Who really needs to own more than one football club?
I mean, seriously? When you think long and hard about it: is one not enough?
Say you do happen to have excess cash after purchasing one club, maybe find something else to do with it? Invest in another sport, maybe, or buy a classic car, or give money to charity to reduce your tax bill – whatever it is people who can afford football clubs do with their money.
And yet apparently, in those circles of uber wealth, one isn’t enough. Owning one football club is no longer the badge of honour it once was.
When the sorts of people who own clubs sit around dining tables in high end restaurants and everyone is talking loudly about the football clubs they own, those with only one now probably keep quiet, faintly embarrassed, covertly emailing accountants on smartphones under tables about finding funds to buy another.
The Eagles are expected to be demoted to the Conference League instead (Photo: Getty)
John Textor needed four, for some reason. One in France, one in England, one in Belgium, one in Brazil. That seems an awful stretch. Surely it is hard enough to find the time to run one club, in one continent, let alone four.
And we know how that worked out for him.
Lyon were kicked out of Ligue 1 for overspending.
The club successfully appealed their expulsion from the French top flight on Wednesday but everyone now awaits a definitive verdict from Uefa.
Well-placed sources told The i Paper last month that if Lyon successfully appealed, Crystal Palace would be demoted to the Conference League.
Palace, a club Textor has since sold his majority stake in, are awaiting the outcome to work out if the club, and their fans, can properly celebrate winning entry to the Europa League for the first time after winning the FA Cup.
Those scenes of wild jubilation seem a distant past, the celebrations turning to unease, still unresolved in what has been like the longest VAR delay in history.
And there are knock-on effects. Nottingham Forest also don’t know which European competition they will be playing in next season, after their own thrilling Premier League run earned them a Conference League slot. Will they swap with Palace?
Well into the summer transfer window now, with clubs under increasingly stringent spending limits, these clubs, the types of clubs that really need to think and plan carefully in the transfer window to compete with clubs with deeper pockets, don’t know exactly where they stand: how much they can spend, if they can stretch to that slightly larger weekly wage a key target wants, if they have the funds to bring in that extra midfielder.
Lyon had, according to reports in France, to find £85m by the appeal date and must find another £85m by the end of next season.
Palace, meanwhile, have been left to feel like an expendable pawn in a game of 4D chess clubs like them are not supposed to play.
If there is any silver lining to Palace’s plight, it is that it has really sharpened focus on what a mess multi-club ownership is making of football (if Brighton and Aston Villa’s owners having to sell stakes in sister clubs, or Manchester City and United owners having to pretend, via blind trusts, they relinquished control over sister clubs, hadn’t convinced you).
Of course, nobody wants this, apart from greedy football club owners. Nobody needs this – not even the greedy football club owners.
Just because someone with tons of money tells you something is a good idea, doesn’t mean it is. In fact, generally it is a bad idea, for everyone apart from them. Which is broadly where we are with multi-club ownership.
Even clubs who are at the top of a multi-club chain now and reaping the benefits – wait until your owner decides they are onto a good thing here, that they want to scale it up, and buys a bigger club, demoting you to a smaller cog in the machine whose best players now move frequently to said new club for remarkably low but somehow fair market value transfer fees.
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There is still time for the football authorities to step in.
One simple rule that even a humble journalist could draft will stop it: Owners are not permitted to possess a majority stake in more than one football club.
That is it; that is all you need.
It doesn’t have to be something we wilfully accept, as seems to be the direction of travel.
“The rise of multi-club investment has the potential to pose a material threat to the integrity of European club competitions,” Uefa stated in a report into multi-club ownership in February 2023.
Only a month later, Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin was saying publicly that multi-club ownership shouldn’t be banned, that they needed to think about it carefully.
Were any fans consulted on this sweeping decision with its multitude of massive ramifications playing out before our eyes? Was any right-minded person who enjoys the game asked whether it was a good idea to let this continue?
I suspect not. I suspect that, as usual, the multi-club revolution is being driven by those who claim it is a good idea, but are only looking out for themselves.