FootBiz newsletter #15: how you hire an England manager

Well, that all moved rather quickly, didn’t it?

Thomas Tuchel’s appointment as the new England coach caught a few people by surprise on Tuesday morning, including us, with the back pages still very much focused on a move for Pep Guardiola.

By Wednesday morning, the back pages that had been warm to Guardiola 24 hours earlier were a little colder on the prospect of Tuchel, who is still a Champions League winning coach lest we forget.

If my checking and double-checking is correct, he is the only international manager to have won European football’s biggest trophy - but that doesn’t mean everybody is happy with the hire.

I have read and respect the arguments against, and my position on this is as follows:

1. I absolutely understand the people who think international football is about who has the best footballing system and culture, and think a foreign coach is incompatible with that. It’s an understandable stance to take

2. I don’t actually share that view, and think it’s fine to have a foreign coach (although I would say that in a perfect situation you’d have a domestic one)

What I can’t really understand is how you can believe point 1, as the Mail appears to, but then say “we may have made an exception for the mighty Pep Guardiola” as in the above editorial.

You either believe that “international football should be the best of ours versus the best of theirs” or you don’t. Apparently the best of theirs is actually fine in certain circumstances?

Either way, the nationality piece of this hire was always going to be a debate and it’s healthy. It could even be productive if it helps place focus on the lack of English coaches coming through and leads to some action on that front, though you can’t force Premier League clubs to hire them and so it’s hard to see what the plan of action would even be.

What is interesting to us at FootBiz is the process behind hiring an England manager, and so premium subscribers can now read our interview with the last man to hire an England manager - Dan Ashworth.

Obviously Dan has been technical director at West Bromwich Albion, Brighton, Newcastle United and now Manchester United but he is also responsible for many of the structural improvements in the England set-up that we see bearing fruit now.

If you aren’t yet a premium subscriber, you can upgrade here for as little as £3.99 a month or £40 a year to read a lot more insight like this.

PL vs Man City update

The emergency meeting called by the league for this week has been postponed.

With a lot of legal details to work out regarding its APT rules, it appears the Premier League has realised that there is no quick fix in sight and will instead take its time in ensuring a robust rewriting of the rules that were deemed unlawful.

Two preparatory meetings of the league’s legal and financial groups were also postponed.

Further reading: How Man City's attack on the Premier League could affect crucial voting blocs

Tebas lets loose

As previewed on Tuesday, Javier Tebas spoke at the European Professional Football Forum in Brussels, an event hosted by the Union of European Clubs (UEC).

In a typically combative appearance, Tebas:

• told FIFA to cancel the Club World Cup

• attacked the European Clubs Association (ECA) for only serving the elite

• claimed that the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) is “dead”

…among other things.

Addressing FIFA president Gianni Infantino directly on that first point, Tebas said:

“Mr President, you know you have not sold the broadcast rights for the Club World Cup, you know you have not sold any sponsorship rights.

“Scrap the Club World Cup. It is not needed by players, clubs or FIFA.

“If you use FIFA’s own money to pay for it, you are taking money away from the national associations. Please scrap it.”

Tebas’ attack on the ECA was supported in more gentle terms by Alex Muzio, president of the UEC, whose stated purpose is to promote the sort of representation and transparency in European football that they feel is not provided by the ECA or those who regulate the game.

“Regulation across football was not designed for the current football industry, in which the UEC is needed.

“There is a siren call for better regulation across all football, as football is misusing the power it’s been given.”

Christmas cheer

Credit to the Premier League and their broadcast partners for finalising the festive schedule already.

It has been a big issue for fans in recent years that games being moved for TV haven’t been announced with enough notice, particularly when public transport is such a nightmare around holiday season, but the December and January schedule is now locked in. 

Rotten Apple?

Major League Soccer’s bold decision to go with a global broadcast rights deal through streamer Apple TV hasn’t necessarily backfired, but the signs are there that it isn’t what either side had hoped for.

Apple and MLS haven’t released any data around subscriber numbers since Q4 of last year, when they claimed to have two million subs. That figure included free subs given out as part of a partnership with T-Mobile and thus the number of paying customers figures to be significantly lower, way below the threshold where the revenue-sharing portion of the Apple-MLS deal would kick in.

Major League Soccer released a Key Business Metrics report in July trumpeting a range of positive numbers but nothing about Apple subscribers, which suggests the take-up has been as poor.

More broadly, the league should be trying to achieve visibility and break through into the public conscious ahead of World Cup 2026 and that is impossible behind Apple’s hard paywall.

Anecdotally, in five years of living in America I have seen lacrosse, softball and cornhole being shown on TVs at sports bars but never an MLS game. That is crazy to me.

