- Arsenal players’ goals per game figures
- Arsenal v Leverkusen, tuesday at 8pm. How the opposition are doing
By Tony Attwood
Football is always engaged in some sort of new adventure, ranging from someone who knows nothing about football buying a club to get a bit of local popularity, through someone having the bright idea of owning a number of clubs in order to be able to transfer players in and out as needed within the group.
Or you might like to own a TV station, and get the rights to show matches of a club in another country. Then buy a travel agency and start putting on week-long trips that include watching a home game for your club. Then you might have the travel agency sponsor the hotel, which in turn sponsors the club. After which, you might buy a club in another country and arrange for the two clubs to play each other in pre-season friendlies. Turn the pre-season friendlies into a cup competition. Fix up with a tour operator so your pre-season visitors get tours, the football match and anything else you can throw in. Then buy the airline that transports people to and from matches. And then buy the TV channel that also sells all your memorabilia. Then buy another club. And then think: who needs supporters?
Uefa is nervous and has, on several occasions takled about kicking clubs out of European competitions next season because two clubs owned by the same corporation are in the same competition.
And hey – we already have a model of this, with Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan and the City Group – a group so powerful that when the Premier League in all its pomp and might, challenged them and found them guilty of 115 charges, and nothing happened. Silence from February 2003 to March 2006, and we are still waiting. Meanwhile, the group runs a dozen or more clubs worldwide from ManC to New York City, Girona…
And there is not only City Group, but also Red Bull, Blue Co, the Eagle Group… Still, at least at the start of this month Uefa put an end to extensions to and exemptions from the multi-club rules. And yes of course, I know that Arsenal’s owners have interests in American clubs, and I’m not that keen on that either – but at least they are on a different continent.
The good news this season was that Drogheda United, FC DAC 1904 and Crystal Palace all got challenged by Uefa, and now we know that for next season all multi-club groups have to be compliant with the rules by 1 March for entry the season afterwards.
But there is little doubt that multi-club ownership is where football is going. According to Uefa are over 345 clubs now in a group, and there are over 100 top division clubs in some sort of partnership or group.
Uefa knows the development poses “a material threat to the integrity of European club competitions with a growing risk of seeing two clubs with the same owner or investor facing each other on the pitch.” But it doesn’t want to interfere. Even when we find that the owners of ManC is now linked with Fenway Group, with its own multiple shareholdings. And that matters because each group acts for the group, not the club. Imagine Arsenal selling two of their best players to another club owned by KSE because that club was not doing well in an American league.
The fact is, in any group of companies, one is always dominant and will dictate policy. And fine if Arsenal is the dominant force it its group, but I still don’t like it because Arsenal was not built on that model. It was created as Woolwich Arsenal by men who wanted a football team in their area. When Woolwich Arsenal failed because the crowds were not big enough to sustain a league club, a director of Fulham came along, paid off the debts, paid for a new ground where bigger crowds would attend, and started the club on the route to success. If you have read my ramblings on the Arsenal History Society site, you’ll know all about him.
Meanwhile, today, as ever Uefa is looking weak. For example, they have ordered City Group to separate the ownership of ManC from Girona – and then allowed them both to play in the Champions League. I wonder what Crystal Palace made of that.
So is the ManC group a success? Well, not really as the group managed to lose over £1bn, and it seems to be losing more year by year (last year the group lost getting on for a third of a billion pouds. They are staying afloat by selling bits of themselves off; it is not looking like a very viable model.
Now one might say, well, that means the whole system will eventually collapse, and that is certainly possible (one just has to look at the French league to see what can go wrong when one club is allowed to become so dominant that even the TV companies give up on the project and pull out).
And we might also remember the group that was made up of Crystal Palace, Olympique Lyonnais, Botafogo and RWD Molenbeek. They ran into so many financial problems that eventually they had to break the group up and let each club swim in its own mess.
In effect, virtually every group of football clubs is losing money. Their one hope is that one of their clubs will become successful and earn enough money to pay off the debts of all the others. Which is a bit tough on the successful club – all that effort and then the profit goes to keeping failing clubs going.
The groups do claim that they save money on scouting and have a more attractive route to the big time for talented youngsters, but I am not sure that really is what supporters want. As for Arsenal, there is no indication that we need such a system. Think of Saka. Think of Dowman. I think we are ok as we are.
