The original plan for this column is a grand tour of the last five days of football-related news.
Then, on Friday at 10. 36am (UK time), Liverpool “sent a message to the fans” and for the rest of the week they disappeared into a hole in the shape of Jurgen Klopp.
So here are a few early observations from a purely commercial point of view.
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One: Fenway Sports Group (FSG) is going nowhere — not for the foreseeable future, anyway.
The idea that Liverpool’s owners were making plans to withdraw their chips was widely debated on soccer’s M&A network about 18 months ago. The narrative that the team had reached the end of a cycle, competing with Manchester City and was not going to achieve anything. less difficult and here comes Newcastle United.
Some industry resources noted that without a European Super League to look forward to, or a Project Big Picture-style reorganization of the Premier League, it is difficult to see signs of significant long-term profit growth. Others simply think that the dissolution of the FSG union, and some investors cannot do anything else with their money, an NBA franchise, for example.
These theories coalesced when The Athletic revealed FSG was putting the club on the market in November 2022 and the sporting director Michael Edwards, the co-architect of Klopp’s title-winning team, confirmed he would be leaving at the end of that season.
But then. . . Not much, actually.
The club went off the market last February when FSG learned that Manchester United had shortlisted the only two candidates in the hunt for a multi-billion dollar football team in the northwest of England, but a small stake was sold to a hard-to-understand personal equity firm. in September.
And now FSG is wasting its maximum number of workers in Liverpool, which means uncertainty, and uncertainty is bad for business. If no one wanted to buy them when they still had one of the most productive players in the world, a guy he enjoyed among the fans. Who’s going to buy them now?
Indeed, a new narrative is already emerging: would Klopp leave if he knew someone with a richer wallet was on the horizon?
Or maybe you’re just tired.
Two other minds come to mind. Two hours after the video was posted on X, Twitter’s former platform, it had been viewed 17 million times. How’s the engagement going?
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But you know what’s missing? Brand. Simple sweater, jeans, blurred view of education floor in the background – obviously there are messages that no sponsor needs to be associated with.
That said, anyone who visits the club’s online page will be greeted with a pop-up message telling them it’s their “last chance” to get free international delivery on orders over £50 at the club’s store.
At 12:36, two hours after Klopp’s video aired, here are the 16 most sensible trending words in UK X, in order: Klopp, Gerrard, #YNWA, Anfield, De Zerbi, Fergie, Leverkusen, Shankly, Stevie G, Wenger, Angel, Eviscerado, Dortmund, Sir Alex, #FSGOUT, Kenny.
Someone could write a decent column based on that.
As January marks the end of the British pantomime season (“Oh no, it’s not,” etc. ), The Athletic is very happy to be invited to a function at the House of Lords in Westminster on Monday.
Presented jointly through the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Football and the English Football League (EFL), the main ones were Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Lucy Frazer, EFL President, Rick Parry and TV star, Dion Dublin.
The audience was filled with EFL club executives, football directors and politicians, and they shouted jokes about independent regulation, ownership investments and parachute payments.
It’s an elegant curtain but something is missing: a Captain Hook, an evil queen, a Richard Masters (the head of the Premier League).
So instead of the back-and-forth we’ve noticed in other recent versions of the “New Deal for Football” panto, this one is a bit one-sided.
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That said, there are a few lines of crack.
For example, Parry pointed out that when he started his campaign for another look at how English football distributes its wealth in 2020, he thought an extra £285million a year would solve the EFL’s sustainability problem. The Premier League’s 20 clubs earned £4billion more than the EFL’s 72 and spent £1.6bn more on wages every year than any other league in Europe at that time.
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Since then, Premier League clubs have had to increase their wage bill by a total of £500m, the investment hole with the EFL has grown to £5bn and they collectively spend £2bn more on wages each season. than its closest European rivals.
Parry also presented a compelling answer to those asking why the Premier League shares “its money” with the rest of the pyramid.
He pointed out that only six clubs have been in the Premier League since its inception in 1992. Of the remaining 14, the average length of stay in the Premier League is thirteen years. The EFL has 30 groups that have been in the Premier League. Can you guess what the average length of stay is for those over 14 years old?Yes, thirteen years.
For Parry, that means they have played as big a part in the Premier League’s 32-year success story as the majority of the clubs currently in the league. So whose money is it really?
As for the elusive ‘new deal’, no one in the public expects to see it until the government has tabled its long-awaited football governance bill.
As Masters admitted to the Culture, Media and Sport select committee last week, he has effectively given up any hope of getting his clubs to agree on how to fund the extra £900million they have reluctantly agreed to share with the EFL over six years until after they have seen what is in the bill. The league is holding a two-day meeting in early February to discuss all this but no decisions are predicted. The clubs are simply too far apart.
This means that EFL clubs are in “no deal” territory, so most of them will continue to receive the same amount of solidarity investment that makes them completely dependent on their benefactors to keep the lights on.
Monday’s temperament can be described simply as stoic, but that doesn’t mean there is rarely very genuine discontent, especially among those who believed the Premier League when it told them, in meetings, that they would receive more money this season.
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League One’s Lincoln City, to pick just one, are widely considered to be a well-run club. But they have had to use £500,000 that their owners had earmarked for next season simply to pay this season’s bills.
Masters’ week finished with a letter on Friday from the select committee asking him to clarify the remarks he made last week when he appeared to imply Everton and Nottingham Forest, the league’s FFP bad boys, are “small clubs”.
The committee also wrote to the Minister for Sport, Stuart Andrew, asking him about the prestige of the Football Governance Bill (“It’s you!”).
