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Hello and welcome to the Golden Football Weekly.

It's Football Finance, Murky World, PSR, Bosman, Super League bookies that don't quite exist time.

Kieran Maguire and Filippo Clare are here to guide me and Barry through all of it.

Premier League clubs selling Academy products to each other for bucket loads.

Let us all loop through that hole.

Is it bad?

Can it be stopped?

Manchester United job cuts.

The optics are terrible, but is it just new management sorting a bloated workforce?

More and more clubs increasing ticket prices and reducing concessions.

Sure, you might be 95 and have been coming to the ground for 200 years, but give us thousands of pounds.

Is the Super League still twitching somewhere, ready to be reignited by a super baddie?

Is there a new Boswin case happening in Belgium?

Killian and Bappes buying a football club.

What's happening at Bordeaux?

And who are the Hydra bookies?

And finally, there's Steve Coogan playing Mick McCarthy and Steve Bruce feeling the rhythm.

All that plus your questions.

And that's today's Guardian Football Weekly.

On the panel today, Felippo Claire, Bonjour Sava.

Savabia, Mics.

Barry Glandening, welcome.

Hello.

And from the Prices Football pod, Kieran Maguire.

Hello, Kieran.

Good morning.

As Michael says, have the Guardian lawyers had a good preseason?

They'll need it.

Oh, you never know.

You never know.

Let's start with the PSR stuff then.

Dan says, just on PSR and Academy deals, in no other competitive environment can two entities inflate and manipulate prices.

Why is football exempt?

Is that fair, Kieran?

Is that what's happening here?

Yes, what we have seen is that more and more clubs have realised that if you're trying to make a profit from a player sale, it's your sale price less the book value of the player.

If you've got an Academy product, your book price is zero.

So we saw with Aston Villa selling Jack Realish a couple of years ago, they made a hundred million pounds profit.

There were around about half a dozen clubs who were very close to breaching PSR at the summer of 24, and coincidentally, they decided they were going to start selling Academy products and booking profits.

It looks distasteful because you're effectively commoditizing children or people who have just come out of being children.

In terms of the prices themselves, how much is a Ming Vars worth?

How much is a Banksy worth?

So trying to get a definitive price for an Academy player is close to impossible.

And I think the clubs have leveraged on this in order to book the profits, which means that they don't go on the Premier League's naughty step.

Who is the Ming Vars?

Yacumba Minter, who Brighton have bought from Newcastle, or Elliot Anderson, who's gone to Forrest from Newcastle, or is it Lewis Hall who's gone, he's played a few Premier League games, hasn't he?

And then Amari Kellyman went from Chelsea to Villa.

It just feels, Philippe, just complete, it feels totally wrong.

But unfortunately, it's the logical consequence of the Turkeys voting for Christmas.

Because if I'm not wrong, and Kieran will correct me, he knows far more about this particular dossier than I do.

But it is the Premier League clubs who actually put these regulations in place.

They voted for them and now they're reaping what they have sown.

And suddenly it's hitting, the reality is hitting back that some clubs have been remiss in their spending.

They've been

basically they haven't done their accounts properly and they realize a little bit late that they're in breach of the regulations they've put in place themselves, which is quite ironical, really.

The consequences for I'm also thinking about players like Emil Smith Rowe, even though he's not an academy player going straight from the academy to another club, he's still somebody whose transfer fee is going to come in very handy for Arsenal, which by the way was one of these clubs which might have had some problems with PSR.

And you might wonder, well, would his career path be different if he were not put in this situation?

Could he have tried to stay in the club that he genuinely loves?

He's genuinely loved by the fans who are having a bit of a nervous breakdown because of his departure.

And they're thinking, well, the reason why we've sold him is not just that he hasn't been able to show what he can do on the pitch over the last year and a half or so.

It's also because we need the money and we need need that kind of money.

And even conspiracy theorists will tell you, well, maybe he's been actually put outside of the team because they wanted to sell him later.

So

morally speaking, I mean, even though it ticks all the boxes, if you look at the regulations, what they're doing is perfectly legal.

There's absolutely no problem with that.

It's another step in the, I would call the de-identification of clubs,

another step towards clubs which become basically nothing but franchises dealing with assets and disposing of these assets when they see fit.

So Kieran,

how would you fix this?

If it's pure profit, if you sell an Academy player, surely we can just change that in a way, can't we?

Well, you can only change it if the clubs vote for it, as Philippe was saying.

And I think it's one of these classic unintended consequences of the rules when they're introduced.

I mean, it's quite easy to sit down as a creative accountant and come up with half a dozen schemes to get around around whatever the rules are.

So I think you have to first of all identify what your objective is if you're going to have any form of financial controls and then

backward engineer from there.

I mean my view has always been that as somebody that comes from an insolvency background, businesses go out of business because of a poor management of cash.

nothing we're profit schmoff it as far

i can make a profit from anything as as we've seen with chelsea selling hotels to themselves, selling car parks to themselves, potentially selling the women's team to themselves.

