The Business of Football - [Business Breakdowns, EP.126]

25:21And certainly, those clubs are seeing it as an opportunity for revenue generation what's been really interesting is the number of subscribers that we then get to things like amazon prime that are then consuming multiple bits of that content so if you watch the all or nothing documentary you probably watch it on the manchester city case the tottenham hotspur case you're probably watching the stuff in nfl and it probably started all the way back with the all blacks didn't it and you're consuming sport content which is great for amazon but also demonstrates to the club that behind the scenes, that dressing room situation is really powerful.

25:54And Netflix have done the same with Sunderland Till I Die. To go back to one of my very opening lines, if you look at Wrexham, the Disneyfication of what Wrexham have been able to achieve with that Hollywood star glitz and glamour, they've generated more from their docuseries than they've spent in player transfer fees over the last sort of months. So there's clearly something in storytelling and consumers consuming that content. And that brings us on something really interesting, is that if you look at the average age of a match day spectator in the Premier League, I think it's about 52. Wow. But 52 -year -olds aren't watching all or nothing docuseries.

26:31It's the 16 to 24 market that nobody can seem to crack, that want their content on demand. They actually don't really want to sit down and watch 90 minutes of live sport. they want to consume highlights packages, which is why I think this whole broadcast market, this fan lifetime value proposition, it just becomes really, really interesting. I don't have all the answers to where it's going to go. I'm just absolutely sure it's going somewhere and that's where teams can really make a big difference. I'm stunned that 52 is the average age of a Premier League spectator. That's incredible. It's a product of the cost though as well.

27:05Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the costs have crept up and typically you would have your season ticket from a very, very young age. And just the way the market has developed and how technology has changed and how our viewing habits have changed, it's meant that the age has gone up for those match day goers. It's worse in rugby union, it's probably even older without having the data to hunt. Yeah, and the cost of going to watch a rugby match these days is extortionate if you can think about it. One thing I've been interested to watch is how many clubs are building new stadiums. And obviously the upfront investment and Tottenham is probably a good case here.

27:36I think they had to take out a billion pounds of loans or something to build this amazing new stadium. The upfront investment is huge, but it seems to be worth it for these clubs to grow their stadiums so that they can increase their match day ticket revenues. Is that truly a needle mover? What sort of payback time are they looking at for these stadiums to pay for themselves? Because it seems like there are probably easier ways to generate more dollars, some of which we've just talked about, than to build a brand new stadium. There are. There's two things here. So Tech Tottenham Hospice Stadium, their average match day takings have gone up by about 40%, I think.

28:08The speed of transaction is much, much quicker. They've been able to leverage a much, much broader array of commercial corporate hospitality type areas. So that's moved their revenue needle, but it's moving the smallest part of their revenue profile, a very, very small amount through what is a substantial investment. So I'd hazard a guess something like 30, 35 years is probably the payback period on that particular stadium. And that, of course, is if you're not investing heavily into the transfer market and you're not paying these player wages. So I think the time horizon for the return on investment from the stadium reinvestment is excessive, which is probably why the Glazers haven't done that at Manchester United, because they can't extract enough value from it.

28:48I think the other reason, though, that clubs are starting to invest in stadia is because they don't want to be left behind. and five years ago Manchester United fans would say this stadium really needs some work but the general market wasn't saying that the away fans would say how the section of Old Trafford in the southeast corner was pretty ropey and not very good but the volume the amplification of that narrative wasn't very high at all it's only since the teams have started to build those stadiums that we've really seen the amplification of that narrative go up so you need to keep pace with your competition and you go over and see Bayern Munich in their arena You've got Atletico Madrid, fabulous stadium over in Madrid.

29:27You know, big developments going on at Real. Manchester City have just announced a huge redevelopment of part of their stand to build a fan park. So I think you need to keep pace with the competition because there's almost an expectation that if you're going to charge me $60 to go in and watch a game, I want my seat to be not broken and I want to be able to get a beer in the concourse or some food that isn't looked like it's been scraped off the floor. So that's all of the regeneration, isn't it, of stadium infrastructure, but of course it's very, very costly. That makes a ton of sense. And then the third big pillar of this is commercial.

