Football (Soccer) Thread

[Sheilbh]

CLEAR THE AIR!

[celedhring]

Florentino is doing another interview right now on the radio, and quite ashtoundingly is repeating exactly the same arguments as if nothing had happened. It's really amazing how teflon-skinned he is.

Some of his lines tonight are crazy - Japanese soldier in the jungle territory from him at the minute.

I think the biggest thing this has revealed is that Madrid, Barcelona and possibly Juve are in far bigger financial trouble than people had perhaps realised.

Oh, we've realised a lot on that regard. Shit's looking really grim over here, given the perfect storm of pandemic+Bartomeu's mismanagement. The fact that the wealthiest of Laporta's board members (a banker) resigned a few days into the presidency after the accounts were audited sent a chill down my spine.

From Pérez's second interview, I loved his quote claiming that 40% of young people don't watch football... which would mean that 60% do watch football, which to me... seems pretty good?  You aren't getting 100% of any audience these days.

I mean, I'm sure he pulled that number from his behind, but I don't think it means what he thinks it means.

[Admiral Yi]

I'm slightly amused by the co-option of Marxist rhetoric on those tshirts.

"The fans" by denotation means all fans, whether they're in Barcelona or Shanghai, but by connotation everyone knows it only means the former.

[Duque de Bragança]

I don't think marxism is relevant for the socio model of Osasuna, a model shared by Barcelona and, in theory, by Real Madrid.

[celedhring]

So, Ceferin gave another interview and it looks like we're back under UEFA's good graces after Laporta told him it was all Bartomeu's fault 

He's such a weasel 

[The Larch]

From Pérez's second interview, I loved his quote claiming that 40% of young people don't watch football... which would mean that 60% do watch football, which to me... seems pretty good?  You aren't getting 100% of any audience these days.

I mean, I'm sure he pulled that number from his behind, but I don't think it means what he thinks it means.

Yeah, he said that too back on monday and people were saying the same thing, that having a potential audience of 60% of a certain group is actually a huge success, you can't aspire to universal acclaim. But as we saw, Floren doesn't play by the same rules as anybody else.

Btw, another gem from last night that we missed, that the American owners of some of the English teams "are not in it for the money, but because they love sport". 

[Sheilbh]

FSG literally tried to trademark the word "Liverpool".

[Grey Fox]

Btw, another gem from last night that we missed, that the American owners of some of the English teams "are not in it for the money, but because they love sport". 

That's gold. Stan Kroenke owns 8 sports teams. He love sports! and the money it brings. 

[FunkMonk]

Open question.

From the perspective of "legacy fans" ( ) who is worse (or best): the American owner-investors, the Russian oligarchs, or the oil states/sheikhs?

[The Larch]

There's a fourth group that is much worse, the shady Chinese businessmen. Each of the other three have their drawbacks:

- American owner-investors will load the club with unsurmountable debt and treat the club as just another investment to add to their portfolio, you'll possibly never see them in the stadium actually watching a match there.
- Russian oligarchs and oil sheiks will prop up the club while they enjoy the new toy, but if they stop having fun they'll discard it. Also, the "moral" problem of knowing that your club is being the beneficiary of massive corruption abroad and possibly blood soaked money.

[Duque de Bragança]

50 shades of plutocrat territory.

Even russian oligarchs may vary from year to year such as for Monaco with Rybolovlev owning 2/3 of the club with the rest owned by the tax-haven ruling family of Monaco.

[Sheilbh]

I'm slightly amused by the co-option of Marxist rhetoric on those tshirts.

I'm not entirely sure about what's Marxist about this

"The fans" by denotation means all fans, whether they're in Barcelona or Shanghai, but by connotation everyone knows it only means the former.

So there's two sides to this.

I think it is generally true that there is an implied hierarchy of fans which I don't like and is often a little bit xenophobic - but also frankly has class and generational issues. Very often the fans who are involved in fan activism and are perceived as the real fans are the ones who live close to the stadium and can afford season tickets. This is particularly an issue with the six English clubs involved where it's pretty expensive - so it's broadly middle-aged men. I'm not sure those fans are necessarily "better" fans than people from overseas who build entire holidays about going to see their team. In my club there was a particularly famous example of a Malaysian guy who made an entire holiday to the UK about going to see Everton only for the game to be called off due to bad weather (Obviously he's now a local legend and the club paid for him to come to another holiday and watch a game that actually happened)

Having said that I think the flipside of that is that a lot of these elderly and middle-aged executives as well as having an insane set of opinions about "the youth" also have incredibly basic and patronising views of foreign fans. So fans in Shanghai have no discernment, no interest in the background to the clubs they support and will almost mindlessly devour Liverpool v Barcelona seven times a year - and pay for the privilege. I don't think that's true. I think actually global fans often are as, if not more, committed to their clubs and sometimes support them because of their heritage/traditions. Also my experience just being online is that if anything they mirror the local fans because that's almost the way of showing credibility as a real fan - so I don't know that they'd necessarily be into a tournament entirely opposed by the local fanbase. And I also think European - or at least English football - markets itself around the fanbase. I keep mentioning it but the thing about pitchside mics, the emphasis on the derbies etc etc. AR earlier in the thread said maybe the English fanbase is more passionate than in some US sports - I don't think they are, I think that view is a consequence of really successful branding by the Premier League.

