There is news this morning that Aston Villa Football Club has been sold. After a disastrous season my first, immediate, reaction was 'for not much, I suspect' but then a more interesting question occurred to me, which is what ownership really means in such cases.
Legal title to the share capital in the club may have passed but any football club, and any company of any size, has a reality way beyond that. Who does Aston Villa really belong to? The legal owners, or its loyal supporters who have suffered miserably this season and will still probably turn up for a new season knowing that they now can enjoy the prospect of playing the best club of all, who are Ipswich Town FC, in the Championship? And what of the employees?
The question is a real one. And it is important. I am not worried right now in the context of tax and tracing beneficial ownership. I have concern in an economic sense. To pretend that Aston Villa's shareholders really do have all the claims on the Club of that name is absurd. The capital in that club was in large part made by and belongs to those who support it and the hundreds who work for it without enjoying the pay rates of the few who failed so dismally on the pitch this season. In which case it is wholly appropriate to ask how their interests are protected in any situation like this, and what duty to them shoud be legally (and I do mean legally) recognised when what is called a Club or a company has very clear obligations not recognised in its apparent ownership structure.
I am not putting forward an answer, although in the case of football I have argued for a very long time that local authorities should have a stake in all clubs as agents for the communities who host them. In other situatuons accountability is the very least of the obligations that should be assumed, hence country-by-country reporting. And a comoany of any size has, in my opinion a duty to create employee representation structures. But is there more?
What is not acceptable is that we continue with the myh that he or she who holds the shares is the owner. They are, but only of certain rights. Many other rights have been created by and belong to those whose company the legal owners keep in the social sense, and I believe that the time has come for company law to recognise that fact.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
You make an interesting case. I’d argue a club belongs to its fanbase and local community. A club’s success or otherwise can have a great impact on the community where it is based, even beyond those that follow football. As my hometown team Leicester City have show.
Football has lost it’s real meaning and the teams might well be called ‘Team A’ or ‘Team B’ or named after the Money Managers who run the show.
My view on sport is that it should remain amateur as Rugby was until 1995. Players’ fees seem to be all about assets on books like banks who are notionally ‘solvent.’
The days of football as a real community died in the 80’s when they began running around like sandwichboard men. I prefer the atmosphere of my local, now league two team Cheltenham Town to mega-stadium/mega star/mega pay football. People can relate to footballers who are more like them on non-fantastical salaries.
Bobby Charlton was paid £40 for the 1966 World Cup match-a decent wack then bun not absurd.
Totally agree , I follow a local amateur team now on a level playing field. They announce the crowd to the teams. Professional football sold its soul and its community roots to Sky and money. Having said that , well done Liecester City. Only wish your ground was still called Filbert Street – get my drift.
Richard
Thanks for raising a question that has been festering for 150 years! I recently listened to a very interesting R4 program which pointed out that, until the mid C19th, if the occupation of land was in doubt, what mattered was the use of the land. So, if a landlord was letting good land lie, a peasant was entitled to occupy said land & cultivate it. IF the peasant was working the land & the landlord sought to reclaim it, this would be decided according to the “value to the land”. (I.e it was up to the landowner to show he could make better use of the land than the peasant.)
This was all undone in the late C19th by the spread of what were then called “mercantilist” & would now be called “neo-liberal” values which insisted that property rights trump all other rights.
Regrettably, we now live in a world where that seems to be seen as a “self-evident truth”, although no-one, so far that I can see, knows why.
It plainly isn’t a “self-evident truth”, & in Germany, for example, they would see it as absurd to think that just because you own a factory you have sole decision over what happens to it & the workforce, the wider community, the people who it affects have no legal rights.
It might be a bit obscure but you could say that Jeremy’s manifesto for the next election should be “putting property rights back in their box”.
All that without mentioning Villa. I don’t want to talk about that, I cry easily.
The only rights that aren’t protected at all, of course, are I.P over human interactions – the gesture, the wording, the movement,
probably quite rightly, but if there were a copywriter, Jamaica would overtake Switzerland as the richest country in the world!
Indeed…
Sorry if they’re you’re team
Think of it this way – no club has spent longer in the Premiership than Ipswich
Richard your question of ownership and responsibilities goes to the heart of my issue with private financial capitalism, and therefore I welcome the debate not just over a football club but over all organisations large and small which have a social, economic or environmental impact on our lives. They all have several stakeholders and this should be reflected in the ownership structure in my opinion. The decision making and beneficial interest should be more widely shared because the risks are far greater than just financial investment.