29:59And there's a link here between what you talked about in the US market and the stadiums and sort of the juice to be squeezed out of commercial arrangement for clubs. And this is a huge piece of their income stream. And I saw something that you'd written about how, I guess, football in general, but particularly European clubs and the English Premier League are way behind on things like naming rights for stadiums and being able to monetize those aspects of their club, looking, I guess, across the Atlantic and seeing what US sporting teams have been able to do throughout, I guess, the suite of their business in terms of turning those into commercial opportunities.

30:35Can you just talk a little bit about how that is developing in football and where you see opportunities for them to expand, whether that's looking across the Atlantic or other areas of the world? Yeah, so I mean, it's probably linked to the stadium redevelopment question, actually. It's probably the third part of that argument, as you say. goes back to the big differences between the US model of team sport and European model. So the franchise -based system in the US lends itself to, we can move that team to that particular city infrastructure, build a new stadium as part of that real investment in that city.

31:05And that enables us, because it's very new and it's very shiny, to sell those stadium naming rights and commercial opportunities to new companies. What you have in the UK generally, that we also see through the Premier League, is this cultural almost inertia that says with this football club has existed for over 100 years it's always played there it's always played in this particular color that's our stadium don't go near it old trafford is called old trafford highbury where arsenal used to play was hybrid they were only able to rename that the emirates stadium because they moved stadium and they built a new one at manchester city the city of manchester stadium which was built for the commonwealth games in 2002 and essentially gifted by the way to manchester city so they didn't have that at front cost rebranded the Etihad Stadium.

31:48So it's happening, but it tends to happen with the new stadium infrastructure builds and where you don't have that and a really deep -seated historical connection to a community. Because unlike the American model, don't pick up Manchester United and move it down to London because there's a better franchise value there. And then of course you would be able to rebrand the stadium. But Old Trafford is Old Trafford. It's got pretty ropey seats because it's not in the best of conditions and you can never ever sell the naming rights to that and go back again a couple of years and look at the Newcastle United story when Mike Ashley was the owner before Public Investment Fund in Saudi Arabia came in, tried to rename St.

32:25James' Park the Sports Direct Arena and you've got 100 ,000 plus Geordies going absolutely wild that their owner didn't understand the nature of the club and was moving. It's just an argument you just don't want to get into because the backlash is too big. Yeah, the behavioural side is so interesting. Yeah, that last couple of pieces on the club side that I wanted to touch on with you. One is regulations and how that fits into running a football club. And the thing that I always focus on is financial fair play. And you mentioned some of the other pieces of regulation in and around European football is exactly how much of an influence that has on the running of football clubs.

33:00Because periodically you'll see a Manchester City has had this very recently, cases being brought against clubs for overstepping the mark in terms of financial fair play or whatever the regulation is. But then as a fairly impartial observer, there never seems to be too much slap on the wrist, but that's it. Please educate me on why I'm wrong or if I'm not wrong, what's going on there? So if you go pre -2011 when Financial Fair Play was first introduced by UEFA, you had a football industry that was littered with examples of financial mismanagement of clubs teetering on the brink of not being in existence.

33:35That has a tribal impact on communities. These football clubs, a big business for not just themselves, but also the local communities that they're situated in. And you also had then this excessive spending by some of the big, powerful clubs that was distorting the European competition. And we go back then to competitive balance and the importance of joint natural production. So UEFA kind of said, look, we've got to stop this. These clubs are really important cultural artifacts, but they also need to be competitive and be able to wash their face financially. So financial fair play, basically, and in very, very brief terms, means that clubs have to make sure they don't spend any more than what they earn.

34:12And there are also then limits to what investors can put into the club to make sure their income profile is, which is why Manchester City have perhaps been tarnished by some of their activities around the regulations. because you had things like signing of sponsorship deals that were delivered by companies that didn't exist or delivered by companies that really didn't generate the sorts of value that they would need to generate to hand over £50 million or $60 - $70 million a year in terms of a sponsorship agreement. And you've got two levels. So you've got the UEFA competition. So if you participate in European competition under UEFA regulation, then you've got Premier League stuff and then Football League.

