+34Manchester City's guilty verdict has reignited debate over the corporate carve-up of English football, tracing back to Francis Lee's 1994 takeover and the Premier League's 1992 breakaway.
Manchester City's guilty verdict has brought football's great sell-off crashing to earth, arriving in the heart of the Labour party conference in the afterglow of Andy Burnham's rapturously received prime minister's speech.
The news broke during a long meeting of the Socialist Campaign Group, where people were celebrating Keir Starmer's ousting and Burnham's more leftwing direction. On the same day, Burnham spoke of the wrong turn Britain took under Thatcher. In the 1980s, Thatcher pursued selling off and privatising council housing, water, energy, transport and care. We built the common good, Burnham said, but the common wealth created for the many was seen as an opportunity for the few.
Football Follows Thatcher's Privatisation Path
He could have been talking about football too. Where Manchester City have ended up, having been bought by Sheikh Mansour of the Abu Dhabi ruling family in 2008, is a culmination of decades in which the people's game has been carved up for profits. Clubs like City were formed in the Victorian smog of industry by churches, schools and workplaces.
Generations of supporters built them into powerful homes of belonging, yet they were sold off just when football finally had enough wealth to go round. I investigated and reported on that financial carve-up in my early years of journalism, and Burnham worked on it too at the start of his political career, as administrator of New Labour's football taskforce. My 1997 book, The Football Business, likened football's commercialisation to Thatcher's privatisations.
It chimed with supporters' groups campaigning against rocketing ticket prices, exclusive pay-TV deals, and the drawbridge the newly mega-rich pulled up. My moment of clarity came at Manchester City, reporting on an earlier takeover in 1994 by a beloved former player, Francis Franny Lee. I grew up in Manchester, and from as early as I could answer the challenge of which club do you support, it was always City for me.
Manchester City Through a Supporter's Eyes
My dad took me, fast-walking hand-in-hand, to big matches in the 1970s, floodlit glory nights of my boyhood. I have always loved the colour blue, especially sky blue, and have never really worn anything red in my life. For supporters of my generation, the only trophy City won was the 1976 League Cup, claimed with a wondrous overhead bicycle kick goal by our winger, Dennis Tueart.
I like art as much as the next ignoramus, but the photograph of Tueart's goal must be the picture I have gazed at more than any other. The perfection of it, Tueart's straight back in mid-air, arcing the ball behind him into the Wembley net, Newcastle's opposition defenders frozen in time for ever. But unlike Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal, City never had a period of sustained success.
They compressed a golden age into two years, 1968-70, and soon after that League Cup triumph, they were relegated in 1983. For years, while City fans became celebrated for their loyalty and sod-it humour, taking bananas and other inflatables to matches, there always remained a mournful yearning for success to return. When Lee finally took City over, acclaimed by all supporters, it seemed like deliverance.
As a fan in the old Maine Road stadium, I cheered him on Saturday, then as a journalist on Monday I pestered for an interview. They agreed, and I was escorted behind the scenes, along some threadbare corridors into the chairman's office, where Franny sat glowing behind the desk. Everybody involved was so delighted to have pulled it off that they shared details quite gleefully. And that was when I first understood that Manchester City wasn't a club at all.
It was a company, with owners, and this had been a corporate acquisition. Franny was one of many other business people, a consortium, who had bought the shares. Later, one of the lawyers proudly showed me some corporate engineering they had done. They had formed a holding company, Manchester City plc, that would own the old football club company.
This followed a breakaway in 1992 by the top clubs from sharing TV money with the clubs in the other three divisions of the Football League. This boosted the value of the top club-companies. The new consortium planned to float City on the stock exchange, like Manchester United and others, where ultimately their shares could then be sold at a profit. That plan could boost income artificially by 900 million pounds.
The Corporate Engineering of Football Clubs
I learned that holding companies were formed to bypass the longstanding rules of the Football Association, the game's governing body, that restricted shareholders being paid dividends and directors a salary. The FA imposed those at the dawn of professional football in 1892, allowing clubs to form limited liability companies but limiting the personal money shareholders could make. This was to retain the collective, service ethos of a club.
A century on, the rules were still in the FA's handbook, at No 34. To the relatively small but formidable core of people who really care about these principles, rule 34 became totemic of football's sell-off. It was surrendered to enable vast personal gains by investors. That was now deemed antiquated, blazers' bureaucracy that must not restrain football's new business dynamism.
To me, it was all a gut punch. This critique was put forcefully to Labour's football taskforce, with calls by the Football Supporters' Association for strong regulation to harness the benefits of the new era. Fans understood that German football's response to the pay TV transformation was to permit corporate reorganisations, but require clubs to be controlled 50% plus one by mutual supporters associations.
Reform Fans and Grassball Football
New Labour was never going to introduce a football regulator or major reforms, but Burnham worked hard for concrete improvements. The Premier League agreed to distribute 5% of its TV deal to improving desolate grassroots playing facilities via a new grant-giving body, which has been transformative. Burnham also championed the cause of supporters seeking a greater voice in how their clubs are run.
The verdict against Manchester City now forces football to confront the full cost of the sell-off that began decades ago.
Football Sell-Off Andy Burnham Premier League Football Association
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