Of course, the Stadia rely on local infrastructure – I wonder how the clubs support that?
Chicken and egg. Should the community provide the stadia. Most clubs don’t have the cash so it needs to be a club / private. / public initiative. There is no public money so there are no easy answers for most clubs. My club ( not the amateur one ) have a big plan in the North East of Scotland. A plan but no detail! 40 million for the stadia or we could just buy Messi. Funny old game.
Have you ever attended a football match? Every football club should be owned by its fans . Check out Heart of Midlothian run by the impressive Anne Budge. She has breathed life into that club and will stay at Tynecastle. My club plan to leave the city – shame on them.
Football should not be run like a business, and no club should have a solo owner. Fans at all clubs should be represented on the board.
The FA should take a much larger percentage of money in football to redistribute to communities, their methods of distribution should be fully transparent and accountable. Wealth in football has grown massively, the numbers of players stay the same, unlike other business where their costs grow with staff recruitment and logistics. So the wealth gets distributed to so few. That’s wrong.
100%agree.
A pal of mine co-edited this book “Who Owns Football?”
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Who-Owns-Football-International-Contemporary/dp/0415445701
Excellent question. Ask Charlton supporters. The club ‘owners’ are realising that technical ownership simply isn’t enough to be able to do whatever you want. The fans have power, if they choose to exert it. I believe that the owner of the proper best club in the Championship (Brighton) does actually understand that, and reflects it in the way the club is run. And it is working. So far at least.
There must be lessons in there somewhere!
If you think Villa are in a bad way try working out who owns Coventry City.
The league could not solve this one. Companies with the Coventry City name have been dissolved without ever filing their final accounts.
Joy and her hedge fund Sisu seem to be ultimately in charge. But i don’t understand how the trail goes through various Caribbean entities.
This is how a club gets to play in a different region, boycotted by its real fans.
Lionsafterslumber
Thats an interesting point. A few years ago, it may have changed, no-one could work out who owned Leeds Utd either. I don’t know how many other teams have similarly opaque ownership.
I’d like to hope even the numb nuts at the FA can work out that this is a major concern. Who’s to say that the same person doesn’t ultimately own Coventry, Leeds & perhaps one or more other league clubs?
Going into the play-offsyou’d like to think it was all fair & above board, wouldn’t you ?
The Tax Justice Network have done a lot of work on this
Interesting post. Part of the problem with putting the links between a football club and its locality on a statutory basis (perhaps not the correct words to use but I can’t think of a better way of describing what you are suggesting – and I appreciate it’s just a suggestion) is that a local authority might become invested in the well-being of the football club. I could see an arms race developing as they compete for what is the 21st century equivalent of bread & circuses. Everyone fancies that there is some untapped market out there for English football, and speaking as an Irishman who invests an awful amount of emotional capital in one particular club, much of which went up in smoke last night *sob*, I can tell you there is a lot of truth in this. But everyone could spend £100 million and someone would still have to finish last. Without drastic reform of where the profits from football go, I think local authorities should sup with a long spoon when dealing with the local club.
perhaps the problem with football has been ‘free-trade ‘ and globalisation. Keep football local rather than obsessing with who ‘wins’. I find it disturbing and sad that so many African kids dream of football as a way out of dire poverty rather than the transformation of their own countries. I think Arsenal once fielded a team that was entirely foreign players. Where’s the sense of locality there?
Absolutely right – and I say that knowing I’m part of the problem. My local team, Waterford United (which happens to be the team the Ipswich manager’s father would have called his local team before emigrating, if he had been so inclined) once competed to the extent that Shay Brennan, European Cup winner with Man Utd, played out the tail end of his career and ended his days here. Now we have a situation where the one player we had of note in recent years was picked up for the equivalent of chicken feed by West Ham. He didn’t have much chance of making their first team but he was so cheap to them, and the rewards for him so great, in a relative sense, that there was no way he was staying. The whole thing is the Wild West, and the sooner some kind of order is put on it, the better. I ain’t holding my breath though.
When I was a Councillor on the L.B. Barnet, I recall reading a Fabian pamphlet (which I cannot now find, alas, even though I squirrel away everything!), which proposed turning FC’s into co-operatives, in which the fans would – rightly – predominate.