34:52La Liga have a similar method. They do salary cost management. All of the major leagues have a level of regulation and licensing about them. And it's designed to make the clubs more stable from a financial context. And when we start looking at the investment landscape, that's why football clubs are becoming more attractive to potential investors, because the regulatory framework that sits around them makes them a de -risked investment, notwithstanding the fact they could still get relegated and lose everything. So that's what the regulations are kind of there to do. What I think we need to remember is, and this is where the Manchester City case becomes really interesting.

35:30Manchester United were broadly dominant in all of the Premier League era. Arsenal had fleeting success, but every competition needs somebody else to challenge because if you don't, it becomes really boring. So Bayern Munich pretty much win the Bundesliga every year. It's really boring as a competition. Juventus were doing the same in Syria. It's a really boring competition. La Liga was always contested by Barcelona, Real Madrid, and more recently Atletico have broken into that. They're not attractive competitions. What makes the competition attractive is the competition. So whilst Manchester City were allegedly breaching financial fair play, let's not forget it was probably good for the Premier League brand and it's probably enabled them to sell bigger TV rights.

36:15Whilst the other clubs might be a bit grumpy because Man City are running away and winning league titles, they were doing so with a brand of football that was exciting to watch they were doing really well in European competition and that has a league benefit as well I talked very very briefly about rugby union we saw something similar in in that sport with breaches of salary cap it ended up being good for the league as a whole so we've got to be really careful with the application of those regulations and then what charges obviously and follow what generally are the penalties that they do or have or can impose well UEFA will tell you that the penalties range from fines to point deductions from competition expulsion and Premier League would say the same.

36:55When you look at the magnitude of some of the charges that, say, Man City have been hit with this 115, I think there's about 30 of them that are really quite serious. Ultimately, I'd be looking at it thinking, well, if that's proven, that's expulsion from the Premier League, and then you probably do a deal with the English Football League, say actually they can't participate in them, so you drop them down to National League. But I'm a Manchester United fan, so I probably would say that. And I guess one, it probably gets drawn out in the courts for a long time, but two, to your point, they have to be very careful as to what they do because ultimately they've helped the product of the Premier League enormously over the last five, 10 years.

37:31The Man City case is interesting because obviously they took it to Cass when they were charged by UEFA and they weren't proven innocent in that case. I need to be careful how I choose my words here because I don't want to get told off by any of the Manchester City lawyers. So they weren't proven innocent. The judgment was that they were time barred from challenging the payments that have been put in because UEFA have a statute that says, if this exceeds X number of years, then you can't be charged for it. So I got away with it in my book. The Premier League don't have those same time barred statutes, which is why they've come out with this set of 115 charges.

38:04But some of them are really minor. They're like, you're reporting was slightly wrong in that column. You've put a figure erroneously in that one. so let's strip out all the noise. There's about 25, 30 charges that are pretty serious to them. But the Premier League will then absolutely be looking at how significant was the breach and then remember that Manchester City can probably afford better lawyers than the Premier League so you end up in this courtroom battle. What history tells us is if you've got enough resource, you can probably make anything go away. There's part of me that thinks if you've got the best lawyers and the best accountants, you're probably going to win whether you're right or wrong.

38:38I think that's probably fair. I would say it's going to be interesting to watch. I'm not sure if that's actually true. We'll find out what happens. It'll be interesting to see the outcome. It'll be interesting to see the response of the other clubs in the context of that. And I think Premier League will be weighing up its options with regard to if we find them guilty for that particular charge, what does that mean for everybody else? Or if we find them not guilty, then how's the rest of the competition going to respond? So it's a very, very fine balancing act. And look at the east side of Manchester.

39:04Manchester City's investment in that part of the world has been unrivaled. the fundamentals of the club going forward and what they've done is absolutely brilliant. You can't fault it. And if they've had to circumvent a regulation to achieve that, he'd probably say they're great or good. It might have been worth them doing. On a sporting competition, Aguero still scored that goal that won them the league over Manchester United on goal difference. It's a very, very delicate balance. If you're talking about on this section, how strong is there a link between sporting and financial performance? you could argue spend more win more or maybe you know long -term sustainability relies on you being somewhat profitable or not hugely loss making and you have the ability to cover those debts in the years that you aren't profitable so if i had the answer to that question dom i think i'd be working in and around the game rather than in a university talking about it what i can tell you is this a guy called dr dan plumley and i at sheffield business school work very close together have done for a number of years, have written a series of papers, have done bunches of statistical analysis on this exact concept.

