David Conn is a great sports journalist. He happens to write for the Guardian, but he's the sort of guy who would flourish anywhere. This morning he has an article in the Guardian entitled:
Reading, tax havens, secrecy and the sale of homely football clubs
That's Reading FC, by the way, not the art of reading this.
And what he documents is that 11 of the UK's premiership football clubs are now under foreign control and held through tax havens.
This does, of course, constitute foreign direct investment" into the UK. It is part of the "Britain's open for business" policy that the government is so keen to tout. But the reality is that this means the relationship between Reading the club that bears their name is remote. And that is a measure of increasing inequality and a lack of social cohesion that sport should help create and something deeper still. Of the last Conn notes:
"The Premier League's financial criteria seek to ensure responsible and sustainable ownership," a league spokesman said, explaining that it is examining whether further regulations are required. "Each club's ownership model is compliant with UK company law."
That is true. The clubs, as ever, reflect their times and country, in which so much is up for sale and use of offshore havens to avoid tax has become routine.
It's the standard guff: we're compliant with the law so all is OK. And so what if a tax haven hides what we're really doing from sight and helps us avoid tax?
Well, actually it matters quite a lot. It matters to the people of Reading. It matters to the children who want sport in school but can't have it as tax isn't paid. It matters to those who are out of work because the government has cut spending as taxes aren't being paid and as a result they can't afford to go to football. It matters to the accountability of a totem for a place to that place. It matters because this is all about community.
But then, offshore denies there's community or society. There's just self interest, and that's all that matters in their world.
In the real world things matter that offshore denies. And that's why it's so dangerous. It's destruction of real value is what is so corrosive about it.
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I spoke to a (very mature) relative of mine who was a director of a division one club in the 1960s – you can tell how long ago it was as he has nice things to say about the FA because they won the world cup. He tells me that gate receipts would at that time be split roughly 3/4 for the home team 1/4 for the away team, of course with no telly money.
Running football clubs since the 1880s has always been a Tory thing, but this really shows how much Conservatism has changed since the 1980s. Trying to implement the Watergate principle ‘follow the money’ you run up against the crypto-fascist Russian state, the Islamic police state of the UAE, and even those owners based in the democratic west means the money follower just hits his head against a series of opaque tax havens.
So the late E H H (Ewen) Green was right with the title of his book ‘Ideologies of Conservatism’, and football is one of the best indicators we have to show what is wrong with today’s Torism.
Really good piece, especially the sentence about this all being about community. To be fair, a lot of clubs do a hell of a lot of good in their local communities but the general disregard for what a club stands for in its local area is a real shame.
When watching the Euros or World Cup, you see a player from some African country or remote part of Europe and the commentator says something like “he is a popular member of the Barnsley team.”
Despite attracting all this ‘inward investment’ into the Premiership ,our national team does not do that well.
Parallels with British business-all the money coming in does not improve other parts of the economy very much.
Where clubs are held offshore through the usual complex webs of trustees, nominee directors etc, how can we know the ultimate ownership ?
In that case, what’s to stop the same person(s) owning 2 teams meeting on last day of season where one is playing for promotion ? In that case I imagine the manager of the other team is going to get a pretty clear instruction what to do if he wants to keep his job !
That would be ruinous to the game – it can’t survive loss of trust that its “straight”.
FA says they know
The Leeds debacle says they don’t