The effect of that is you can't pivot on a dime and say actually the USP of English/Spanish/Italian football isn't the passionate fanbases - it isn't the Manchester derby, the Curva Nord etc - actually it's just about the quality of football which is the (self-appointed) best teams always playing. That's a different product. So if you can't bring the domestic/"legacy" fans along to create the atmosphere and a product that plays into the existing brand, then I wonder if you actually have a global audience who want this. Given how badly planned everything else about the Super League was - I'm not convinced these executives have done loads of research and I think they made a lot of assumptions that there'd be widespread interest in it.

[The Larch]

50 shades of plutocrat territory.

Even russian oligarchs may vary from year to year such as for Monaco with Rybolovlev owning 2/3 of the club with the rest owned by the tax-haven ruling family of Monaco.

Didn't he buy the team and talked about making Monaco an European powerhouse only to basically quit on the team after a couple of years?

Another example of a bad owner of this kind is Sheikh Abdullah al Thani, a minor member of the Qatari royal house who in 2010 bought Málaga and pumped it up to the point that it was starting to appear as a serious contender for the top spots in Spain. After a couple of years Málaga managed to reach the QF of the Champions League, but setbacks in the sports side (they got banned from European competitions by UEFA due to financial irregularities) and the Sheikh's own business side (several side projects that he had around Málaga failed around the same time) made him basically discard the football club as a broken toy, and he basically put up a figurehead to run the club and forgot about it in a rather negligent way (several times the players went unpaid because the figurehead president had to chase the Sheikh around in order to get him to sign off on the salary expenses), to the point that courts had to formally remove him from the running of the club, and it now languishes in the 2nd division.

[The Larch]

So, Laporta has finally spoken and... he just said that the Super League is absolutely necessary. 

These people just can't read the room...

[Sheilbh]

Open question.

From the perspective of "legacy fans" ( ) who is worse (or best): the American owner-investors, the Russian oligarchs, or the oil states/sheikhs?

Americans.

Oil states are in it for reputational laundering purposes so they tend to be quite committed to their "project". They tend to build flashy infrastructure. They normally keep things like ticket prices affordable and in the case of City they still have loads of heavily discounted tickets/increased availability for young fans and for people who were fans when City were not in the Premier League. And, again, from just looking at City they have poured money into some of the poorer areas of Manchester and really helped renovate the areas. There are a huge number of moral issues with it and I think there are moral lines that each fan probably has so they might be okay with Abu Dhabi or Dubai but draw the line at the Saudi Crown Prince. But from a purely fan based perspective I think they're probably the best.

With Duque's qualifier about Russian oligarchs actually having the funds, then I think they will spend a lot of money on the club. They will build it up and again normally make improvements to the infrastructure. But there is a risk they will get bored/not allowed to enter the country and the money taps turn off.

The Americans fundamentally want to run it as a business. So - in English sport experience - they tend to buy the clubs in a leveraged buy-out so load them up with huge amounts of debt. They want to make money so they will try and increase ticket prices. They have form for not running clubs well - I think FSG are good at the football/sports side of that, but I don't think the Glazers, Kroenke, Lerner, Khan, Short or Hicks and Gillett experience has been great from a football/sports side of running a club. And I think they understand relegation in theory but don't get it in practice - that's something I've read about Lerner and Short that they both thought there would be some way of somehow getting out of it. But because they ran the club badly on the sports side - especially overpaying for players - they got relegated and in enormous financial trouble and their asset lost a huge amount of its value - so I think Randy Lerner got Aston Villa for £65 million in 2006, ten years later after relegation and a firesale of over-paid players he sold it for £75 million. We're still waiting for the end game with FSG, Glazers, Kroenke etc - but I can't think of many American ownership groups that have left their club in a better place than when they took over.

And obviously the most dodgy/one to avoid is Chinese ownership at the minute - because of a combination of capital controls meaning they sometimes literally don't pay the bills and other times do some very dodgy accounting/company law tricks. So Wigan had this last season and I still don't fully understand what happened. They were 13th in the Championship. The club owner was a Hong Kong holding company. They then sold their entire shares to another Hong Kong holding company who put the club into administration. This meant that even though they had been 8 points clear of relegation because they were now insolvent they got a 12 point deduction and were relegated - I think they've now been bought by Bahraini business group. But the whole administration is really bizarre and it was not an insolvent club, they were put into voluntary administration and apparently the owner of the buying Hong Kong fund had been asking about the administration process in England before buying the club - so I can only assume there was some strange accounting ticks going on in the background.