40:12So what is the relationship between sporting and financial success? So what I can tell you with statistical significance and absolute confidence is that sporting and financial performance are inextricably linked. What I can't tell you is which one drives the other because we don't know. So we can say that if you are financially successful, you are likely to be successful in a sporting context to your point you can afford to buy more players and be more competitive but more interestingly perhaps if you are successful in a sporting context you will also be more successful in a financial context so if we take a club like Brighton and Hove Albion for instance much much smaller club to a Man City a Manchester United Chelsea Liverpool and so on but are extraordinarily successful on a sporting basis based on their resource envelope and are able then to transfer players back out of the club, which is making them very, very successful financially.

41:05So I'm sorry I can't answer your question definitively. We know they're linked. We just can't work out which one drives the other. No, well, that's interesting in itself, to be honest. And then if we shift gears a little bit and talk about investors and some of the very touched on it a bit with Manchester United and a few other clubs, before we get into some specifics, can you just go through generally the ownership profile or models that you see in football itself? to overlay a bit history to this because they've evolved slightly over the last decade if not the last 20 years or so typically we would talk about ownership types as profit maximizers or utility maximizers so go in try and extract lots of value or go in put some resources in and try and make sure that utility on the pitch is as successful as it can be and then we saw the emergence of different types of owners so typically in any football club across europe it would tend to be wealthy business person buys local club, tries to run them like they've run their, I don't know, flooring business or a real estate business, fails because of the emotional attraction of sport and the stupid decisions that get made, sells club to another wealthy business person to then repeat cycle.

42:15And it was rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. Then kind of emergence Premier League, we saw stock market model start to emerge. Tottenham Hotspur, Chef United, Manchester United all floated on the stock exchange, generated some pretty decent amounts of capital, reinvested those in playing squad, no dividends to investors. Most of those clubs ended up then delisting late 80s through into the early and mid 90s. The stock market model, funnily enough, in our ownership research, is still the most successful from a sporting and financial point of view. I think that's because you're accountable to others.

42:48So rather than just your board, if you're not going to pay a dividend, you've got to explain why you're not paying that dividend and what your longer term strategy is. And then we had the emergence of what we called trophy asset hunters, which we've touched on. So those owners that really didn't care how much they were putting in because they wanted to win those trophies. And then we saw the emergence of what we now call in win maximization. So on a large swathe of cash going into a business to try and maximize the winning mentality, which I think probably links to the trophy asset to a certain extent.

43:17And then over the last few years, we've seen the emergence of much, much different types of finance, whether that's private equity, whether that's sovereign wealth funds, state ownership, and then you kind of get into conversations around sport washing and all that stuff. So we've got a long timeline of these emergence of different ownership types that probably started with local person that had done pretty well for themselves and then lost a fortune. Yeah. The one that really sticks out to me is the private equity surge in the last few years. Why in particular? I mean, if I think about private equity generally, they're very focused on the numbers and there'll be owners for a defined period of time, whether that's five or 10 years, and then they'll want to sell it for some profit and move on to another asset.

43:58What is it that they've seen in football that has led to them entering the market? I think generally speaking, undervalued asset class, which links back to the regulatory framework that now exists. As an investor, whether you're private equity or otherwise, you're always trying to de -risk your investment proposition so that you can extract maximum value when you ultimately sell. And through those tweaked regulations, the legal cases that go when somebody gets challenged for a potential breach, and the scale of the broadcast here, which probably protects your position in the league. So if you're able to buy a Chelsea football club, chances of you being relegated now are so, so slim because of the gap that exists between the Football League and the Premier League, that you're almost buying a risk -ish free asset because of the regulatory context.

