Fans Before Profit: Who Owns Football?
By Sports Editor Jack Kelly
Football fans love supporting their clubs. Many of us football nerds cannot imagine any other way to spend our spare time aside from shouting at other adults to kick a ball into a net playing for a team we decided to support as kids. The romance that supporters of football elites attach to games played under the night sky in cities across the continent, is no different to the fascination of fans in the lower leagues. The love of one’s football club is a phenomenon that unifies cultures. In short, this is a facet of fan culture, which is an integral part of a football club’s identity.
If you are not lucky enough to attend a game, then the next best thing for fans is making the vital decision of which game you will spend your time with. On the fourth of October, the two most obvious choices were RB Leipzig vs Manchester City or Newcastle United vs Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League. It is fair to say that the backgrounds of the clubs involved in these two fixtures offer a depressing commentary into the modern football landscape. To put it bluntly, a marketing strategy for a drinks brand (RB Leipzig) versus a club owned by an autocratic state (Manchester City) and perhaps, even more nauseating, was the game that was played out by PSG and Newcastle United, both owned by gulf states in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
It has been said before but it must be mentioned that the autocratic regimes that own these clubs are alleged to have committed countless numbers of human rights abuses, and are effectively used as tools of foreign policy to cleanse their image abroad. Did you always need a degree in International Relations to be a football fan?
Admittedly, an argument could be made that by watching these games, we are complicit in supporting these regimes and their goals. It is a complex issue and it is probably fair to assert that it is in the eye of the beholder. In a way, that is fair, but on the other hand, aside from educating themselves and being critical of the regimes, what can football fans do when the powers that be are happy to do business with these dictatorships?
Similarly, with the news that Everton F.C are in the midst of a takeover by U.S private equity firm 777 Partners, a group that, according to an article by Paul Brown and Philippe Auclair in Josimar, “has a patchy record in honouring its financial commitments and is the subject of several court actions in the USA”, club ownership and football governance is getting more and more troubling. Furthermore, half of the 20 teams in the Premier League are part or fully owned by private equity firms from America. These clubs are treated as economic and/or political profit, by teaming up with institutions, football clubs are turned into business ventures. So, do fans have any say over the governance of their club?
In Germany, they have the 50+1 rule, which states that the fans must control a minimum 51 per cent stake in a club - with a couple of exceptions, such as Bayer Leverkusen, who are owned by the local pharmaceutical firm Bayer, and Wolfsburg, who are owned by Volkswagen. Advantages of this ruling include low ticket prices and a greater sense of fan engagement on political issues, taking strong stances against homophobia or in support of refugees. This was exemplified by Bayern Munich ending their partnership with Qatar Airways in June 2023 after a large number of supporters voiced their opposition to the deal.
In the case of RB Leipzig, they make to obey this rule, but in reality, do not. The club has only 21 members, which is miniscule compared to Bayern Munich’s 293,000. Moreover, Leipzig are somewhat exploiting the rule by the fact that all of their members are linked to their owners, the drinks brand Red Bull.
Was there ever an owner that embodied the spirit of the supporters that just wanted the club and area to succeed? Historically, there have been some but, in the context of the Premier League, the most obvious is the former owner of Blackburn Rovers, Jack Walker.
Walker made his millions from Walkersteel, a sheet-metal business he and his brother inherited from their father in 1951. By 1990, the business was the largest steel stockholder in Britain and employed 3,400 people across 50 sites. The Walker brothers bought GKN and sold it to British Steel for 360 million pounds making Walker one of the richest people in Britain at the time. Blackburn was Walker’s hometown and Rovers was his boyhood club. He had continued to support the club while he made his fortunes, before eventually investing heavily in them. Before Walker, Rovers had lived within their means to say the least. For example, when Howard Kendall became manager in 1979 he was instructed to reduce the amount of milk used in the player’s tea and to make sure his mail went second class.
This Dickensian manner of club ownership changed when Walker took over, as he made significant investments that rapidly changed the fortunes of the club. Firstly, it was said that Walker paid around a million pounds of his own money to acquire the services of former Liverpool player and manager, Kenny Dalglish. It seems that the major draw for Dalglish to make the move to Ewood Park was the money Walker was committing to the club. “I am saying ‘how can they be signing these people? They can't have that type of money.’ Jack had that type of money, so he was financing it for everybody. If he did not have the money, I would not have gone because the only way you can get success is to spend money.” The appointment of Dalglish proved to be a key turning point for the club as Blackburn won promotion to the newly-formed, lucrative Premier League in 1992 under the Scotsman.
Walker’s financial commitment to the club continued as he spent £25 million (a significant sum at the time) on players in his first three years at the club. But, it is fair to say that the most crucial moment of the Walker-era was the signing of English striker Alan Shearer in the Summer of 1992 for a British record fee of £3.5 million. In the club’s first season in the top flight of English football since 1966 they finished 4th before finishing as runners-up to Manchester United in the 1993-94 season.
However, it goes without saying that the apex of Walker’s time as owner of Blackburn was in Anfield in 1995 when Rovers, despite losing 2-1 to Liverpool, won their first league title since 1914 when they were crowned Premier League champions. This title along with the talent in the squad and the resources at the club’s disposal should have heralded the birth of a new superpower in English football to rival the status quo but their demise was as swift as their rise.
Dalglish moved “upstairs” to take the position of Director of Football and was replaced by Ray Harford and their seventh place finish in 1996, as well as their poor showing in the Champions League, signalled a decline from which they have never really recovered as they drifted from the top of the Premier League in 1995 to being relegated in 1999.
Walker died in August 2000 aged 71 and the club was eventually sold to Indian poultry giants, the Venky’s, in 2010 for £23 millio. Although the club never reached the success of the early years of Walker’s tenure as owner, nothing can be taken away from the purity of Walker’s intentions: to deliver success to his boyhood team. Fundamentally, Walker represented the fans.
This point is crystallised succinctly by Dalglish in an interview with Off The Ball “That’s not going to happen again, some local chap coming up with the money, putting it in and being as successful as he was. Jack Walker said ‘I was born and brought up here. I have got a steel business here, I own an airline here and I just want to give something back to the people of Blackburn.’”
Football clubs should represent the fans, but do they still? A banner held up by fans of German side Borussia Dortmund offers a damning statement on where club ownership has gone: “FOOTBALL FOR MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, NOT BILLIONS OF EUROS!-RECLAIM THE GAME”.
Sadly, Dalglish is right. For the most part, notions of simply giving back and local pride are the antithesis of contemporary club ownership; the idea of a club as a communal entity has been eroded by unscrupulous owners. Unlike local philanthropists, dictators do not invest in clubs out of the goodness of their hearts; altruism is not a theory compatible with the soft power foreign policy of autocratic regimes.
