By Andrew Warshaw
October 21 – Yet another audacious challenge to the Champions League is reportedly being plotted behind the scenes involving Europe’s biggest clubs and altering the entire landscape of the game at elite level. It is a repeating narrative in Europe but this time round appears to have FIFA’s encouragement.
October 21 – With the uncertainty surrounding club revenues in domestic leagues, particularly around match day revenue, clubs that have qualified for the UEFA Champions League will be grateful for the relative the financial stability that competition brings.
October 16 – The French League (LFP) has formally demanded that Spanish media rights agency Mediapro pay €172 million due as part of its Ligue 1 broadcast deal.
October 15 – Borussia Dortmund are reporting a 25% decline in revenue for the covid-hit final quarter of the 2019/20 season against the same quarter in 2018/19.
By Paul Nicholson
October 14 – With battle lines being drawn around the ‘Project Big Picture’ proposal that would restructure professional football in England, the FA has said that it would use its veto to kill off any English breakaway league and take away Champions League qualification from those clubs.
October 14 – Serie A clubs are entering exclusive talks with a private equity fund consortium, led by CVC, for the sale of a stake in the league’s broadcasting media business, league officials announced on Tuesday.
October 14 – Liverpool owner Fenway Sports Group looks set to expand its capital base with the sale of 25% of its stock to RedBall Acquisition Corp.
October 14 – At last positive news for Macclesfield Town who were relegated from the EFL’s leagues last season via a points deduction and were yesterday expelled from the fifth tier National League.
By Paul Nicholson
October 13 – The radical ‘big picture’ plan led by Liverpool and Manchester United to restructure leagues, refinance the EFL and take voting control of the Premier League, and in effect the lower three tiers of England’s professional game, have met with mixtures of silence, anger and some optimism from clubs hunting for an immediate cash windfall.
By David Owen
When it comes to the football business, one cannot help but admire John Henry’s timing.
October 13 – The collective £830 million transfer fee spending by Premier League clubs during this year’s (extended) summer window was not an extravagant amount in a time of revenue uncertainty and no match day income, according to a football finance academic at the Global Institute of Sport (GIS).
October 13 – An analysis on the transfer fees paid by big-5 league clubs in 2019 shows a dominance of Premier League clubs amongst the big spenders, with Manchester City topping the spending table, and Manchester United third ranked, just behind PSG.
By Andrew Warshaw
October 12 – Could it be the saviour of English football or death knell for the game as we know it? Is it handing power to a cartel of money-grabbing clubs or an invaluable rescue package for the lower professional leagues?
October 8 – The biggest impact the Covid pandemic has had on football’s transfer market is to slow down the inflation of players’ prices that in the 2019 window, where like-for-like player transfer price inflation was running at 15%.
October 7 – Serie A has once again postponed a meeting to assess bids by private equity funds for a stake in the league’s broadcasting rights as the bidding war between the interested parties intensifies.