FootBiz newsletter #7: Mbappe, UEFA threats, Reading deal collapses and will the players strike?

Unless you’re in your teens, and I’m not sure there are too many of those reading, then you are old enough to remember when a Premier League club hiring a director of football was some sort of cutting edge signal of intent.

These days, it’s the bare minimum. Indeed, every club in England’s top flight has at least one person with a director of football or sporting director title, and in many cases several people in senior executive roles around them on the sporting side of the club. Chelsea, whose fondness for excess seems to rival the ancient Romans, have two co-sporting directors.

Add in that American owners have flooded into the league, comfortable with the General Manager role you see in major league sports, and the competitive necessity for these clubs to replicate more successful structures on the continent, and the age of the heralded sports exec is truly here.

And with its arrival, the old-school manager role and the wide-reaching control Sir Alex Ferguson enjoyed is gone forever at the elite level.

In his piece we published last night, Rob spoke to a ton of different executives, owners etc to gauge where we are in the evolution of the sporting director, what clubs are even looking for, and why sporting directors are a bit like central midfielders.

As ever, this newsletter is free to read but our best work is behind the paywall for premium subscribers. You can click the link above to upgrade for as little as £2.99.

Beyond that, it’s been a busy return to continental football with the Champions League enjoying its ‘showcase’ week.

With the new format launching this season, execs at UEFA decided to give their top-tier competition three nights of consecutive football to kick off the competition, which when you stagger kick-off times opens up a lot of broadcast windows for fans to catch everyone’s favourite anthem.

Next week, the Europa League gets its turn to do the same. (And I sneaky like the Europa League anthem too).

Anyway, let’s get going with the newsletter shall we? Oh, and if you’re enjoying it please tell a friend 👍️ 

Table of Contents

• The drip, drip, drip of strike talk

• Dark forces at play?

• Burn after Reading

• FIFA raid UEFA for new COO

• Mbappe’s annual cost to PSG: £180m

• How do clubs onboard new players?

The drip, drip, drip of strike talk

Do you hear that?

Well, now the steady drip of players mentioning a possible strike has begun, it is unlikely to stop any time soon.

It was Rodri who started things off and, fittingly, he could become the face of this movement. I say fittingly because he played 63 games for club and country last season in a campaign that didn't finish until the Euro 2024 final on July 14th. A month later he was playing Premier League football again. Nobody should pretend that is sustainable, and Jules Kounde, Dani Carvajal and others added their voices to the chorus this week.

Speaking at the World Football Summit in Seville on Wednesday, the Professional Footballers Association (PFA) CEO Maheta Molango explained that things aren’t going to get easier for him any time soon (and why this story won’t be going away).

"This season [Rodri] can possibly reach the Champions League final, which is on 31 May, and within four days, he could go to the Nations League finals on 4-10 June, and then, within four days, he is asked to be in the US to play in the Club World Cup, which will last until mid-July. So, how can you possibly do all this and not at some stage pick up an injury or drop your performance?"

The question that prompted Rodri to drop the S-word was specifically about FIFA’s new, expanded Club World Cup set to take place next summer. Now, there remains a chance that the lack of TV deal and sponsorships for the tournament might mean its first edition is delayed. “There’s no chance it can happen as planned” reckons one executive at a governing body.

Alternatively, the tournament could happen but clubs decide not to take a first team, surely a crippling blow for the TV ratings needed to make the business work, or bigger clubs could decline their place altogether - as mooted by Carlo Ancelotti - and (permanently?) damage the credibility of FIFA’s brand new toy.

That Ancelotti, the consummate club man, was sent out to make that point to the world seemed quite the political move. Carletto is famous for staying above the noise, avoiding controversy and working with what he is given. His work is done on the training ground so it seems a stretch that he would go out of his way to discuss the finances of a competition his team are playing in, even if he performed a convincing reverse ferret (below) soon after.

"Players and clubs won't participate in that tournament," Ancelotti said originally. "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."

But I also don’t want to pile on the Club World Cup here. It is a symptom rather than the cause.

Broadly, governing bodies, sponsors and leagues tend to want there to be more football because they make more money when there is. For clubs, it tends to vary by how reliant you are on matchday revenues or a number of other factors but for players? Virtually every player at the elite level will tell you there are too many games.

The PFA has banded together with its Spanish and French equivalents to legally challenge FIFA’s ability to unilaterally set the international football calendar in court.

Some predict that strike talk will increase to deafening levels as the legal battle heats up and other Club World Cup issues run into harder deadlines.

