Crystal Palace mess sums up football's multi-club ownership problem

Telegraph

3 days ago

After six historic wins, culminating in victory over Pep Guardiola's Manchester City, it appears that the biggest obstacle to Crystal Palace's first European campaign can actually be found at the Uefa offices in Nyon.
Palace 's multifaceted ownership structure, which includes the American John Textor's 43 per cent stake, is under intense scrutiny due to Uefa rules which forbid clubs with shared owners competing in the same competition.
Textor also holds an 88 per cent stake in the French club Lyon, who have also qualified for the Europa League. The situation is potentially further complicated by another Palace shareholder – David Blitzer – also holding a stake in Brondby. The Danish club have qualified for the Uefa Conference League and it had been suggested that Palace could yet find themselves 'demoted' to that competition.
Talks continue as they search for a solution, with Textor suggesting on Monday night that his stake in Palace is now up for sale. But one thing is at least clear within this mess.
The explosion over the past five years in the number of multi-club ownership (MCO) structures means that such situations will arise with increasing frequency.
It is barely a month, after all, since it emerged that Evangelos Marinakis had placed his Nottingham Forest shares into a 'blind trust' to satisfy Uefa rules which would preclude him from having 'influence' should Forest have qualified alongside another of his clubs, Olympiacos, for the Champions League.
The same move was made last year by Sir Jim Ratcliffe's Ineos at Nice and City Football Group at Girona, after Manchester United and Manchester City joined their sister clubs in respectively the Europa League and Champions League.
Chelsea, who are owned by the Todd Boehly-fronted BlueTech investment vehicle, had faced the same looming issue in respect of Strasbourg and were in talks with Uefa in case the French club also qualified for the same European competition. Fifa has also just expelled Leon from the Club World Cup after ruling that they could not participate alongside fellow Mexican club Pachuca because of the potential conflict of interest from shared owners.
Prior to the pandemic in 2020 there were less than 60 clubs worldwide operating within such an arrangement. That number now stands at more than 400. And research by Jason Stephens, an MCO adviser and lecturer at the University Campus of Football Business in London, has found that there are now 147 MCO operations in the world.
Familiar examples include the City Football Group, in which Manchester City stand at the top of a 13-country, five-continent structure and Red Bull, one of the innovators of a concept that has brought shared playing styles and brand identity across countries.
The prospect of heading up one of these multi-faceted operations was apparently sufficient to lure Edu from his job as Arsenal sporting director to a widely expected global director of football role across the Marinakis's empire.
The Greek businessman, who is worth an estimated £3 billion, has since been in talks to add a controlling stake in Brazilian side Vasco da Gama to his network in England, Greece and Portugal.
It is also notable that Marinakis's Forest are currently working on a deal that links them again with Textor's clubs. Forest are hoping to tie up a remarkable triple de al with Brazilian side Botafogo for striker Igor Jesus, centre-back Jair Cunha and left-back Cuiabano. The completion of those transfers would likely open the way for Danilo to leave Forest and join Lyon.
Botafogo are owned by Textor, the owner and president of Lyon, as well as co-owner of Palace. If the deal progresses, Danilo would be the third player Forest have sold to Lyon in the past year. Last summer the French club paid £27 million for defender Moussa Niakhaté and about £15 million for midfielder Orel Mangala.
Liverpool's Fenway Sports Group has also been actively exploring options that include buying a stake in Málaga in Spain, after pulling out of a deal last year for French club Bordeaux. Brighton owner Tony Bloom bought a 19 per cent stake in Melbourne Victory last month and has just submitted a bid for almost a third of the Scottish club Hearts. Brentford's controlling group, Best Intentions Analytics (BIA), bought the Spanish club Asociación Deportiva Mérida last month and Stephens believes that major recent investments at Aston Villa and Chelsea, respectively by the companies Atairos and Ares Management, will be used to widen existing MCO portfolios.
It is a booming alternative transfer market with huge implications and yet it has gone largely unnoticed by the majority of football supporters.
'Cheaper to buy a club in Europe than pay £30m for a young player'
So what explains this trend, and should fans be worried? Simon Leaf, who is a partner at legal firm Mishcon de Reya, which has advised clubs on their MCO structures, says that it is 'almost a development on' from the situation in South America two decades ago, when agents began owning the economic rights to players, most famously Javier Mascherano and Carlos Tévez.
'Rather than having agents owning players or clubs you now have clubs owning clubs, and there are multiple benefits that can bring,' Leaf says.
These include reducing costs by centralising resources and expertise in key staffing areas, notably scouting and data analytics to optimise player recruitment and development, with MCOs potentially able to develop global academies across entire regions through a handful of clubs.
'It is actually cheaper to buy a club in Europe than to pay £30 million for a young player,' says Stephens, who says that you can then 'house multiple talented young players, control playing style and development minutes, ensuring they are prepared to play at the appropriate level.'
