John Textor – GAME OF THE PEOPLE

THE GUARDIAN list of the top 100 women footballers has been released and unsurprisingly, Spain’s Aitana Bonmati was at the top. Bonmati, 25, was considered the best player by 102 of the 112 judges, making her the overwhelming number one. Bonmati was the outstanding performer in the World Cup, scoring the winning goal, and was pivotal in Barcelona’s UEFA Champions League success in 2023 She was one of 15 Barcelona players in the top 100. Lyon had 10 players in the list and Chelsea eight. Second place in the voting was Chelsea and Australia’s Sam Kerr. England also featured prominently in the top 100, with 12 players included. Keira Walsh, Mary Earps and Laura James were all in the top 10.

A report from the players’ union, Fifpro has highlighted that security in stadiums must be improved and player safety needs to be ungraded. Sixty-three per cent of the 41 national unions surveyed said the standard of security and stewarding was below par with 71% believing checks on supporters entering stadiums were poor. Sixty-eight per cent said technology in stadiums which could identify perpetrators, such as CCTV and facial recognition tools, was insufficient. Alexander Bielefeld, Fifpro’s director of global policy and strategic relations for men’s football, said: “We cannot continue to allow a culture in which footballers are the victims of unchecked and normalised aggression in their working environment.”

Paris Saint-Germain’s president, Nasser Al Khelaifi, has admitted he wants Kylian Mbappé to remain at the club, amid rumours the France international is poised to move to Real Madrid in the summer. Mbappé’s contract expires in June 2024 and as it stands, he can walk away from PSG and the club will not get a fee. Al Khelaifi said: “For sure I want Mbappé to stay. For me he is the best in the world and for me the best club for Kylian is Paris. He is the centre of the project today. It’s normal to ask about him. For me he is the best in the world, I have a very good relationship with him. Not only as a player, as a person. He has an agreement with me, as he has said. There is no negotiation, but I think he is still young, he wants to win many trophies and hopefully with us.”

The Eagle Football Holdings group, which is chaired by US investor John Textor, may be looking to sell its 45% stake in Crystal Palace. The group is exploring the possibility but nothing formal has been agreed as yet. It has been suggested that potential buyers would only be interested in Palace if they could gain majority control of the club. This would mean that Steve Parish, who has a 10% stake, would have to be bought out. According to media reports, fellow shareholder Josh Harris, who has 18%, may be interested in upping his sharein the club. As well as Eagle’s investment in Palace, Eagle Football Holdings also owns Botafogo, FC Florida, Molenbeek and Lyon.

FOOTBALL fans, despite the presence of billionaire benefactors, hedge funds, private equity firms and nation states, still believe they are the spiritual owners of their clubs. It is one of the great delusions of the football experience. Once a club passes into the free market, it is no longer the property of the people that pay to watch the team. They become customers who either buy into the process or they don’t.

If that isn’t hard enough for fans who still hanker for the flat-capped working class game that effectively died in the 1980s, we have moved into an age where football clubs are an asset class that can form part of an investment portfolio. Once that happens, the gap between the spiritual owners and the real owners becomes even wider and even more inaccessible. The idea that an owner can be running a club from a high rise in Manhattan or San Francisco is unthinkable.

Multi-club ownership is on the increase and the fans are deeply suspicious of its intentions. While it represents the new reality, it makes most supporters very uncomfortable because they see their club being treated as an asset rather than an organic body. The average man on the terrace in the 1970s and 1980s knew that their club was propped-up by a local businessman who funded their Saturday pastime – people like Bob Lord, Louis Edwards and the Moores family – but they were, in most cases, cut from the same cloth. The average club chairman (no-one was ever called an owner), was invariably from the neighbourhood and had “made good”. Today’s owners are, very often, anonymous figures who live on the other side of the planet.

So when that owner has more than one club, the discomfort intensifies as the perception is the club is merely a line on a spreadsheet. It isn’t like that, in all probability, but fans want owners to feel the same emotional extremes that come with following the team. It is difficult do when you’re sipping a cocktail in the Cayman Islands, Martha’s Vineyard or on a yacht moored in Marbella.

The most publicised multi-club models are the City Football Group and Red Bull, but there are other, less noisy versions. At the World Football Summit in Seville, the subject of multi-club owners was discussed. One aspect that emerged was the difficulty of running such a model and the complications that come with a multi-club structure. There has to be a strategy and some cohesion between the various parts of the model. Some investors feel that “planting flags” is enough to build a portfolio, but understanding the culture of the component clubs is vital. This doesn’t work when owners are absent from the scene. In Europe, fans like to see the owner is attentive. “US owners should spend more time with their clubs,” said one member of the World Football Summit panel in Seville.

There are good owners and bad owners; the Friedkin family at Roma was considered to have been successful in understanding their club, but others that believe running a soccer club is akin to operating a US sports club are mistaken. US investors with a high focus on data believe analytics can bring them advantages, but they often overlook how lacking in simplicity football can be. Owners also make the mistake of sweeping away the people who have been involved with the club but then bring new personnel into a tense environment. The tactics of Wall Street companies are totally unsuitable for the world of football.

	Clubs	Countries
City Football Group	12	12
Red Bull	6	4
David Blitzer	8	7
John Textor	4	4
Pacific Media Group	5	5
777 Partners	9	9

Football fans need to know that their club, if it is part of a portfolio, is given the attention it needs, be it financial support, long-term strategic thinking and the right partners and management. There are advantages in being part of a broader network, such as the exploitation of commercial synergies, the possibility of sharing best practices and the cross-fertilisation of talent. This all sounds like a million miles from the old image of the game, but it is all very 21^st century. Ultimately, those that see a club as an important part of their life need certain guarantees: are the owners/investors in it for the long haul?; is the financial model stable, transparent and sustainable?; how independent is the club from the multi-club structure?; and are the benefits two-way?.

The modern football landscape is a very different paradigm, but there are only so many willing billionaires who wish to be involved. Therefore, the multi-club model enables investors to enter the market on a smaller scale, allowing them to hedge their bets. At the top end, the City Football Group is different in that their flagship is Manchester City, but lower down, much smaller clubs can be part of a structure. Whether we like it or not, there’s every reason to expect this to continue and grow far bigger, but essentially, any group has to be very clear why they are building a portfolio of football teams.