FootBiz newsletter #22: APT vote on a knife-edge plus governance bill and Club World Cup latest

The bad news is that it’s another international break.

The good news is that it’s the last international break until March.

By the time we have cleared this 10 days of purgatory, the next time we see international football we will know the result of Manchester City’s 115 charges hearing. Those secret proceedings and the downstream effect of them are still occupying a surprising amount of brain space among Premier League people we speak to.

Further down the pyramid, the focus is on the Football Governance Bill, which we have some news on below. Tomorrow the bill will be discussed in the House of Lords once again, its second reading, as we continue to await the appointment of the long-promised regulator and similarly long-promised ‘new deal for football’.

If either of those are sewn up before March it would be a genuine surprise.

Quite a beefy list of contents today so I won’t waste any time.

Table of Contents

• PL/APT update

• Governance bill latest

• PGMOL crisis

• Real Mad over Club World Cup?

• Lineker to leave BBC

• Football is Paramount

• Bonds broken, bonds issued

• FIFA eyeing tech advances

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PL/APT update

Premier League clubs are not expecting a rash of inflated related-party sponsorship deals if amendments to the existing rules are introduced next week.

The 20 clubs are due to meet at London’s Nobu Hotel on 22 November to vote on proposed changes to the regulations, which have been triggered by Manchester City's legal challenge to the Premier League's Associated Party Transaction rules.

An independent tribunal ruled last month that elements of the rules were unlawful, which has led to the Premier League proposing a series of amendments. A change to the Premier League's definition of "fair market value" has been billed as hugely significant, as clubs will now only have to demonstrate that a contested sponsorship deal "could" rather than "would" agreed by another party that does not have links to their owners.

This interpretation has led to suggestions that City and Newcastle in particular will be permitted to agree far more lucrative sponsorship deals in the future. The legal dispute was originally sparked by the Premier League's decision to block a new sponsorship deal with Abu Dhabi-owned Etihad Airways.

This analysis ignores the fact that the proposed Etihad deal was blocked under the old APT rules introduced in 2021 however, which are not the ones being amended. The current rules were only introduced in February and have not been used to block any new sponsorship deals involving any club.

The Premier League are privately disputing claims that the new rules will open the floodgates to huge new commercial deals, a message they have relayed to the clubs ahead of next week's vote. The previous vote on this issue in February was as tight as possible, with the Premier League only just achieving the required two-third majority of clubs who voted on the basis of two abstentions.

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Governance bill latest

The Premier League are continuing to lobby for amendments to be made to the Football Governance Bill following its introduction to Parliament last month.

A "strengthened" version of the bill first tabled by the Conservative government last March was introduced in the House of Lord's last month. The most significant change is the government's decision to put parachute payments within the scope of the new Independent Football Regulator.

Under the new legislation the IFR's “backstop powers” to impose a financial settlement on the Premier League and EFL if they cannot reach an agreement on a formula for redistributing broadcast revenue will include the ability to determine the level of parachute payments. 

The Premier League are strongly opposed to parachute payments being part of those discussions, as they regard them as fundamental to maintaining the competitive balance of the top division, as they provide a financial safety net which enables clubs promoted from the Championship to invest heavily in their playing staff. 

The clubs and the Premier League executive are continuing to press this point to government with the aim of removing parachute payments from the IFR's remit, or at least limiting the regulator's scope to determine their level.

The EFL continues to push for the payments to be scrapped altogether, as they argue that relegated clubs receiving an extra £40m-a-year from the Premier League distorts the competitive balance of the Championship.

PGMOL crisis

The attitude towards the body that organises refereeing in English football, Professional Game Match Officials Ltd (PGMOL), has quite noticeably changed in recent years.

With the introduction of VAR, fans have come to expect a level of perfection that wasn’t possible in the before times. Errors are now more commonly seen as deliberate and avoidable, while the misaligned incentives of social platforms reward engagement farmers trading in this sort of content.

Clubs have also embraced the very ‘online’ comfort of conspiracy theories to explain away mistakes. Conspiracy, it would seem, is far easier to blame than incompetence.

With that as context, the last thing that PGMOL needed was a controversy of some actual substance, but they got that yesterday when a video of Premier League referee David Coote appeared online in which he called Jurgen Klopp an “absolute c**t.. a German c**t” and referred to Liverpool’s performance in a game he had officiated as “shit”.

While the latter may have been a fair, qualitative judgement, to say it down the barrel of a camera in a profession where objectivity is an absolutely core tenet shows hideously poor judgement.

Coote was suspended while PGMOL and The FA investigated, originally denying that it was him.

Within an hour of that denial being reported by The Daily Mirror’s Darren Lewis, it had melted into a soft admission (with no recall) of its authenticity.

For those wanting to see the video(s), they are linked here.

The second, rather ominously, sees Coote say: “Just to be clear, that last video can not go anywhere.”

His friend(?) in the video then, even more ominously, says: “he’s a Premier League referee. Let’s not ruin his career… we can’t ruin a bloke’s career.”

