Q & A: Chelsea ownership, a Liverpool sale, the future of Man Utd and more | The Football Boardroom

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1:04CP, it's time to dive into the bulging mailbag. We've had so many questions coming in, so time for a quick Q &A. If I can kick off, this is Simon. Simon has asked us whether we think Eddie Howe will be a West Ham manager before Christmas. We've also been asked to explain what is going on at West Ham with the latest boardroom manoeuvres. You'll start it for 10. Keep it short.

1:28Henry:OK, I will. I think the prospects of Eddie Howe being in before Christmas have receded. And that's because I think the chances of Amanda Stavely becoming a shareholder of West Ham have reduced dramatically in the last few days. fundamentally, as I understand it, the Kratinsky-Sullivan groupings have found common purpose and have between them now acquired most of the shares held by the gold family. Kratinsky's gone up, I think, from about 27 % to about 46%. Sullivan's added a couple of percentage to about 40%. And whilst he is completely and utterly out of the picture from a day to day management situation, I think Kratinsky and Sullivan have effectively said we jointly own this football club.

2:16Henry:We need to get it back in the Premier League and then one or both of us can sell the whole club for a lot higher value than it's worth today. Amanda Stavely served a very valuable purpose for the gold family because she basically forced Kratinsky and Sullivan to pay a fair price for those gold shares. We all thought if she got in, she'd have been making a phone call to her old friend, Eddie. But it looks now that her move is not going to culminate in her becoming a shareholder. Just quickly for me on that, I think that the job that Nuno is doing and the fact that phenomenal support, they've been getting 60 ,000 in for their home games, backing the team.

2:56I think Nuno will keep going this season. He knows how to get out of this division. Obviously, Eddie does as well. But I think Nuno absolutely deserves staying with.

3:04Henry:Moving on to the next question. Definitely your specialist subject on Mastermind. A lot of people ask your views on this. It's 10 years since Leicester City's miracle winning the Premier League in 2016. How have things got so bad? Five or six reasons from tragedy to recruitment. Before the World Cup, I went to see Kasper Schmeichel, who'd announced his retirement. And I went to their magnificent training ground, 100 million pound training ground, fantastic place. And Kasper was there with some of the other players from 10 years ago, the 5000 to 1 fairytale title winning team. And they were sort of getting together.

3:43I think it was a game for the foundation. And you just saw them, they were just clicking back into that mentality, that band of brothers. They've lost that band of brothers on the pitch, in the boardroom. Obviously, the tragedy with Vishay, the amazing owner that they had, losing him. And then his son, top, it must be absolutely impossible for him to go into work effectively every day at the King Power Stadium and passing where his father, his mentor, such a huge, obviously a huge figure in his life, passed away. So that must be difficult. Top's made some poor decisions. The fact that Rudkin is still there influencing things is bemusing to most Leicester City fans.

4:28The trust has been very heavily involved in trying to turn things around to get the club to see sense, to be a bit more transparent. But the only way out of it is a full sale. And I think that will happen in the next year.

4:39Henry:I think it's a cautionary tale. I think, you know, people, personalities aside, this is sort of Icarus flying too close to the sun. They are a cautionary tale for a club that dared to dream, that laddered up, that the closer they got to being one of the big boys, spent more and more rules, forced them to balance the books and selling your best players and replacing them with less good players. on similar wages often ends badly and this is an extreme example but not the first example of challenger clubs ultimately being defeated by the process of forced selling of best players and just how hard it is in the end to keep replacing your best players and now down in League One right, one for you CP a club you know well Chelsea having worked there this is from Stuart the Chelsea fan he wrote in a few weeks ago asking us to do a Chelsea deep dive and hopefully enjoyed our recent episode on Chelsea, which had a slight emergency feel given the events in America.

5:49Anyway, we've got another Chelsea-related question. CP, what is your reading of the latest regarding the boardroom situation at Stamford Bridge?

5:57Henry:Yeah, this is definitely picking up on what we alerted our audience to two weeks ago, namely that the shareholder group around Todd Bowley, 38 % of the total shares of Chelsea, as opposed to the 62 % owned by the private equity firm Clear Lake and led by Badadik Barley, the 38 % grouping contains shares owned by Todd Bowley's mentor and partner of many years, Mark Walter, who we know has sailed into some tricky financial issues in America around his main businesses. My understanding is that he continues to be exploring the sale of many of his businesses, including his and Todd's stake in Chelsea.

