There Is No Alternative (TINA).

The best and most popular historical fiction in the last 50 years, if you exclude wizards and dragons, has always been around mafia. “Godfather“, “Casino“, “Goodfellas“, “Peaky Blinders“ and of course “The Sopranos“.

So, one is always going to be attracted to this article.

A simply astonishingly juicy tale, that shows in all its glory why Italian football clubs are NOT a normal asset class.

‘Ndrangheta!

The world itself, the name for the Calabrian mafia, is full of menace, and will make an op-ed Column for another Sunday perhaps; titled “Babes in the Wood”.

Then you see this, watching your team lose 7 goals in Dortmund.

You only care about the money.

Football is so obviously now in the Twilight Zone, and we all need to seriously reflect about who really is running our game, and for whose interests. And where this all finishes.

 

We haven’t heeded the warnings.

In an AYNE podcast many years ago, we enjoyed the wisdom of Andy Sutherden, forced under hostile questioning to defend the League (Carabao) Cup, he had at one point represented. Andy is a comms guy and, obviously, did his best, defending his wicket well.

Like many in this industry he is a good man, and naturally attractive as an optimist. In fact, most like him will tell me…

Oh don’t be so melodramatic.You are often far too negative, even hyperbolic for effect and shock. It’s evolution not revolution.

These people and friends, I fear, are mistaken.

I hope I am wrong, but I don’t think so. Reality eventually bites. Hard. Cans kicked down the road don’t disappear.

 

Reality did bite this week for that League Cup. 

Surely it is clear now that this tournament, under the current governance of football, has no reason to exist, no dignity, and of no value whatsoever to any broadcaster or sponsor with a brain.

And all this was so so utterly predictable.

This is the opinion of someone, me, who actually loves cup competitions. They are the very essence of true sport: David versus Goliath, Rocky versus Apollo Creed. But, sadly, they are a victim of the system of football we have created in the last generation. A second knock-out tournament is now a nonsense in today’s squeezed calendar. If even the FA Cup is lamentably now more nuisance than glory, the League Cup is frankly a bad joke.

It didn’t need to be this way. We did it. It is on us.

Cup competitions in every country have withered on the vine of football politics. Those in Dortmund call it organised crime.

The League Cup only still exists, because it is a key asset of the English Football league (EFL) and they will never let it go. The EFL are one of the three bodies that run English football, all of them acting in unapologetic self interest, causing really bad decisions for the game as a whole.

 

Politics now dominate sport. 

There was a comment in Como from Mark Oliver that hit home hard, around the future of European football. He is a qualifier commentator, having spent so much time at the BBC, the original political hot potato in sport and media. He knows how it goes.

More and more, all of this, our games, will be decided by politics with a capital P.

Policies and manifestos of rival parties (if such things even still exist) are now dictated by polling and grabbing hold of issues that can be seen as “important” to voters. Football ticks that box in spades everywhere: in Europe, in Latin America, and increasingly in Asia, Africa, MENA. In America a similar role is played by the NFL.

People care about football, both versions. It is, in fact, the very definition of “populist”.

So, in a world where elections are now utterly dominated by social media algorithms pumping simple recognisable soundbite narratives to very unsophisticated voters, football will be just too tempting for any smart politician to ignore, and Mark Oliver is dead right.

In 2024, politics with a capital P is all over football, and it’s just going to get worse. We should get prepared.

 

History always gives us a good steer. 

Two specific relevant examples.

Mark and I are of a vintage where we remember in 2001 the threat to the football transfer system, from players and their unions, called Bosman 2. This legal challenge got very very close to passing when I sat on the UEFA Professional Football Committee, and found myself right in the middle of it all. Faces were strained with worry, from Gerhard Aigner down.

The idea was that footballers should be considered just as any other employees, on a contract, and with full freedom of movement when they see fit. If they want to leave one team for another, all that governs them is their employment contract and the resultant damages they would owe should they breach it. Think of a footballer like an investment banker. If you walk out, resign, you pay contractual damages and start somewhere else, non-compete clauses permitting. No bank or club owns your “registration”.

The entire transfer system, and its players protocol, would all have been torched overnight. No more transfer fees, no more player trading models. An existential threat.

PS. this exact issue, covered weeks ago on Goal Own Goal, is getting resurfaced today, front and centre.

I’m sure some called that AYNE podcast on Diarra hyperbolic too. We’d suggest that perhaps AYNE is actually the podcast where you often see the future before anyone else. On Friday, the sports legal community reported that Diarra has won this case, and we now await the full judgement. My summary would be: HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS.

Why didn’t it already happen back in 2001? Well, the politicians were brought in. Platini got his French buddy Sarkozy involved, and the EU passed something called the principle of the “Specificity of Sport”. Basically the idea that sport stood above all natural employment law. A protected special asset.