This was clearly the fruit of the very short-lived “stakeholder society” phase of New Labour, which lasted about as long as Blair’s first week in No 10, probably when he realised a stakeholder society wouldn’t go down well with the City – a useful electoral rallying cry, but of little further relevance in the allegedly “business-friendly” market-led society Blair was intent on creating.
As I chaired the Economic Development Committee, I thought turning Barnet FC into a voters’ and stakeholders’ co-op was a real way forward, given that Barnet FC needed to develop and expand, by moving from its cramped stadium at Underhill.
My proposal never came to anything, alas, swallowed up in an amazing saga over the move from Underhill, too complicated either to recount or even remember (it is nearly 20 years ago), but which had electoral significance, both in 1998, when Labour retained power in Barnet, and 2002, when it lost, losing seats in the Ward containing Barnet FC.
I can’t claim turning Barnet FC into a co-op would have saved Labour from electoral defeat, but I’m fairly sure some of the heat over the club and its move might have been reduced, even avoided, had that been the case.
I stirred a bit on the same theme at Ipswich in the late 80s….
It was quite fun at the time
Don’t you mean early 80’s when you had Butcher , Wark , Mariner , Muhhren and Thissen and Bobby Robson as your manager. 1981 I think I was and Bobby a tad annoyed that a scummy jock team belted him. Mind you that tractor boy team were pretty tasty
FC United of Manchester have a set up as the alternative to corporate football:
“FC United of Manchester is a community football club owned and democratically run by its 5381 members. Its corporate structure is a Community Benefit Society and membership is open to all, with everyone an equal co-owner, holding one voting share in the club.”
See: http://www.fc-utd.co.uk/
We need more fans to vote with their feet and empty stadia-Liverpool fans did that to reduce ticket prices-I think the whole face of sport needs a change.
I’ve always thought that mass understanding of the dynamics of financial capitalism through its impact on the premier league might be the final tipping point for a ‘revolution’.
The way the premiere league distributes it’s money between clubs, collective bargaining. Just why can’t they extend this logic to the clubs lower down and to grass roots. The Spanish league does not adopt this policy, as real and Barcelona have negotiated there own deals.
This leaves them way beyond financially what the rest can compete with. But the clubs in Spain play much better technical football which kind of negates the money differential when they compete in Europe.
Just as an aside while talking about different ownership models, this video blog from Robert Llewellyn provides fascinating insight into sustainable production, operation and re-use/recycling of private transportation in the future. The first half will be of interest to those with an interest in electric car technology, but the second half is the really fascinating bit from an economic perspective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utmkddBFUg0
The Riversimple mission statement is: “To pursue, systematically, the elimination of the environmental impact of personal transport.”
When Wimbledon took the money and ran to Milton Keynes to become the MK Dons, like the vast majority of Wimbledon supporters we became members of the Dons Trust, which owns and controls AFC Wimbledon. We have really enjoyed climbing up through the pyramid, playing in League 2 and are now looking forward to Wembley, where we have a chance of promotion to League 1.
It seems to me that this is where real football is.
I agree
And I remember the old ground
Blackpool football club, run by the Oystons is a tragedy. My daughter has followed them, went to Wembley, it has all been downhill since then. Many are staying away. I used to go with my Dad and brothers to Man City, on the bus, very tribal with Man United fans, all of us in good voice. Maine Road, rousing with cheers. In the olden days of course. What price now a ticket, many prohibited from a visit.
The Green Bay Packers have a not-for-profit model.
Shares are issued, nobody can own more than 4%, profits are reinvested in the club (there is a charitable foundation in there somewhere so I imagine they get some of it).
Shares give voting rights and merchandise but no rights to dividends, capital or even a right to attend any matches (you still need to buy your ticket separately). Don’t know whether ticket prices are cheaper than elsewhere (I’d imagine not, if they are to afford to attract decent players).
Club is managed by an elected board.
Although there are shares, it seems more like an English ‘company limited by guarantee’.
The NFL now limits teams to a maximum number of shareholders so it is no longer possible to replicate this model in other teams (the Packers are left as an exception, presumably for historical reasons).
The team does OK, but in a franchise system, they don’t fear relegation. Also, unlike English soccer, they aren’t competing with leagues in other countries for playing talent.
Local government stake in professional sport? No thanks.
If you want dysfunction and corruption, just give politicians a stake in the success of the local team. I’ve seen bits of it in action behind the scenes. Not a good idea.