6:49Henry:And under the terms of his shareholder arrangements at Chelsea, then I believe that Clear Lake are the only permitted buyer or certainly Clear Lake would have to agree if anyone else was to buy those. So my understanding is that Clear Lake and Tobbole are in discussions about those shares being bought out. And if that deal happens, then of course that means Clear Lake would become more or less the 100 % owner of Chelsea. I think we watch this space. These are extremely sensitive and private negotiations. Really complicated and difficult, particularly around the area of valuation. And if you want more information on that, please listen to our show where we explained the conundrum facing Eqbali and Boley as they try and reach agreement on what their club is worth.

7:42Henry:I suspect by Christmas we'll have clarity on that. Interesting. It might actually be easier and better for Chelsea if they just have one owner and whether it's Kleele and Todd Boley. moves on, but we'll see on that. Okay, one for you, one of your absolute favourite subjects. What is going on with the New Deal? For those of our audience who don't know what that refers to, the New Deal is the name given to a potential update to the financial agreement between the Premier League and the EFL, whereby the Premier League shares TV money with the EFL. What's going on? Why the hold-up? What are you hearing behind closed doors, H?

8:31I mean, first it's four or five years. It's crazy that it's taken this long. The pyramid is stronger together, all 92 clubs. You look at the managers and the players in the Premier League who've benefited from part of their footballing education being in the EFL amongst the 72, whether on loan or academies. The sport is absolutely stronger together. I think in fairness to the Premier League, the executive as much as the clubs, Richard Masters, the chief executive, I think he has got a deal together and he's passed it to the EFL. And what is the holdup? Personally, from what I'd heard initially, I thought it might have been League One and League Two, not happy with the deal in terms of, I think there were problems, I think he said about 12%.

9:13each, with the majority obviously going to the championship. But it does seem that there are elements of the championship which are holding the whole thing up. And I think they're being a little bit naive because at some point the regulator, particularly with the regulator's state of the game report, at some point he'll start knocking heads together. But I think Richard Masters deserves credit because they have come up with an offer.

9:41Henry:Yeah, I agree with you. So the hold up most definitely is now not on the Premier League side. It has taken a very long time for the Premier League management team led by Richard Masters to get a vote from its member clubs to increase their payments. Just to remind everybody, they already give championship clubs about£5.5 million per club per year. And the proposal is for that to increase by about a total of£150 million a year over 10 years. It's a£1.5 billion proposal sped over 10 years and the EFL so far have not accepted it. My sources are telling me that it's quite finely balanced. I'm impressed because I think the regulator that hasn't been around very long has most definitely encouraged bilateral discussions and I suspect those discussions are ongoing.

10:41Henry:We'll see how quickly we get a breakthrough. But I'm kind of optimistic that the fact that the Premier League have put a deal on the table, yes, I think it'll get tweaked by the EFL and I think it probably could be tweaked. But fundamentally, you know, heads have been banged together. I think they're in the room. I think they're trying to get something done. and I'm more optimistic than I have been for the last four years that that will happen. I think the new government is a factor in all this. I don't know this, I really don't, but I'm quite sure that the new prime minister, very passionate about his football, very short lines of communication, most definitely knows the bloke running the regulator.

11:23Henry:I'm quite sure he'll have said, guys, it's time to put this to bed once and for all. Just before we move on to the next questions, you can see it slightly from either side because if you're a championship club, you've just looked at the Premier League spent, was it north of three billion on players? And then we've got agents fees to come on that. When the FA print those, there'll be a little bit of, hang on a sec, you're spending all this money going out of the game on agents and players do need clubs, do need agents. I understand that, but there was a lot of money going out the game. But then you would imagine that some of the Premier League owners will look at some of the championship clubs, think actually the wealth of one or two of the owners down in the championship and worry that if I know a lot of it's ring fence, but worry that if the money that their money that they are giving to the championship club goes on wages.

12:14I don't know the I mean, Mark Lyman, Sky, his work on it has been fascinating and giving more of the detail of what's potentially in this offer from the Premier League. But I just hope a lot of it is ring fence around academies.

12:27Henry:I'm absolutely certain that the sticking points will not be purely the quantum. I'm quite sure that there will be voices in the championship who do think it should be more. And again, we did a show on this a couple of months ago where we broke down just how much this money really adds up to. But you're absolutely right, H. I think the really complex issues are unchanged for when I was in the room three years ago. And they are how do we make sure the money doesn't simply inflate wages and drip out the continued losses in the championship, whether it's ring fenced for community use, whether it's ring fenced for assets, whether it's all of these factors, I suspect are on the table.