If the rules are that weak, then I think they need ripping up and starting with an agreed objective.

But I don't think you're going to get consistency within the Premier League because it's become so factionalised, as we've seen in some of the recent votes.

Who is struggling under PSR?

Who is in...

We've seen Newcastle having to sell to buy, like, which clubs really are under huge pressure at the moment?

Just before the end of the financial year, which is the 30th of June, a well-known satellite broadcaster asked me to write a summary of six clubs which they had identified, which were Chelsea, Newcastle, Everton, Forest, Villa, and Leicester.

And funnily enough, all six of those clubs were involved in unusual transactions just before the year end

and then have been in a position since then to be able to sell.

So as far as 23-24 is concerned, I don't think there's going to be any problems because the clubs took advantage of the rules.

I think the only issue that we've got overhanging the summer is that of Leicester.

And that's because they've tried to go into sort of this

black hole of neither being a Premier League club nor being an EFL club.

But I suspect that's going to come back to bite them on the bum over the course of the next few months.

And we're also in this weird position where

newcastle in theory are the richest club in the world with bottomless reserves of money but they find themselves having to to sell a young couple of young players to to balance the books and it seems they're still not even sure the books are balanced but they're more are balanced enough in in terms of newcastle they they have the wealth from the owners um who can inject cash into the club to make it as sustainable as you want it to be.

The purpose of financial fair play and the purpose of its latest manifestation, PSR and what we're going to move to, which is a squad cost control regime, is not to create a level playing field, is not to allow clubs who are ambitious or aspirational to try to join the top table.

It's to create a glass ceiling.

Because if you've already qualified for Europe, you've got £100 to £150 million advantage over the clubs that are not in Europe if you're in the Champions League.

And if you can spend 70% of that on wages, that means you've got somewhere between a £70 and £100 million advantage.

Now, if...

That allows those clubs to maintain the status quo.

And that was always the purpose of PSR.

It was just dressed up

as a form of cost control, which was good for the game as a whole.

But 19 out of 20 clubs in 22-23 lost money on a day-to-day basis in the Premier League.

It's a fallacy.

Football doesn't have a problem in terms of the money coming in, whether that money is from owners, whether it's from ticket sales, whether it's from TV or whether it's from commercial.

Football's got a problem in terms of spending money, not generating money.

And I think the bigger clubs don't like the idea of another Manchester City or another Chelsea threatening the existing position.

Six into four doesn't go.

So seven or eight into four doesn't go even worse if you've got Villa and Newcastle banging at the door.

One thing for Newcastle, they're in a strange position also because of the huge financial investment they made shortly after Eddie Howe arrived, where if I'm not mistaken, within a single calendar year, they spent over 200 million pounds net.

I said net, which is the word which matters here.

So they basically made a gamble and they've now got to back back up the gamble they made at the time.

So it's

completely logical.

And by the way, there's another player, I mentioned Emil Smith Rowe,

but there's another player who should be mentioned because it was also a heartbreak, I think, for the fans and for the player himself, is Kennan Dewsbury-Hall.

You know,

a Leicester Sherboy.

who's been sold for Chelsea for, what, 30 million, something like that, which goes straight into wiping out some of

the the negative

line

on Leicester's accounts.

And

everybody knew at the club knew, every fan knew that he would be sold.

And he would be sold for that reason and no other reason than that.

And that in itself is wrong.

So, should they get rid of Pierce Archimede, or should there just be something else?

Because my understanding was actually it was sort of...

Is it quite good for lower league clubs?

I mean, obviously, it's quite hard to have

one thing that one size fits all for the top Premier League clubs and clubs in League Two, but there needs to be something, but I don't know what it is.

Well, we've seen a couple of proposals, one of which is to have a

cap on wages in effect, which would apply to every club in the Premier League.

And that would mean that if they wanted to, Crystal Palace, Bournemouth, Villa, Newcastle could spend as much money on wages and player transfers as...

Manchester City, Chelsea, Manchester United, and so on.

So therefore, if you've got a new owner who comes in who's a squillionaire, then if he wants to spend that money or she wants to spend that money on the club, they're free to do so.

Another suggestion is that we have some form of transfer tax.

And I've sort of crunched numbers into a spreadsheet.

If you say that every club can spend a fixed amount of money on player transfers and if you want to include wages and agents' fees as well, and then you tax anything above that at 500%.

So if you spend £100 million on players, you'd have have to pay 500 million pounds worth of tax 50 of that goes into grassroots 50 of that is spread between the rest of the premier league so everybody wins if if the i suggested that to various government departments right and what have they said oh

and have you suggested it to any premier league clubs

No, no, mainly because Premier League clubs don't like me very much.

Right.

I wanted to ask you, actually,

have any clubs ever come to you looking for ways of, I don't know, cooking the books?

Well, I used to teach a creative accounting course on Wall Street.

