Henry hit the nail on the head several years ago he said he wondered what the losing bid was, when they agreed one of their inflated sponsorship deals.
Essentially, there is no way to turn a decent profit when all funds are channeled back into competing with funny money. The only way they can do it is to realise capital gains. Iâm guessing that they are selling up at what they regard as the peak of the market.
Will the PL open a new investigation for subsequent years? They should.
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Yep, thatâs what I think, too. They will leave.
And if thatâs how it plays out, it will be interesting to see what happens, because potential new owners will not be getting the club or team, as is.
Yes, but I donât think the attraction of owning a football club is ever going to be turning a steady profit.
FSG bought the club for about 500m, if you include cleaning up H&Gs mess. Theyâve just sold a third of it for 1.65bn
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Article in the Guardian about the murky politics behind it.
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âTo make a small fortune in football, start with a large one.â
People have made money in football, but it has always been capital gains.
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The conventional wisdom is that there was a lot of room for the overall valuation of football clubs to increase. But the focus that theory was not focused on profits, as in running it like a traditional business, but more about money made from an eventual exit. The irony of that is profits made and/or taken are perceived to impact the increase of the valuation. So the question is why is it going up if youâre not any more profitable while having to feed it a lot more money to sustain that original level of profit (a lot more downside risk)? And ultimately valuations go up so high that there is no one left to sell it to. The NFL has had that problem for a while which is why they recently and reluctantly opened up minority ownership to institutional investors. But weâve seen it with football as well. We want to put a human name on the owners, but very few of the top clubs these days are owned by a person rather than a group.
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Thatâs as a close to a âfuck these guysâ as you can get.
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It certainly looks that way. The legal posturing by City is bring countered by resolve. Fuck them.
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I canât wait to see the irrefutable evidence in reply , although Iâm guessing I might have to.
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So if Iâm reading this right, they basically committed fraud up to the value of around a billion pounds over the time period being investigated. Wow, had no idea it was on that kind of scale.
They surely, surely, canât get away with just a slap on the wrist over this.
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SKY doing their best on Cityâs behalf.
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so with the Premier League using the term âsham contractâ is that them saying that Man City have commited fraud?
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Delete themâŚwipe them out of all footballâŚmake em sell upâŚevery last itemâŚdoes this sound harsh???
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Not all of that is excess spending, a lot of it is fake revenue allowing the club to justify the level of spending they were doing. But some of it is hidden spending. And even without that they were already the most lavishly expensive in the league. Puts into perspective the idea that they still won it on the pitch fairly.
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