Soccer's Old-Money Upstarts
Manchester F.C. club chairman Khaldoon Mubarak (left) and owner Sheikh Mansour (middle) pictured in 2010, two years after purchasing the club. (c/o AFP)
A version of this piece originally appeared as a special issue of Southpaw, a weekly newsletter by Calder McHugh and Ian Ward covering the intersection of sports and politics. That version, as well as other iterations of Southpaw and the option to subscribe, can be found here.
JURGEN Klopp, the talismanic manager of Liverpool Football Club who last year led his team to its first Premier League title in thirty years, gives extremely interesting press conferences. They are principally noteworthy for the way he delivers everything, whether a humorous anecdote or a philosophical musing on the state of the game, with unbridled directness: for example, when declaring that his players should either win or “fail in the most beautiful way,” or when upbraiding a pundit who criticized his team’s performance by informing him that he must have been watching a different game. But in a pre-season media stakeout last month, the fifty-three-year-old German produced a blunt rhetorical flourish even by his own quixotic standards. Asked if he was concerned that Liverpool had failed to match the lavish summer spending of rival clubs, Klopp preëmpted the premise of the question. “We live in a world, at the moment, with a lot of uncertainty,” he observed. “For some clubs it seems to be less important how uncertain the future is, owned by countries, owned by oligarchs...we're a different kind of club. It was always the same.”
In pointing out the basic financial realities under which top football clubs operate, Klopp was transgressing one of the unspoken taboos of his profession: that managers should not become political pundits. He was not announcing any political allegiance (he’s already done that), but but rather pulling back the veil on the abominable political economy of world football. If it’s true that soccer explains the world, it does so by embodying and magnifying every pathology that lies at the heart of our global social crisis: unchecked financialization, astonishing high-level corruption, the prostituting of public goods to private interests, and ravaging inequalities of wealth and opportunity. Top football managers are not prone to chatting with the press about the shadowy global forces that increasingly permeate their sport, not least because many of them now depend for their job security on those same forces. And who can blame them? You cannot compete effectively in a game if you are constantly questioning the rules.
Klopp’s central, if understated point in his September press conference was that some clubs, like his own, are run like normal businesses, while others are not. Among the characteristics of being a normal business is a certain level of responsiveness, hence susceptibility, to the state of the world economy. At the time he was speaking, Europe was starting a sluggish recovery from an international economic crisis brought on by a global pandemic. Most conventional streams of revenue in sports had dropped to zero for several months, with the most conventional of all, match-day ticket sales, set to remain so indefinitely. In the midst of this total and unprecedented disruption, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who owns Chelsea F.C., spent a total of $272 million to bring in six marquee summer signings. Manchester City’s Sheikh Mansour al-Nahayan, a member of the Emirati ruling family, plowed through $180 million of his own on seven new players. In neither case did sales of other players come remotely close to covering the outlay, resulting in net-spends in the hundreds of millions for the transfer period. Liverpool, meanwhile, put most transfer plans on ice as they attempted to shore up losses and balance the books.
Such discordant displays of largess were possible last summer for the same reason that it was possible for Roman Abramovich to first acquire his wealth—billions upon billions of it, aided by bribery and the “shock therapy” privatization of Russia in the 1990’s—even as his country’s social state was collapsing. Wealth that is parasitic, that is untraceable in origin, or that is coequal with the national wealth of a government, is not necessarily answerable to the fluctuations of what is commonly referred to as “the economy." If there is a correlation at all, it is often inverse: the worse the crisis, the better the opportunities to get rich. Instead, such wealth is dependent on a shadow economy of shell companies, foreign trusts, and tax-dodging, passport-pedaling élites. Together, these form a black hole that exerts its pull on an ever-expanding share of the world’s legitimate economic capital, while itself remaining invisible. As a result, a portion of that capital is apparently spirited out of existence every year, sucked past the event horizon and into the unknown. Over the last two decades, some of that disappeared wealth has been periodically reappearing in the balance sheets of mid-level football clubs, transforming them overnight into global powerhouses: Chelsea, Manchester City, Paris St. Germain. By contrast, Liverpool’s owner, the retired American financier John W. Henry, is worth $2.5 billion, not $22 billion, and he is not a country. The source of his money is the humble hedge fund, in which business he worked for thirty years, and his other franchises include Boston Red Sox and the Boston Globe. But herein lies a paradox.