And that was highly successful until 2007, 2008.

And all of a sudden, my phone stopped ringing.

So I've got no idea why.

Yeah, I get the occasional, would this work?

Don't mention it on the podcast.

So, yes, but I don't do it from a commercial point of view.

I mean, i mean and any accountant worth their sort can can run run rings around the rules in their current form when they were first produced i i i wrote down 10 schemes in the first night and i've just been ticking them off ever since um so it is farcical did did you have selling a hotel to yourself was is was that in your top 10 yeah yeah related party transactions are very easy um and we've seen that with with players as well with with the multi-club model if you think about aaron moi going from melbourne city to manchester city he's never been seen he was never seen in the manchester city shirt you know you know normally when you get when the club player signs well he was just shipped out before he had got a chance to wave uh to wave the scarf and the shirt around and and then they sold him to huddersfield at a profit of 10 million quid that's also what's happened with savinho in manchester city who was uh sent to to troix uh he would have done a lot of good to troy because as you know they they went uh they went down and then they went down again uh but then trois could actually and then he went on on loan to girona which is another of their clubs and then he could be sold back to manchester city that's absolutely marvelous the way it works i have a question for you akiran is there any other branch of business in which this the the strange amortization rules uh which are part of it by the way of of the dossier by which clubs can actually put in their accounts as coming in all of the money that comes for a transfer And then they can amortize the player's purchase over the length of his contract.

Is there any other business in which this kind of creative accountancy works?

Well, this is standard accounting practice for every single intangible asset.

So you can do it.

What we don't have in any other industry.

You're saying Mikhailo Mudrick is intangible.

I mean, that's the big question.

Yeah, I mean, and an intangible asset by definition is one which has no physical substance.

So therefore, you cannot kick it, which intuitively seems

odd.

But it's the rights that the contract brings, which is the asset.

It is standard accounting practice.

It's very rare for me to ever defend Chelsea, but I don't think that they've actually done anything wrong.

They've just taken on a huge risk, because if Mudrick turns out to be Pants, then he's Pants for eight years.

It's the same with Fernandez.

And that's part of business.

That's a risk of the way that you conduct themselves.

But it does give you a financial advantage in the short term.

But if it doesn't work out, as we've seen with Romano Lukaku, you've got a player on a five-year contract who they've been trying to get rid of for over two years now.

Can we move on to Everton?

Autumn says that with the collapse of the deal to sell Everton to the Freedking Group, how livid should fans be with Farhad Mashiri for trying to work with 777?

You've done quite a lot of work on this, Philippe.

I think it was insane from the beginning.

So it was a good thing that the club finally decided to do away with this particular relationship.

But the relationship should never have been started in the beginning because

all the red flags, there were more red flags around 777 than there are red flags when Charles de Clare wins a Grand Prix with the Ferrari, you know, in the stand.

So

it was insane.

And as the months went on, and what I think is a major problem, you could have seen, maybe imagine that Franz Marcieri had rule pulled over his eyes and he genuinely thought that Triple Seven were serious people who had the financial clout to take over Everton.

But when it became clear that they did not, and it became clear that they did not very quickly indeed,

they carried on taking money from them.

And you think of these things put together.

And I think the second mistake for me is even more reprehensible than the first.

The first one,

it could have been misled.

That's possible.

It could have been shown papers which were not possibly

close, as close to the truth of the financial state of 777 partners than they pretended to be.

But to carry on with the relationship for so long,

when there were other offers, and then to find your club

now having to find an owner, a new owner, but on top of that, having added colossal amounts of money in debt.

All of this, you know, for the stadium, but also for simply paying the wages.

That, I'm afraid, isn't forgivable.

So for Everton fans,

it sounds pretty drastic you know.

It's not good, I think, in the medium term.

In the short term, the money from Friedkin, which is around about £200 million, doesn't have to be repaid until 2025.

So you've got a bit of breathing space.

They just had the first installment from the Premier League in terms of this year's TV money.

That's probably worth about £40 million.

They've sold...

a player or two.

So

they've got enough money for the next two, three, four months, perhaps.

But when we get to October, November,

they're then reaching crisis point again.

And what does that mean?

Like crisis point is in.

Well, how do the bills get paid?

Are Lango Rort going to continue to work on the stadium?

There's still another,

according to reports I've read, there's still another 70 to 80 million pounds worth of work to be undertaken.

Well, if I was a contractor, I'd be demanding cash up front with regards to that because of the uncertainties over the position that Mashiri's put the club into.

Yeah, so

on the Friedkin Group withdrawing interest, Everton insists they are, quote, absolutely not in a precarious position.

But me listening to that, Kieran, makes me think like Everton may not be a going concern in November.

Is that going too far?

They're not in a precarious position in July or August.

But by the time we get to November, things are going to deteriorate.

Now, if there's no deal done or there's no sign of a deal by the end of next month, I think there would be pressure on the club to try to bridge that gap, perhaps by selling one of their crown jewels in terms of players.

