FootBiz newsletter #8: No public money for Old Trafford, Everton deal's new twist and Club World Cup

There is a cruel irony, or perhaps simply evidence of what he was complaining about, in Rodri sustaining a likely season-ending injury during Manchester City’s rather tense draw with Arsenal on Sunday.

The unexpected face (and voice) behind the players’ strike movement, Rodri’s footballing workload has been enormous and eventually, predictably, it took its toll.

Now City are without the player that many consider the world’s best midfielder for the rest of their campaign. He will surely miss FIFA’s new Club World Cup in the summer too, a tournament that has become the lightning rod at the centre of discussions around the overstuffed playing calendar.

Pressing ahead with the CWC despite those conversations, FIFA initiated a conversation of its own by calling an emergency meeting with global broadcasters that took place on Friday.

In what multiple sources in attendance described as a smooth sales pitch, FIFA president Gianni Infantino brought out the big guns, with PSG chairman Nasser Al-Khelaifi and Manchester City chief executive Ferran Soriano eulogising about their backing for a tournament they claimed could become the biggest club competition in the world.

Over 50 media companies had senior representatives on the call, ranging from the BBC to streaming providers such as Apple and Netflix, so there is certainly interest in the televising the tournament. The problem is a familiar one of valuation, with broadcasters reluctant to invest huge sums in what is essentially a start-up product shrouded in uncertainty, with even fundamental details such as kick-off times yet to be agreed.

“It's too risky to put serious money down," a sports rights negotiator told FootBiz.

But even beyond the broadcast troubles, and the aborted deal with Apple that sponsors were sceptical would hide their branding, the tournament faces issues with finding partners after locking out their biggest corporate supporters.

More details on that, the stadiums that have been chosen and the difficulties of spinning up a huge new commercial property from scratch are in Matt and Ricardo’s latest piece below.

Beyond that, there’s plenty to talk about including a twist in the Everton saga, Manchester United’s plans, more independent regulator talk and a load of other stuff.

As ever, if you’re enjoying the newsletter or the premium analysis please share with like-minded individuals who would consider subscribing.

Enough babble, though. Let’s get going…

Table of Contents

• No public money for Old Trafford upgrade

• M&A murmurs

• Behind the wall

• Sponsorship trend

• New sponsorship deals

• Price of Football - live!

• Independent regulator latest

• The end of independents?

No public money for Old Trafford upgrade

Whether Manchester United give Old Trafford a facelift or demolish it and start again is still very much to be decided.

But the mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, has now confirmed that the club won’t be receiving any public money to do so.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe had suggested it was a “no-brainer” for public money to help build a “Wembley of the North” on the site of United’s slightly creaking stadium, though he has something of a vested interest (around 25% if I recall correctly).

In the end, the optics of handing over a significant amount of British taxpayer cash to fund a stadium project for a billionaire who moved to Monaco to avoid paying British taxes was also always going to prove a sticking point.

Burnham does seem more open to investing in transport and infrastructure development that surrounds Old Trafford and regenerates the area, but the concern remains a rail freight depot near the ground that would need to be moved for the site to reach its full potential.

That job would not be quick, nor would it be cheap, though Burnham was confident in comments on Monday that it would also help fix the rail network in the north-west, a significant issue for locals.

Norman Foster’s architectural firm has been appointed by the club to draw up a development blueprint for land they own around the stadium, but all indications are that this won’t be a quick process. With no government aid, it will be United footing the full bill.

M&A murmurs

Everton’s on-off takeover saga is long past the point of predictions, though credit to our resident football finance expert Kieran Maguire for calling back in July that the withdrawn offer from The Friedkin Group did not mean the end of TFG’s interest in acquiring the club.

David Ornstein broke the news that TFG, who were still intimately bound to the process because of the £200m loan they had provided to keep the club going, have now reached an agreement with Farhad Moshiri to acquire the club subject to regulatory approval. The assumption in football finance circles is that Friedkin must have found an agreement with creditor A-Cap over their interest in the Toffees, a downstream effect of the 777 bid disintegrating under question marks and lawsuits.

It is a blow to John Textor’s ambitions of owning a controlling stake in a Premier League club, but the Eagle Football owner did acknowledge recently that he could be gazumped as his 46% stake in Crystal Palace needed to be sold before he could finalise any deal on Merseyside.

With Raine Group working on the sale of that piece and a now-public acknowledgement that he is unhappy with the structure he finds himself in at Selhurst Park, dealmakers are expecting Textor to push ahead with the sale of his minority interest.

The timeline, however, is now less pressured and Textor has recovered a small amount of leverage in those negotiations.

For Everton, the endless procession of false dawns might be over.

Behind the wall

For premium subscribers who might have missed them, a little recap of a few of our recent analysis pieces:

• What do clubs want in a sporting director? The evolution of a now-crucial role

• Man City’s 115 charges - what happens next? What if they win? What if they lose?

• “It’s Behdad’s club now”: What to make of Chelsea’s civil war going public

• Under new management: Pressure on WSL’s new overlords to bounce back from bungled broadcast negotiations.

Sponsorship trend

When Canada wanted to hire Jesse Marsch to continue the growth of their men’s football program, they needed a bit of extra money to make the deal happen and the Canadian Soccer Association didn’t have it.

