When a Bunch of Bloody Yanks Came for English Soccer
American investors are gobbling up the storied teams of the English Premier League — and changing the stadium experience in ways that soccer fans resent.
When a Bunch of Bloody Yanks Came for English Soccer
American investors are gobbling up the storied teams of the English Premier League — and changing the stadium experience in ways that soccer fans resent.
Spectators at a Premier League match between Aston Villa and Bournemouth in Birmingham in April.Credit...Alexander Coggin for The New York Times
By Bruce Schoenfeld
Bruce Schoenfeld is a frequent contributor to the magazine and the author of “Game of Edges: The Analytics Revolution and the Future of Professional Sports.”
- May 4, 2024
In the first half of a January game at Stamford Bridge, the London stadium where the Chelsea Football Club has played since its founding in 1905, seven well-groomed spectators in green velvet jackets stood up together from their seats behind the substitutes’ bench as players raced up and down the field in front of them. They pulled out books and began to read. Then they all brushed their teeth.
Listen to this article, read by Robert Fass
Listen 25:41The publicity stunt turned out to be a promotion for the film “Argylle,” which would be released a few weeks later. The use of a Premier League game in a packed stadium as the backdrop was criticized in the English media as yet another transgression by Todd Boehly, an American investor and the most prominent figure among Chelsea’s owners. Boehly, who also owns a sizable piece of the Los Angeles Dodgers, probably saw it as simply another way to generate revenue — no different than putting advertising on shirt fronts, which English clubs have been doing since the 1970s — and something that would be considered part of the spectacle of sports in America.
In England, though, many fans perceived it as the further desecration of a cornerstone of national culture: a soccer club’s being treated as an investment to be exploited by a gauche American owner. “That may be fine in U.S. sports,” Pat Nevin, a popular Chelsea player in the 1980s who worked for the club until the end of last season, told me. “But to a football fan, that hurts.” A few months after leaving Chelsea, Nevin went on the BBC to warn against the prospect of adopting a popular feature at many American sports venues. “I told them, ‘No, no, don’t do a Kiss Cam,’” he says. “ ‘Such a small thing, but you can’t imagine the reaction you’re going to get.’”
The unabashed attempts to Americanize the English soccer experience range from musical acts as pregame entertainment to the addition of club seats — with waiter service and lounge access — and members-only bars inside stadiums. Later this year, the London club Fulham, which is owned by the Pakistani American businessman Shahid Khan, will unveil a $200 million-plus expansion that includes a stand overlooking the Thames, restaurants curated by a Michelin-starred chef, a street-level produce market and a boutique hotel and spa with an outdoor swimming pool — an attraction also found at the stadium of Khan’s N.F.L. team, the Jacksonville Jaguars. The expectation that such “improvements” mean higher ticket prices led to a fan boycott of a recent game. “People here hold football very, very dearly,” says Nedum Onuoha, who grew up in Manchester and played professionally for several English clubs, before moving to Real Salt Lake in Major League Soccer. “They don’t like change.”
The antecedent to such change occurred in 2005, when the first Americans to buy a Premier League club — Malcolm Glazer and his sons, who owned the N.F.L.’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers — acquired control of Manchester United. Almost immediately, other wealthy Americans set out to get clubs of their own. Nearly all of them already had sports teams in the United States. They figured they could bring their successful business practices to English soccer, which in many ways was stuck in the 1960s. Fans were going to games in decades-old stadiums with hard wooden seats and squalid bathrooms. The fare at concession stands was almost exclusively beer and reheated meat pies.
This season, nine of the 20 Premier League clubs are owned by Americans. The sale of a 10th awaits approval. All of them, you could argue, are being run far more professionally than ever, as the billion-dollar businesses that many have become. Yet most of the Americans spotted in the owners’ box from time to time — or, worse, seldom spotted there at all — are disdained by their club’s fans. The sentiment is easy to appreciate. Imagine Chinese businessmen, say, quickly coming to control half the teams in the N.F.L., a situation that would probably spark congressional hearings. The concern would be cultural as well as economic: How could foreign investors truly understand this integral piece of Americana when they didn’t grow up hearing the stentorian voice of John Facenda narrating slow-motion highlights, or watching Detroit Lions games in the tryptophan haze of a Thanksgiving afternoon?
Now imagine that pro football has been the country’s defining leisure activity for 150 years. “We’ve reached a point,” Onuoha says, “where there is something of a stigma against American ownership.”
At Manchester United, fans regularly gather before games to protest against the Glazers, who have burdened the club with debt (now exceeding $990 million) yet regularly take dividends for themselves out of the annual revenue. At Arsenal, the owner is Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, which has teams in the N.F.L., N.B.A., N.H.L. and M.L.S. “We had our American owner, who everyone hated,” Nick Hornby, the author and noted Arsenal supporter, told me. “People used to bring banners: ‘Kroenkes Out!’” (The anger has subsided as the team’s performance has improved.)
Image
The new owner of the Chelsea Football club decided to spend more than $1 billion on new players.Credit...Alexander Coggin for The New York Times
Boehly arrived at Chelsea in May 2022 as the epitome of the cocksure American owner, a Ted Lasso of the boardroom. “A man who has looked at football and thought, ‘This is a business which is straightforward and simple — and because I’m so smart in so many other aspects of life, I can handle this,’” is how Graeme Souness, the former Liverpool captain and manager, characterized him in The Daily Mail. Boehly started his tenure at Chelsea by suggesting improvements to the Premier League — adding an All-Star Game, for instance. After the departure of the two executives who had been handling player acquisitions, the English equivalents of an American general manager, he took their place. More than $1 billion later, Chelsea owns the contracts of 25 new players. Currently it is closer to losing its spot in the Premier League than it is to winning the competition.
