The Finances of Football

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

Will Big Eck stay, I wonder?

he will til he's paid not to

Hm yes that's fair xp, apologies for that - I'm pretty sure he brings it up every time he writes about them though, when really it's nothing to give any heed to.. Promises of investment are the fluttery eyelashes of football finance imo.

There's a lengthy summary of Liverpool's situation on the Andersred blog today. I haven't read it, but it might interest some of you. Will link later.

Not read the Andersred piece yet but here it is:
http://andersred.blogspot.com/2011/05/liverpools-200910-results-underline.html

Good write-up on Swiss Ramble which includes some thoughts as to what FSG's strategy may be, in the form of a 15-point plan:
http://swissramble.blogspot.com/2011/05/liverpools-future-strategy.html

Good piece, even if the 15-point plan is a bit of a no-brainer.

Further progress from this level will depend on the new management team's ability to sign secondary sponsors. This is the area where United has proved so adept in recent years. United's secondary deals (Turkish Airlines, EPSON, DHL etc) will bring in around £44m in the current year, equivalent to all Arsenal's commercial revenue.

blimey

http://www.arsenal.com/news/news-archive/wenger-city-deal-is-platini-s-biggest-test?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arsenal-news+%28News+Feed%29

We always knew that this would happen. But Platini is powerless, right? No way Uefa are actually going to stand up to billionaires of any kind.

not sure what they could do that wouldn't run into EU legislative difficulties, but i may be underestimating the power of footballing bodies to implement a sectoral agreement type inhibition

Now i'm writing like it's an exam and i'll stop

idk ffp seems pretty hardline so far tbf?

i think rather than finding big blatant loopholes clubs will be looking to find enough small grey areas to dispute long enough to gum up the legal works until it collapses; in this case it'll be an argument about how "market price" of sponsorship is deemed

then it'll be a holding company buying 2 million shirts, etc

that was half laughable half terrifying, but can't help but feel that eejit sim was just a bluffer on an ego ride.

Huh what? What are you talking about?

panorama investigation into the sale of english clubs to unknown/shady/foreign consortiums.

Light on exactly what was wrong with any of it, tbh, just came across as v little england imo.

But the dude liaising as the front for this consortium was a real blowhard. Though tbf there was a lot of pics and evidence of a reasonably close relationship with jason ferguson's dad, which obviously raises questions

This was the Bryan Robson thing, right? I dunno, these programmes should set about uncovering real actual criminality or not bother imo. Breaking football-specific rules, why would anyone who isn't a footballer care about that? Might as well run a splash on breaches of solicitors' accounting protocols or something.

That programme a few years back that failed to uncover bungs and ended up with Harry admitting, casually in ordinary conversation like, that he'd be interested in signing a player who was under contract to another club was the worst.

'these clubs have hundreds of thousands of dedicated fans but are bought and sold like *playthings*'

smh

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/14490740.stm

^^^ This is important.

There will always be loopholes. I understand the desire to link spending to turnover etc but surely someone with a bottomless pit of cash should be allowed to spend it? If this sponsorship deal falls foul of the rules they can just do a "buy a brick" sale and sell Sheikh Mansour a brick for £400m.

In a free market? Fair enough. In a closed system like a professional sport? Maybe not.

I can't find the link just now, but Swiss Ramble analysed the deal recently and basically okay'ed it as not especially outlandish in a footy context.

It's here. It *is* outlandish in a footy context simply because it's so big, although maybe not in a global sports context. That said I'm not sure why Etihad would part with hundreds of millions more than they need to just because Sheikh Mansour was calling in a favour.