For Molango and the PFA, who previously met with FIFA about the match calendar in 2022 to little effect, legal action is the first step before any industrial action.

"Two years down the line, the situation has not just improved, it has worsened. So, what is the solution? The first step was legal action; the second step can be whatever needs to happen in terms of stronger action taken by players."

Dark forces at play?

There were a few England fans alarmed when the Sunday papers arrived at the weekend and the Sunday Times had a story claiming UEFA could ban England from the European Championships that they are due to co-host in 2028 if the long-mooted regulator is introduced.

The threat in question is not without precedent. UEFA have always had rules against government intervention and Greece were suspended for just that in 2006, which would notionally be the justification for such measures with England.

Defenders of the independent regulator unsurprisingly say that it is just that: independent.

Those defenders of the independent regulator also smelt a rat when the story came out at the weekend, feeling that dark forces were at work trying to scare people away from an idea that we already know the Premier League and the FA are opposed to.

Amid the scramble earlier in the week, Matt Hughes spoke to a number of involved parties to find out what precisely to make of UEFA’s letter, and the chain reaction it began.

Read: For premium members

Burn after Reading

It was less than a week ago that Reading head coach Ruben Selles said of the club’s takeover: “How long is it going to take? I don’t know. I’m hopeful it happens. I don’t think Rob (Couhig) is the sort of person who gives up”.

Yesterday, Rob Couhig officially gave up.

The Athletic first reported talks were in trouble earlier this week. The club yesterday announced talks were over.

All parties except Dai Yongge, who remains MIA, are placing the blame squarely at the feet of… Dai Yongge, the deeply unpopular Royals owner who has sparked a protest movement while driving the club into the ground.

In retrospect, the repeated teasing of fans on social media by Couhig (above) and his business partner Todd Trosclair (below) was clearly a bit premature, potentially misled the supporters and stung those who needed pain the least, but reflected the Americans’ confidence that any deal was only lacking the final details.

Couhig did not respond to FootBiz and almost certainly wouldn’t be allowed to say anything anyway, but there are very concerning whispers from those close to the deal that the financial pickle Dai has got himself into could mean it is almost impossible for the club to actually transact.

With Couhig’s exclusivity having expired, anyone willing to untangle the Royals’ debts and staggering annual losses is notionally able to have a stab at getting a deal over the line.

That all seems very unlikely now, and if the wilder rumours about Dai’s tangles are correct then it’s hard to work out how Reading avoids administration, which would cost the club more points (Dai’s mismanagement has cost them 18 already) and possibly many people their jobs.

FIFA raid UEFA for new COO

FIFA have pulled off a major coup by poaching one of UEFA's top executives.

Kevin Lamour, who as UEFA’s deputy general secretary is their third most senior employee, will join FIFA as chief operating officer in November to work closely with president Gianni Infantino.

Lamour has previously worked with Infantino at UEFA and also helped with his successful campaign to become FIFA president in 2016, but rejected offers of a full-time job at that point to return to UEFA. The 44-year-old Frenchman will effectively become Infantino's number three under recently appointed secretary general Mattias Grafström. 

Mbappe’s annual cost to PSG: £180m

Kylian Mbappe marked his Champions League debut for Real Madrid with a goal in his new side's 3-1 win over Stuttgart at the Bernabeu on Tuesday, but there is no sense of regret at his old club Paris Saint Germain.

While PSG remain angry that Mbappe left the club on a free transfer and are in a legal battle with the France forward after withholding £46 million in salary and bonuses owed to him the 25-year-old's departure has transformed the club's financial outlook.

Offloading Mbappe's wages has enabled PSG to slash their wages-to-turnover ratio from 90 per cent to closer to 60 per cent in one summer, according to sources at the club.

The cost of keeping Mbappe in the French capital towards the end of his three-year contract was extraordinary, with his £63m salary and £27m bonuses creating a financial burden of around £180m per year after PSG's tax obligations were taken into account.

PSG withheld part of Mbappe's salary after accusing him of breaking a contractual obligation that he would not leave the club on a free transfer, which has led to the player launching the action against his former employers.

How do clubs onboard new players?

In case you missed it, last week we spoke to player care expert Hugo Scheckter.

My first question to Hugo was about how clubs help new signings settle, with the transfer deadline having only just passed.

What followed was a really interesting discussion into wildly varying standards of player care around the world, the advancement of his particular niche (and why it shouldn’t be a niche!) over recent years and a whole lot more.

Full Q+A for premium subscribers: Player care expert Hugo Scheckter