I'm trying to think if they've got any.

I'm just trying to think.

Who are their crown jewels?

They've already sold Amadou and Anna.

Decore,

I guess.

Branthwaite.

Branthwaite, Branthwaite.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Even still.

Wow, that is sort of much more, that's much more precarious, despite not being precarious than I thought it was for Everton.

We'll end part one there.

We'll do Magic United's job cuts at the start of part two.

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Welcome to part two of the Guardian Football Weekly.

So, Manchester United's job cuts, they've cut 250 jobs at Manchester United.

Jamie Jackson writing in the paper,

that should save them around £10 million a year.

Redundancy is estimated at £40,000 a head.

The savings part of Big Sir Jim Ratcliffe's drive to restructure the club and make it sustainable.

The optics, Barry, are terrible.

I mean, I don't know if Med United is some bloated organisation, but the optics are bad.

The optics are bad.

Like you, I'm not business-savvy enough to know whether or not what Sir Jim Ratcliffe is doing is necessary,

but and it's it's it's it's sort of a cheap shot, but it's the the obvious one to go to.

Anthony cost £80 million.

This is going to save them, you know, that was his transfer fee.

God knows how much he's cost them in wages.

This is going to save them, they reckon, about £8 million a year.

But the optics have been quite bad ever since Sir Jim Ratcliffe took over.

He's sort of deprioritised the women's team.

He's banned working from home.

He's removed cup final day privileges from staff.

He called on the Premier League to give more of a say to the big six clubs.

He comes across as an entitled Brexiteer and called on,

I think he wanted taxpayer money to pay for a old Trafford refurb.

And

now this,

Johnny, I was wondering, would any players come out and say anything about it?

And eventually Johnny Evans was asked about it after their recent game in the States.

And

he, he, you know, he put a human face on the story that hadn't been there today.

Because a surprising number, well, I suppose it's not surprising, but a huge number of Manchester United's online army of fans appear not to give a shit about these people losing their jobs.

And they are of the opinion that if

Maureen from Altringham, who earns £10 an hour on the till in the megastore.

If getting rid of her will help our chances or increase our chances of qualifying for the Champions League, well then sorry, Maureen, get lost.

But these are actual people

who are invested in the club.

Quite a few coaching staff have been identified as people who are going to lose their job, coaching staff who've been there for years and years.

And

yes, Manchester United is a business, but it is also supposed to be a football club, a club.

But very few Premier League clubs are actually,

you know, have a club ethos anymore.

It's all about the loop.

Yeah, Johnny Evans said it's been a difficult thing to see.

People I've known for a long, long time.

One thing about working in a club like Man United, you're all in, and everyone's always been all in.

It's a big, massive staff, but I think that's just been the culture of the club.

I mean,

people lose their jobs at football clubs, Kieran, when a team gets relegated, for example.

And you can't just employ everybody.

like you can't just say here everybody like we're you know this is a wonderful beautiful thing but and i don't know how true this is but at a football club it feels like if everybody is is happy and engaged and having a good time like everybody from players coaches staff the tea lady is always using an example kickman etc you have a better better chance and so i'm just interested this decision is you know you've got to be careful when you make a business decision like this it is very much a business decision and i think if the decision had been made 12 months ago by the Glazer family, then Manchester United fans, both in Manchester and online, would have been up in arms.

So I think it's quite a cunning system that they now have.

Because Jim Ratcliffe is seen as the enemy of the Glazers and is not shaped Jassim.

So I think he was very much the preferred choice because of the narrative that we've had.

from his initial bid that he's always been a lifelong Manchester United fan despite being a season ticket holder at Stamford Bridge despite trying to buy Chelsea three years ago.

But I think that narrative's now come across.

Oh, he's a Manchester lad.

He used to, he was born up in Oldham and so on.

That sort of romanticises the nature of his investment.

But he's actually being used as a Trojan horse to drive through what the Glazers want.

Barry made reference to

claiming that Manchester United are a disadvantaged club.

Now,

there's many things about Manchester United, but I've got their finances going back every single year in the Premier League, and those are not disadvantaged.

That's fine.

Wasting money, yeah, but they've not wasted it on Doreen

from Altringham.

They've wasted it on Anthony, Di Maria, Sancho, you know,

Wambersaka,

Donny van der Beek, and so on.

So there's many things that you can say there.

But I do think the narrative we're getting from Ratcliffe is

he described the Super League as an initiative.

Well,

that's sort of cozying up to it.

He wants a smaller Premier League.

That's quite clear.

The next step, if you're going to make a club more efficient in terms of costs, that's fine.

But here's an idea.

Don't send three executives in three separate private jets down to Eric Ten Hag when he's on holiday to tell him that you've still got a job.

Because, again, the optics, when you're sashing people's job, looks really bad.

I think two is okay.

Two separate persons.

Fine.

