Welcome to FootBiz - newsletter #1

Hi, and welcome to FootBiz. 

If you are here then you’re probably at least curious about the football business, but I wanted to explain what FootBiz will be all about.

The newsletter you’re reading will be free, for now, but the expert comment and analysis elsewhere on the site will be paywalled. I hope you will take up the option to become a subscriber but for now, crack on.

Table of Contents

• What we’ll be covering… and why

• Meet the team

• Window dressing

• What fascinates me right now about football is…

• M&A murmurs

• Data has “won the war” where does scouting fit now …

• Wicked whisper 

• The man bidding for two Premier League clubs

• There is an argument that… 

What we’ll be covering… and why

When my colleagues and I launched The Athletic UK (now The Athletic FC) in 2019 with dedicated reporters for every Premier League club, the thesis wasn’t that existing media outlets didn’t cover those clubs, it was that there were audiences desperate for those clubs to be covered in more detail that weren’t being served. Not through anyone’s fault necessarily, but because business models had not evolved.

I see the same opportunity today in the business of football. 

The business of football has never been more important to what we see on the field. And while I think about this stuff all the time in my work life, there was a striking moment for me in the pub before the opening game of the season when I witnessed fans openly discussing PSR and transfer fee amortisation (albeit not in the most complimentary terms) as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

Football has changed.

Indeed, you only need to look at the rules that leagues have put in place which tie squad spending to revenues earned (and the various acronyms we’ve since had to learn) to know that things have evolved. 

In turn, those decisions make the regulatory and legal environment more impactful (or controversial) than ever - with the upcoming Manchester City battle against their 115 charges likely to be, whether we like it or not, a defining moment in modern football. 

In talking to people around the game too, it is clear that there is an appetite for more coverage of the football industry itself and where it is headed. That is why we have launched FootBiz, to cover the off-field stuff that affects the on-field stuff. 

We will cover the politics that shape our leagues and competitions, the people who are effecting change, the organisations that are gaining in influence, the changing dynamics of the industry that broadcasts football, the money behind it all and the crucial threads that link all these together. 

There are so many people who work in football and want to know more about what is happening in other corners of this ever-growing industry, but beyond the executives and the lawyers and the agents and the owners there are also a huge number of educated, curious fans who want to know more about the sport’s inner workings. This is for all of them too. 

As important as these topics are in shaping the sport, most football fans aren’t desperate to read about them. Blogs on finances don’t drive pageviews, diary items about media rights deals don’t go viral and exclusives about agents switching agencies don’t get fans excited. 

But by building a community around the people who are interested in the business of football, we hope to create a little eco-system of content, events and networking that provides some breadth and depth on these topics and plenty of value for those interested. 

This newsletter, twice a week, will be free to begin with but the analysis pieces we publish will be subscription-only. Events, podcasts and the like will also form part of that subscription offering.

Thanks for joining, should you choose to. There’s a lot more to come. 

Meet the team

FootBiz will publish stories from a number of guest experts and contributors to put forth a range of interesting viewpoints.

The core team of contributors at launch is:

• Ed Malyon - founder and director

  • Former sports editor of The Independent, founded The Athletic FC in 2019, left TA after $550m sale to the New York Times to start a sports & media consultancy, now investing in sports and media businesses and writing about the business of football

• Matt Hughes - partner

  • Former sports news correspondent for The Times and Daily Mail, contributor to The Sun, The Guardian, The Telegraph and the Sports Agents podcast

• Rob Draper - partner

  • Former chief football writer of The Mail on Sunday, Winner of European Football Writer of the Year and Football Reporter of the Year, co-host of It Was What It Was podcast

• Kieran Maguire - contributor

  • Academic, author and broadcaster, expert on football finance and the co-host and creator of The Price of Football podcast

• Daniel Geey - contributor

  • Partner at Sheridan’s, author and broadcaster, expert on sports law working with clients in the sports sector, including rights holders, leagues, governing bodies, clubs, and athletes

• Ricardo Fort - contributor

  • Sponsorship and sports marketing expert. Founder of Sport by Fort Consulting. Former Head of Global Sponsorships at Visa and The Coca-Cola Company

Window dressing

If there was one lesson we learned from the summer transfer window, it was that Premier League clubs have already found a way around the financial rules laid down by the league. 

