World Football Summit – GAME OF THE PEOPLE

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.

SAUDI ARABIA has dominated the sports pages in recent months, thanks to the exodus of players to the Pro League, including some very high profile veterans like Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar. At the World Football Summit in Seville, figures from the league and other industry professionals provided some insight into the strategy that has underpinned the vast outlay of cash luring players to the middle east.

Interestingly, while the session outlined the rationale with some clarity, the gorilla in the corner of the room was not on the agenda. Saudi Arabia’s human rights record and some of the much-documented social issues were totally ignored. Saudi Arabia’s active year is part of a long-term strategy that will transform sport in the kingdom. While the Chinese explosion of a few years ago made a similar splash, it was an approach that lacked substance and quickly lost impetus when the government started to discourage investment in European football. There is acknowledgment that Saudi Arabia’s strategy does not depend on the hiring of trophy players in their 30s. In fact, the perception that the Saudi Pro League spending spree has focused on old hands boosting their pension fund is not entirely true. A total of 52 players have headed to Saudi and the average age is between 27 and 28.

Saudi Arabia is, according to the panel, a soccer-mad country where 80% of a relatively young population either watches or plays the sport. Given the league is half a century old, there is a strong belief it is not a start-up but in a significant growth phase. So why was so much emphasis placed on signing CR7 and Neymar, and if they could, Lionel Messi? These players are figureheads and their influence is huge. From a PR perspective, Saudi bought well. Until Ronaldo arrived, the Saudi Pro League didn’t have overseas media rights, but now, their games are available almost everywhere. Furthermore, in European cities today it is not unusual to see young people wearing a Saudi club shirt, notably Ronaldo’s Al-Nassr.

Saudi Arabia may have been overspending, but football, generally, has spent more than it earns for some time. The representatives of the league insisted European football is respected in Saudi Arabia, but they are learning from the mistakes made in mature leagues. They realise there are challenges – including the aforementioned unspoken issues – but there is a high degree of confidence that Saudi Arabia will be a destination for football investment in the future. There is talk of Red Bull contemplating the purchase of a Saudi club to join their multi-club model.

Saudi Arabia is also investing in women’s football and there are more and more girls playing the game. The women’s national team is now ranked by FIFA (172) and many of the Saudi Pro League clubs have women’s sides. The men’s national team is ranked 54^th and has played in six of the last eight World Cup tournaments. That doesn’t sound like a football backwater.

The next steps for Saudi Arabia involve the continual improvement of their football environment and making the sport a way for their people to connect with the rest of the world. It is, after all, a global language. There will always be concerns about Saudi activity, particularly over the dynamics between the country’s sovereign wealth fund and investors buying European clubs. As the World Football Summit panel highlighted, there are hurdles ahead, but the biggest one may be in convincing the rest of the world the great football initiative isn’t merely sportswashing on a grand scale.