13:11Henry:But as I say, we both, I think, feel that it's long overdue. And for the first time for a while, I'm quite optimistic that something gets done soon. Good, good. I mean, in a way, my next question to you, it's slightly linked in a way. Do you think a full sale of Liverpool is closer than people think? Yeah, this is an allusion to the recent events where a consortium led by the former owner and chairman of Queen's Park Rage and Mr. Batia, but with even more illustrious partners, Jeff Bezos and the founder of Facebook, Eduardo Severin. These three have clubbed together and bought a pretty chunky stake in Liverpool for a huge amount of money.

13:59Henry:And part of that, we now think that could be the best part of 38 % of Liverpool from Fenway, the current owners. And what this question alludes to is the fact there has been some media, extremely brief, often contradictory and most definitely rather opaque, that implies that as part of that stake acquisition, certain rights around the ability to buy more by a majority stake, by a controlling stake later may have been pre-negotiated. We simply don't know whether that is true. But as the question implies, I don't think John Henry and Tom Werrett et al would have been doing this deal and thinking that the 38 % shareholder is going to be at 38 % for the next 10 years.

14:50Henry:I think it will most definitely be a stepping stone to a full takeover. And therefore, for me, it's a question of when, not if. If I was a betting man, I now feel it's more like one to three years than five to ten years. And for Fenway, they will be walking away with obviously a huge amount of money if it's in the next year. But is there any benefit to them financially waiting four or five years, the next round of television rights? Will that go up or down? Would they factor those sort of considerations in? Well, they're in the rather beautiful position of being miles in profit already. It's one of the greatest investments in sport ever in terms of the gains that they have made.

15:36Henry:And they've banked some of those gains across now, just over a third of their stake. And I suspect that they believe value continues to rise. The new investor definitely thinks the value is rising. so I certainly can't see the rest of the club being bought for any less than the implied valuation on this takeover today which is the best part of£5 billion valuation for all of Liverpool. So yeah, it will be happy days one day for John Henry, Tom Werner and the Fenway investors but when is the question? There'll be more than a tea party in Boston. Yeah, I suspect you're right boy. Okay, lots of questions on this one.

16:18Henry:We have a lot of Newcastle fans who follow the show. There must be 10 people saying, what did you make of this summer's window? Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting one. I mean, first the outgoings, Gordon Tonali and Bruno for£230 million. And then you look at some of the incomings. Players that we didn't really know too well, like Storia and Hornacek, who look like they've done well. Nico Gonzalez, who's a plug-and-play Premier League player from Manchester City for£50 million. I mean, credit to Ross Wilson, the sporting director for the work he's done in terms of the players leaving. OK, it looks like they pretty well wanted to go, but he got good whack for them, particularly Tonali at north of 90 million.

17:00And I think the main credit is with the coach, bringing a coach in Iceland, because a lot of us, I didn't know too much about him. And I think he's been good, absolutely, the quality of the team. I also think you can see, you know, the quality of some of the coaching. You look how Alanga has responded. It helps having Johan Wisser fit. So there are elements that he has inherited, but he's worked on and done well. So I think it's been a good transfer. The only thing about transfer windows, I can remember when Liverpool bought Isaac and Eketike and Florian Wurz and Frimpong and players like that.

17:36And I just thought this is one of the greatest transfer windows ever. And you've got to wait. Give it a little bit of time before you can make that verdict. But at the moment, and obviously he got Volta Marder out, gone off on loan. So that makes sense there. So I would say to the Newcastle fans, they must be pretty pleased.

17:56Henry:Yeah, well, I agree with everything you said, most notably that it's rather early to be calling the inns, but extremely skilful management of the outs. Nobody ever rejoices at selling players. and selling your three best players is, I don't think, his cause for joy. But selling them quickly, decisively, for top dollar, smacks of a level of competency and quality that Ross gets a lot of credit for. And that hadn't been true in a few previous windows with some very notorious sales by Newcastle that look very regrettable, like Elliot Anderson, for example, going for a relatively modest price without a sell-on clause.

18:37Henry:So 10 out of 10 on sales. jury out on inns but promising very promising start by the new manager who I knew nothing about and I think this is a reset whatever you want to call it this is a reset in ambition it's a change of approach it's obviously following on from what I think they've even called themselves something like Newcastle 1.0 which basically means Eddie Howe which had huge success associated with it But by the end was definitely fraying somewhat. And there has been a major reset. And I think the reset is in the ambition level and in predominantly in the profile of football as it's now younger, lower wage potential versus trying to buy success, which I think it took them, frankly, rather too long to figure out is simply not permitted under the regulatory regime.

