In today’s newsletter: Boxing Day fixtures are a reminder of the dying traditions in a sport where everything is for sale. Journalist and author Nick Miller explains how the beautiful game came to put finances over fans
Good morning – I hope you had a great Christmas. If you love football, and even if you hate it, one inescapable feature of Boxing Day is the festive fixture list – and a look at today’s matches in the Premier League tells a familiar story of a game that has been swallowed whole by international investors.
Ten of the 20 top-flight clubs are US owned, and many others are linked to nation states or private equity. When the Premier League formed in 1992, 21 of 22 clubs were majority English owned; today, only four are. But if these owners are expecting to make money, they have chosen a lousy economic model. Only five out of the 20 clubs now in the league made a profit in the 2022-23 season, with an aggregate loss of £685m.
Why has this happened – and why does it matter? For today’s newsletter, the first in a series of conversations we’re running until new year, I spoke to Nick Miller, a staff writer at the Athletic and author of Who Owns Football? The Changing Face of Club Ownership, about how the beautiful game got gobbled up. Here are the headlines.
Thanks so much for doing this, Nick. In the book, you set out the transition in football club ownership in the Premier League from caravan park owners and package holiday merchants to public investment funds and private equity. Is it fair to say that 20 years ago ownership was a folly, an exercise in vanity or romance or somewhere in between, and at the top level that is essentially gone?
Well, there’s definitely still vanity at the top level, but a different kind of vanity. The weird thing about football is that there’s so much money washing around in it, but barely anyone makes any. So sometimes people outside the game take a look at it and think: these guys must be idiots – I could do better.
But romance? No, it’s too expensive. The people who have access to the funds you need to buy a big club now, they’re not going to piss it away on a lifesize Subbuteo game. There are two owners in the Premier League who are fans of their clubs, at Brentford and Brighton, but they have been successful because they don’t run it like fans. You don’t get an owner like Jack Walker at Blackburn, a local boy done good who spent enough money on his club to win the title in 1995. From that perspective, there is a kind of innocence lost.
When did that start to change?
Twenty years ago, as a fan, you knew who owned your own club and a few of the gobbier owners in the media, but you didn’t care about anyone else. Now you’re almost forced to care, and you wonder: if my club had one of these giant owners, would we be doing better?
The first deal of this kind that I noticed as a fan was when Sky tried to buy Manchester United, which was eventually blocked by the monopolies and mergers commission in 1999. It was when you saw football becoming an investment vehicle for people with no real connection to the club or the game. It didn’t really exist as a financial mechanism before that.
What happened was, there was a curious decade in the 90s where huge amounts of money were coming into the Premier League from TV deals and everything else, and the league’s profile was rocketing. But there were still the lingering effects of a view of football as, in the famous words of a Sunday Times editorial, “a slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people”. So the authorities had sort of written it off, and there wasn’t a lot of thought about who should be entitled to own a football club: it was just, if you can afford it, you were fine.
Then the change starts to happen quite rapidly as people like Roman Abramovich at Chelsea and Sheikh Mansour at Manchester City come into the game. And now with Everton being sold last week to a US-based consortium, half of Premier League clubs are US-owned. You talk in the book about how clubs should be viewed as community assets, that they’re fundamentally different to a paperclip business. Is it possible to be a community asset and be owned by an opaquely structured set of financial institutions thousands of miles away?
No. A football club is a community asset – it’s about giving people something to be proud of, but it’s also about their impact locally. An investment fund linked to an oil state, for example, just has a different agenda, and the purpose of the club becomes something else.
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There’s a tension there, though, because I guess you have to acknowledge that an essential part of defining a community asset is what the people in the community think. Newcastle fans, for example, are definitely much happier with their club than they were five years ago, even though there’s a massive moral question there.
But you do still have to accept that what the club is meant to be doing is just different now. I don’t blame any fan who supports their team, and the emotional and sentimental ties make it very difficult to change that – but then you will get some who will defend their owners at any cost, and claim that their investment in the area and the team makes everything fine.
You have to think about what the fundamental purpose of that is, which is changing the conversation about what kind of state Saudi Arabia is, and in the end that is going to be more important than the club’s meaning to the community. If you show up at a game with a Saudi shirt on, it’s you serving their intention, not the other way round.
It’s worth saying that this is part of a bigger problem – football fans have been forced to accept that the game is a rapacious, dog-eat-dog world, and the only way to survive or thrive is to fully participate. Whereas if you had a structure founded on a more egalitarian idea of what football should be, there might be more room for fans to have a more sceptical response to these owners.
Exactly. The attitude that as long as they’re spending money and making my team successful, we’re not going to look hard at anything else – that is a product of not being able to compete at the top without the backing of billionaires or a nation state. But what that structure might realistically look like is hard to say.
The clubs themselves would have to support it, and there are enough owners like that to mean that it isn’t going to happen. I suspect that the football regulator, which is coming in soon, won’t have that much of an impact because it’s not clear what real powers it will have, and because teams at the top have got very good at finding their way around rules and regulations.
You also write about American owners who want to buy into the lower leagues because they’re captivated by the idea that you could fight your way to the top, which is impossible in the closed shop of American sports. But at the same time, it seems as if the gap to the very top is just unbridgeable now for a club coming up, and all the big clubs have already been subject to these takeovers. Does that mean we’re going to see a slowing down in the big international money coming into the English game?
Everything is still so volatile, and I wouldn’t want to make any confident predictions about how it will work at the top. But I do think you’re going to see more clubs gobbling up the smaller ones to form multi-club groups. At the top, there’s so much money there now that you can’t buy your way in and expect to suddenly transform things. What you wonder is whether more people will start to get disillusioned with the game at that level because it has become so remote and start supporting their local non-league team, and there are some examples. But I’ve been expecting something like that for about 20 years, and it never quite seems to happen in a big enough way to change the game.
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