Roman Abramovich with Vladimir Putin in 2005. (c/o AFP-Getty)
In February of 2020, UEFA, football’s governing body, announced that it had taken the unprecedented step of banning Manchester City from European-wide competition for two years as punishment for systematic violations of its Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules. UEFA found that City had exceeded the maximum budgetary share allowed to come directly from its owners, a rule designed to force clubs to behave like normal corporations with diverse funding sources, and not merely like playthings for their oligarch benefactors. For a few brief months, it looked as though UEFA's action had dealt a decisive blow to the kind of “financial doping" practices of which Manchester City is hardly the only abuser. But then, sixth months later, came another announcement that carried with it the air of dismal inevitability: the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne had overturned the ban. The Court’s ruling largely took issue with UEFA’s legal strategy, which it said left the charges either not established beyond a doubt or time-barred. City’s escape bore a remarkable similarity to an earlier botched investigation into PSG's $400 million splurge on just two players, Kylian Mbappe and Neymar (PSG is owned by a subsidiary of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund). Documents obtained by the New York Times show that UEFA’s investigative team in that case, led by a former Belgian Prime Minister, voluntarily cut off its inquiry after concluding that PSG's spending fell just within allowable limits. That calculation, based on privately commissioned studies and buoyed by UEFA's opaque investigative structures (to say nothing of the facts that PSG's chief executive sits on the UEFA executive committee, and pays the organization billions of dollars to broadcast it matches on beIN Sports, a network he also owns), was subsequently declared by José de Cunha Rodrigues, the judge who would have been responsible for adjudicating PSG’s punishment, to be "manifestly erroneous.”
The cancellation of a second high-profile Financial Fair Play malfeasance case led the Guardian’s Barney Ronay to declare “Manchester City v Uefa final score: New Money 1 Old Money 0 (aet).” His headline was meant to puncture any swelling sense of injustice we might be tempted to feel at the verdicts, at least in the sense that there was any alternative that would have seen justice served. The unsettling reality of Manchester City's victory is that the only parties who really stood to gain from its defeat were the other super-clubs of England. Manchester United and Liverpool look a lot like Manchester City from the outside, engage in many of the same shady business practices, and lobby just as aggressively to rig football's governing structures in their favor. The principle differences are that those clubs probably haven't engaged in outright fraud as defined by the current rules, and that they have been in the ranks of the super rich for much longer, having dominated English football in an era before the arrival of foreign capital. In the battle between the glitzy, arriviste billionaires and the aristocratic billionaire scions, who are supposed to be the good guys?
In the decade since FFP was introduced, the gulf between Europe’s fifteen or so top clubs and all of their competitors has grown into a vast ocean. PSG are the only club to have convincingly broken in the élite in that time, while several others, notably Arsenal and the two Milan teams, have dropped out. Once-great clubs like Wigan or Bolton Wanderers, wanting for TV revenues, global fanbases, and, thanks to FFP, any potential windfalls from taking out risky financial positions, have tumbled to the point of insolvency. Ronay rightly ponders whether it's fair to come down harshly on clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea when no one can seriously claim that there is any path into football's top echelon today except through brute-force money-pumping on a scale that only governments, or kleptocrats who command the resources of governments, can hope to muster. Old and new money may squabble over who gets to be the face of this rarefied social club, but all members agree on the most important thing: that they have much, much more money than everyone else, and plan to keep it that way forever.
But we can push Ronay's logic further here. For better or worse, the new-money clubs are here to stay. More than that: Chelsea and Manchester City have dominated the last decade of the Premier League, with City in particular reaching such a level of sustained on-paper superiority that even Liverpool’s record-margin title win last year could not seriously jeopardize City’s status as the odd-on favorites of every competition they enter. The heroic narrative that has accompanied Liverpool's triumphant return, the gently approving words of the pundits about Arsenal's “progress" under new management, the vaguely romantic terms with which a return to form of ex-paragons Manchester United is contemplated: all attest to the universal acknowledgment that old money simply has not kept pace with new money in this century.
And so we have arrived at an unthinkable inversion of a situation that was itself unthinkable just thirty years ago. Liverpool—who dominated England and Europe for decades, are owned by a billionaire investment tycoon, have several times been involved in efforts to form a break-away league of the richest clubs from across Europe, and just recently proposed to abolish equal voting rights in the Premier League—can now legitimately be considered upstarts against the new-money “establishment” of football. It's now Manchester City and Chelsea who feel naturally entitled to their positions and nurse historical grievances about the "good old days" of the mid-2010’s when their dominance was even more complete. Meanwhile, Liverpool, Arsenal, and Manchester United revel in possibility of forging new identities and knocking the current emperors off their perch.
This inverted dynamic was on display when a touchline spat erupted during the Liverpool-Chelsea game in the summer. An argument began when Chelsea’s manager, Frank Lampard, remonstrated with some of Liverpool’s assistant coaches about a call that he was unhappy with. As Lampard became increasingly agitated, Klopp got involved, gently raising his hands and imploring Lampard, eleven years his junior, to calm himself. "Fuck off you as well,” Lampard replied before stalking off. Then, evidently possessed with the sudden feeling that he hadn’t quite gotten the point across, he wheeled around and, leering, shouted “One title you’ve won and you’re fucking giving it the big 'un, fuck off." Stunned, Klopp offered only bemused silence to add to the jeers of his players and staff.
