FootBiz newsletter #52: Champions League finale lacks fireworks while VAR survives vote to kill it off

We weren’t necessarily expecting a surprise from last night’s ‘Matchday Mayhem’ - as CBS christened the Champions League’s league phase’s finale - but we were still hoping for one.

In the end the closest thing was Lille, 15 points off top spot in Ligue 1, securing a top-eight spot and direct passage to the Champions League’s last 16, where they also managed to avoid one of the continent’s elite and will have a winnable tie Borussia Dortmund, Atalanta, Sporting CP or Club Brugge.

The biggest losers were Dinamo Zagreb, who acquitted themselves well against AC Milan but missed out on the top 24 despite amassing 11 points. The chances of a team going out on 11 points before the competition started were less than 1%.

Manchester City’s struggles throughout the autumn are punished by a knockout meeting with Real Madrid or Bayern Munich. Celtic, the only team from outside Europe’s eight leagues to progress, will play whichever of those two don’t get drawn against City in Friday morning’s draw, so it is a tough path for Brendan Rodgers’ men.

The big finale of the Champions League was supposed to be a psychedelic 18-game journey with fireworks to finish.

But in the end, the conveyor belt of goals didn’t provide the televisual feast most had expected. One British newspaper asserted “it was also confusing, precisely because it had a lot of goals. Or, rather, a lot of goals where the significance wasn’t immediately obvious.”

What would have changed that was a dramatic late goal or two that radically altered outcomes, but by my calculations the latest goal across all 18 games that actually made a team move into or out of a top-8 position or top-24 position was the 77th minute.

That was Conrad Harder’s goal that sent Sporting CP through at the expense of Dinamo Zagreb.

For a measure of how impactful and dramatic a late goal that was, see if anyone mentions it to you tomorrow.

Table of Contents

• Show me the money

• Hammers win court battle

• Transfer window spenders

• Stadiums as a superpower

• The worst value transfer ever?

• VAR survives

• Gillett continues historic spree

Show me the money

Liverpool's achievement in finishing top of UEFA's inaugural Swiss-style league table - despite last night's 3-2 defeat to PSV Eindhoven - will earn them almost £84m, making them the biggest earners from the group stage.

Barcelona were the second biggest earners at around £75m, but left £1.3m on the table by drawing their final game with Atalanta.

Both clubs have already earned more from just qualifying for the last 16 than the £71m Real Madrid claimed for winning the Champions League last season, as a result of UEFA increasing the prize fund by £320m.

UEFA's newly created value pillar - based on a combination of the size of each domestic TV market and the club's European history - accounts for 35 per cent of the prize pool, with 27.5 per cent divided equally amongst the 36 competing clubs and 37.5 per cent doled out based on performance.

The distorting effect of the value pillar component is shown in Manchester City being placed in the top 10 in terms of prize money with £63m, despite finishing 22nd in the table to earn a play-off place.

Hammers win court battle

West Ham's so-called "deal of the century" for tenancy rights at the London Stadium got even better this week after they were awarded £3.6million following a court battle with the owners, an offshoot of the London Legacy Development Corporation.

The High Court overruled a previous judgement that E20 Stadium were entitled to £6.5m as part of a lease penalty clause after Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky bought a 27 per cent stake in the club four years ago. West Ham paid an initial £2.6m after Kretinsky's £169m share purchase, which was triggered by a 10-year clause in the 2013 tenancy agreement giving LLDC a fee for the sale of any stake in the club until 2023.

LLDC claimed the fee should have been higher and won an expert determination last year for an extra £3.6m, which West Ham paid before challenging in the High Court. West Ham have spent years locked in legal battles with LLDC over a number of issues, including the club's desire to increase the stadium's capacity, who should pay to improve the fans' match-day experience and even the price of beer.

West Ham agreed to an index-linked £2.5m-a-year deal with LLDC when they moved into the former Olympic Stadium in 2013, which cost them £4.4m last year. As part of the agreement West Ham keep all match-day food and drink revenue, which led to a London Assembly member to call it the "deal of the century."

Manchester United's relationship with local government is far more cordial, and Trafford Council this week formally approved the club's plans to redevelop Old Trafford.

As discussed in the newsletter at the start of the week United want to build a new 100,000 stadium on a site adjacent to the existing ground, an ambitious project the club claim will create 48,000 new jobs and 15,000 houses in the area and add £4.2bn to the local economy.

Trafford Council will appoint a team of consultants to work with United on the project, with their endorsement following a pledge of support and potential funding for related infrastructure works last weekend.

Transfer window spenders

As well as doing their best to validate UEFA's new Champions League format by scraping into the knockout stage - somewhat ironic given the mutual enmity between the two organisations - Manchester City appear intent on breathing life into an otherwise moribund transfer market.

With four days to go until the window shuts on Monday, City are responsible for more than half of the £247 million that has been spent by Premier League clubs to date, though with all five of Pep Guardiola's £126m worth of new signings coming from overseas there will no immediate trickle-down effect in terms of spending. Agents and club executives have been telling FootBiz all month that the market is quiet, and finalising loan moves is likely to be the main focus in the next few days.

