Robin Williams and Robber Barons.

Let’s cut to the chase right out the blocks. 

Robber Baron: American industrial or financial magnates of the late 1800s who became wealthy by unethical means, such as questionable stock-market operations and exploitation of labor.

Think Dick Dastardly.

Our industry’s governing bodies have always been a collection of monopolies, often run by a cadre of unapologetic robber barons. All of a same ilk. Difficult to respect, easy to ridicule. Impossible to remove.

Oh Robin, we miss you buddy.

The likes of UEFA, FIFA, IOC, PGA, ICC, rugby unions, have for decades all been allowed to swan around with no real accountability or profit imperative, leveraging unchallengeable market dominance with excessive autocratic power, making decisions in the most opaque of corrupt rooms, looking down from their royal boxes and private jets, as their subjects eat cake.

Mr Bladder (sic), with his blue balls, is a perfect example. Someone comics and artists could always smell a mile away.

So could the FBI.

These cartels have been tolerated in our industry in the name of what is called the “specificity of sport”. The plea that our games are so special as to deserve unique exemption from the very basic common law of the land.

To date it has almost always worked.

In 2001 I myself sat on the UEFA Professional Football Committee that sought to protect the entire football transfer-fee system from the simple rules of EU employment law. In the end, what was hatched as Bosman 2 was a horrendous fudge to kick the can into the long grass under the protection of the “specificity of sport”. An illuminating personal experience for sure.

Today’s Sunday Column considers if the winds of disruption for such monopolies are now strengthening, and what it could mean for our industry in 2026.

It’s really an exercise in game theory. The variables on the board are inter-connected and complex.

The rise of Citizen Smith and Hanoi Jane. 

Power to the people!

I recently spent several dreich November days in the UK, undoubtedly made gloomier by dumbed-down media diatribes about tax-and-spend budgets, haves & have-nots, winners & losers, insolvent farmers, savers & spenders. In short, endless verbal drizzle about what is basically the increasing polarisation of our societies. Some commentary thankfully also drifted into sharper debates about wealth creation, market forces and even the merits of capitalism itself.

Like it or not, there is for sure a growing resentment towards older generations who have “messed everything up and stolen all the money”. A whole socialist/communist/anarchist movement is on the rise, and they are angry and vindictive. 

Yes, the music is definitely changing and needs to be essential context today for anyone writing seriously on business and finance, including sport.

This is a favourite clip of the Sunday Column because it is just so damn accurate, and John Tuld is very correct. Being a great leader is in having the ability to hear the music of next month, next quarter, next year, in advance of the pack. To put together your own playlist before the world wakes up. 

Specifically now, can we yet hear how the rise of feral socialist thinking could affect the monopolies (of sport)?

Spoiler alert: They usually don’t like them, unless they are nationalised. Oops!

 

The children of Reagan and Thatcher.

On full reflection, it is perhaps somewhat lost on today’s youngsters just how much my generation, coming of age in 1980, was so deeply impacted by the deregulation of markets at the end of the 1970s. Life lessons were burnt into our core, which we have inevitably carried into our business careers and politics.

It just doesn’t scale!

Chapeau!

It’s perhaps good to briefly revisit those old days, to better understand how things could play out in the rest of this decade. The past is always prologue.

The 1970s were economically and socially a horrid decade. Cities like New York were a squalid pit of grime and bankruptcy. Labour disputes, power cuts, unemployment, businesses failing, horrendous inflation, and terrorism. The Italians named the entire decade Gli Anni di Piombo (The Years of Lead). We, as kids back then, all got a taste of that lead. Homework by candlelight, frustrated fathers endlessly on strike, British and American businesses evermore uncompetitive. Government finances all fucked compromised.

In 1976, Britain actually went bust, and today’s zealots for tax-and-spend would do very well to familiarise themselves with that episode. The phrase used at the time to articulate the humiliation was “cap in hand”.

Make no mistake, the 1970s was a decade of committed socialist thinking, which objectively just didn’t work. 

 

 

Hands that are invisible.

You can never buck the market.

The intellectual difference between small-government free marketeers and dirigeste socialism is essential philosophy for understanding what is going to happen, also in sport.

We have spent recent Sundays discussing in depth the rise of Paramount, who are now (positively) affecting the bid for sports rights. This broadcaster is cash-flush from an AI market bubble boom, that has massively boosted the coffers and share price of Oracle and the Ellison family.

