Centurions
Well-Known Member
Re: City & FFP (continued)
Sorry, I had to remove all the picture titles, it was doing my head in trying to read that. You also missed a chunk at the bottom.waspish said:Villa, the biggest club in Britain's second city, are struggling to find a buyerSt Helens Blue (Exiled) said:Martin Samuel at last saying it as it is...:-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/fo...ir-Play-gift-club-owners-buy-Aston-Villa.html
UEFA claim financially astute clubs will thrive under FFP laws
But without heavy investment there is no way into the top 6 for Villa
Each January, the Birmingham Post publishes its rich list. The last one contained 20 names of Midlands business folk that, by the calculations of its experts, could afford to purchase Aston Villa outright. Yet still, nobody has.
Lord Bamford, chairman of JCB, prefers collecting vintage Ferraris. Sir Peter Rigby, founder of what is now Europe’s largest independent IT company, likes to fly helicopters and listen to classical music. Steve Morgan already has his hands full with Wolverhampton Wanderers. These are the breaks.
Even so, considering the Premier League broadcasts to a global market, one would think a buyer for the biggest club in Britain’s second city would not be so hard to find.
Yet, still, the For Sale sign resides on the unkempt lawn, as it has all summer. As it has since 2010, really, considering that was the year Martin O’Neill, Villa’s manager, walked out, unable to accept the significant shift in transfer policy that was the first indication of changing times.
Until that point, the owner, Randy Lerner, had shown great ambition in trying to drag Aston Villa into the elite. O’Neill spent over £80million net, achieving three consecutive sixth-place finishes, but faced with repeating that in a final push for glory, Lerner balked and instead implemented a sell-to-buy regime. This soon became more of a selling regime, by which time O’Neill was long gone.
Lerner was looking to follow almost from that point. Not as openly as now, true, but it has been rumoured for several years that he would be interested if the right buyer at the right price came along. Everton is on the market in a similar way, with Bill Kenwright accepting the financial reality of his stewardship.
So, a quick question for Michel Platini and the members of his UEFA brains trust: if Financial Fair Play is the gift to football club owners that you would have us believe, where is the queue of local businessmen seeking to take advantage of this windfall with Aston Villa?
In a matter of months of hard selling the asking price has already dropped by a quarter, to £150m. Yet still nothing. No rich Arabs, no interest from China, tumbleweed blows across America. Most importantly, no Brummies. Not even a sniff from the names on the Birmingham Post rich list, from Pete Waterman to Sir Euan Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe.
Towards the end of May, there was a briefly flickering light on the horizon. Tevfik Arif, a Kazakh-born property mogul and business associate of Donald Trump, was announced as a front-runner in the acquisition of Aston Villa. Bank of America Merrill Lynch, who are handling the sale, would not confirm Arif’s involvement, but did not deny it either. He was supposed to be No 1 in a list of six to eight suitors.
Arif’s interest in sports business was said to include a share of Doyen Capital, a London-based hedge fund that has stakes in professional footballers, including Radamel Falcao. It all seemed to be falling into place. And then, within a week, the following announcement.
‘Mr Tevfik Arif has today asked us to make clear that other than being an avid sports fan himself, he: has no experience of running football clubs; has never met Randy Lerner; and neither he, nor any members of his family, or anyone acting on his behalf has any interest in acquiring Aston Villa Football Club; in addition, he has no involvement in any sports related businesses. We are happy to set out Mr Arif’s position.’
Since when, nothing. No more from Arif, silence from the six or so names in that evaporating queue behind him. Lerner must be concerned. Villa are not such a rotten proposition. They have a fine ground, a European pedigree in the pre-Champions League era, a loyal following.
Prince William supports them. So does Tom Hanks. They are centrally located in England, next to a major motorway, and easily accessible, and are the first, best- supported club of a major European city. They could be very big.
What the average fan might see as irrelevant beside the identity of the manager or the make-up of the first-team squad has value to a buyer. Paul Lambert, Christian Benteke or Ron Vlaar are passing through but a future king on the firm might put your club on the global map. Glamour, history, location, the trivial happenstance of the odd famous fan — these can all be useful selling factors.
There is a French pop group called Aston Villa, just as there are English groups called St Etienne or Kaiser Chiefs. Why? It’s a cool name. That’s why Tom Hanks took an interest in it, too. If you’re an American and just getting into soccer, Aston Villa sounds as quintessentially English as the New York Yankees sound evocatively American to us.
Don’t laugh. It matters. When Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea, that iconic name and the west London location would have helped clinch the deal. They are marketable factors. It wouldn’t have concerned him greatly that Chelsea had not won the league in half a century — that was a drought he could address with investment. Now, thanks to Financial Fair Play, a new owner is close to helpless. And that is why Lerner can’t sell Aston Villa.
Owners exist for many different reasons but one of the most frequently overlooked is the human desire to have fun. Some are motivated by love, some by commerce, but the shared desire is usually still enjoyment. Kenwright looks like he is in agony watching Everton sometimes, but no doubt the victories taste very good.
Sheik Mansour spends very little time at the Etihad Stadium but it is said wherever he is in the world he never misses a Manchester City game and one imagines, at home in Abu Dhabi, when the chaps come round to watch in the air-conditioned cinema room, it’s fun. Even Mike Ashley had pleasure in mind when he bought Newcastle United. What would be the point otherwise?
And Chelsea, for Abramovich, was fun, too. He wanted to be part of the passing parade, he wanted to be entertained, to be successful, to have a good day out. And back then, he could. It was an expensive hobby but his commitment to Chelsea has never faltered.
Yet what remains for any new owner of Aston Villa? To maintain? To stay up? To exist? Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the bang for the buck?
Villa is value only if a buyer can then invest and get in the game. If all he can do is provide po-faced financial services, plodding along with neatly balanced books and a decade of mediocrity ahead, he might as well put his money into a savings account.
UEFA claim that the financially astute clubs will thrive under the new rules, but without additional owner investment, there is no longer a way forward for Villa. Any good players they produce will be poached by the privileged elite — ask Southampton — and the only frisson of excitement will be an occasional cup run, or the seasons when it all goes wrong producing the threat of relegation.
It is a miserable portfolio for a prospective owner, with none of the optimism Lerner must have felt when entering the Premier League in 2006.
Platini’s version of Financial Fair Play was introduced under pressure from the elite. ‘It’s mainly the owners that asked us to do something,’ he said. ‘Abramovich, Silvio Berlusconi at AC Milan and Massimo Moratti at Inter Milan. They do not want to fork out any more.’ Fine, then don’t fork out.
But that wasn’t what the owners demanded, really. They were tired of spending — but scared of losing ground to rivals. So they wanted to stop everyone else spending, too; and being a fool, Platini mistook this for fairness and agreed.
This is now the perfect arrangement for Abramovich, but disastrous for Lerner. Buying a football club used to be an ambition for men who sought the challenge of competition, who wished for excitement and did not really care about the cost. Now it is the preserve of the finance department, wholly bound in UEFA’s red tape.
Fred Allen, the American radio comedian, wrote an autobiography that seemed to encapsulate the plight of those trapped outside Platini’s elite: Treadmill To Oblivion, he called it.
It is hard to see how this will change either, with an exclusive group cemented so tightly in place.
How can Villa get beyond Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and, at a stretch, Tottenham Hotspur if they can only spend what they have already generated? Where’s the thrill? How is Lerner meant to make his club saleable? What dream is he peddling, beyond the heady thrill of accountancy?