, property, stocks, anything. We choose to put this money into a football club. I’ve never had a single person in five years come up to me on the street and say I’m ruining football.’
‘WE COULD’VE PUT OUR MONEY INTO ANYTHING BUT WE CHOSE FOOTBALL’