Impressive 5-year gains, but note the pullback in recent months. That’s Mr Market for you.

The smart kids are starting to trade the AI bear case we laid fully out in Landman, and know it will ultimately impact Oracle. In fact, look at the cost of now insuring Oracle debt 😱.

The truth always lies in the yield of the debt.

If the AI bubble bursts, Paramount will not be unaffected, and sport will have lost its juicy bid from the Ellison family. These right here are the market forces in action, in real time. A grocer’s daughter from Grantham, England, said it best:

You can’t buck the market.

– Margaret Thatcher

Back then she was specifically chastising her own Chancellor Nigel Lawson for trying to artificially peg Sterling to the Deutsche Mark in 1988. And events again proved her right. 

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

What do we hear playing for tomorrow?

More and more now, sport’s special treatment is being attacked. The letter sent by A22 is devastating:

To date, three different European courts including the EU’s highest court have issued consistent rulings that leave no room for doubt: UEFA’s abuse of its dominant monopoly position cannot stand, and its exclusionary practices must cease. Despite this clarity, UEFA continues to maintain statutes which are contrary to EU law. Incredibly, UEFA implemented its most recent non-compliant rules in June 2024, six months after the CJEU ruling in December 2023. As a result, UEFA is now exposed to substantial damage claims from injured parties including clubs, players and A22.

The Diarra case itself is “Bosman 2 revisited” and still today threatens the entire transfer system in European football. It is a swan blacker than the dead of night, and It is not going away. None of this stuff is. Someone check how much the EPL is spending on legal fees these days.

UEFA and football aren’t the only perp. Golf and its Tours are run as a monopoly. Tennis also. Rugby and its Unions, acting in concert, are an obvious cartel. The NCAA for decades tried to bully athletes, until the Supreme Court stepped in.

I’d lawyer-up.

 

The case for the defence is weak. 

Sport’s robber barons continue to throw their weight around with extreme prejudice, withholding golf world ranking points here, threatening exclusion from international rugby there, telling athletes they can’t be paid in college. Their hubris, especially for those who have ever had to deal with them directly, is staggering.

In LIV Forever, we described how exactly this nearly brought the PGA to its knees, because legally they were way over their skis.

LIV Forever.

“A peace was attempted a year ago, when LIV in reality had the PGA staggering on the ropes. The cartel and abusive monopoly behaviour of Jay Monahan had been so bad, with a damning audit trail, that the Saudis had taken them to court. They would have comfortably won that, demanded $3bn, and absolutely bankrupted the PGA. They dropped the case, as an olive branch to hope to get people back around a table to find a peace and a partnership. A future for the game.”

All of these leaders in sport’s monopolies, in their heads, still think that they are entitled to act well outside the limits of antitrust law. And that’s a mistake.

So it’s no surprise that we see A22 and Real Madrid “gently” reminding UEFA this week that things are going to be a bit different going forward. Just as the Saudis did to golf.

And perhaps R360 will one day for rugby. (The number of sports lawyers who have cold-called me, offering to challenge the eight Unions’ threat to players over international rugby, was telling. The shareholders of R360 will be watching the A22 and Real Madrid case with much interest, I sense.)

 

Be careful what you wish for. 

If the industry of sport continues to want to attract capital by calling itself an asset class, then it is just incongruous and naive to think that it can continue to operate outside the legal antitrust framework of business monopolies. And corporate law in general.

If it insists on proudly calling itself an investment for financial return, then it shouldn’t run away to mummy when the normal rules of that big-boy world are applied to its structures and governance. 

Sport has opened a lot of tabs on its browser in these years, trying to attract new money. Many of those, apparently forgotten, are still active, and potentially devastating to the industry. 

…

So what music do I hear queued up?

A sporting monopoly like UEFA has myriad possible futures.

• It remains a permitted cartel, tightly controlled, if not owned, by the EU.
• It gets de facto broken up by market forces, just like the NCAA.
• It shakes Adam Smith’s invisible hand and declares openly that it is nothing more than a closed trade association for the very big clubs.

This may of course be well off the mark, but at least one makes an attempt to hear the notes and think lateral. And that’s always the point. Don’t be AI-generated. You let an LLM (large language model) do your work, you are putting yourself in a cage.

A small Birdcage.

This scene, this film, is simply delightful. Close to his finest work!