📖 Who Owns Football?: The Changing Face of Club Ownership By Nick Miller (Bloomsbury)
This book cites the old joke that asks the best way to become a millionaire. Answer: become a billionaire and then buy a soccer club. It still rings true, but since that gag was current, the game’s ownership has changed in numerous radical ways. Nick Miller of The Athletic does a fantastic job of setting them out and subjecting them to balanced scrutiny.
Who Owns Football? answers its own title across the course of several themed chapters, and serves as a neat history of the pitfalls and follies of investing time, love and money in something as capricious, fallible and emotionally loaded as a soccer club. A club, say, in the English league system with upward potential, but a tradition of under-achievement and a fanbase that will turn against you as soon as the fiscal spigot is tightened, closed or even locked.
The ownership models that Miller examines are mainly European-based, but given the number of North American shares now in the old continent’s clubs, I’m going to assume an interest among Soccer America’s readership. As many dollar-toting benefactors have learned the hard way, while U.S. sport has always been first and foremost business and spectacle, in Europe clubs were largely founded as communal hubs for social recreation, hard-wired to be suspicious of outsider interest in assets too cherished to be draped in a distasteful price-tag. This paradox has yet to be solved.
“As a rule football clubs weren’t viewed as vehicles to generate money,” Miller writes of the time when club directors could not be paid, and their dividends on any shares were capped at 7.5%. “They were, broadly speaking, run as football clubs.” Those restrictions were lifted in 1981, and two years later Tottenham Hotspur became the first big club to be traded on the Stock Exchange. A decade on and the commercially conscious Premier League was born, while in 2003 Chelsea FC was gorging on the dubious riches of its new owner, the Vladimir Putin-allied Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. It was time to wave goodbye to clubs being owned by the local butcher made good with only the club’s interest at heart.
Before Chelsea, though, Blackburn Rovers — owned by steel magnate Jack Walker — was the first real example of an unfancied team being pumped with expensive talent to win the Premier League. That was over 30 years ago, and they’ve not been close since to repeating that triumph, but it was an influential model. Wealthy companies, states and individuals have since been using club soccer to raise their profiles with variable success, and vastly fluctuating degrees of business savvy.
Miller examines the multiple models of ownership from a fair and balanced perspective. Originally published in 2024, and updated this year, his book was still too early for the English FA’s guilty verdict on Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City’s financial doping. Still, you can’t help but think about it when reading the chapter on international ownership. The vacuous words of Qatari-owned Paris St. Germain chairman Nasser bin Ghanim Al-Khelaifi may do little to convince the reader that being owned by an authoritarian state with a disgraceful human rights record is in the best interests of the game. PSG fans brandishing two Champions League trophies no doubt see things from a different podium.
“Sportswashing is about people thinking of Cristiano Ronaldo when it comes to Saudi Arabia,” Nicholas McGeehan of Fair Square tells Miller. “But I also think it’s about normalizing a state like Saudi Arabia, that is one of the few states in the world where it’s a one-man rule and people can get forcibly disappeared for years without anyone being able to inquire about it.” Contrast that with the words of a fan of Saudi-owned Newcastle United when asked about human rights: “I’ll care when someone is beheaded in Eldon Square” (in Newcastle city center). By which time, it may be too late, mate.
Miller also looks in detail at examples of community-run and fan-owned clubs, celebrity- and media-powered phenomena like upwardly mobile Wrexham, the unique models of the German Bundesliga and MLS, and the pros and cons of multi-club ownership (Manchester City again…). The chapter on the women’s game has a particular U.S. focus thanks to the example of Angel City, a club with no history but plenty of capital, seen by its co-founder Kara Nortman as, in Miller’s words, “the opportunity to align profit and principles.”
“The only way to grow the women’s game is to make it financially sustainable,” Victoire Cogevina Reynal of investment group Mercury13 tells the author. “Depending on grants or getting a percentage of the budget from the men’s club is not sustainable.” The woman behind the initiative to create a global ownership group of 13 women’s clubs calls women’s soccer “inherently a gender-equality movement” with huge growth potential, and “a once-in-a-generation opportunity for a brand to support such a movement.” After reading about all the dictators, grifters, knaves and narcissists involved in the men’s game, this more optimistic chapter offers a dynamic model based on future autonomy for the women’s game.
“We get to break the rules and rewrite them,” Reynal says. Her hope is that in a decade the world’s biggest clubs will be calling her up and asking her, “How did you do it – teach us.” Even a superficial glance at the UK Independent Football Regulator’s State of the Game report on the precarious financial state (and debt) of the vast majority of English soccer clubs makes you wonder if her hope will be realized sooner rather than later.
Right now, many of those clubs are accumulating debt by pouring unfeasible amounts of money into player wages in the hope that success on the field will yield eventual profit or publicity. Unfortunately, in sport as in capitalism, not everyone’s going to win, and going by the currently inflated financial model in the European men’s game, bust will follow boom as sure as raccoons in a lidless trash-can. The forthcoming losers would be advised to read this crucial book for some alternative ways to own their teams. Miller knows that soccer is “a huge cultural force,” and while he shies from judging one ownership model above any other, he does finish his book with some pointers for teams fixated on limited and potentially harmful definitions of ‘success’:
“You can use football as a valuable part of a local community that genuinely contributes to it rather than just taking up space. You can use football to empower women in a patriarchal society. You can use football to encourage people to think about the climate crisis and how they can live their lives in a way that isn’t going to make the planet cave in. And you can use football to bring people from all corners of the globe together in an online community.”
In short, “there are reasons to be hopeful,” concludes the author. Knowing soccer and its owners, though, it will take a colossal slump before the game even starts to realise its true potential.
Soccer America rating: 8/10
📖 Who Owns Football?: The Changing Face of Club Ownership By Nick Miller (Bloomsbury) | Kindle
• Ian Plenderleith‘s latest book is, The Last Amateur and Other Stories, an excerpt of which can be read here: Managing Kids: It’s all about player power these days.