44:45So that means that the whole system is slightly undervalued because they've not generated the revenue values that we think are on offer. Clear Lake and Blueco going into Chelsea, probably, I think they ended up about 2 .7 billion, so 3 billion -ish US, plus a bit of additional investment in stadium infrastructure, plus then the investment that they put into playing squads is still, I think, relatively low. and normally we talk about private equity on a five to six year time horizon go in try and sort out your governance put a new board in generate some additional revenue invest stabilize sell we were talking about private equity going into european football clubs and that timeline probably extending to 10 to 12 years because it's still pretty underdeveloped but club like chelsea i think particularly with the transfer spending that we've seen over the course of the last three windows probably still says to me, five or six years, they could be on the hind heels and out for US $6 billion, something like that, which would be a tidy return.

45:43For those investors in particular, is the equation really increased revenues? Because from my vantage point, there isn't a huge amount they can do on the cost side. Player wages, player transfer, market prices just seem to be going on one way and that's up. And that really is the bulk of your costs as a football club. We talked about stadiums a little, but is it really on the revenue side that they're just trying to drive incremental value? I think so. So you can't do a lot with the broadcasting because you can't sell your own rights, but you can definitely do more on the commercial side. You can definitely do a bit more on the match day experience side.

46:13And then we're back into that fourth revenue pillar, aren't we? I think it's totally untouched. So I think that's where the real proposition is. And it's interesting, actually, post -COVID, the transfer market has been relatively flat. So it retraced a bit immediately after COVID. I think one or two clubs are driving the valuations back up to what we saw just pre -COVID, which was relatively high. Let's not beat around the bush. But I do think there's a level of sensibility that's starting to go into the transfer market. So I hear a lot of narrative coming out of clubs now that they're benchmarking players into certain brackets and they're just simply not prepared to go over those values to try and protect that level of cost control.

46:54at least a little bit. And of course, when your rivals are looking at signing the same player, the valuation goes up a bit, doesn't it? That is unexpected and brings me on to the sovereign wealth funds, I guess, that have also entered the market in recent years. In particular, if I think about the Saudi Pro League and their activity in the transfer market, Neymar this week has just moved there and reported to be on 150 million euros a year. All right, if you can get it. Yeah, you're telling me. It seems as though they are distorting the market prices of this stuff, but you just told me that you think actually it's settled down and seems about your high end, but not totally irrational.

47:29What does a force like the Middle East and some of these either sovereign wealth funds who are using football to a certain end, but not necessarily thinking about it from an economic return standpoint, how does that change the landscape of football for you? So I need to be really careful how I answer this because I could end up with a metaphorical leg on my face next year. The Saudi Pro League is doing very much what the Chinese Super League did probably five or six years ago, which was acquiring playing talent. Now, critically, most of that playing talent is at the end of its career life cycle, not in terms of age, but in terms of transfer value.

48:07So if you sign a player that's 28, 29, 30 years old, the chances are it's a diminishing return. You're not going to generate that same level of transfer deal. And that's what we've seen the Saudi Pro League do. So they're paying strong money for players that probably wouldn't be transferred within a domestic competition or certainly around about Europe. Now, Harry Kane would be the exception to that rule because I still think he's peak performance. But if you look at most of the players that have transferred, they've gone over that peak performance curve. They will still be very good, get me wrong, but they are on the decline of their career.

48:41Now, where it will get really interesting, this is my caveat now, is when the Saudi Pro League are able to extract a player that is 23 -24, that is just on the start of their curve for peak performance. Now, Mason Mount would have been a good example of that. 24 -year -old, year left on his contract. If the Saudi proposition was really strong right now, they'd have been able to extract somebody like him, probably paid Chelsea £80 -90 million as opposed to the £55 million that he ended up Manchester United. So I think the overall transfer values that we're seeing, when we look at the age profile of those players, the Saudis are paying much bigger money than those older players would command in their domestic markets.

49:26But those older players wouldn't necessarily be transferred in the first place. So Man United were trying to get rid of another, weren't they? It was a good deal for him. Sadio Mane at Bayern Munich wasn't doing particularly well. It was a good move for him. Kareem Benzema at Real Madrid. So for the selling club, it's really attractive because actually you can get rid of an ageing and unvaluable asset for a few quid, which actually then goes back into the system, doesn't it? So whilst the Saudis are buying players left, right and centre, those clubs in Europe are in receipt of those transfer fees and are able to then reinvest across the European market.

