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Manchester City’s aspirations of global hegemony?
Posted on December 14, 2010
Manchester City are the latest addition to a strategic alliance of football clubs across the world which Atlético Madrid have been building. Atlético’s international agreements go back as far as November 2009, when they started to collaborate with Shanghai Shenhua of China (1). Collaboration was essentially sporting, with the use of player loans to gain playing […]
Posted in Fans, Globetrotterisation | 2 Comments »
Manchester City following in Pompey’s footsteps
Posted on October 2, 2010
Manchester City’s financial results, published earlier this week (1), were generally reported uncritically earlier this week, notwithstanding the key loss of £121m, with the exception at least of The Sun (2), where there was some attempt to look beyond the positive headlining provided by the club. According to the club, the financial highlights could be […]
Posted in Benefactors, Costs, Debts, Ownership | 10 Comments »
The Magic of Football – still there in the Cups?
Posted on January 27, 2012
It’s increasingly difficult to see any magic in the beautiful game other than black magic, especially when you look at it from a financial perspective. You only need to think of the narrow escapes at Plymouth and Wrexham recently, and both Portsmouth and Darlington are standing on the edge of the precipice. The Cups may […]
Posted in Community, Fans | Leave a Comment »
Stadium developments (and redevelopments)
Posted on October 24, 2011
In the last couple of weeks, stadiums, both those which are newly planned and those where there has been or will be redevelopment, have being popping up on my radar screen with surprising regularity. The saga of what to do with the Olympic stadium shows no signs of reaching resolution. Sadly we seem to be […]
Posted in Assets, Stadium | 5 Comments »
The Big 1, 2, 3 or is it still 4? Or more?
Posted on June 9, 2011
Currently I’m working on a joint research project on various European football leagues with colleagues in Austria. One set of data which we have produced so far casts some light on this perenial debate. The latest version of the date centres of course on whether Liverpool ‘have fallen out of the Top 4′, and/or whether […]
Posted in Governance, History, Premier League, Pyramid movement | 3 Comments »
How utterly, utterly absurd!
Posted on April 20, 2011
There are reports that a Dubai Sheikh is set to buy a La Liga team, possibly Getafe, and add the words ‘Team Dubai’ to the club’s name (1). This is as absurd as Manchester City becoming Manchester City Team Abu Dhabi, for example, or Chelsea becoming Chelsea Team Chukotka, only to be renamed Chelsea Team […]
Posted in Fans, Organisational culture, Ownership | 13 Comments »
The scarf your mum knitted and competitive balance
Posted on February 22, 2011
I haven’t been enjoying lunch lately. Nothing to do with the food in the university canteen; it’s my daily read of The Guardian I blame. That Matt Scott in particular had me choking today (1) over my vegetarian shepherds pie, although the oxymoron itself hadn’t put me in the best of moods. I was so […]
Posted in Benefactors, Broadcasting rights, Ethics, Financial doping, Merchandising, Revenues | 1 Comment »
Liverpool and Manchester United
Posted on October 14, 2010
I’ve been abroad for work and then taken a couple of days leave – the net result is a week of only occasional internet contact. A week is a long time in football it would seem. All my standard searches to keep up with football management affairs have resulted in a total overkill on the […]
Posted in Costs, Debts, Investors, Ownership, Revenues | 5 Comments »
Transfer torpor
Posted on September 7, 2010
The transfer window just isn’t what it used to be. I found myself habitually clicking to find the latest news from the BBC website and checking Twitter, but there just wasn’t much happening. Even on the final day, there wasn’t much action to follow, unless you are a Stoke City, Spurs or Sunderland fan. As […]
Posted in Transfers | Leave a Comment »
The trouble with new stadiums 4 (and final)
Posted on August 10, 2010
[See also The trouble with new stadiums 1, which looked at the argument that "We’re a club with ambition and we need more seats to reflect that ambition", The trouble with new stadiums 2, which looked at the argument that "We’ve got the wrong sort of stadium. We need one better suited to maximising our […]
Posted in Assets, Costs, Debts, Stadium | 13 Comments »
JB’s awards for Season 2009/10
Posted on August 2, 2010
Yes, silly season again, at least, until the Glorious Seventh! SOAP STAR OF THE SEASON AWARD: Some noble efforts this year, but there was no-one in quite the same league as Portsmouth. As if four owners, Administration and HMRC challenging the CVA in court wasn’t enough, they managed to carry on ‘soaping’ over the summer […]
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
The trouble with new stadiums 1
Posted on June 27, 2010
You may have noticed – I am not a fan of the new stadium. At the Supporters Direct Conference I spoke briefly about ‘the myth of the new stadium’, and over a couple of postings I’ll elaborate on why I don’t, in general, rate them. Broadly, there are three lines of argument that are trotted […]
Posted in Stadium | 7 Comments »
HMRC v. The Football Creditors Rule
Posted on June 2, 2010
It has emerged that HMRC are to mount a legal challenge against the Premier League and the Football League in an attempt to overthrow the Football Creditors Rule (1). Until September 2003, the Crown, and hence the Internal Revenue (IR) and Customs & Excise (C&E) who subsequently merged to form Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs […]
Posted in Debts, Football League, Governance, HMRC, Insolvency, Law, Premier League | 17 Comments »
English excesses exported?
Posted on February 16, 2010
With Deloitte’s annual publication of its Football Money League, identifying what Deloitte euphemistically calls the ‘richest’ clubs (it is based on revenues and conveniently ignores debts), we have become used to English clubs being at the vanguard of high revenues. In its most recent version published almost a year ago (1) there were seven English […]
Posted in Costs, Wages | 1 Comment »
Is this really ‘financial fair play’ yet?
Posted on January 7, 2010
‘Debt-for-equity swap’ seems to be the buzz phrase of the moment. [Please scroll down to beyond the italics if you are into finance and don't want to rehear some basic stuff.] What it means in simple terms is that someone who has lent the club money decides to wipe the debt out by accepting shares […]
Posted in Benefactors, Debts, Governance, UEFA | Leave a Comment »
