🤔 How Football Clubs Game The System

The Saudi Series is coming.

I had an idea to do a series of videos breaking down Saudi Arabia’s takeover on Global Sport many months ago. I threw up a landing page to gauge the interest and the response was pretty overwhelming. Within a week several hundred people had registered their email addresses and there are now 750 of you eagerly anticipating more.

This was enough for me to go to work.

The result is eight episodes. Breaking down the assault on global sport from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The research has been nothing like I have ever seen before. Infact this project has completely changed how I view ownership in football itself.

It will be with you in due course. But before then, som other grievances with ownership in football. This time, certain parts of multi-club ownership.

Football is such an incredible sport but as I get older I realise there are some clear areas in the game that need regulatory involvement from a central governing body.

One of them is the use of Associated Party Transactions. In 2022, Newcastle were sponsored by Fun88. A gambling company who reportedly paid them £6.5m/yr for the rights to be a front-of-shirt sponsor for the Geordie club. In late 2022, Newcastle got acquired by the PIF in a famous deal worth £300m. Shortly after, Fun88 were replaced by Sela, a Saudi Arabian Hospitality company… also owned by the PIF.

The sponsorship fee went from £6.5m/yr to £25m/yr.

There are no rules in the Premier League stopping these kind of deals from happening even though they are, in my opinion blatantly wrong.

Daniel Levy spoke to this in his recent interview with Gary Neville on The Overlap too, highlighting that even Top 6 clubs are affected by this.

Another area which makes me question the integrity of the game is how transfers are handled inside multi-club networks.

Take the case of Sávio, also known as Sávinho.

In 2022 he was bought by Troyes, a French club owned by City Football Group, for around €6.5 million. He never played a single minute for them. Instead, he was sent out on loan, first to PSV Eindhoven and then to Girona, another club inside the same group.

At Girona he had an impressive season and became one of the most talked-about young wingers in Europe. Man City then bought him from Troyes for €25 million.

On paper this looks like a success story. A young talent developed on loan, and then moved up to one of the best clubs in the world. But dig deeper and the numbers raise questions. Troyes recorded an €18 million profit from the deal, a huge boost to their financial fair play position. Yet the player never actually left the City Football Group system.

To me, this is clear as day. Infact, critics call this financial engineering. It allows owners to shuffle talent and cash between network clubs and strengthen the flagship team.

It might all be legal, but the more I see it, the more it undermines the fairness of competition. Just like with Associated Party Transactions, the numbers can be manipulated to serve the ownership group, not the sport itself.

I’ll leave you this week with a cracker from Kieran Maguire.

The aesthetics on this screenshot aren’t amazing, but the point is clear as day.

What a shocker from my beloved club.

See you next week.