THE BILLIONAIRES’ CLUB: The Unstoppable Rise of
Football’s Super-Rich Owners
JAMES MONTAGUE
Bloomsbury, 2017, 330 pages
Review by Phil Shannon
At this stage of the 2017 English Premier
League (EPL) season, it looks like either of the two Manchester teams to win
the championship - and with barely a Mancunian between them. Both Man United and Man City have overseas owners,
overseas managers and overseas-dominated player lists. The same foreign flavour emanates from most
of the clubs in the elite competition – whilst only thirteen imports in the
whole of the competition took to the field on day one of the season just 25
years ago, now 67% of players (and 69% of managers) are from overseas.
What the EPL clubs also share, not
coincidentally, is wealth, loads of it – billionaires own the clubs, millionaires
coach them and highly-paid players pull on the jersey. What, asks the British journalist, James
Montague, in The Billionaires’ Club: The
Unstoppable Rise of Football’s Super-Rich Owners, has happened to this
quintessentially English working class game of yore?
Big Global Money, that’s what. Rampant capitalist globalisation has opened
up an international footballing meat market, turning the people’s game into a plaything
of international profiteers.
The pivotal year was 2003, when Chelsea,
whose EPL existence was threatened by a large debt burden, was purchased by the
Russian billionaire, Roman Abramovich.
This shady businessman had graduated from minor ventures like rubber
duck salesman (under Soviet President Gorbachev’s free market reforms) to
staggering wealth from the liquidation sale of state assets at massively discounted
prices to the most corrupt, greedy and politically-connected new money kings of
post-Soviet Russia. Abramovich had scored
a spectacular goal in picking up one of Russia’s largest oil companies for just
2% of its true, three billion dollar, value and he used this windfall to
finance his Chelsea vanity project.
Abramovich has since splurged north of £2
billion on top quality international players, and the silverware has duly
followed. Other EPL clubs have had to join
the new financial arms race or die i.e. face relegation and the loss of their coveted
slice of the EPL’s billion-pound broadcasting deals.
No longer can talented local lads take to a
pitch which is now reserved for players with wage packets of up to £200,000 a
game in a ridiculously overpriced global player transfer market. No longer can ownership rest with the “local
businessman made good” (Man U was once owned by a local butcher) or even with millionaires;
only the super-rich can now cut it – billionaires have bought outright, or own controlling
shares in, fifteen of the twenty EPL teams.
The ethical price ticket of this money
invasion is steep. Abramovich, for example,
is from a long line of Kremlin-favoured business cronies with financially hazy
pasts. Other fiscal felons from the
global kleptocracy have embraced the world’s most popular sport for the
sparkling distraction it provides from the financial and humanitarian crimes of
the game’s new owners.
The former Thai Prime Minister, Thaksin
Shinawatra, for example, bought a majority stake, illegally using state funds,
in Man City in 2007 to perfume his shonky human rights and corruption record. When a military coup ousted him from office and
froze his liquid assets the following year, Shinawatra was forced to sell his footballing
holdings but the ethical fog did not lift, however, as Man City’s new buyer was
Sheik Mansour al Nahyan of the autocratic monarchy which rules Abu Dhabi, the
biggest emirate in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (which also owns Melbourne
City in Australia’s A-League).
The UAE’s grotesque wealth rests on massive
oil deposits, a brutal state security apparatus, the outlawing of strikes and
severe exploitation of the Asian migrant workers who build the leisured elite’s
air-conditioned skyscrapers, malls and airports in 50 degree heat. In 2004 alone, the embassies of India,
Pakistan and Bangladesh sent 880 of their construction worker citizens back
home in body bags. The price of a prestige
English football club is a small overhead willingly incurred by the UAE
business-royals to help cover up their failings in labour relations and
democracy.
Qatar’s Middle East despots, too, are
anti-democrats and migrant-abusers who know the image-cleansing and profit-protecting
value of sport, including their (corrupt) purchase of the 2022 World Cup hosting
rights, their sponsorship of some of the biggest clubs and competitions in
Europe, the naming rights of Arsenal’s new stadium, and the acquisition of
French power club, Paris-St Germain, an “asset just like any other” on the
state-run Qatari Investment Authority’s books (alongside Sainsbury’s, Harrods,
Barclays Bank, Volkswagen, Porsche and Miramax). Qatar Airways, the state airline which bans
unions and sacks women cabin crew on pregnancy, is prominent in the fiefdom’s
football outreach.
In the US, of course, the profit motive
(well-honed in their domestic basketball, gridiron and baseball competitions) is
central - the American owner of Man United (the property magnate, Malcolm
Glazer) sees football as a pure “entertainment product” for commercial
exploitation through advertising, television broadcast subscriptions, ticket prices
and merchandising.
The fabulously wealthy elite of China, on
the other hand, has to mix profit with politics (party approval at home and
‘soft power’ abroad) through its football investments. A Chinese lighting manufacturer (which also
owns the Newcastle Jets in Australia), for example, signed a sponsorship deal
with Portugal’s’ second division which required the top ten clubs to include at
least one Chinese player. Meanwhile, to
the background of the English and Chinese political leaders’ mutual celebration
of Sino-Anglo trade and investment ties, a Chinese media mogul’s wise acquisition
of a stake in Man City and a seat on its board paid promotional political dividends
in China by procuring one of the rare slots (there are only 36 of them) in the
English Football Association’s Hall of Fame for Man City’s Sun Jihai, a name
not quite on par with fellow famers like George Best, Bobby Moore and Bobby
Charlton.
It is not just the foreign rich who have compromised
ethics. The British billionaire owner of
Newcastle United, for example, is a sportswear retailer whose mega-wealth rests
partly on a workforce exploited through zero-hours labour contracts and
sub-minimum wages. A British steel mogul
is an industrial-scale tax evader whose state-supplemented player shopping
spree included the goal-scoring metronome, Alan Shearer, to take the unlikely Blackburn
Rovers to league championship glory in 1995.
The money culture of football matters in many
detrimental ways. Apart from the moral
stain of an ownership wealth tainted by thievery and exploitation, the hegemony
of money corrupts fairness through the ‘financial doping’ of teams to win
titles and it concentrates success amongst the few, predictable, glamour teams.
Serious lucre also tampers with cherished
football traditions, whether that be though altering traditional strips,
colours and logos, or covert plans for a breakaway European-wide competition
restricted to a qualification-exempt and relegation-proof elite of ‘legacy’
clubs, a mooted competition that avoids the risks to their rich owner’s
investments from missing out on the existing pan-European competition.
Although Montague doesn’t address the
deeper issue with the capitalist commodification of football - players as
production inputs, the sport a media product, all run for profit – most
detrimental is the disenfranchisement of local players and fans from a
community connection. Cheering on the
heft of the owner’s wallet and celebrating the international managers’ and
players’ monetary valuations is hollow compared to barracking for a team that
has an authentic grass-roots identity.
Montague takes some heart from supporter
ownership of football clubs (AFC Wimbledon, Exeter City, Portsmouth) but this model
is feasible only in the lower, cheaper Divisions, and even these people power football
roots are fragile – Pompey’s rank-and-file (2,500 supporters with £1,000 shares
each) yielded to the temptation for higher league honours and sold to a former
Disney CEO.
In 21st century capitalism, football always
seems to be an away game played on Big Money’s home turf. Still, there’s always next week, or next season,
and upsets against the odds do happen, not just in the weekend kickaround but
in the war between the classes as well.
It’s all to play for.