49:59So I think it's going to be interesting how they battle for TV rights. I think the deal they've done with the broadcast so it's only worth about half a billion US. Compare that to the Premier League deal is about 10 billion US. There's still a long, long way to go in terms of the attractiveness of the competition. It is a force that is making a big mark in the market. And I think we need to be really cautious about how we deal with it. Yeah, we'll see. That makes a ton of sense though. And as a lever from a club's perspective, how important is the transfer market to them is potentially an avenue where they can also generate an extra source of income if they're able to either buy young players or develop them and then sell them for big money in the window?

50:39Is that something that clubs really think about? Or do they just say, we'll just try and be net neutral over a reasonably long period of time? I think it depends on the club and the status they've got in the particular division. So some clubs are looking to extract big transfer receipts for their playing talent they've developed. Southampton, we've talked about at Brighton and Hove Albion today. There's typically smaller clubs that have almost decided We're not going to break into that elite group of clubs, but we're going to do very well and we're going to sell to them and make some money. And over time, we might be able to get into those groups.

51:10And what I think is really fascinating recently is how those elite clubs that once just disposed of players, so it's like buy fairly high price, pay lots of wages, end up getting rid of that player for next to nothing. And I hate the term net transfer spend was always negative. What we're seeing is those elite clubs actually generating positive returns on their net spend. And Chelsea are a really good example, you know, 900 million in transfer acquisitions. And I think over the last three windows, they've got net profit on their net spend of about 150 million, which helps them with their financial fair play compliance.

51:45So again, back to regulatory framework, the importance of player sales in the context of balancing your books is really quite important. I think we've done a fantastic job of laying out the key themes and ideas and things that people think about in terms of the business of football from a club's perspective. where do the fans fit into all this? Because they're clearly the lifeblood of all of this stuff. We've touched on them briefly, but we haven't really talked about them in any context. But ultimately, without fans, there wouldn't be any clubs and none of this discussion would be possible. It feels like they'd be marginalised to some extent, but where do they fit into these plans?

52:16How much influence can they exert? So you do see from time to time, protests and things working to shape the club in the way that the fans would want. So let's go back to history books. You look at matchday attendances from the 1940s onwards. and what you saw is a bit of a peak in the UK in 1966 because we won the World Cup for the first time and then they steadily declined. I think they went from a high of an average of 44 ,000 fans per match. By the time we got into the mid -80s and you've had a couple of big disasters at Stadia, very, very disrepair. And then, of course, we had the Hillsborough disaster as well.

52:50The average matchday crowds were about 16 ,000. So when Sky bought the two digital satellite companies came together to build the Premier League with these lucrative broadcast rights. Most analysts would have said, now there's no money in football. There's nobody going. There's no way you can extract value. Actually, what we saw from the advent of the Premier League is match their tendencies then start to creep back up. So to your point, fans are still the lifeblood of these clubs. Without them, broadcasters aren't interested. Go back to it. Why don't BSkyB or B in Sports or Desen spend billions on broadcasting the Bundesliga or La Liga or Serie A?

53:28It's because you've got half empty stadiums, because there's not a competition integrity with the two teams that are playing each other very often. And therefore, the spectacle on the television is not as attractive. So without those match day going fans, you don't create an environment in the stadium. You don't generate ultimately the product. And it's interesting that you go to that fourth revenue stream that we've talked about, that customer lifetime value or fan lifetime value. that's where the saviour of club finances and the control through club finances actually sits so I think fan engagement understanding the profiles of your fans understanding what they want being responsive to them in some sort of context is really important and you only need to look at the protests that go on around club ownership you only need to look at what happens in stadiums when fans are unhappy about managers and coaches and players the boards ultimately stand up to be counted.

54:20And how many clubs over the years could we say have fired their manager because of fan opinion rather than what that board of directors really wanted to deliver through the coaching setup. And that's where the emotion comes back in. It's such an emotive business, which makes it quite short term, which naturally means those fans are really, really important. Yeah. And changes the dynamics from a business standpoint massively. Is there anything you think that we haven't really touched on that you think about a lot as it relates to the business of football in your day -to -day work? I think the way that Premier League have been at the vanguard of those broadcast rights is quite important.

