American investment in soccer will soon face a stern opponent: itself
In 1986, the former Buffalo Bills quarterback and future Republican vice-presidential nominee Jack Kemp spoke on the floor of the US House of Representatives and said a silly thing. 'Football,' he said, referring to the gridiron variety, 'is democratic capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist sport.'
Kemp was trying, apparently, to underpin his opposition to the US potentially hosting the 1994 Fifa World Cup. Later on, by which time his comments had been tucked away into the filing cabinet of infamy, he contended that he was only kidding. Kemp attended said World Cup himself and admitted that half his grandchildren were soccer players. Sure. Fine.
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What makes the quote memorable nearly four decades later is how ludicrous it was, and very much still is, on its face. The NFL, after all, remains a closed and heavily socialized economy, whereas soccer's runaway capitalism zooms along largely unfettered. Soccer, as a business, metastasizes in spite of failed or failing attempts to stand up fiscal guardrails like Uefa's 'financial fair play' regulations or the Premier League's 'profit and sustainability rules.'
Soccer's final barriers to total commercialization and highest-bidder-ism are crumbling. Competitions like the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A and Liga MX are evidently free to undertake these incursions into the territorial sovereignty of Major League Soccer now that a lawsuit by a promoter has been settled, removing the last obstacle blocking cross-border domestic competition. A Fifa working group is now outlining rules for this newly borderless landscape, but these away-away games in the United States staged by other leagues are pretty much an inevitability.
This sets up a kind of reckoning between the two occasionally-overlapping sects of the American investor class: Those that bought into European soccer, and those that did so with the interests of the domestic game.
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If European club soccer tries to eat into the American market, that will be, at least in some part, because American capital devoured much of the sport on the old continent and then transformed it.
For several decades now, American investors have systematically bought European clubs, or bits of them. First came the billionaires, buying the mega-clubs, following in the wretched wake of the Glazer family's highly leveraged and resource-draining acquisition of Manchester United in a hostile takeover. Then, more quietly, a less moneyed class of American investor without the means to buy a multi-billion team in the NFL, MLB or NBA, or much interest in the nine-figure valuations of MLS teams, scooped up lots of sensibly low-cost, high-upside European clubs with less fashionable names.
These investors were in it for varying reasons and deployed varying approaches. The billionaires made the same old billionaires' gambit, banking on the years-long constant of widely supported sports teams becoming worth ever more money through the magic of scarcity. All they really had to do was ensure that they expended just enough effort and cash to safeguard that support. Other owners just liked the idea of owning a team in some city or country they enjoyed going to – a lifestyle choice that one soccer economist called 'A very expensive season ticket.' And some others were in it for the content – call them the Wrexham Ownership Division.
And then there was the sort of investor who saw a club that would benefit from an injection of savvy. An institution that could be run more professionally and profitably, perhaps promoted once or twice, or qualified for a European competition, operated more shrewdly in the tantalizingly all-cash transfer market. This was the approach in the bulk of those American acquisitions of European teams, and there were dozens of them, often folded into small constellations of clubs across the continent. For a long time, there were plenty such clubs up for sale, or looking for investment. Around the time Brett Johnson and his group were in the market for a club and bought Ipswich Town – for either $24m or $55m, depending on the report – he was, he said, approached about buying scores of clubs, a different one every week. Armed with historically cheap debt, American investors feasted on soccer clubs doubling as distressed assets in the wake of a ruinous pandemic.
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Some of those investments went catastrophically wrong but at the more visible end of the European club football business, American ownerships have had a hugely successful season. Three of the Premier League's current top-five clubs are American owned, as are six of the top 10. Crystal Palace, meanwhile, is 12th and Manchester United is, well, where Manchester United is. Ipswich will be relegated, but only after it was promoted in back-to-back campaigns under Johnson's ownership. Both automatically-promoted Championship teams have American owners. In the third-tier League one, promoted Wrexham is wholly American-owned and Birmingham City part-owned by Americans. In Serie A, four of the top-9 have American owners and a fifth is controlled by a Canadian. In France, two of the top-5 are under American control.
Many of those American owners of European teams must have decided against putting their money into MLS instead. And when you consider that Real Salt Lake, coupled with the NWSL's Utah Royals, recently sold for a reported $600m, it isn't hard to unravel the math that got done. Recall, after all, that the Saudi takeover of historic Premier League mainstay Newcastle United (and its vast fanbase) in 2021 was valued at £300m ($400m).
Now that the rest of the soccer world has been fully liberated to treat the United States as an ATM to be plundered at regular intervals, those investment choices could have far-reaching repercussions for the domestic game. MLS's interests are represented in the Fifa working group, and the league has been pushing to curtail foreign leagues' access to its market – and its fans and their disposable income – to the American off-season, or at least the fallow periods in its calendar, per The Athletic. The working group as a whole hopes to curb how many games can be moved abroad.
Yet there may be no stopping the border-hopping. Because soccer is fully Americanized in that it is now almost universally arranged to optimize monetization. The Americans came for the European soccer clubs, and now those teams, and all the others around them, are stealing covetous glances back at America.
If only Jack Kemp were alive to see it.
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