The second example is obviously the Super League a few years ago. It failed definitively when European Prime Ministers started throwing around serious threats, and owners got very very scared.

 

Politics is a double-edged sword for sport. 

Much ink has been spilled discussing sport as soft-power, as sports-washing, as a tool to change an entire economy away from carbon industries.

Oh… the outrage, the wringing of hands, especially from the Pharisees in London broadsheet rags.

Often the hardest part of operating in sport is having to digest the naivety (or stupidity) of people who should know better. The guys who LOVE the status quo because it’s given them a very comfortable life.

Sport is clearly politics in every way, and in fact some of these professional scribblers themselves are now the first to suggest a UK government regulator for football in the UK. They seem to miss the irony! They like politics in sport when it suits them, when they think it will deliver their preferred agenda. Otherwise no.

Sorry, that’s not good enough. You either believe that politics should have a role in sport, or not. You can not pick which politics suits you, and gets invited in.

 

Football faces Hobson’s Choice. 

As a “small govt” guy, believing in markets more than politicians, I’ve always been in the camp of self-regulation for sport. But we have to admit that this has shown itself to be equally as inept, and we are left with Hobson’s Choice going forward.

Infantino or Trump? Ceferin or Macron? You see what I mean?

The standard of politician around the world today is just so very very low. Indeed, it is truly astonishing to see how the new Labour Party in the UK, with a massive majority, is already losing any semblance of authority, and some of their MPs are already resigning the party whip. Their “leader” is under siege, protected by what looks like legal injunctions covering serious scandal.

But sure, forget all that, they will be just great at solving the really challenging problems around our national game with their regulator. They absolutely will have the quality, the will and the EQ to do it well!! If you believe that……

But not all politicians are the same.

Those more mature readers this Sunday will remember a time when the big idea in politics was to get governments the hell out of the way of private enterprise. Small public sector, lower taxes, all to allow the wealth creators space to do their thing and allocate capital wisely to grow economies and innovate. At the start of the 80s, this was called Reaganomics, or Thatcherism.

 

The Iron Lady.

I thought of Margaret Thatcher this week. What would she do to save what is one of Britain’s few remaining hubs of global excellence. The English Premier league (EPL) is a world-leader and she would have liked that. Been proud.

There is an entire library full of great Thatcher quotes, but this is the one I remember, referring to a certain Lord King, the guy who turned around British Airways.

He is my favourite, because he doesn’t bring me problems, he brings me solutions.

Each will have their own opinion on Thatcher (and Reagan), and their politics. But what can not be in any doubt is that she was a conviction politician. She ran on belief, not polls, and she walked the talk. She looked for solutions to what she saw was a problem, and she didn’t waste time on consensus, as this amazing clip shows. Click here to watch it.

My God, she speaks as if from another planet when compared to the political class of 2024. It’s jarring. The Iron Lady indeed. Formidable.

There is another similar type, a woman again, leading Italy today. They stand out a mile and do NOT suffer fools. They despise consensus.

 

That “consensus” around the Super League.

The universal narrative on the collapse of the Super League was clear. Everyone slammed the idea, called it every name under the sun, labelled the proponents heretics and asset strippers. To quote Grant Williams on ending the League Cup, “corporate wankers”. All understandable.

But I’d like to think, instead, that Maggie may have had a different view, and would have asked her ministers…

So then, can I now assume that the problems of our national sport have all gone away?

Nope.

Indeed, my own sadness at the collective glee around the demise of the Super League was exactly that. Everyone behaved as if the status quo was acceptable and sustainable; the Shire-land of milk and honey.

And that, frankly, is nothing short of criminally negligent. Ostriches with heads in the sand.

Those who laughed at Agnelli, Laporte and Fiorentino Perez offered absolutely nothing as a solution to what is in front of all of our eyes.

It is time for people of conviction (true fans) to say “enough”, because our game has stage-4 cancer. It’s that bad. Here is the scan result.

1.

Fragmented bloated self-serving governance, creating an over-saturated calendar of games.

2.

Club versus countries jealousies and conflicts.

3.

Players keeling over with the overplaying.

4.

No cost control of player salaries.

5.

An industry systematically loss-making.

6.

Financing deficits by taking insensitive cold capital from all and sundry.

7.

Dominated by legal challenges and accounting tricks.

8.

Pricing the common fan out of the game.

9.

Losing younger generations not interested in 90m live.

10.

Piracy killing the golden goose media model.

Pretty terminal diagnosis, and the symptoms of cup competition irrelevance don’t even make the top ten of issues.

The status quo is a long way from ok, and that is what you’d need to answer Mrs Thatcher.

No Ma’am, the problems haven’t gone away.

 

Don’t bring me problems; bring me solutions. 