The league’s response will almost certainly be to adopt new rules, which will once again be circumvented in a game of eternal regulatory whack-a-mole.

The real question is what happens next? Football finance expert Kieran Maguire digs into a knotty sort of topic in his first piece for FootBiz.

And there are other ways clubs are changing how they work.

You can debate whether clubs like Chelsea got smarter in handing out long-term contracts to find a way around these regulations, given the downsides we are already seeing (hi, Raheem!) but there’s little doubt that there has been a general trend for more intelligently structured deals across the footballing landscape.

Lawyer and author Daniel Geey will be one of a number of regular legal contributors where football intersects with law, and as he notes in his first article for FootBiz, there are new clauses popping up everywhere that simply weren’t being used five or ten years ago.

What fascinates me right now about football is…

…that virtually every single club is run differently.

There might be 80 leagues that matter, with an average of 18 teams in each. That’s nearly 1500 different teams all choosing to run themselves in a different fashion.

We’ll be digging into what the successful clubs do well, and what the underperformers do badly, over the coming months on FootBiz.

M&A murmurs

This will be a regular segment discussing the latest around clubs that have sold or been put up for sale

It is no secret that Tottenham Hotspur have been on the market for some time, with chairman Daniel Levy conceding in April “the club requires a significant increase in its equity base”, and some figures in the banking world expect interest from Qatar to heat up in the coming weeks and months with the arrival of Amanda Staveley on the scene.

Which group from Qatar might back her is the question. The club categorically denied reports in the winter that Paris Saint-Germain and QSI chairman Nasser al-Khelaifi had held talks over buying a stake, while CBS Sports reported that the mysterious Sheikh Jassim would not be pursuing Spurs after his failed attempt to buy Manchester United.

Staveley, recently out at Newcastle United but keen for a new project, brought in Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund to buy Newcastle but looking elsewhere for help now. As has already been widely reported, Staveley is evaluating the possibility of buying out ENIC as the club’s majority owners, and is seeking the significant financial backing she would need to even get close to Spurs’ lofty asking price.

The £3.5bn price tag placed on the club would represent a ~6.3x revenue multiple for a club that lost £80m last year and still holds net debt of nearly £700m. It’s a lot, and a handful of bankers canvassed on that asking price considered it very unlikely anyone would ever pay it.

Spurs are owned 86.6% by ENIC, which in turn is owned 70.1% by the Lewis Family Trust (of which now-departed absentee owner Joe Lewis is no longer a beneficiary) and 29.9% by Daniel Levy and some of his family. 

The Lewis Family Trust are believed to prefer a full sale, and an astronomical return on the £47m ENIC paid to gain control over 20 years ago, but Levy is thought to prefer an option where he stays in charge of the club and raises money to buy out their share. Levy, per the Sunday Times’ Rich List, has a net worth of £450m in his own right but much of that tied up in Spurs.

While those two positions are not fully impossible to reconcile, the biggest issue remains what analysts have said all along - that the asking price remains far too high despite such incredible progress on the commercial side and revenues crossing £500m for the first time this year.

Staveley and her backers could no doubt afford a minority stake in the club, which is understood to be Levy’s preferred strategic option right now.

Whether Staveley and Levy could (or would want to) co-exist is another question entirely.

Close to London, recently in the Premier League, a great stadium and training facilities, well-connected by road and trains and not too far from Heathrow Airport, it has always been easy to see the upside with Reading FC. 

For the last year or so, the Royals have been up there with Everton as a club that investors felt was teeming with potential but with financials that made you break out in a cold sweat, with any realistic deal incredibly difficult to envisage. 