Philippe?

Yeah, I mean,

to put this in perspective, we should also look at Manchester United as a business concern and realize that I think their last accounts for the year ending 22 or 23

showed a record turnover of nearly 650 million quid, that they had reduced their loss to 28.7 million pounds, which by Premier League standards is pretty much the equivalent of nothing.

That's one thing.

The second thing is that when I hear Kieran saying that Ratcliffe can romanticize anything, I'm wondering, can you romanticize carbon emissions or productions of plastic?

I mean that's absolutely amazing.

And also,

it certainly punctures that balloon which was always filled with hot air that Ratcliffe's arrival at the club was all about the sport.

Because let's remember, this is how it was presented to us, that we would have a real football person, somebody who loved the game and loved the club, who who was going to

actually move the focus of the club from being a gigantic juggernaut, commercial juggernaut, to a club that actually wins titles.

And what we're saying is that, well, actually, no, it isn't.

It's exactly the opposite.

He wants to carry on with Manchester United as a commercial juggernaut, and he just wants to shave a few costs here and there, keeping, of course, the, you know, he's got an investment to make back.

He's not a philanthropist, you know, he's not.

We should remember that other clubs have also used this kind, have used context

in order to get rid of what they thought was a little bit of fat.

Remember COVID, when COVID happened, and Arsenal actually dispensed with 55 people at the time of COVID, which was brutal.

That was brutal.

And we shouldn't forget that.

Manchester United, we should talk about this, but we shouldn't think that they're the only ones actually using this kind of technique, as it were, to

put a bit more sanity in their accounts.

And actually, on a slightly different line, Kieran, but not dissimilar, is ticket prices and concessions.

Richard's a West Ham fan who's asked about it there.

I know there have been problems at Fulham Archie talks about it a lot.

Tottenham, I think, stopped their concessions for some people.

Nottingham Forest, there were issues about, you know, your tickets in the same place and suddenly it's gone up exponentially.

Is every club going that way?

Yes, I think every club with the exception of Palace has increased ticket prices this year.

But if we're going to use, we're going to move to an environment in football where cost efficiencies become the norm, then it's a horrible phrase.

You want revenue efficiencies as well.

If I can sell 100% of my tickets at £50, then the logical thing to do is to put them up to £60.

Now, the fact that you're a seasoned ticket holder and you've invested in Spurs or West Hamming Forest for the last 30 or 40 40 years, thanks very much, you've served your purpose, now either pay up or get out is the attitude of owners.

And they will claim that because we've now got a static TV deal and commercial income is difficult to increase, especially if the betting sponsors are going to disappear, and we'll come to that in a minute,

then unfortunately the fans are going to just simply have to pay and suck it or move on.

And another thing is, obviously, a lot of these owners are now Americans or American investment funds and so forth.

And what they will have done at the beginning when they started to get interested in football is compare the ticket prices in the USA and in the Premier League.

Try to buy a ticket for an NFL game and come back to me and complain about the prices to get a ticket at Stanford Bridge or the Emirates, believe me,

you'll be blanching.

They also know, like, for example, on the secondary market,

if you want, when season ticket holders do something which, by the way, is not quite legal, but resell their season ticket for a game to somebody who will fly over a fan who will fly over from overseas I've had people like that standing quite close to me at the Grove at Arsenal and we usually ask them well how much do you pay for your ticket and these guys are genuine fans it's a one in once in a lifetime occasion perhaps for them and they will think nothing of paying 350 quid for a ticket that cost 45 pounds in my section so they will play nearly 10 times more and and the people upstairs they will have taken notice of that.

The worst people

for Premier League club owners are season ticket holders.

They're the worst.

If they could do away with them, they would do away with them.

There's absolutely no doubt about that.

There's absolutely no doubt about that.

They need them because you want atmosphere, the players want them there.

And also, if they decided to do away with season tickets,

there wouldn't be much left of the stadium, I think, after 24 hours.

It would be catastrophic.

But in an ideal world, that's what they would like to do.

So what they're doing is they're pricing those people, pricing people out of being season ticket holders.

And then afterwards, and reducing the number of season ticket holders.

It's an incremental process.

It's lovely, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean, I suppose it's hard, isn't it, to sort of, you know, what's the most benevolent thing you could do is sort of means test it or say, look, every year you're there, your season ticket gets a bit cheaper.

And and you sort of say well you know but if you hand it down to your son or daughter well then they have to pay the you know and what's the sort of communist what's the socialist way of this working i i don't know kieran i don't think there is a simple answer they're now forcing season ticket holders if you cannot make a match it's not if if i give my brighten season ticket if i can't make a match to my next door neighbor i will get a 10 match ban

So what the clubs want to do is that, especially if you've got pairs of tickets, they go back into the the clubs own you've got to effectively sell them back to the club you get one nineteenth of your season ticket back and then they will package that as a hospitality deal as as philippe says season ticket holders have outlived their usefulness you know when football was was a pariah sport and we're all old enough to remember that season ticket holders were the lifeblood but

the proportion of money which is generated from ticket sales has gone from 42% in the first year of the Premier League down to around about 13 or 14.