FIFA get Miami heat

It was, as we called out at the time, a fairly transparent money-grab by FIFA when they inserted Lionel Messi Inter Miami into their under-fire, expanded Club World Cup simply for finishing top of the MLS Regular Season standings.

As well as they played this season, considering every other team going to the CWC will be there based on their achievements in continental competitions, it remains a bit of a joke that David Beckham’s franchise were included. The same courtesy would quite obviously not have been afforded to the Columbus Crew or Toronto FC, though Miami’s inclusion would, at least, have been a bit more palatable had they ended up winning the whole thing in style.

Instead, the worst possible timeline played out for a number of parties as Atlanta United (the 20th-best team in the regular season) eliminated Inter Miami from the playoffs in the first round.

It was a disaster for:

• Inter Miami - who might only have one more shot of winning a first MLS Cup with Messi

• MLS - who, struggling for coverage in a crowded media environment, just lost their most marketable team and any chance of global coverage as the playoffs progress

• Apple - for the very same reasons, though they do at least have an opt-out clause in the MLS deal that might save them

And while it would be tempting to say it’s a disaster for FIFA too, that is only really in an optics sense. As far as the tournament goes, there will be more eyeballs and more commercial dollars as long as Messi is involved.

Given the struggles in getting the CWC off the ground, that clearly matters more at this stage.

Real Mad over Club World Cup?

Real Madrid have budgeted for no income from the Club World Cup next summer, a move that has set off alarm bells as focus on the tournament intensifies.

While the club rowed back on coach Carlo Ancelotti’s comments earlier this season that they wouldn’t be participating, Madrid’s forward-facing budget suggests that the club could still be considering its options (or simply enjoying the leverage that appearance would afford them).

If they still plan on participating, it is more likely a comment on how the financials surrounding the tournament are not expected to meet FIFA’s original guidance, as Ancelotti already alluded to.

"Players and clubs won't participate in that tournament," Ancelotti had said. "One single Real Madrid game is worth €20 million, and FIFA want to give us that amount for the entire competition. Negative.

"Just like us, other clubs will refuse the invitation."

Sources told ESPN that clubs could pocket north of $100m for taking part. FIFA had projected billions in revenue from the tournament but are still scrambling for a broadcast deal and headline sponsors of world football’s governing body are taking action over being excluded from the tournament, which is now left struggling for commercial partners with time ticking away.

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Lineker to leave BBC

Gary Lineker has signed one final contract extension with the BBC, with the former England striker leaving Match of the Day at the end of the season and the corporation fully after World Cup 2026.

Lineker has been the face of the BBC’s football coverage for nearly 25 years now, inheriting the golden chair of Match of the Day from Des Lynam and fronting live coverage of the FA Cup, European Championships and World Cup.

The BBC needs to cut costs and Lineker has long been one of the highest earners, even as his own media empire has grown. Goalhanger Productions is one of the UK’s leading podcast companies boasting a stable of shows that goes far beyond sport and into politics, entertainment and history.

New director of sport at the BBC, Alex Kay-Jelski, will not be afraid to make changes at the Beeb as he sets about modernising their coverage.

Football is Paramount

Last week it was Fox crediting its Summer of Soccer for strong earnings, now we have Paramount citing the UEFA competitions (and the NFL) as they celebrated a significant uplift in subscribers and direct-to-consumer profitability in its Q3 report.

On the back of adding 3.5 million subscribers to Paramount+ in the period to September 30, the streamer’s quarterly revenue grew by 25% compared to the same period in 2023, while Paramount’s overall DTC income rose 10% to $1.7 billion.

CBS’ coverage of the Champions League has been a hit in terms of digital reach, with it’s banter-heavy approach increasingly being mimicked by other broadcasters.

Paramount added the EFL rights to their offering this season, which also includes Serie A, NWSL, CONCACAF fixtures and the Scottish league.

Bonds broken, bonds issued

Ruben Amorim bade farewell to Sporting CP and arrived in Manchester yesterday to take over at Old Trafford. In doing so, he has cleared out much of Erik Ten Hag’s holdover coaching staff; most notably Ruud van Nistelrooy but also Rene Hake, Jelle ten Rouwelaar and Pieter Morel.

Six points clear atop the Portuguese league and second in the Champions League mega-table, Sporting last week also announced a bond issue in order to refinance debt, offering a €40m issue to be repaid in 2028. This follows €50m of bonds issued earlier this year which mature in 2027.

The previous bond issue, from March, attracted 2,690 bond investors at €5 each with a gross interest rate of 5.25%.

FIFA eyeing tech advances

FIFA is creating a joint venture with Sony-owned Hawk-Eye that will explore new technologies that advance and aid the officiating of the game.

With the world currently using a patchwork of different tech advancements to help referees, including goal-line technology and semi-automatic offsides, FIFA is moving to formalise its relationship with Hawk-Eye that began in 2017.

Hawk-Eye was one of the first movers in the sports technology space, making significant inroads into cricket, where its DRS product is now a key cog in the umpiring process, as well as replacing line judges in tennis and other racquet sports.

FIFA have also given a $3m grant to two American universities to try and find a solution for football pitches during the 2026 World Cup.