The contrast between the two men could hardly be more striking. Klopp cut his teeth at Mainz in the German second division; his father was a traveling salesman. He is, as far as one can be in modern football, a self-made man. Lampard was born into sporting royalty. His father played for England, and his uncle, Harry Redknapp, managed West Ham United in the 1990’s—which, incidentally, was where Lampard got his first playing time. When I was a child first learning about football, I remember being told by older boys that Frank Lampard was a “genius” because he had reportedly scored highly on an IQ test. What I couldn’t have understood at the time was that public school boys usually do. After West Ham, Lampard went on to a hugely successful playing career at Chelsea, winning the Premier League three times, before retiring and turning to management in 2016. His path greased by Uncle Harry’s glowing recommendation, Lampard spent a season at Derby County, with whom he nearly, though not quite, earned promotion to the Premier League. That was considered adequate credentials to be handed the reigns at Chelsea last year.
After the game, Klopp refused to hold the posh young steward of London’s poshest club accountable for his words, saying essentially that he could excuse anything in the adrenaline-laden atmosphere of a live match. Still, it seemed like an awfully specific choice of words for a throwaway remark meant to let off steam. The unmistakable air of entitlement, and the slightly histrionic defensiveness of one whose sense of entitlement has been threatened where it hurts, was hard to miss. This is my turf, Lampard seemed to be saying. Never mind that he was barely a year old when Liverpool won their eleventh league title and a precocious child of nine when they won an eighteenth. Forget that Chelsea labored in mediocrity for decades before being transformed overnight when a Russian billionaire, peering down from his helicopter, asked “whose stadium is that?” Someone had to put these Liverpudlian upstarts, these inevitable one-hit wonders, in their place. And Lampard won the league (as one player among dozens, but never mind) no less than three times—how many Premier Leagues did you win when you were a player in Germany, Jurgen? Giving it the big 'un, indeed.
An aide whispers to PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaifi while he watches a game with former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. (c/o Getty Images)
If Klopp is now leading the upstart challengers of the new-money behemoths who have come to dominate the game, it's not for a lack of questioning the rules. In addition to his candor about financial structures, Klopp has called for more monetary redistribution to the lower leagues and is obsessed with trying to reduce the number of games on the calendar for the sake of player health, all of which is directly against the financial interests, and increasingly the trend, of clubs, governing bodies, and broadcasters alike. Klopp may feel free to say all of these things because, having secured a record of success in one of the least secure professions in the world, he is now the longest-serving manager currently in the Premier League.
But that record of success is supported by a decade of bullish competitive acumen and shrewd business decisions on the part Liverpool’s American owners, who have built up an enormously successful team while keeping net-transfer spend low (and who far are interested in pulling up the ladder behind them than letting anyone else share in their success). In his September press conference, Klopp leveled an oblique criticism of the “Galactico" model pioneered by Real Madrid in the early aughts, which consists of throwing money at the world’s greatest individual players and hoping they coalesce into a coherent team. That mindset has certainly infected the thinking of many of the new-money clubs in the last decade, most notably PSG. Business acumen doesn't matter very much when one’s owners are willing and able to pay out record-breaking transfer fees on a regular basis. One such instance in particular bears retelling: PSG had sought to tempt Brazilian star Neymar away from Barcelona, but found themselves unable to do so by conventional means. So they turned to the player’s release clause, a standard feature of football contracts that allows the contract to be bought out at any time, but for a sum which is purposefully set at an unrealistically high level to deter potential poachers from ever actually triggering it. Not so PSG, who cheerfully shelled out €222 million, a 125% increase on the previous world transfer record. Insanely overvalued on its face, the deal was quickly hailed by football pundits the world over as among the worst in the history of football, despite Neymar’s status as one of the best players in the history of football. Last summer, when Lionel Messi himself tried to leave Barcelona but was thwarted by a contractual dispute, Manchester City reportedly looked into pursuing the same strategy to wrench him away from his boyhood club. The purported value of his release clause? €700 million.
The enormous success of these clubs despite the abysmal lack of strategic soundness they frequently display, a lack born of never being accountable to economic constraints and continually escaping punishment for gross violations of the rules, is a testament to the unassailable positions that their owners have been allowed to purchase for them. The former arrivistes now possess an air of aristocratic right all their own, one that no amount of blundering can cause them to lose. In this respect, football’s new-money establishment are a bit like the landed gentry in Adam Smith's tripartite division of society in the Wealth of Nations: successful, secure, but also a bit dumb and slow-moving by virtue of their vast wealth being unearned and untouchable. Meanwhile, Liverpool and similar clubs are like Smith’s capitalists: wily, disciplined, and constantly having to outmaneuver their rivals though superior skill and positioning if they want to keep their station.
And the proletariat? There is no proletariat in elite men’s football. The proletariat are playing in the Women’s Super League.