Football, the world's most popular sport, was codified in London in 1863. The Premier League stands as Britain's greatest soft power export. Yet today, its clubs are owned by a deputy prime minister of Abu Dhabi, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, a tax-exile billionaire in Monaco, and a motley assortment of hedge funds and private equity outfits. And what, really, could be more British than that? Football remains the national game, but it has become a strange mirror of our times.
The Manchester City affair has exposed just how difficult it is to regulate some of the most powerful bodies on earth. The long wait for a verdict was frustrating, but perhaps unavoidable. When a leaked email from City's in-house lawyer during Uefa's action threatened to spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next 10 years, the scale of the challenge became clear. You never got that with the old guard like Albert Alexander Sr or Peter Swales.
What has happened to the local owners of English football clubs?
Clubs in England and Wales still claim to represent their communities. That relationship is strained by the pressures of a globalised entertainment economy, but it remains broadly true in sentiment. Arsenal may feel like the club of choice for the nouveau fan from Singapore to San Francisco, yet the scenes of celebration when they ended their 22-year wait for the league title last season were an undeniable expression of local pride.
The notion of a golden age, when clubs were run by benevolent local potentates for the good of their towns, is romantic nonsense. But just because there was no idyll does not mean the situation has always been as bleak as this.
How did we get into this mess of geopolitics and global finance?
Chelsea alone, in the past four years, have had a Russian oligarch forced to sell the club after falling under UK government sanctions, while a subsequent American co-owner was forced to sell his minority stake after his insurance business came under federal investigation in the US. It is a curious world in which the professional gamblers now feel like a welcome breath of fresh air.
The days of the local businessmen, the owners of mines, shipyards and factories, the hauliers and scrap-metal dealers, are gone. Some invested because they genuinely wanted to give back to their communities or loved the sport. Others did so because it was easier to fund a local club than to improve working conditions or pay a proper wage. And some did so because, wrongly in most cases, they thought there was money to be made.
But nobody should mistake those days for purity. The decrepitude of English stadiums in the 1980s should caution anyone who thinks football was uncomplicatedly better then.
Why does fan ownership matter, and is it the answer?
The contradiction has always lain at the heart of English football. Clubs represent their communities, and for fans, support becomes an aspect of identity, a link to family and place and past. That role has only grown more significant as the influence of traditional institutions, the church, the workplace, the social club, has faded. Yet fans in England have almost never owned their club, which in part underlies the present crisis.
That is not to say fan ownership is a panacea. There is much to admire in the German 50+1 model, which, to oversimplify, ensures outside investors can never own a majority of a club. But it has not prevented Bayern Munich from winning 13 of the past 14 Bundesliga titles. Some recognition that a club is not just a business, that it has a community function, might, however, have prevented the free-for-all that has led to this mess.
At least when most owners were local, there was some understanding of what the club meant to its area, and a recognition that exploitation or neglect could have direct consequences. No owner wanted demonstrations at the directors' entrance, or to be jeered as he drove the streets in his Rolls-Royce, or to have his car showroom boycotted because he put up ticket prices then sold a popular centre-forward at a knockdown price. The distant majority shareholder in his boardroom in Los Angeles, his penthouse in Monte Carlo or his luxury villa on the Gulf feels the sting less keenly.
What is the legacy of Richard Scudamore and New Labour economics?
Richard Scudamore, the former chief executive of the Premier League, did more to shape the modern competition, for good and for ill, than any other individual. He always spoke of being neutral about ownership models. Essentially, that meant taking the money without worrying too much about where it came from. The current Premier League is the consequence: a gleaming, world-leading edifice, but built on what?
Perhaps it is not fair to be too harsh on the Premier League. This is not just modern football; it is modern Britain. As commentators have argued, the Premier League is a direct outcome of Blairite economic policy. Oliver Bullough's book Butler to the World described the classic New Labour approach as allowing something, making money from it and attempting to solve the problems it causes after they've occurred.
Can football ever escape the clutches of the mega-rich?
But how do you solve those problems in football? How can the game extricate itself from the clutches of the mega-rich? Regulation, up to a point, helps, and there may at least now be a sense that there can be enforcement. Whatever the flaws of the profitability and sustainability rules, or the squad cost ratio that has replaced them, it may be useful if football could accept the basic premise that the game should not just be about how rich your owner happens to be. But that can only go so far; a door open to the world has admitted a world of problems.
Short of some sort of financial crash in football, the sort of apocalyptic event that would make the sport unappealing to big finance and require the game to be built anew, with a fresh spirit that might recategorise football clubs as community assets rather than simple businesses, we are probably stuck with it.
How, after all, could football ever escape the society that produced it?