So

they want to try to get that money back by converting season ticket holders into day trippers.

And just one

short addendum to that.

What we're saying is valid for the Premier League, but it's not necessarily valid for other national leagues and or lower tier, because a very important source of revenue on the continent, certainly, is when in June it comes for people to renew their season ticket.

And therefore there's an influx of money, of fresh money, which allows the clubs then to do their business in the summer.

So, when talking about season ticket holders, we're really talking about the elite of the elite, the people who are making an awful lot of money and want to make even more.

Let's talk about betting.

Oh, dear.

Yeah.

Oh, dear, everyone.

Where do you want to start, Philippe?

Do you want to?

I think we start with the number, which is 11, which is a number of front-of-shirt betting sponsors.

People very often stop there, but they don't realize that actually clubs who do not have

the name of betting companies on the front of shirt might also have agreements as regional partners with

better with bettings and betting companies and sometimes they have relationship with several.

So what's happening is that with the end of the front of shirt

sponsoring by betting operators from 26, 27 onwards, it's an opportunity to cash in

for the clubs because betting sponsors, and we'll come to that, offer more money than ordinary sponsors.

And there's a reason for that, which we'll come to in a second.

So, the clubs want to cash in.

They've got two seasons.

So, most of the deals actually we've seen, and I don't think I'm wrong in saying that, are actually two-year deals.

So, we lock the money for that.

Then, afterwards, we'll go back to sleeve partnership because that will still be allowed.

And advertising in Premier League grounds where you can still have all these funky new websites that nobody existed the day before being advertised for 90 minutes or 95 minutes these days.

This will carry on.

Of these 11 sponsors, new sponsors, one, two, three, four, five of them are so-called Asian-facing operators, which mean they are illegal as specified by the Mechelen Convention and nothing else.

So six of them are basically illegal, right?

They operate, or we shall say they operate illegally in the countries which they target as their major market.

They will say it's a grey market and and so forth.

So there's this huge problem of carrying on promoting brands which shouldn't be promoted.

And then there are others which are now linked to also crypto betting, which is a very, very dark area indeed.

And there's, you know, and it's not even talking about why it might not be such a great idea to promote an activity which can be extremely addictive and dangerous when we don't do it for football or alcohol.

But there's a huge problem at the heart of the relationship between, in particular, English football, not just English football, German football as well, Spanish football as well, but particularly English football relationship to the

grey market betting industry, which it has derived, I mean, hundreds of millions from over the years.

Just to be clear, Philippe, for anyone who might not know this, we see

ads written in Chinese on shirt fronts or on advertising hoardings.

They're being seen by viewers in China who then go, oh, I can put a bet on this game by going to that website.

This is what this is all about.

Am I right?

It's all about that.

Because

it's a galaxy of brands that actually are only related to a very, very small number of operators.

Check out what we did on Yozimar just about a week ago about that, where we identified

basically one particular huge owner of a number of brands which we have seen on Premier League shirts.

They cannot advertise for their wares in China, in mainland China, which is the number one market, obviously.

So what they do, they use Premier League football as a means to promote and legitimize their business.

And I will add one thing without adding names, but if you read the report on human slavery, which has been published by United Nations Department of Drugs, Office on Drugs and Crime UNODC, it actually shows very clearly, as actually has also done some of the work we've done with Yosima, that many of those brands are not just illegal, but they're involved in some absolutely nefarious practices, particularly in Cambodia and Myanmar.

So it's the real human suffering at the end of this.

There is.

It's not a victimless crime.

That's what I keep saying.

When I do conferences, what I always say, that's what I start with and finish with.

They're not victimless crime.

Even if, say, oh, these people are illegal, but you know, kind of like they're a bit like, I don't know people who smuggle tobacco through the customs.

you know what's what's the crime well the crime is that these companies work because people are there to care about the it people are there to uh to deal with the uh the customer chat um but these people are forced to do this job they are forced to do this job um they are very often um tempted by job offers which

see them sent to Cambodia, particularly Barrette, Sierra Noucville are two of the main centers or were two of the main centers.

And when they find themselves there, they're enslaved.

They're brutalized, beaten.

There are some absolutely genuinely awful stories which have come out of that.

And if the betting industry, that betting industry says, well, maybe you're painting too dark a picture, in the Philippines, which is one of the havens of gambling, the government, Marcos Jr.'s government, has actually just announced that it will take all of the pogos, those illegal, or those licensed actually, operators which operate from Manila, take them out of business altogether by Christmas 2024.

And the reason that was given for that is because they're linked to prosecution, because they're linked to racketeering, fraud, money laundering, and even murder.

This is the world we're talking about.