Even with five or six Championship clubs formally on the market, this League 1 basketcase still somehow seemed more appealing if there was a deal to be done.

After a few false starts, those close to the Reading takeover do - finally - expect it to happen fairly soon. Possibly within the next few days. 

The up-and-down nature (to put it mildly) of this takeover has been hard for fans to cope with and is taking its toll on unpopular owner Dai Yongge too, who was miffed in recent weeks at a Rob Couhig tweet that he felt suggested Couhig had bought the club when there is still no signed purchase agreement. This week has been a down week, for those following.

There had been some optimism that Couhig’s purchase of the club would close before the first home game of the season, a win over Wigan Athletic, but further delays came as a result of issues around the stadium and the hotel attached to it and there is still no white (and blue) smoke in Berkshire.

Dai was still demanding £30m for the club in the spring but we understand the final price after all the relevant deductions (including loans that have kept the club running) will be closer to £14m. 

For all those who looked at the books and didn’t take a punt on Reading, the Royals will be a club whose progress they closely follow over the coming years.

Data has “won the war” where does scouting fit now?

Every club uses data these days, the (huge) differentiator in results achieved is simply how they use it.

Rob Draper, formerly chief football writer at The Mail on Sunday, dug into the aftermath of the war that data won to see where traditional scouting fits into the modern recruitment process for his first FootBiz story.

How data fits into club operations and the differing processes used by clubs will be a key focus of FootBiz content going forwards.

Wicked whisper 

Which EFL owner walked out of the league’s general meeting this summer branding proceedings “a joke”? 

Even those who stayed and generally support chairman Rick Parry concede “things were a bit disorganised”.

Parry is fortunate that none of this will really matter to his legacy as the chief of the old Football League. All that most will consider is what sort of deal he manages to get from the Premier League in these now somewhat drawn-out negotiations over a ‘new deal for football’.

The man bidding for two Premier League clubs

John Textor has been a colourful figure in the football landscape since he began acquiring clubs in 2021.

While his on-pitch rant about alleged corruption in Brazilian football went viral, he is probably better known for buying French giants Olympique Lyonnais and a stake in Crystal Palace, which he was simultaneously trying to sell and then turn into a majority stake last week as things came to a head with his attempts to buy Everton.

Confused? Let Matt Hughes, formerly chief sports reporter of the Daily Mail and sports news correspondent of The Times, explain in his first piece since joining FootBiz as a partner.

There is an argument that… 

This is a regular segment where a FootBiz contributor will stick their name on a take and stand by it - feel free to email your responses

There is an argument that… the hiring of the new USMNT manager is one of the most consequential appointments in modern football history.

I felt this before USSF technical director Matt Crocker secured Mauricio Pochettino for the role, and now we have to wait and see the impact he can have on the field.

Pochettino was the best candidate available, so an A+ grade for execution here, but when you stop to consider the downstream effects of the hire (potentially on the global football landscape) it is just so huge.

The difference in projected revenue for the USMNT, USSF, MLS, and everyone around soccer in America is so staggeringly different if the US gets to a World Cup semi-final on home soil versus exiting at the group stage. I am convinced that the neutral fan in America will jump on board with a home World Cup (although I think it won’t happen until very late in the day) and for the first-time fan, especially in the US, the only thing that matters is success.

Even beyond the sponsorship revenues that would jump with a deep run in the tournament, the players that it would inspire, in one of the greatest global athlete pools, would surely have a knock-on effect of producing elite players for the USMNT that they have been craving for decades. The cyclical effect of reinvesting increased revenues in the development of better talent could, finally, elevate the US to a global footballing power by the 2030s.

I really fancied Jose Mourinho for the role originally, mainly because I felt the American public would love his swagger and his need to win at all costs.

Poch, however, is a far better coach in 2024, and now the future of US soccer rests on a couple of knockout games in two summers’ time. No pressure.