Has anyone heard any serious alternative solutions to cut out this cancer? Any proposal that looks remotely like turning this ship around? Ending the relentless polarisation that can only end in a small group of super-clubs who will obviously one day want a closed league?

You should never shout down ideas of innovation and change unless you can make a credible case that the status quo is sustainable. Football never has. Still doesn’t.

This Column has humbily tried to do its bit, here Explaining open sports leagues to Logan Roy. – Albachiara and here This is the end, beautiful friend. – Albachiara . 

But Don Quixote comes to mind when penning these pieces, even as you write them. One tilts at windmills, and nothing changes. The cancer just spreads.

If football had Margaret Thatcher running it, she’d offer little patience for the listing of problems. She’d demand solutions.

And don’t come back until you have them.

This attitude is the 1980s world of work that formed me and my generation. We are all children of Reagan and Thatcher. Get it done, or fuck off. Today they’d call that bullying. But it is also the Roy Keane and Michael Jordan school of team leadership. They won the odd thing, right?

 

Problem-solving is humanity at its best.

Humans have become the dominant species on this planet because the best are just extraordinary. They solve problems, use tools, and think outside the box.

When you have serious issues, that’s what you need. To quote Furlani in Como.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

You get your top talents in a room, lock the door, keep them fed and watered, offer the odd “energy” pill to get them through the night, and tell them to bring solutions. Or they don’t need to show up at work the next day.

There Is No Alternative (TINA). Ask Ed Harris.

I suggest you gentlemen find a way to put a square peg in a round hole… Rapidly.

Because TINA. There is no alternative, and impossible is nothing.

 

Fixing Football for Maggie or Ed…Rapidly!

Today’s Sunday Column ends with a frivolous exercise to imagine a scenario where we were told by our leader to solve football’s problems in Europe, by morning, without going full Super League.

Or don’t bother coming back tomorrow.

I envisage that it would go something like this. The team leader would set the tone.

The default position here is an inevitable Super league, unless we come up with an alternative. If we fail, we will find ourselves one day with closed American-style franchises. The culture and heritage of our game will be gone. 

So, what are the blockages and issues? Can we remove them or work around them?

All ideas, no matter how radical, fly.

Then you’d start!

You need one body running the game.

At least at a national level. Almost everything wrong in sport today is down to multiple governing bodies, in prisoners’ dilemma, unable to make good decisions.

If governments and politics really do want to help sport, that is what they need to do. Mandate that football in each country delivers one governing body. If they can’t achieve that themselves, the Minister of Sport will do it for them.

No more, FA, EPL, EFL. One body. Run with conviction, not consensus.

Convince the politicians that this is a vote winner of material import and terminate the Blazers with extreme prejudice.

If you get push back from FIFA, warnings around not participating in World Cups, you threaten these people with all kinds of big hairy problems, from corporate and personal tax audits, loss of any non-profit or charity benefits, etc.

If another countries’ governments don’t back you, do it anyway. Sometimes you just need to have the conviction to do the right thing.

You then need a sensible playing calendar.

For performance reasons, health reasons, and marketing reasons. It’s so obvious.

Leagues should be no more than 16 teams. 30 fixtures. Free up space. Players should be legally forbidden from playing more than 50 games a year.

One cup competition, only one, but with major incentives for clubs to prioritise it. Money, and Champions League (UCL) qualification. Also, any club winning their national cup is protected from relegation from the top league, and is automatically promoted if in a lower league. Serious jeopardy. Replays are reinstated, as this is the essence of the cup, and all fans understand that.

International football radically downsized for the “Principle of Scarcity”. Summer tournaments need to be 16 teams, short and sharp, based on qualification via ranking points and history. No one cares about Slovenia versus Armenia. Sorry.

There should also be space in the calendar for an official new format competition. Like Kings League. Like TGL. Space to innovate formats, distribution and revenue models.

Find a way to make open leagues, with promotion and relegation, financially sustainable.

That’s the brief from the boss, and so be it.

This means you need an idea of manageable step-up and down between leagues, without the debilitating chasm of differing revenues. This needs solved, as the very big media income differences between, say the EPL and EFL, create all the incentives for people to risk crazy money to get up, or not go down. TINA. It needs solved.

You can frame and resolve all this relatively easily, with some kind of re-distribution, if you are only governing body. You absolutely can not if there are many.

All this won’t be palatable or easy, and it does necessitate a very serious discussion about spreading revenues that is realistic. How many professional teams can each country really support? For example, in Scotland they have over 40 teams for a population of 5m. England, with ten times than population, has 92. Bayonet the wounded.

Once again, I’m sorry. Our brief isn’t to satisfy the 300 supporters of Alloa Athletic, and as leaders we are not in the consensus game. We are in the conviction game.

Eliminate the unmanageable volatility of UEFA revenues.

The other main driver of income unpredictability, volatility and risk in football today arises from participation in European competitions. Qualifying or not. Especially the UCL.

