The Finances of Football

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/06/wikileaks-burma-manchester-united-takeover

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/jan/11/uefa-footballpolitics

It will be interesting to see how on earth City comply with this, given that their wage bill is actually higher than their entire turnover.

£300m season ticket for the Sheikh, sorted.

something like that, yeah. New jersey bought for everyone in qatar or w/e

Hahaha. I was trying to think up some sort of wage-low-turnover-heavy subsidiary for them to open up and skew it that way - Citeh Property Trading and Gold Mines Inc or something - but that's a much better plan.

Hmmmmmmm. It's difficult to see how Platini could get round that.

course it is, football authorities arent any cleverer than internal revenue and 1/3 of britain's 700 biggest companied pay no tax at all (readasundaytimesarticleLAD)

I'm not sure Platini minds too much about "benefactors" gifting large sums of cash to fund footballing success. Irritating, perhaps, but not ruinous, and that's money coming into football from outside. I reckon they figure that there simply aren't enough people who are rich enough and mad enough to want to spend half a billion quid on buying some trophies for a football club to warp the competition beyond recognition.

I think they're trying to dissuade people from running up huge debt trying to compete with benefactees: fewer mad spenders will reduce the inflationary pressure on wages and fees.

If that works, of course, it will lower the cash requirements for entry into the benefactor game, but they'd still need to best what the biggest clubs actually earn, so that's still quite a lot of money.

I don't think this will solve all of football's problems but it is a move, and a start. I wish the FA / Premier League / Football League / Conference would do something similar.

Yes, it's a step in the right direction

I never knew that it was officially 'break even for the three years before 2013... give or take 30m'

According to the Guardian the rules "will also take into account any sponsorship or marketing deals not deemed to be at market rates." So yes, I agree with y'al above that it will be v hard to police that. Still suspect that's the bit the authorities care least about mind.

anyone see last night's panorama on the notts county fiasco? holy shit.

I saw it, amazing how far a brass neck and nothing else can get you.

Mostly it just made me realise how different the mentality of guys like that is. The whole time I was thinking 'How can they possibly have thought they'd get away with it? How could they think this was going to turn out well?' It was only when the door opened at the end that I realised that he had got away with it and it had turned out well - sending some cash out to Bahrain and living there in a decent flat was probably the point all along. Wouldn't it just be easier to get a regular job?

I missed it, what was the general thrust?

A couple of guys, one posing as a prince, convinced people that they were managing a fund for the Bahraini royal family and hence had access to billions, managed to acquire Notts County, half an investment bank and exclusive rights to exploit North Korea's mineral and coal reserves. The method used seems to have been a mix of charm and signed statements (not bank statements or anything like that, just the guys signing letters basically), then once the club was on board Sven & co being paraded around to convince the bank & nk that these guys were major players. Sven recounting being wined & banquetted in Pyongyang, while worthless share certificates were being written out to pay the koreans, was pretty wtf.

yeah, i'd only add that the mineral rights in n. korea were valued at over $1 trillion! and sven said at the time he was being told that notts county couldn't even afford to pay the milkman. it's really worth watching the whole thing, half an hour well spent imo.

that's pretty much how we ran an entire country tbf

sounds amazing. is that available anywhere online?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010p00r

Available in UK only, I think.

wow...totally crazy.

can't help but feel it's no coincidence sven was involved here. not suggesting he did anything untoward but followed the money as usual.

We like David Conn but this article on the Arsenal takeover really bugs me. Attacking the owners for selling their shares and not a penny 'going back into the club' - it's just basic lack of understanding, money went into the club at some point when the shares were issued, and they've been free to trade ever since, the money that Kroenke's paid is not coming out of the club in any way. It's not an obscure technicality, it's how every company in the world works and you'd think the foremost footy finance journalist would know that.

I don't know what he's arguing for anymore, unless it's for a business based on pure altruism.

Yeah that article is really poor. What does he suggest the shareholders do?

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=6354899

176	Middlesbrough	England (D2)	$1,376,640	$26,474

Relegation then getting wee Gordon to hoover up overpaid SPL players really hitting home.

lol at Kimi Raikkonnen being the world's third-highest earning athlete

athlete?