This pooling and internal movement of players clearly has huge potential upsides in minimising what are often astronomical agents' fees, as well as dealing with local immigration rules, such as the UK's post-Brexit ban on bringing in players under the age of 18. At a commercial level, shared sponsorship deals and unified merchandise platforms across diverse regions are also estimated to enhance income by up to 30 per cent.
Multiple concerns have been raised, however. Fans (more commonly outside of England's dominant Premier League) fear their club potentially becoming a lower-order concern within a structure that might ultimately be about maximising the 'mother' club. There is also the fear of lost identity – would Leeds United fans want their club rebranded if Red Bull ramps up its investment? – and the potential loss of proximity to an owner.
Fan protests
While certain collaborations may make sense on a practical level, is that compatible with the emotional one-club mindset of so many football followers? Fans at Nice, Troyes and Strasbourg, respectively linked via their owners to Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea, have all protested in recent years.
'Fans [from clubs] at the top of the model are not so bothered, but lower down they are,' says Niamh O'Mahony, chief operating officer at Football Supporters Europe. Strasbourg supporters wrote a stinging letter in 2023, outlining their fears over the 'senseless' recruitment and 'over exposition' of very young players. 'Fans don't relate to their team at the moment,' they said, warning that the MCOs risked reducing most clubs 'to a simple objective of developing young players and helping the few clubs at the top of the pyramid.'
For regulators such as Uefa, the major concern relates to potential conflicts of interest. The Uefa rule book says that no one may be simultaneously involved 'in any capacity' in the management, administration or sporting performance of another club in the same competition.
Owners have so far satisfied Uefa by placing shares of one club in a blind trust to be operated by independent directors or, in the case of Brighton and Union Saint-Gilloise in 2023, a reduction in Bloom's stake in the Belgian club. Few experts, however, believe that governing bodies can easily enforce rules around control or influence.
Blind trusts are 'token gesture'
'It doesn't matter what measures you put in place – reducing stakes or creating temporary blind trusts – you are never going to control influence,' says Stephens. 'This blind trust rule is a token gesture. The owner is still funding the club, and do the football regulators really believe that conversations are not taking place in the shadows on the strategic direction?'
Research last year by Nicholas Lord and Peter Duncan of the University of Manchester laid bare the complexities of Premier League ownership structures. Of the 20 clubs in 2023-24, more than half had five or more different entities within their ownership structure, including six clubs with 10 or more entities, of which many are based outside the UK in jurisdictions with higher financial secrecy. Lord says that it would not be difficult theoretically for an investor who wanted to 'mask' any conflicts of interest. 'I think currently it's very straightforward to do that by using these various legal entities and arrangements,' he says.
Duncan says that he is not particularly concerned from the point of view of sporting integrity, but questions whether it is desirable for clubs to be concentrated among a more select group. 'It seems indicative of this pattern of concentration of wealth among an ever smaller proportion of the population,' he says.
Potential for hidden MCOs
Arguably of greatest concern is the fact that ownership rules in England require only someone above a 25 per cent shareholding to take the Owners' and Directors' Test and more than 10 per cent to have their identity declared.
It would suggest that the real worry might not be those MCOs which are out in the open but the possibility of investors accumulating multiple interests that are not publicly declared and having almost a hidden MCO. According to Lord and Duncan, who work in the department of criminology at Manchester, that is perfectly possible.
'You don't have to declare who is a shareholder unless they have more than a 10 per cent stake in a club and, even if they do have greater than 10 per cent, it is possible to hide that,' Duncan says.
Lord adds: 'You might have a situation where you have lots of investors, investing in lots of different clubs, and no one would be aware. How much sway and influence they can have over these different clubs and activities, their transactions, is very difficult to determine. It is still straightforward to circumnavigate [the 25 per cent 'control' and 10 per cent 'significant interest' thresholds]… in that you can simply split your investment across different vehicles.'
Player trading in MCOs has been another area of concern, particularly in the context of meeting various financial rules on spending and the subjective nature of valuing players. Allan Saint-Maximin's move from Newcastle to Al-Ahli (also owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund) for an undisclosed fee in 2023 is one deal that came under scrutiny.
City Football Group, says Stephens, has come to be seen as a benchmark, not just for its on-field success at Manchester City, but also its work within communities surrounding its clubs.
He also cites Core Sports Capital, with its growing structure in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, and the Black Knight Football Group, which includes Bournemouth in its portfolio, as other currently successful examples.
It certainly feels like we are witnessing a permanent shift rather than a passing fashion. Asked if he sees this trend continuing, Stephens has a simple answer: 'Yes, 1,000 per cent.'