Club Ownership and Management

Bury and (almost) Bolton is the two latest clubs to bite the dust due to the mismanagement of their respective owners and management. While it may look like a distant memory, but slightly over a decade ago Liverpool was on verge of liquidation. If clubs like Milan, Roma, Marseilles and Newcastle are staring at any future, it must be a very bleak one. The meteoric fall of Valencia, Villarreal, Parma and Fiorentina is still livid in the memory. Without any exception, the incompetency of the owners and the management team were always the devil in such cases.

There are some tried and tested ways the owners and management screw their club:

The leveraged purchase/financing scheme whereby rather than pumping their own money or operating within their means, the club is straddled with a debt which becomes unsustainable at some point. Sounds familiar, eh!

Selling too much. Buy low, develop, sell high, reinvest is a nice strategy as long as you are ensuring the sustainability of the project. What was Parma left with after they had sold Asprilla, Zola, Dino Baggio, Fernando Couto, Néstor Sensini, Buffon, Crespo and Thuram between 1996 and 2001? On a low-key instance, who replaced Georginio Wijnaldum or Ayoze Pérez after Newcastle had sold them?

Buying too many. Around the time Valencia started to slip, they had too many players brought in by different short-lived managers. I understand Monaco currently have a shit-load of underperforming or unproven players too. Liverpool too had a bloated squad blessed with the likes of Downing and Markovic.

I would wager that even a round-the-corner grocery shop is subjected to more regulatory oversight than any professional clubs. What are the bench-marks for owning and running a professional club? Off-course it can be argued that the authority (FA) assigned to uphold or oversee the bench-marks is inept and corrupt. But the fact is the clubs operate in an environment with least (if any) degree of oversight. How a club with five freaking European Trophies can be on verge of liquidation?

Then there’s another issue. Suppose you own/inherited a castle with historical or architectural significance. Now if you are unable to maintain it, try to change or use it in a way contrary to its heritage; wouldn’t you be subjected to regulatory and legal oversight? Why shouldn’t the clubs, which are more profoundly integrated with the community, be subjected to such protections?

Good post.

I won't pretend to know the situations of the other clubs, but I wouldn't call Roma mismanaged overall. Footballing wise, The Pallotta era hasn't quite reached the heights expected, but nearly everywhere else the club is very much on the up and up. I think the footballing piece of the puzzle will fall into place sooner or later.

Always believe Roma's problem is you can never keep your core for long enough to achieve consistent results. It's a never ending roller coaster.

Monchi had also done a bad job which did not help, but even before that, Roma had reputation of buying good players, showcase them a bit, then sell quite LOW. Then you got chased by FFP. So not only the players don't stay long enough, but the budget would not even allow to buy the hypothetical missing piece of the puzzle.

Yeah this problem precedes Pallotta and his decisions. The Sensi hired and fired 5 coaches in 1 season. This is a systemic, historic problem at Roma. We've been chopping and changing our core since that scudetto win 18 years ago.

I have always considered the crux of that problem being club leadership's inability to handle the pressure from the Roman press and the ultras, who are extremely fickle and unafraid of making their feelings known in physical ways. This problem is systemic because the Sensis and Palotta have failed to choose the right people at key roles in the club who have the the ability to exceed under pressure. These key roles, to me, are: Sporting Director, Coach and player positions.

Bolton is an interesting case because during the early 2000s, their owner, Eddie Davies, invested a lot of his personal wealth into the club. He was such a fan that when he sold the club in 2016, he wrote off debts of £175m, and even invested more money to rescue them from administration.

However, there was a big downside to all of that. Bolton's rapid growth (going from Division 2 to Europe in only a few years) was unsustainable, especially during that era, when TV money was no where near as obscene as it is now. When they fell, they fell hard. Then the ownership changed, and made things even worse.

Bury are kinda the opposite example. They were a club with debts who got sold to a wealthy owner (relative to being a League 2 club), but ended up being saddled with all the debts that owner had accrued from failed property ventures.

So you can see the pros and cons of private ownership in full effect with these clubs. Legislation can help protect clubs, but it can't prevent owners making bad decisions or using his own assets as he wishes. The only thing football can do is ensure the Fit-and-proper-person test is thorough enough to weed out the dodgy owners in the first place, but there are a growing number of examples in the UK of this test being insufficient. Portsmouth were of the more unfortunate victims of this, and it took them a decade afterwards to get back on an upwards trajectory.

There's a good argument to be made for football clubs being non-profit organisations due to their role in communities all over the world, but at the same time football as a product is lucrative and sells for hundreds of millions. As long as that's the case, I don't think you can ever disentangle clubs from private ownership.

To speak of my own club's situation for a moment: Arsenal under Stan Kroenke could be better, but it could be a lot worst. Fans dislike him because he's passive. He hasn't invested a single pound into the club since buying a majority share (Arsenal are the only club in the PL to not have owner investment, to put that into perspective) and offered little input into how its run, which left certain people in charge for too long. At the same time, he didn't take any money out of the club (though a £3.5m "consultancy fee" a couple of years ago looked mighty suspicious), has yet to use it as leverage for any debts, and has recently allowed a transformation of the club's management structure. Plus the club has spent about £500m of its own wealth on players in the last decade. So yeah, it's hardly Mike Ashley levels of neglect/incompetence.

McLewis wrote:Footballing wise, The Pallotta era hasn't quite reached the heights expected, but nearly everywhere else the club is very much on the up and up.

Pardon me Mr. Lewis, but don't you find it ironic that a football club is up and up in everything but football? Another couple of season without CL and they would be like a midtable club, fighting for the scraps left by JJ, Napoli and Inter.

Duronto-Roddur wrote:

McLewis wrote:Footballing wise, The Pallotta era hasn't quite reached the heights expected, but nearly everywhere else the club is very much on the up and up.

Pardon me Mr. Lewis, but don't you find it ironic that a football club is up and up in everything but football? Another couple of season without CL and they would be like a midtable club, fighting for the scraps left by JJ, Napoli and Inter.

Well firstly, welcome to our community

Secondly, I'm glad I'm not the only that sees the irony in what I said in my previous post. I thought the very same thing when writing it so I figured someone would pick up on it.

Roma are a conundrum wrapped in irony. What's down is up and what's up is sideways.

Unlike most Romanisti, I prefer to see the bigger picture. Pallotta's tenure has revitalized the club overall, but that progress has been much slower on the pitch. Off it, I think the club is miles ahead of other clubs with the way it uses social media to engage and attract fans. Eventually, I do believe the club's progress from a footballing perspective will catch up to its progress elsewhere, as long Pallotta and Co stay the course and keep trying to find the right combo of backroom management and the players to carry the club forward.

Duronto-Roddur wrote:

McLewis wrote:Footballing wise, The Pallotta era hasn't quite reached the heights expected, but nearly everywhere else the club is very much on the up and up.

Pardon me Mr. Lewis, but don't you find it ironic that a football club is up and up in everything but football? Another couple of season without CL and they would be like a midtable club, fighting for the scraps left by JJ, Napoli and Inter.

Stick around and you will see McLewis is the most benevolent and loyal fan you will ever come across. For him the glass is always half-full.

Welcome abroad.

I wouldn't say the most loyal as I've had more than my fair share of days where I have questioned why I support Roma, but I appreciate the sentiment nonetheless, Ifti.

Perhaps not exactly relevant to the thread, but worth a watch.



Football is no longer a sport. It is a business.