I'm not saying that the guys, you know, who will have partnerships with Premier League clubs and Bundesliga clubs and A-Ligo clubs, are necessarily these kind of guys that are enslaving people.

That's not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying, the industry as a whole is so problematic that you shouldn't want to touch it at all.

Just the same way that if you think that crystals are great for your health, and good luck to you if that's what you think,

you shouldn't buy them because you should know where they have been mined.

And mostly, Brazil, South America, in absolutely appalling conditions by people who are paid a pittance when they're paid at all.

It's exactly the same thing.

It's about ethical thinking.

And it is for me

the most glaring assault on the most basic, fundamental human rights and ethical values that I can think of in football at the moment.

That'll do for part two.

We'll be back in a second.

HiPod fans of America.

Max here.

Barry's here, too.

Hello.

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Welcome to part three of the Guardian Football Weekly.

Lots to get through, so we won't probably do any of these stories justice, but let's try and get through them in some sense.

Kieran, you said in the WhatsApp group, the Super League isn't dead.

That sort of sparked my attention.

A22, who are the mouthpiece of Florentino Perez, are still warbling about their free TV meritorious system, which is so good that if a club like Leicester won the Premier League game, it could then qualify for a playoff to get into the fourth division of the new competition.

So it's still around.

It's still around.

It's still around.

I mean, like, on a sort of odds of it happening, to me, naive man sitting in cupboard here thinks it is dead.

But

is that what they want me to think?

I think they're trying to work out

how do we win the marketing campaign?

How do we sell it this time round?

Because it was such a mess the first time.

But there's certainly a desire.

And again, you've only got to look at what Jim Jim Ratcliffe was saying.

He says it's an initiative.

He's not saying he didn't condemn it.

It was saying, I need to work out a way around this so that we can persuade fans that Manchester United being guaranteed to qualify for the competition every year is actually fantastic news.

At what time of the night are we supposed to go down Florentino Perez's cellar with

a hammer and a massive nail, open the coffin and

hammer a stake through the heart heart of the Super League?

Is there a way to do this?

Is there a way to do it?

It's a way to do it.

That's a good question.

I mean, if you did it and filmed it, I think it would get good numbers.

Oliver says, I'd be interested in learning more about what happened at Bordeaux

and how, if that could have been prevented.

Yeah, Bordeaux filed for bankruptcy following the collapse of takeover talks with the Fenway Sports Group, who own Liverpool.

They withdrew their appeal against being relegated from Ligue Deux to the third tier, national one by French football's financial watchdog following the end of those talks.

They filed for bankruptcy, will abandon their professional status, which they've held since 1937.

First of all, it's a huge club.

I would say

the parallel would probably, Everton wouldn't be a bad parallel.

Okay.

Six times league champions, the club that has given us Zinedine Zidane, you know, just that, that's pretty damn good.

And more recently, Aurelian Chuemini as well.

And so many players have gone there.

Lizarazo, Rezo, Tigana, Contana, Clive Allen.

Clive Allen, yeah.

Who was very successful there actually.

And it's the result of colossal mismanagement.

COVID was certainly a factor.

They were really badly affected because they play in a stadium, the Mathmut Atlantic, which is 42,000 spectators, which is a legacy of the 2016 Euro, which they found pretty difficult to fill, but which costs an awful lot of money to maintain.

The debts went up and up to be at the moment 90 million euros.

Imagine what it's like for a league and club to have 90 million euros debt.

The loss, I think, on the last exercise was 54 million euros as well.

It's absolutely dreadful.

So what happened is that

the Americans who owned it decided to pull out, which is understandable, and it was straight from the frying pan into a gigantic fire, into the

the entrails of Earth's magma, because the person who came up was Jar Lopez.

I will stop at saying that.

He's already

bankrupted Mucron in Belgium, which by the way is dead and dead, dead, dead, not like the Super League.

When it comes to Bordeaux, despite the best will of the town hall and the council authorities,

the money which is lacking is so

enormous that the best we can hope for, I think, even though there are quite a few meetings which are going to take place over the next two weeks, is that we'll have some kind of a Phoenix club being born from the ashes of the great Girondin.

That's perhaps, you know, it worked for Fiorentina, it worked for Rangers, it could happen, but it is the result of mismanagement.

And I would love to talk more about this, but I know we don't have much time, but this has to do, and we would love to have Kieran and talk to him as well about this.

It's what we're seeing at the moment is what multi-club ownership is doing to football.

We've seen it with Troy in the city football group in France.

We've seen it with all the clubs from 777 partners.

Tendard de Liège, an absolutely immense club in European football, which is facing bankruptcy right now, at this minute.

Girondin going out of business.

What do they have in common, those clubs?

They're all part of MCO portfolios.

So there is a bigger debate to be had about that and the impact that allowing people to own multiple clubs clubs in multiple countries for reasons to them best known is something that perhaps should be looked at a little bit more closely.

Because at the moment, it's less affair, is anything goes, it's like cold porter.