That’s one reason for Chelsea supporters’ discontent. Another is the wanton pursuit of profit that has altered the club’s relationship with its most loyal followers. Henry Winter, one of England’s most respected soccer journalists, wrote in The Times of London recently that Boehly is “rebranding the club into a business where the sport feels almost secondary.” Consider one example: The club-subsidized buses that used to deliver Chelsea fans to distant corners of England for a nominal fee — standard practice among Premier League teams — have been discontinued this season, forcing fans to rely on trains that often stop service for the day before evening games end. “What they are doing is what great businessmen always do,” David Chidgey, a lifelong Chelsea fan who hosts a podcast about the club, says of Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, a co-owner and principal of the private equity firm Clearlake Capital. “They exploit opportunities and exploit their environments.”
Chidgey acknowledges that Boehly would be perceived differently were Chelsea playing as well as it had over the past two decades, when it was owned by the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and won five Premier League titles. But the nature of sports is cyclical; even the richest and smartest clubs inevitably experience disappointing seasons. “And if you get rid of the culture, what do you have during those times when you’re not winning?” Chidgey asks. “You don’t have anything.”
It was probably inevitable that venture capitalists and hedge-fund managers would discover English soccer. The clubs, from the famous ones to those in leagues further down that have plumbers and shop clerks playing part time, enjoy support that most American teams can only envy; they all have the emotional stickiness of the Dallas Cowboys, or even Notre Dame football. It doesn’t hurt that they seem wildly undervalued compared with other sports investments. To take just one example, the San Diego team entering M.L.S. next year, a league that’s 30 years old, is paying a $500 million expansion fee to join; Bill Foley, the owner of the Vegas Golden Knights in the N.H.L., paid less than a third of that in 2022 to buy A.F.C. Bournemouth, a team founded in 1899 that currently sits in the middle of the Premier League standings.
At the same time, underpriced tickets and bad food have provided a significant opportunity for economic growth — “low-hanging fruit,” as investors tended to describe it. So has the propensity of English fans to arrive moments before games and leave right after. Get them to spend more time at the stadium, like their American counterparts, and they might have a meal there. They might linger at an expanded club shop selling branded versions of everything from license-plate frames to dog beds. An N.B.A. owner once told me that a successful sports team should be a kind of mutual fund of businesses, across categories that include entertainment, digital content, apparel, hospitality, even real estate. Until recently, most English soccer clubs were in one business: staging games. And they didn’t do it particularly well.
Image
English fans tend to arrive moments before games and leave right after. New owners are hoping to get them to linger and maybe have a meal.Credit...Alexander Coggin for The New York Times
But as American owners have sought to optimize their investments, they have found that many fans in England do not want to be reminded that their soccer clubs are in any businesses at all. Their relationship with their clubs is far different than fandom is across the Atlantic, a product of the way sports in each country evolved. Aston Villa was founded in Birmingham in 1874 by four members of a Bible class; Arsenal started in 1886 as a recreation for munitions workers. These were private clubs, but also societal assets that gave communities a reason to gather on Saturday afternoons. “Football clubs have always been owned by rich people, usually rich English people,” Hornby says. “But it was done in a very old-fashioned, gentlemanly way.”
That’s not the case in the United States, where professional sports teams were organized as companies — in a sense, branch offices of a single company. (There’s a reason we call them franchises.) Teams displayed city names on their uniforms, and often played in stadiums funded by taxpayers, but there was never any illusion that they belonged to anyone but the businessmen who owned them. Every so often, those teams would leave their city for another one — even some of the most popular teams, like basketball’s Lakers, or baseball’s Dodgers and Giants, or football’s Raiders. That has happened only once to any team of note in the long history of English soccer, two decades ago, and the outrage it engendered has not yet subsided.
By the early 2000s, the skyrocketing values of American sports teams were starting to attract a new kind of investor, one who was not necessarily drawn by love of sport or civic pride or even ego gratification as much as by economic potential. “If you went back and looked at N.B.A. owners in 1980, they were the local Budweiser distributor, or they owned car dealerships, or they’d been successful in real estate,” says Wes Edens, the owner of the N.B.A.’s Milwaukee Bucks, who partnered with the Egyptian businessman Nassef Sawiris six years ago to buy Aston Villa. “And that might have been OK when your franchise cost $20 million. Once it becomes a billion-dollar business, though, it’s no longer a hobby. And the financial demands of a billion-dollar business are so different. And so, what’s happened is a very natural changeover, from the local guy who ran a car dealership to the guy who ran an equity fund” — someone like Edens himself.
Aston Villa was on the verge of bankruptcy and had fallen into English soccer’s second tier when Edens and Sawiris bought it. During the 2018-19 season, their first, the club earned promotion back to the Premier League. After the deft hires of a sporting director and manager, Villa has emerged as a winner. With four games left in the season, it sat in fourth place, a position that would put it into next season’s Champions League with Europe’s best teams. “We were facing extinction, one of the biggest clubs in English football history,” says John McGinn, a starting midfielder for Villa. “And we’ve had an owner come in and completely transform it. So I don’t know why anyone would be against that. No matter what happens, we should always be grateful to Wes.”