ESPN's nomenclature but seems fair, it's not like he's a dartist, snookerite or chesser. Top earners by sport and country here.

No idea how they got the figures or how accurate they are, but loads to see - Chamakh earning the same as Pandev just caught my eye.

free transfer lol

Wait where is that dude

orgy in Vegas iirc

Sounds like Arshavin, except I bet he doesn't pray:

Mariano Rivera - New York Yankees

"I get a lot of ideas thrown my way. Some people will even come to the stadium or find me when I'm at home in Panama. One time, I was going to a CVS when some guy said, 'I have this idea.' I listened to him; it doesn't cost me anything to listen. After that, I take their business card, and then I pray about it. Most of the time, I don't do anything else."

David Conn picks apart the financial horrorshow that is the EPL

Or: move along, nothing to see here. Except well done Wolves. I could barely be bothered posting this tbh, it's been heading towards oblivion forever now. It occurred this morning that the Premiership is basically a casino for guys too loaded to get any kicks from a real one.

of course it's only a matter of time before Wolves fans start moaning that Morgan's taking profit out of the club, so in some senses it's hard for even responsible owners and chairmen to get a square deal. i kinda think that clubs end up with the financial management that the bulk of their fans deserve, sort of?

Sign of a dysfunctional system I suppose - with no real risk of going under, being reckless and being prudent are likely to end you up in the same place eventually but only being reckless gets you a shot at trophies, so no reason not to decry fatcats like Morgan.

I dunno, I think being reckless is eventually going to end up with a team being fucked, with those being sane is going to be pushed up the table. Utd are still going to make heavy losses even if they win the CL as well as the league, right? Unless Qataris buy EVERY club, it just cannot hold. Sure it may be 10 years before shit goes down but I'm going to be watching football, hopefully, for anohter 70 years so I'm trying not to think with the immediacy of 24 hour news cycles.

Sure it may be 10 years before shit goes down

Depressing thought

football clubs are ridiculous, thread synopsis

This is staggering - Man U have lost the equivalent of five CRon7s in five years just in Glazer loans/fees/interest.

The Glazer family's ownership has cost United around £350m in interest, fees, loans to the family themselves and bank charges since 2005, and they have never put money into the club. In the year to June 30 2010, United paid £42m interest on the £500m loans the Glazer family originally took out to buy the club in the first place, and just refinancing that debt, replacing the loans with a bond, cost United an eyewatering £65m, cash.

wish I'd had the Glazers' idea tbh

Yeah, buy a £1bn football club for fuck all, take all its money, laugh at the fans changing their scarf colours while still giving you £750 a year each.

ok but eventually utd aren't going to be able to continue paying off their purchase of the club and are going to start focussing on their loses instead? i dunno, like unless someone starts putting something in, utd are going to die sometime soon? No other business can consistently lose £80m a year.

eventually utd aren't going to be able to continue paying off their purchase of the club

i thought this would have happened by now, but they keep refarming their debt and carrying on

Debt:
http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/net-debt-by-premier-league-club-m#LFC

David Conn's churning things out almost daily at the moment, but with almost no content. It's most unlike him. The Birmingham one today could basically just be a hyperlink to any number of previous articles by him re Carsten Yeung.

is it along the lines of Yeung is just a front man but with nothing behind him? which is the story i've heard since he's been there more or less

I think so, basically. It goes something like this: Yeung started off making big promises of £80m investment, they have since been denied, he needs to tap the Hong Kong stock exchange for continued funding, is unlikely to get it in the amount sought, big hole appearing in Birmingham's finances due to drop to Championship, likely unable to operate within bank facilities available at present, auditors have raised doubts as to club's continuing as a going concern.

All good points to be sure. Conn seems most rankled by the unfulfilled £80m promise though, which is surely the least important thing there and like it's the first time an owner's money and mouth are in different places anyway.

That's what I don't get about Conn, really - he amasses the evidence forensically, then argues his case like a punter on the terraces.

fuckin a, it worked in rocky iii didn't it

Ishmael you're exaggerating a bit, from what I can see he mentions the non-existent £80m once, in the first paragraph. Most of the column is about how the club will survive in the Championship.

by kicking their opponents to death, same as every season

hey it's the national modus operandi tbf