And presumably, Kieran, like the difficulty is that you know, regulators

there is, you know,

who's going to stop that happening, right?

Who has the control to do that?

I can't see FIFA doing it because they're just interested in international football.

UEFA,

it's too big a topic for them to handle that they're having to look after the interests of the super league clubs they're having to give them more and more concessions and that's where their focus is um you know we've seen seffarin mumble about mcos but already this particular season concessions have been given to both manchester united and manchester city owners in order to create these these relationships which allow clubs within the MCO to now face each other.

Whereas 12 months ago, Villa and Brighton owners had to sell their shares.

so so we're I think we're we're making the MCO model more attractive to investors and actually and if you're a club that doesn't have one and you see others that do you sort of have to say well we probably should do that because

it financially it's beneficial it's beneficial for lots of reasons and you know and for your bit if you're the biggest uh you know egg in that basket it's actually good for you right there are lots of positives from being the top of a chain of these very quickly philippe kinney and bape buying a football club this is quite interesting isn't it it's very interesting because it's a new trend, I think, amongst superstars of the game.

You were used to having footballers sometimes putting a bit of a penny in their old club for sentimental reasons, like Axel Witzel did, for example, with Saint-Ardeliège, talking about them a second ago.

We saw Ronaldo as well,

the proper one, the great one, the Phenomeno.

He was also involved, but has got out now.

Lionel Messi is now involved in an MCO, actually, a model in which he would be a shareholder.

We know that his relationship with Inter Miami is actually quite very interesting to look at.

And now it's Killian Bappé.

Oh, and Golot Conte bought a club.

Extraordinary, a lower division club in Belgium, if I'm not mistaken.

Nobody knows exactly why, but he did.

And well done, Golot, good luck to you.

We love you.

And Killian Mbappe threw is because he's got a family investment fund.

So you've got FSG, you've got the City Football Group, and you've got Coalition Capital, Coalition Capitale.

And that's Killian Bappe, and mom and dad, and perhaps his lawyer as well.

And they have bought, or they will buy, very shortly.

The information is actually very, very strong.

80%

of Stadmaner de Con, which is a Ligue de club, which has got a fantastic academy and actually has got great potential for growth.

And he put 15 million Euros into it in CON, which is the former club of Engolo Conte.

Right.

Stranspurs says, says, With Steve Coogan confirmed to play Mick McCarthy in the film about Saipan, who else should be cast?

Jason Statham as Lee Carsley, obviously.

Lots of people, Barry, excited to know what you think of Steve Coogan playing Mick McCarthy in this blockbuster movie.

Well, it remains to be seen if it's going to be a blockbuster movie.

It's it's a provisional title, I believe, is Saipan,

and it's uh all about the

bit the civil war uh that erupted after on the back back of the the

um row between mick mccarthy and roy keen

before the world cup in japan south korea in 2002 i'm not sure the definitive story of what actually happened has ever emerged there

everyone was like you're either a mccarthy you're a mick man or a keen man

i'm working on the assumption that this is going to be like that jamie vardie movie and will never get made because it's quite clearly a terrible idea

I may well be wrong.

I interviewed someone and like no one's ever said it.

I think it might have been, this may be completely wrong, but was Clinton Morrison in that squad?

He might have been.

I don't know.

I remember, I think he told the entire story and then was, you know, I just think there's somebody and it might not have been him was just like, this is what happened.

And we're like, oh, we've never actually heard this.

A bit like Matthew Edlington, I think, told the entire,

you know, James Beattie,

Neil Warren.

Tony Pulis.

Tony Pulis.

That's it.

Who would play the naked Tony Pulis?

Would Steve Cougan do that role as well?

Who knows?

In the next movie.

Bob says, who will play Steve Bruce in the film of him winning Olympic gold with the Jamaican national football team?

Can Steve Bruce really manage on a balmy Tuesday night in Jamaica?

says Paul.

Yes.

Steve Bruce has reportedly held talks to be the manager of Jamaica, which I think sounds absolutely tremendous.

I'm all in favour of Steve Bruce taking the Jamaica job.

Well, that job has just been vacated by the guy who's taken over as Ireland manager.

And Steve Bruce was sort of in the frame for that as well.

So, um,

feel the rhythm, you could look to him.

I mean, absolutely, but by all accounts, he couldn't be bothered going to training at Newcastle.

So, I'm not sure how they'll get him to go over to Jamaica.

Well, I didn't want to there, though.

It's probably listen, I should say, for the benefit of the lawyers, that it was Amanda Staveley who said that and quickly retracted her comments.

I'm, I'm just, you're just a man.

I'm not saying she was right

anyway.

I've got through a lot and I enjoyed it.

That'll do for today.

Thank you, Kieran.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you, Philippe.

Thank you, Max.

Thank you, Barry.

Thanks.

Put more weekly is produced by Joel Grove.

Our executive producer is Danielle Stevens.

This is The Guardian.