The Premier League has become the United Kingdom’s greatest soft power export, and it now sits in the hands of owners drawn from the very top of global finance and geopolitics. That is the starting point of Jonathan Wilson’s argument that the English top flight is entangled with forces far beyond the game itself — and that there is little realistic prospect of the model changing.
Wilson notes that the laws of football were drawn up in London in 1863, and lists the current ownership of Premier League clubs as including a deputy prime minister of Abu Dhabi, the public investment fund of Saudi Arabia, a billionaire based in Monaco for tax reasons, and what he calls a disappointing assortment of investors and private equity funds. His point is that the modern English game, for all its claims to national identity, is a very British export indeed.
The Manchester City case, Wilson argues, has exposed just how difficult it is to regulate some of the richest and most powerful bodies in the world. The long wait for a verdict was frustrating, he concedes, but perhaps unavoidable given the possibility of legal objection at every turn. He points to a leaked email from City’s in-house lawyer during Uefa’s action against the club, which threatened to “spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next 10 years”. Such battles, he suggests, were a world away from the era of figures such as Albert Alexander Sr and Peter Swales.
Wilson is careful not to romanticise what came before. The idea that there was once an idyll in which benevolent potentates ran clubs for the good of their communities is, he writes, romantic nonsense. But the absence of a golden age does not mean the situation has always been as bleak as it is now, and he argues that the decrepitude of English stadiums in the 1980s should caution anybody who believes football was uncomplicatedly better then.
He traces the shift away from local ownership. The days of the owners of mines, shipyards and factories, the hauliers and scrap-metal dealers, are gone. Some of those men invested because they genuinely wanted to give back to their communities or simply liked the sport, Wilson writes; others because funding a local football club was easier than improving working conditions or paying a proper wage; and some because they thought, wrongly in most cases, that there might be money to be made.
At the heart of English football, he argues, lies a contradiction. Clubs still represent their communities, and for supporters, following a club becomes an aspect of identity — a link to family, place and past — a role that has only grown as the influence of traditional institutions such as the church, the workplace and the social club has faded. Yet fans in England have almost never owned their clubs, which in part underlies the present crisis. He cites Arsenal as a club that can feel like the choice of the nouveau fan from across the world, while describing the scenes of celebration when they ended a 22-year wait for the league title last season as an undeniable expression of local pride.
Chelsea serves as his illustration of the wider turbulence. In four years the club had a Russian oligarch forced to sell 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 United States. Wilson notes the curiosity of a world in which professional gamblers can feel like a welcome breath of fresh air. Chelsea supporters, meanwhile, held a peaceful, fan-led protest in January calling for accountability and structural change, criticising the club’s ownership model, recruitment strategy and overall leadership since the takeover, and urging an end to micromanagement.
Fan ownership, Wilson argues, is no panacea. He admires much about the German 50+1 model, which broadly ensures outside investors can never own a majority of a club, but points out that 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, and that it has a community function, might nonetheless have prevented the free-for-all that has led to the current mess.
When most owners were local, he writes, 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 and then sold a popular centre-forward at a knockdown price. The distant majority shareholder in a boardroom in Los Angeles, a penthouse in Monte Carlo or a luxury villa on the Gulf, Wilson argues, feels the sting far less keenly.
Much of the responsibility, in his reading, lies with the competition’s own outlook. Richard Scudamore, the former chief executive of the Premier League who did more than any other individual to shape the modern competition, always spoke of being “neutral about ownership models” — which Wilson interprets as taking the money without worrying too much about where it came from. He also cites Miguel Delaney and Jack Pitt-Brooke’s argument on the Libero podcast that the Premier League is a direct outcome of Blairite economic policy, and Oliver Bullough’s book Butler to the World, which 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”.
Regulation, Wilson concludes, helps up to a point, and there may now be at least a sense that enforcement is possible. Whatever the flaws of the profitability and sustainability rules, or the squad cost ratio that has replaced them, he suggests it would be useful if football could accept the basic premise that the game should not simply be about how rich an 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 kind 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 clubs as community assets rather than simple businesses — Wilson sees little prospect of change. How, after all, he asks, could football ever escape the society that produced it?