I learnt a new word this week, courtesy of Susie Dent of Countdown’s Dictionary Corner: ‘ingordigiousness’, an insatiable desire for wealth at any cost. Ingordigiousness seems to be everywhere, but I wonder if it is a coincidence that Susie chose the word on the day a new proposed European Super League was revealed. I believe she supports Arsenal, one of six English clubs and six continental teams to have signed up and which now face hefty sanctions even though the ESL has been kicked into row Z. The cost of their extreme greed could be high.
I will refrain from making any observations about the many ingordigious decisions that have been taken by football teams and authorities over the years that have led to a crisis that we surely saw coming. The point is that even though the ESL is a non-starter, the abortive attempt to get it off the ground must surely invite closer scrutiny of the way football and its clubs are run and regulated, and the way money is distributed.
Indeed, a generous reading of the unfolding situation would be that the big teams are simply playing another game of brinksmanship to extract a bigger share of football’s pot – squabbles over Champions League cash and other TV money and how teams struggling at the base of football’s pyramid are supported have been going on for a while and revealed the big clubs in all their avaricious glory. A less generous reading would be that those involved honestly believe they have a new, more profitable model for the biggest football teams – let money do the talking and damn the legacy fans and historic structures.
In fact, the share prices of listed football teams that have already signed up to the ESL rose on the news and continued to rise throughout the day even as tempers erupted. I assume the buyers driving this price move assumed that the ESL signatories would get their cake and eat it – a franchise-style league that delivered better revenues than the Champions League without the risk of non-qualification, and a continued berth in lucrative domestic leagues, too.
That may have sounded great in the New York boardroom at JPMorgan, but overlooked the tribal reality of football or the jeopardy at the heart of its perennial drama. As fund manager Nick Train, a holder of Manchester United and formerly Juventus, put it when we interviewed him last year, “owning equity in a company that creates such devotion and enthusiastic interest among fans, and whose games are followed by millions of people around the world, is a hugely valuable thing”. In short, fierce fan loyalty underpins the financial value of football clubs, and those pesky legacy fans are part of a hugely valuable thing that has been created not just by Manchester United and the rest of the dirty dozen, but by everyone who has participated in a structure that makes football work.
That loyalty has been severely tested, and I hope for those fans’ sake – and the playing staff of those teams – that any penalties imposed on the clubs are directed at the owners rather than them (even if that means West Ham does not win the title by default). The question of whether they can be trusted to run English football clubs must be asked, having demonstrated no regard for the game’s social importance and a willingness to flout rules – clear failures on two out of three ESG fronts. If nothing else, it seems unlikely that the rest of the football world will continue to offer them the special treatment they had previously demanded (and got), and political intervention seems likely. Whatever comes next, the investment case for football has suddenly got more holes than the Hammers’ defence.