On Tuesday, news broke of a very trendy football story: two teams from several clubs are fighting over the reimbursement of a general manager.
No, it was not those two multi-club groups and that chief executive. This was about Gauthier Ganaye, once the youngest-ever EFL chief executive at Barnsley, and his summer move from Pacific Media Group-owned KV Oostende to Eagle Football Group-owned RWD Molenbeek.
At first glance, it is serious. Oostende, a Belgian team of the department at the time, had filed a complaint with a Brussels court over RWDM’s failure to pay 100,000 euros (£850,000; $108,600).
This begs the question of whether RWDM is struggling to make such a modest payment: why is the club’s ownership group, led by John Textor, talking about a takeover bid for Crystal Palace and looking to bring Karim Benzema back to Lyon?
However, this one should probably have been sorted out over a Belgian beer, as it seems like this is a minor dispute between two combative investors in PMG’s Paul Conway and Eagle’s Textor, who actually get on pretty well.
The war of words revolves around whether Ganaye had obligations to PMG when he joined RWDM, given that he had not been paid for several months in Ostend. This situation was resolved in May and the Frenchman joined RWDM shortly after.
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It was at this point that Textor would possibly have warned him that he was willing to compensate Conway for his troubles, though Ganaye told him he didn’t want to.
Conway is not one to leave money on the table, though, particularly in a week that started with him being trapped in a stadium toilet by angry Oostende fans (the club was relegated last season and are currently bottom of the second division, having been docked six points) and ended with an administrator being appointed to take control of the club’s finances.
Conway and his investors will soon regain control of the club and are also looking to win back those points, but it does not appear that Textor has agreed to be taken to court for hiring an unemployed soccer executive.
On Wednesday, Joe Lewis pleaded guilty to insider trading charges in the United States.
This was news, as the 86-year-old Londoner owned Tottenham Hotspur between 1991 and 2022, when he quietly moved from the Premier League club to a circle of trusted relatives.
At that time, the atmosphere at the club: “nothing has changed; as always,” but has become “Joe, who?when he accused last summer.
At that point, Lewis also strongly denied the charges, which were related to him passing on stock-market tips about companies he part-owned to his girlfriends, assistants and the pilots of his private jet.
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But on Wednesday, he replaced his tone, raising his hand to 3 of the fees and saying he was “very embarrassed” and would like to apologize.
Of course, this surely has nothing to do with Spurs and it will have to be just a coincidence that less than an hour after the story was revealed, a prominent football negotiator contacted The Athletic to say: “Here we go, Spurs are for sale again. “
We will be this space.
Thursday brought unexpected (and almost old-fashioned) news: he resigned as a matter of principle.
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And simply “someone”, UEFA’s first “head of football”, former Croatia and Milan master, national hero, history graduate and now advocate of smart governance, Zvonimir Boban.
The point of principle is that Boban believes it is up to UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin to introduce term limits for leadership positions as part of a series of reforms in 2017, only to look for a loophole in them in 2024.
The flaw lies in Ceferin’s obvious confidence that, since he began his first presidential term in 2016, he does not count toward the three-term limit he imposed a year later. And if this is true, the Slovenian could run for another four terms. one-year term in 2027.
Coincidentally, FIFA President Gianni Infantino managed to convince his electorate of the same thing last year, meaning his reign in football’s global governance system will grow bigger until 2031.
Ceferin told everyone he wouldn’t have done so if he sought to run for another term, but Boban wasn’t going to stick around to find out. His resignation letter was insane, raising “deeper concerns,” “total disapproval. “and things that were “beyond comprehension. “
All of this sets the stage for the UEFA Congress in Paris on February 8, when the organization’s 55 member associations will meet to discuss Ceferin’s “amendment” and other headaches. Athletic knows of at least two federations that share Boban’s views on his tenure. Limits. It will be attractive to see if it grows.
But that’s not Ceferin’s only concern, as the congress will also be the first primary collection since the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its ruling on how UEFA reacted to the release of the European Super League in April 2021.
This will become clearer when the original ESL vs. UEFA case returns to the Commercial Court in Madrid, where this legal war began, because CJEU decisions are judgments on the application of European Union law and it is up to national courts to apply them.
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That Madrid court was fairly impressed with the ESL’s case in the first place, so it will be a major shock if it takes the ECJ’s critical assessment of the UEFA rulebook in 2021 and suddenly swings behind Ceferin & Co now.
The case is expected to begin on March 14. Bring some popcorn.
It takes us back to Friday, when only one story is told in Liverpool or any other football-loving city.
So we’re going to put an end to everything that comes from the other end of the spectrum, everything that comes from a position that has a reputation for never changing: Gibraltar.
Congratulations to Mark Palmer, Chief Executive of the Solihull Moors National League, on the acquisition of Lions Gibraltar FC.
Founded in 1966 as Lions Football Club through an organization of friends willing to honour England’s World Cup triumph, they obtained permission from the English Football Association to also wear the ‘Three Lions’ as an insignia.
In 2011, the club merged with Gibraltar FC to form the Gibraltar Lions and have spent the last decade competing in the British Overseas Territory’s elite, with ambitions to compete in Europe.
They haven’t controlled it yet, but that was before they teamed up with the Solihull Moors, fourth in the National League and on course for a third play-off in six seasons.
Palmer and Solihull Moors chairman Darryl Eales plan to take advantage of the multi-club strategy, so expect a lot of movement in terms of players between groups and marketing deals to “see the Three Lions in Europe”.
(Top photo: Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)