Imagine you’ve been rooting for a team your whole life. Suddenly it is bought up by an investor company, without you being able to do anything about it. The company owns many other teams in Europe, among them a major club in the Premier League. Now the head of the company says that your club will develop talents for the big team in England. Soon your team will have players on loan from the club. At the same time, your team begins to recruit young talent from all corners of the world. The good ones are sold on to the Premier League. This fate does not affect Norwegian teams, where clubs are managed by the members, but in other countries it happens more and more often. Proud clubs with rich traditions in practice become reserve teams for larger clubs. And there are no rules that can stop it. The networks Chelsea are behind one of the latest features in this trend. The team from West London was bought last year by a consortium of investors, with Todd Boehly at the head. These owners are not enough with one club. Last week they bought Strasbourg, one of the weaker teams in Ligue 1, the top division in France. The plan is to build a network of clubs. They have taken the working drawings from City Football Group (CFG). That company is owned by Sheikh Mansour, a member of the royal family that rules the United Arab Emirates, and is best known for Manchester City, the team of Erling Haaland. But CFG owns much more. Since 2012, they have built a network with 12 other teams: New York City (USA) Melbourne City (Australia) Yokahama F. Marinos (Japan) Montevideo City Torque (Uruguay) Girona FC (Spain) Sichuan Jiuniu (China) Mumbai City (India ) Lommel SK (Belgium) Troyes (France) Palermo (Italy) Bahia (Brazil) Bolivar (Bolivia) ONE OF MANY TEAMS: New York City FC sweeps scoring against Real Salt Lake in MLS. Photo: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez / AP More and more people are doing the same. Last year UEFA said more than 180 clubs worldwide were part of larger networks. In the Premier League, 10 clubs have owners with shares in other teams. When website The Athletic counted last September, they found 20 other such clubs across the top divisions in Italy, France and Spain. So what is the point of this? Loans players to themselves For CFG, which is associated with the Emirates as a state, owning teams in countries such as China and India provides political influence. For most other owners, football is like a stock market, where they can buy teams cheaply and sell them dearly. Everyone wants the clubs to do each other good. They can buy, sell and loan players between them. This is particularly important when it comes to talent development. Especially in England. Second teams, i.e. adult teams that play in lower divisions, are not allowed there. England bans this in part because it gives the other teams in the division varying opposition, depending on how many A-team players are in each week. This is a problem in Norway, where the second teams can be strong for one game and hopeless three days later. That is why the clubs in England have reserve teams that play in their own league. For many talents, the level there is too low, while the level in the Premier League is too high. In the past, clubs have solved this by entering into agreements with teams abroad to loan them players. This allows the talents to play at a higher level. But the English clubs have lost control over where they play on the pitch and whether they are allowed to play at all. Now they have come up with something better: instead of such agreements, they buy up the clubs. They make them foreign reserve teams. This is no secret: Boehly said last year that he wanted a new club to give talent a better route to Chelsea’s first team. An example of this is Kaoru Mitoma, who went from Japanese Kawasaki Frontale to Brighton in 2021. He was not ready for the Premier League, so Brighton loaned him to Royale Union Saint-Gilloise, a team in Belgium that has the same owners. Mitoma was allowed to develop there, and this year he has been one of the Premier League’s sensations. ENERGY: Mitoma has visited several clubs with the same owner, here in action for Brighton. Photo: TOBY MELVILLE / Reuters Talents can also go the other way. If the small club has a good player, the owners can “sell” him to their biggest club for change. The assembly line Especially teams in Belgium, France and Portugal are popular. They are cheap, they are located in countries that produce a lot of talent, and they have strong connections to other continents. France is home to many players from Africa. Portugal is a bridge to Brazil. For teams in England, these countries also provide opportunities to get around rules for buying players from outside the EU, which have become stricter after Brexit. Is there any downside? Not really. Chelsea reportedly paid £65m for Strasbourg. That is about the same amount they pay for a player for the A team. When the teams are so cheap and the benefits so great, the question becomes: Why not? JUBILEE: Strasbourg’s players celebrate the team’s third goal against AC Ajaccio. Photo: SEBASTIEN BOZON / AFP No one is ready to stop the trend. The European Football Association (UEFA) forbids two teams with the same owner to play in the same tournament, but only the continental cups. As long as the owners behind the big clubs buy small teams in other countries, it will be fine. And UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin has amazingly said he is considering changing the rules in place to encourage more investment. As if that’s what football needs. In a few years, Ligue 1 may in practice be a reserve league. European football can be dominated by a handful of networks that own teams in all the important countries. These will act as an assembly line for talent going to the elite. You can say that the best players end up at the top anyway, but now at least the selling teams get big sums for them. This will not happen if the buyer and seller have the same owner. When Strasbourg is not even properly paid for its big star, the financial differences increase even more. Big protests And what about the fans? For some, new owners are good, as their teams gain access to a new world of resources, personnel and expertise. A good example is Royale Union Saint-Gilloise, who have been lifted from the Belgian second division by the clever owners of Brighton. This season they were just seconds away from becoming Belgian league champions. They have developed talent for Brighton, while retaining their own ambitions. UPTURN: Royal Union’s players celebrate victory over Club Brugge. Photo: KURT DESPLENTER / AFP But not all owners find this balance. It is understandable that many fans protest. In January, Ligue 1 club Lorient was bought by Bill Foley, who also owns Bournemouth in the Premier League. Then the fan group Merlus Ultras wrote that “It is out of the question that we will become a vulgar satellite club, a simple training center for an English parent company”. Last year, CFG tried to buy NAC Breda in the Netherlands. Breda fans raged on social media, warning of “the darkest day in the club’s history”, and a group headed up to Manchester to protest outside City’s stadium. It worked: the club’s shareholders said no to the sale. But Breda is the exception. Strasbourg fans held up a banner with large red letters saying, “BOEHLY IS NOT WELCOME”. They were not heard. For them it is too late.
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