So with some help from the owners of the three MLS teams north of the 49th parallel, the money was found and Marsch was announced as the “MLS Canada Men’s National Team Head Coach.”

Jokes were made and fun was had but the reality of finances at association level means we will be seeing more of these.

In the same way that many fans continue to call their club’s stadium by its original name (the Camp Nou rather than Spotify Camp Nou) there are very few people, if any, who will be terming Marsch by his full title.

The trend won’t be going away, though. Australia’s men’s team is now the Subway Socceroos, and they announced Tony Popovic as their new head coach on Monday.

We understand that the possibility even came up in negotiations with Mauricio Pochettino during his protracted hiring by the US Soccer Federation, though in the end it was individual donors that got the deal done rather than corporations.

And, if we are honest, the Ken Griffin USMNT head coach Mauricio Pochettino might be a mouthful too far.

While I’m not aware of any clubs doing this yet, it is surely a matter of time…

New sponsorship deals

We mentioned last week that Qatar Airways would become the aviation sponsor of the UEFA Champions League… and that oddly UEFA had agreed to a six-year deal rather than their usual three-year sponsorship term.

Well now we know why and there are 500 million reasons over those six seasons. The €83m per year partnership is a big hike on the deal that Turkish Airlines had for the same rights.

The Women’s Super League in England also got an upgrade and doubled its title sponsorship with Barclays to an annual fee in the region of £15m, according to the BBC.

Price of Football - live!

For those of you interested in football finance who don’t listen to the Price of Football podcast, I ask you ‘what are you doing?’

Kieran, Kevin and Guy are hosting a live show in a few weeks for London-based listeners (and non-listeners, I guess) who are interested.

Tickets on the link below 👍️ 

Independent regulator latest

After UEFA’s mild threats and posturing over an England ban from Euro 2028 (discussed further here for premium subscribers) a detailed response from the Labour government to UEFA's letter is expected fairly soon.

One of the first tasks for the regulator seems certain to be breaking the deadlock in negotiations over a long-mooted “New deal for Football”.

On Monday, Salford City owner Gary Neville accused the Premier League of “bullying” behaviour in their reluctance to agree a deal to fund the lower leagues.

“I have no idea what they’re playing at – they look awful to me,” he said at the Labour party conference in Liverpool. “They look selfish. They look greedy. Everything you wouldn’t want to be in life, everything your parents wouldn’t want you to be.

“I know exactly what they’re doing – if they had wanted to have done a deal, they would have done a deal. But their mindset is such of a bully, their mindset is that they can influence a regulator once a regulator is introduced and get a better deal potentially the other side of the regulator coming in.”

It feels like at this rate there’s probably going to be something new on the regulator every week until there is material progress. Perhaps that’s justified, given the impact it would have (or supposed to). 

As Neville alludes to, probably too much of the conversation around the independent regulator is centred on the elite clubs and those who feel regulations and cost controls limit their boundless ambition to catch them. 

In my mind a main reason for regulation is to prevent clubs being so badly run that they go out of business and prevent them falling into the hands of bad actors. That won’t happen at Premier League level because there will always be someone to buy an asset like that - and Everton with their £600m of debts, mounting losses and conveyor belt of suitors are the most live example of that. The owners that the PL have welcomed into the league also show that the owners and directors test surely needs strengthening.

What we’re trying to avoid is administration or bankruptcy, the fate that Reading are facing after Rob Couhig pulled the plug on his rescue bid.

“Never has the need for independent regulation been more obvious” was the view of their dismayed supporters’ trust.

Greg Double, from the protest group Reading Till We Dai, pointed his finger at the EFL even more sharply with further points deductions still possible for the beleaguered Royals.

“They let the fox into the chicken coup and then they fined the chickens for getting eaten.”

The end of independents?

Last week we carried a piece ahead of the WSL season that focused on some of the off-field issues the league are facing.

Among them, the bungled TV rights negotiation that resulted in a one-year rollover of the existing deal and questions over the revenue model of teams competing in the WSL, with many relying on subsidies from Premier League clubs.

To the latter point, Omar Chaudhuri of 21st Group published this on LinkedIn recently, which demonstrates a clear trend in the game:

“If we look at the evolving correlation between the performance of clubs' men's and women's teams in England (according to Twenty First Group's team ratings, which evaluate underlying performance relative to other teams in the pyramid), there is a clear an unmistakable trend: there is a growing resemblance between the ranking of men's teams and women's teams within their respective pyramids.

• 2012: 58% correlation between men's and women's game

• 2015: 59% correlation

• 2018: 65% correlation

• 2021: 70% correlation

• 2024: 80% correlation”

Even a simple glance at the WSL table tells you that all clubs are now attached to a Premier League institution, and this suggests it will make things more difficult for independent clubs like the London Lionesses, now in the Women’s Championship and owned by Michelle Kang’s multi-club group, to have success in this environment.

“Clubs also need to start managing their women’s teams properly,” says one international player in the women’s game.

“Manchester City couldn’t play their star striker [Bunny Shaw] in the Champions League last week because they didn’t sort the visa. Imagine if they’d done that with Haaland? It would never happen.”

For context: Shaw is the reigning golden boot winner, WSL player of the season, PFA women’s footballer of the year and the Football Writers’ Association’s women’s footballer of the year as well as being City’s all-time leading goalscorer.