An eclectic and eccentric view of football, business and management by media entrepreneur Chris Ingram.
Let’s face it they call it “Soccer” (or “Soh-cerr”) which always brings a patronising smile from football fans in Europe.
Lets’ get our bragging rights out there now: There is only one truly global sport: football. The English Premier League is received in 206 countries which is more countries than there are members in the United Nations (197). It’s enough to impress anyone, particularly Americans who, for all their talk about “World Series” don’t have a truly international sport at all.
But forget the gloating, the answer is less straight-forward than it seems.
I’m in New York regularly but it was only this Spring that I was calling on investment bankers with the subject of sport very much in mind. I was exploring avenues for funding having recently taken a controlling stake in Sports Revolution, the sports media and marketing group.
The size of the American market and the huge amount of money there has enabled specialist expertise in funding to be created that would be unprofitable anywhere else. I’d come across investment banks specialising in media years ago when I was building the international media agency, CIA. This depth of expertise also exists in Sport. I only visited four firms but discovered that, between them, they had arranged just about all the funding for the Glazer acquisition of Man United and the Hicks and Gillett purchase of Liverpool. Now you can criticise one or both of those deals for being over-leveraged or whatever but what impressed me was their huge knowledge of the Premier League, the issues and `who was doing what to whom’. Here I was 3,000 miles away on the other side of the Atlantic and these guys knew more about the Premier League than most directors of Premier League Clubs. Because I didn’t realise this, it made for some initially very confusing conversations. I was talking about “Soh-cerr” whilst they were saying “football” which I thought meant their American Football, whereas they were talking about well, football. (That’ll teach me to be so patronising). Anyhow, I rapidly learned that most of these guys were only interested in deals worth more than a billion dollars, which at this stage of the Company’s development was way out of my class.
Nevertheless, behind the big investment banks wanting to do big, high profile corporate deals sits a large number of high net worth individuals who want their bank to come up with some “fun investments” to go with the solid, reliable investments which take up most of their money. So, at the end of one of my meetings, I was amazed to hear one director ask:
“Hey, do you know of any interesting Championship sides that are available? Three or four of my clients want to have some fun and they’d like to buy a club between them”.
And by extraordinary chance, at my very next meeting, I met a much smaller investment bank where I learnt that they’d already invested in a famous Championship Club on exactly that basis (without much success to date, as it happens. But that’s another story).
The point of this story is that some Americans know a great deal about our beautiful game and the reason why, is that they’ve learnt that there is a huge amount of money in football and in New York they do money very, very well.
Chris Ingram is as passionate about football as he is about business. Owner of Woking Football Club, and a majority shareholder in the fast growing sports media business Sports Revolution, Chris is one of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs.
Recently celebrating 50 years in the media industry and still actively involved with Woking, Chris is ideally placed to comment on the business side of football.
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