The UCL, hailed by the “consensus” as the great success story of European football, has in reality utterly distorted the fabric of game. It has baked-in the dominance of the Big 5 leagues and a few clubs, who are given most of the places and the monies. This has polarised the competition and the game in general, rendered it very predictable, and just made the rich richer and the poor poorer.

This is a vicious circle that absolutely needs to be broken, as qualification for the UCL is now utterly existential for clubs in trying to budget and manage a serious business. And that volatility is very costly and unsustainable. So there needs to be radical thinking about how to deal with the central media and sponsorship revenues of the UCL.

This here is where you earn your corn. This is you working out how to get stranded astronauts back home. When it’s really hard.

There ARE potential solutions.

One radical idea could be to not offer any prize or participation money to clubs for the UCL. UEFA keeps all the media and sponsor revenues, to create a Football Endowment Fund. Just as institutions like Harvard University create their own wealth reserves for future generations, so should the greatest popular sport in the world. This fund would be husbanded (if that is still a verb you can use these days?) and managed by serious people from asset management. You pass the political idea, poetic to the max, that you play UCL only for the glory, and the monies generated by UEFA are for the long-term good of the game. Not to just stuff agents’ and players’ pockets even more. Politicians would like that line as a vote-winner.

This principle in fact could even apply to all domestic leagues, where central media deals are NOT distributed to clubs, but held back into a similar endowment fund. Think, all that European football has done in the last 30 years is grow revenues exponentially, and then pay it all away to players. It has kept nothing back. Worse still, this has created a club addiction, a dependency, to media revenues that has done nothing positive for the game. They are what has polarised everything, to the massive disadvantage of the non-Big 5 leagues, whose clubs have been left to die. The tragic loss to European football of Ajax, Celtic, Red Star Belgrade, Porto, Benfica, Anderlecht could be reversed, and like American sports, the UCL would then be winnable by far more clubs than today. Making it much more valuable.

Politics is often about least bad choices. Realpolitik. 

Almost no one this side of the pond wants closed leagues, but the price for preventing them ultimately has to be the radical re-assignment of media revenues. That will be very painful medicine for certain stakeholders. Principally the existing investors and the players (who will earn much less).

Much capital, equity and debt, has been deployed into European football based on projections of these future media revenues. Private equity has done league and club deals built on those assumptions; other teams have raised debt, only possible by putting up future media income as collateral. So any change to all of this would be dramatic for these providers of capital. They would likely take major losses on their investments. Haircuts like Elvis in Germany.

Some may say…..tough. Like investing in a gold mine and then finding the country in which it is located nationalises everything overnight. But governments usually look after the interests of Big Finance, (their principle donors), and in fact in 2008 bailed them out entirely. So politicians may hesitate a moment.

Politics is the art of the compromise and some kind of staged introduction of these radical ideas, with understanding tax break compensations for investors, is the preferred route to suggest. Allow everyone to manage themselves out of their deals by 2030. Many debt-ridden clubs will just default and end up being owned by the lender. This has already happened to AC Milan and Inter. No big deal. Fans wont care,

Look, serious change isn’t ever a walk in the park. But it’s a lot easier when you have no choice.

TINA.

You just need the will to do it. Political will.

To really change things. There would be other ideas.

Taxing the transfer market to take out the froth.

Football has always seen new owners go a bit crazy in “buying success”. From Gianni Agnelli, to Berlusconi, the Galaticos, Man City, and now Chelsea.

That will never change. Nor should it. It’s part of the passion.

But it should come at a meaningful cost where, for example, the governing bodies charge a significant stamp-duty tax on all transfer fees. Added to the Endowment Fund naturally. 

Player cost control via hard salary caps.

Take lessons from American sport. Build in “marginality”. This isn’t hard. You just need the political determination, and one governing body.

Club employers fairly and fully rewarded for their contribution to international football.

Full compensation for use of their players, and rewards/incentives for academy players they’ve developed, who go on to represent their country.

 

…

If Mark Oliver is correct, and we are indeed entering a world of politics with a capital P, football should get smart, and harness that power to deliver all of the above. Politics, and mafia, is all about power. If you don’t get it to work for you, it usually ends up working against you. So move first.

You take a summary like this back to Mrs Thatcher, and I believe you still have a job in the morning. Your idea doesn’t need to be perfect and unassailable logic. It just needs to show leadership, bravery and talent. And an idea of the correct direction of travel, and fresh original thinking.

In British slang, “wet” means weak, inept, ineffectual, effete. Thatcher coined the usage in 1979–80, Wikipedia.

Don’t be a sport Wet. Don’t think the status quo is fine. Don’t be complacent.

The Wets didn’t last Maggie’s first cabinet re-shuffle. They were terminated with extreme prejudice.

 

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