The Premier League has become the dominant football league in the US (though Liga MX also has a fair claim) with an average of nearly 450,000 viewers per match. Man United vs Liverpool and Tigres vs Club America - comparable fixtures - both pulled around 2.2m viewers last year on linear television.

By way of comparison, 43 of the 479 MLS games in a season (8.9%) are broadcast on linear television via Fox Sports and the recent game between Inter Miami and Columbus Crew, the league’s two best teams, fetched just 150,000 combined viewers across England and Spanish language broadcasts.

Speaking at the Leaders summit in London yesterday, MLS commissioner Don Garber tried to not show any sign of concern, saying:

“If it continues to grow and we’re very much in the revenue sharing mode with Apple then it will turn out to be one of the greatest deals in sports history.

“If we’re wrong, and the world doesn’t go into the streaming environment the way we think it is, you’ve just got to be smart and make the right decision, you figure out what you need to do to go forward. But I’m really bullish on Apple.”

BeIn blow-up

French football is a fairly unhappy place these days, with the historic bungling of their TV rights negotiations by LFP president Vincent Labrune severely denting club’s revenues.

After promising €1bn in TV rights last year, Labrune delivered around half of that via desperate last-minute agreements with streamer DAZN (8 games per matchday) and linear broadcaster BeIn Sports (1 game).

DAZN’s subscriber numbers have been disappointing amid fan protests over the high price, which was recently cut by nearly a third. They deny having as few as 100,000 subscribers - as had been reported - but haven’t published a number, while L’Equipe report it is around 500,000. Contractually, the streamer can walk away from the final three years of their deal if they haven’t hit 1.5m subscribers by next December.

In addition to the price, fans haven’t been impressed by the product on offer, with nearly half of the games they broadcast having one sole commentator and no analyst alongside them.

BeIn’s involvement has proven controversial because €20m of the ~€100m arrangement with the LFP to broadcast Ligue 1 was funded by Qatar Tourism and classified as a sponsorship deal. Every club has been mandated to propose how they plan to promote Qatar Tourism and it has caused a lot of friction for teams already irked by the league who feel the league has sold their inventory.

What has angered clubs more is that BeIn has not made any of its payments due this season as the broadcaster feel the sponsorship piece has not been honoured. In separate but related news: BeIn has also not paid a payment due to UEFA for broadcasting Euro 2024.

In France, it means clubs already hurting from broadcast revenue that is significantly less than last season are now stinging even more at the hands of a league partner. That this particular league partner is headed up by Nasser al-Khelaifi, also chairman of Paris Saint-Germain and the ECA, is not lost on many around the league.

Olympique Lyonnais went nuclear this week on “the incompetence of the LFP” and said they "consider the partnership agreed in violation of our rights and therefore void” while Le Havre’s president said he would not let BeIn Sports into his club’s stadium if they were due to broadcast one of their home games. Nice’s president took aim at the league, saying: “It is not up to the 18 club presidents to solve this. We must be informed of what is happening. The level of information we have had on these subjects is, for me, largely insufficient."

All in all, a messy situation that doesn’t seem like it will be fixed soon.

The next flashpoint is likely to be Le Classique between PSG and Marseille in 10 days.

Zombie Superleague rising?

In a rather fitting story with Halloween just around the corner, the zombie Superleague project is slowly trying to reanimate itself.

Bernd Reichart, the CEO of A22 (effectively the Superleague’s corporate identity) gave an interview with Kicker magazine in Germany where he criticised the Champions League’s new format for not delivering what clubs had wanted.

The German cited Bayern’s 9-2 romp over Dinamo Zagreb and Dortmund’s 7-1 defenestration of Celtic as being bad for clubs.

Interestingly, A22 sources told Spanish sports newspaper AS that the new Superleague is slated to start in September 2025. Which would mean this was the last season before it gets going… and would require a lot of work to be done already.

"We are studying new technologies and a business model based on those because we believe that football fans deserve a better and more accessible experience on their screens,” said Reichart of the project, which notably failed to have a broadcast partner for their aborted 2021 launch.

“In our view, matches are more engaging when everything is at stake and teams compete on equal terms. That is why we are in favour of a classical home and away format followed by a playoff.”

Personal view: I was at Soccerex Miami last year watching Reichart try to sell the new vision of A22, and while I do believe that they will be more prepared second time around after their shambolic attempt to launch in April 2021, it is still difficult to see how they manage to bring anything meaningful together. The entire project seems more like an operation to ensure Real Madrid and Barcelona retain leverage in ongoing negotiations and disputes than anything material.

One thing we might agree on, however, is his assertion that “the foundations of the monopolistic governing bodies are beginning to crumble” and that might create opportunity for new insurgent competitions as governing bodies increasingly face legal challenges over the limits of their control.