The Premier League's total spending of £247m still dwarfs that of the rest of Europe however. Unusually Ligue 1 is the next highest spending league this month with £106m, with PSG's £59m signing of Napoli's Khvicha Kvaratskhelia the biggest deal and Rennes spending £39m on three players, while despite constantly pleading for more Premier League funding the Championship is the third highest-spending league in Europe with £44m.

Even more bizarrely, League One Huddersfield Town have spent more than double the amount of all the clubs in La Liga combined after splashing out over £4m on new strikers Joe Taylor and Dion Charles, bringing into sharp focus the financial constraints facing Barcelona, Real Madrid and the other 18 clubs.

Looking further afield there have been some unusually big deals in north and south America. Brazilian club Palmeiras have spent more than £30m on Paulinho and Facundo Torres to bolster their squad for the Club World Cup, while Mexican side Cruz Azul, Austin FC in MLS and Estudiantes de La Plata in Argentina have all spent over £20m.

Stadiums as a superpower

Thank you, as ever, to our premium subscribers for supporting FootBiz.

Yesterday, those premium subscribers received Rob’s piece on elite clubs rushing to renovate (or rebuild) stadia as other revenue streams flatten out.

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The worst value transfer ever?

Neymar was one of the most talented players of his generation, he holds the world record for the most expensive transfer ever (which is unlikely to be beaten for quite some time) and he has won a gaggle of trophies.

That said, his move to Al-Hilal will go down as arguably the worst value transfer of all time.

The Saudi Pro League side unloaded $102m (£80m) to sign Neymar in 2023 and then handed him an annual pay packet of over $100m.

In the end though, injuries restricted Neymar to just seven games for Al-Hilal, scoring one goal.

While his signing was a big attention grabber for the Saudi league at a time when it was trying to attract big stars, the move was sufficiently unsuccessful that Al-Hilal were willing to let Brazil’s all-time leading scorer out of his contract six months early to return to boyhood club Santos, where a teenaged Neymar burst onto the scene looking like Rufio from Hook.

Neymar said on his departure: “To everyone at Al Hilal and to the fans. Thank you! I gave everything to play and I wish we enjoyed better times on the pitch together.

“To Saudi. Thank you for giving me and my family a new home and new experiences. I now know the real Saudi and have friends for life. I always felt your love and passion for the game. I will be following your journey ahead as a club and a country towards 2034 (World Cup).”

So that ambassadorial gig promoting the World Cup should at least be secure. Not that he’ll need the cash.

VAR survives

A couple of weeks ago, it looked like we had our first successful revolt against VAR as clubs in the top two divisions in Norway voted to abolish the technological saviour/scourge (delete as appropriate) of our game.

Well, it turns out they are going to be ignored.

“Despite strong arguments for abolishing VAR, and opposition from professional clubs, the NFF has unanimously decided that it is best for Norwegian football to retain and further develop VAR,” said NFF chairwoman Lise Klaveness.

Onlookers have noted that Klaveness was the lone critic of FIFA’s World Cup bidding process that handed Saudi Arabia a gift-wrapped 2034 tournament, saying it “does not align with the principles of a sound and predictable governance system.”

So it will be interesting to see how she squares that with her own stance on VAR, which appears to also be fairly anti-democratic.

For premium subscribers, here’s Rob Draper on why VAR needs to be abolished.

Gillett continues historic spree

We have covered Foster Gillett’s attempts to invest in Estudiantes de La Plata, and the subsequent arrangement which nobody is quite sure of but which entail Gillett spending lots of money to buy them players.

Well it’s continuing, and by my maths it’s the biggest single transfer outlay in any window by an Argentine club.

Estudiantes pissed off Boca Juniors mightily by activating Cristian Medina’s $15m release clause, and while they didn’t do it correctly the first time they have resolved the issue and Medina will certainly be playing for them next season.

They also signed former River and Bayer Leverkusen striker Lucas Alario, once an Argentina international, to lead their frontline.

Now the Pincha have triggered the clause of River Plate’s Rodrigo Villagra for $11m, a sum that seems elevated to say the least considering Villagra wasn’t a key player in his one season at the club.

Curiously, reports in Argentina are specifying that the Gillett Group, rather than Estudiantes, are buying Villagra. How this skirts around third-party ownership rules is a burning question, but Gillett is also reportedly funding a move for FC Cincinatti’s Luciano Acosta.

The 2023 MLS MVP, Acosta has not yet agreed a contract with Estudiantes but the clubs have settled on a fee.

Apple, MLS kick up promotions

We know from comments made by Don Garber that Apple’s partnership with Major League Soccer has not yet progressed to the revenue-sharing phase.

Apple needs to drive significantly more subscriptions to get there, and with teams returning to pre-season training this week there are a slew of new promotions to try and add customers:

• In an attempt to increase their reach, Apple will also broadcast a game for free every Sunday night.

• US-based customers with Xfinity cable will have the Season Pass interface integrated into Xfinity (though it will still cost extra)

• Apple has partnered with T-Mobile to give T-Mobile customers a free subscription

It’s worth noting that I worked an an almost identical promotion with T-Mobile a few years ago and it did bring in a large number of subscribers. Those subscribers were, however, the least-engaged cohort in our database and almost all of them (90%+ if I recall correctly) churned after the free period had elapsed.

Keeping those promotional subscribers will be a big challenge for Apple and MLS.