54:54So this expansionist policy that they've been able to chase, whilst they're generating big money in foreign markets through TV revenues, they're only really scratching the surface. And there are huge markets that are still up for grabs, which is why Liga have gone into India to stream free content because the population the Indian subcontinent is about 1 .2 billion, something like that. So if you can get some followers in those territories, you're really going to generate big amounts of cash. It's why we see such aggressive US pre -season tours happening and tours to the Far East and so on. And that expansionist policy needs to be done in conjunction with the league and with the clubs.

55:29Otherwise, we're going to start hearing about potential super leagues or pan -national leagues and all this stuff. So if we as fans want to keep consuming the content that we do in the way that we do it. We've got to keep our voices heard and make sure the league organisers pay attention. And how much do the league and the clubs work together on that stuff? They think strategically, okay, the Indian market is important to us in terms of the amount of eyeballs and engagement potentially and long -term value that we could create out of that market if we do this right. I want these three clubs to go and tour India next summer.

56:01We're going to try in conjunction with that. We'll be doing stuff from a league perspective. Does that happen? Or is it a bit more haphazard than that? Yeah, well, at least publicly, it doesn't get talked about happening like that. I'm not sat in a Premier League boardroom. So I couldn't say whether they do or they don't. My view, my subjective view is that, so league organisers like La Liga are much more strategic in the context of where they think they need to position the sporting competition. I think the Premier League have lost a bit of control and the big six are so powerful now. The revenue profiles are bigger than the Premier League in itself.

56:33I think there's a lot of self -interest that drives what we see in the Premier League. So I don't think it's as joined up as it really ought to be. I think there's a reliance on clubs in the Premier League to allow the Premier League to go out and negotiate. But actually, some of those clubs would rather do it themselves. We need to be really careful about how that ends up washing out. Yeah, and I'm sure necessity drives some of it. The Spanish League is probably looking at the English Premier League and seeing that they're at a disadvantage to begin with. So where can they go and find additional dollars quickly?

57:00Well, this has been a fantastic discussion. I really appreciate your time and your insight over your career that you've shared with us over the last hour or so. So we always finish these discussions with the same question. And that's what lessons you've learned that you could share with our audience from covering this aspect of football over your career. What would you highlight as a couple of things that you either apply in your career or you would urge other people to look at or think about as they go about their lives? I think from a positive context, the ability to take the odd risk, I think, is really important.

57:27So you look at a club like Southampton trying to develop that playing talent at a very, very young age and then bringing them through to the first team to give them minutes. I think as a longer term strategy is much more effective for those teams than it is just to import some talent from a different club. Of course, the proposition there is going to be different depending on what club you're in. But if Manchester United or City can generate homegrown playing talent and bring them through to their team, they actually can generate some pretty big sums through that. So take some risks on playing talent.

57:57Don't be afraid to generate new ideas in new markets. Some of them will fail. Some of them will be really, really lucrative. and without trying to finish on a downer, I've fallen out of love with the game a little bit. I used to love going and watching a game of football on Saturday afternoon, but since I've been studying it and researching in it so intensively over what is now just over a 20 -year career, it's become so business -focused and it's lost that real compassion and enthusiasm that I've seen and actually get a bit more enjoyment when I go and watch Sheffield FC locally, which is step seven.

58:28So way, way out of the big football pyramid, their story is that the world's oldest football club and that narrative is quite nice. And you can see football for what it was almost 100 years ago or more rather than these big sanitized stadiums. But I love sports, so I'm always going to carry on watching it. It's just taken the edge off slightly. Well, what an interesting place to end. I'm sure a lot of that has to do with your day job. But we certainly appreciate what you've been doing for the last 20 years and being able to condense that knowledge into the last hour or so. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us.

58:56No, it's been great, Don. Thanks ever so much for having me on. To find more episodes of Breakdowns ranging from Costco to Visa to Moderna or to sign up for our weekly summary, check out joincolossus .com. That's J -O -I -N -C -O -L -O -S -S -U -S .com.