Gästkrönika: Breaking the myths of football finance
SFSU fortsätter serien med gästkrönikor med ett bidrag från London. Kevin Rye skriver om den engelska fotbollens ekonomiska verklighet, utveckling och vad fotbollssupportrar drömmer om på de brittiska öarna. Det är inte drömmar om Champions League eller för den delen nostalgiska blickar bakåt mot VM 1966.
In England there’s a great deal written about the finances of football clubs. Years of failure and bad management under private ownership by people who overspend and put their clubs at risk, along with poor regulation of clubs by the football authorities, has resulted in an eye-watering level of financial meltdown and bankruptcies – over 110 since 1992. One of the responses to this has been for many to start demanding greater control over what clubs can spend, particularly on player wages.
One of the other responses is that supporters now refuse to believe the myths peddled by these people and have been organising into groups to demand changes to the way their clubs operate.
This overspending used to take place with very little challenge; fans were simply told that to compete and grow the club had to have the best players possible, and that meant paying what the market demanded, and that this would take ‘investment’. Taking a risk was vital; you had to speculate to accumulate if you wanted success, whether promotion, the place in the Champions’ League, whatever, and the fans knew little better because no one made the truth widely known enough.
These so-called ‘benefactors’ have been a part of the English game for years. In English, the word ‘benefactor’ simply means ‘a person who confers a benefit, a ‘kindly helper a person who makes a bequest or endowment, as to an institution’. But the activities of most people that are known as ‘benefactors’ in football clearly don’t conform to that definition, except in a few cases.
Many years ago the owners of clubs were more like that; local businessmen or dignitaries who owned the local football club because it was viewed as important to the local area. They weren’t perfect – grounds were often falling to pieces, players were treated more like cattle and fans just as badly, but there wasn’t really the belief that they were there to earn money for themselves (and in fact, The FA didn’t permit directors of football clubs to be paid).
Those people have long-since gone to be replaced by people who are still given the name of ‘benefactor’, but who behave very differently. There’s a lot written about the myth of the ‘benefactor’, particularly by people like Dr John Beech, an expert in Football Finance at Coventry University and Ian King, blogger at Two Hundred Percent (I’d urge you to read these blogs as an introduction to English football finance).
What happens in far too many cases is an owner who gets involved in a football club for a variety of reasons, sometimes related to tax and their other business interests, sometimes because they have a big ego, sometimes because they want to get their hands on a piece of land or something valuable that the club owns. Sometimes, I’m sure, they even get involved for criminal or illegal purposes, for example to ‘clean up’ money acquired through criminal means.
In Sweden, and likewise in Germany, you have something that in England looks very attractive to us. A rule that at least 50%+1 of the club must be owned by the fans is a block on precisely the kind of thing we’ve been fighting against for years in English football. It doesn’t stop bad practice, bad decisions and sometimes it doesn’t even stop overspending or financial problems – regulation like that from some national associations or, for example, UEFA, is what stops that. What it does do is to ensure that it’s a lot more difficult to behave in a way that endangers the club’s future because the owners are the people who would have the most to lose; you, me, us.
I am in no way saying that there are people getting involved in Swedish football because they are laundering money; it would clearly be wrong of me to prejudge their motives, but given that UEFA for example are introducing far more strict control through club licensing on how clubs run themselves financially, I am asking you, looking at the situation in England, why do you think they want to get involved?
I know they’ll be saying that ‘It’s for the good of the club’, or ‘I only want to see our great club successful’, they always do, but ask yourselves why, and ask yourselves what the cost could be.
It seems to me that the direction that most countries are heading in Europe where football is concerned is to make clubs more responsible to their supporters, not less, and that having a rule that guarantees the right of fans to be in control of the institutions that they will live with all their lives makes total sense, against the alternative of having people who are only there for as long as they want to be or for as much as they can get from it.
And that’s shown in the high demand for our work across 22 countries to help groups of supporters achieve this at their own clubs in countries as far afield as Poland, Spain and Cyprus, or as close to home as Denmark or Belgium. In fact the German football authorities have just upheld their own version of the 50%+1 rule against the elected president of Hannover FC who was making the same noises about needing ‘investment’ in his club to help it to compete.
It’s true that it would take a lot for Swedish football clubs to become as badly run as those in England, but the first step to that is to remove the protection that clubs have; English football writer David Conn points out that until the late 19th Century/early 20th Century English football clubs were essentially members’ associations that then converted to private companies to protect those people (the situation was very different; in English law ‘unincorporated associations’ historically have no legal protection against debts). Some years later, it’s this absence of protection – along with some other regulations being quietly dropped such as the non-payment of directors of football clubs – that has meant that those clubs are now in the mess they are.
We’re desperate for some real change, and hoping that a current review of football by an influential group of Members of Parliament is going to have a big impact on football and the way it’s run in England. We’re optimistic, but the people who have the power aren’t very keen on giving it up.
In English football, we have had to learn from bitter experience – and experience not of our own choice – that the people who get involved in football often cannot, sadly, be trusted to make the right decisions, and will often do things thinking about their own needs, not those of the club.
It’s not an experience I would wish to share with you in Sweden.
Kevin Rye
Supporters Direct Europe