19:34Henry:even if you do have quite literally the richest ownership group on the planet. So a reset, a new coach, really early days on the inns in my opinion. Two quick final things on that. Two very much huge positives. Investment in a new training ground. I think that is absolutely crucial. And also on field, re-signing Lewis Hall contract extension. and I think it's five years when he will walk into the Manchester United team. They've definitely been linked with him. Keeping your best players is a very important part of a transfer window that doesn't get enough attention. And as you also alluded to, not for the first time in Newcastle's recent history, players that have terrible first seasons come in good and Eddie must be, you know, there'd be a wry smile on Eddie's face to see the form of Issa and Alanga this season when last season they were big money signings that really, really didn't deliver.

20:36Henry:A few injuries there. Yeah, sure. In mitigation. There's always mitigation, but I think they definitely look to be on the up. So, OK. This is me to you. OK. OK, this is from Alexander. What is more likely at Manchester United, a potential buyout by Ineos finally forcing the Glazers out or the Glazers selling their stake to another investor? Well, that's a really interesting question. I certainly think rather like my comments on the Liverpool transaction, which does have quite a lot of echoes, i.e. a very rich and successful group of businessmen buying a minority stake. I think in the case of Jim Ratcliffe, I don't get the sense that he's in the market for a£5,£6,£10 billion purchase.

21:34Henry:I think he wants to drive massive restructuring and improvement at Manchester United, oversee that, have complete responsibility for that. He managed to get that in his arrangements with the Glazers. if it succeeds then by definition they'll have made the club more valuable at which point you know they could coexist for another decade together I can't see the Glazers buying Ratcliffe out under any scenario because they don't write checks and I think it's relatively unlikely that Jim would buy them out because I don't get the feeling as I say that his resources outside of his core business stretch to that level.

22:19Henry:So probably the most likely scenario is for a club that, as we pointed out recently, has huge underlying profitability. It's a sustainable club. It's a club that can tick along very, very nicely. And if they fix management, it could tick along very, very nicely for the Glazer family and for Jim Radcliffe's investment company for quite a long time. Or somebody could come along and say to the two of them thank you very much and buy the ultimate trophy in English football one day but there's so much work to be done and any discussion of buyouts either way I think will not be on the agenda until they succeed in what is basically a turnaround.

23:02I think if the Glazers did leave and when they do eventually leave it will be the biggest party in Manchester United's recent history. I think you're right. I think they are they're not particularly popular um gone far i think if you got one for me i do i do um somebody who abbreviates then their initials to nl well you abbreviate yours to cp yeah that's true or you do um could

23:30Henry:english football deliberately restructure itself so that its top 36 clubs become globally valuable sports franchises with the kind of valuations and commercial models we see in american sport but while retaining promotion, relegation and the traditions that make English football different. Blimey. Blimey. That's a whole episode in itself. But briefly, I mean, the top 36 clubs, I mean, are you saying that, or is NL saying that it's... 18 and 18? Well, is there going to be a PL2? I'm good at arithmetic, aren't I, by the way, mate? Fantastic. Crunching the numbers. That's a Harvard education for you.

24:07But the fact that it's of 20 and then 16 from the championship, What does that do to the championship? But also, when you look at the structure of English football, 51 teams have been in the Premier League. I mean, they're big teams who actually wouldn't be in that 36. So how do you then define it? We're going to have an American one who's got the shoutiest owner who's going to get into that 36. So I would hate it because of what it would do to the championship, which is a fantastic division in its own right. You've been in it. You fought your way to get out of it. And I just think if you took 16, yeah, if you made it to 18, so there was a PL2, I mean, I would worry about the damage to the championship.

24:51I would also worry about, is this a step towards B teams? Now, we had this debate a few years ago with the Football Association and they got fairly quickly shot down. The prospect of it, I mean, fans wouldn't like it. The thought of B teams, I know it works in other countries and all that, but the thought of Manchester United or Liverpool having a B team lower down, I would hate the door to open to that, which I think a PL2, which is essentially what this is, would lead to. So, no, I'm not a fan. And from your experience, you still mix with all the chief executives and the club bigwigs. Do you sense any desire?

25:35Henry:I think that look I think that at the very top of the Premier League I'm quite sure that there are clubs who think the Premier League could be 18 not 20 and that that would just obviously drive up. But no one's going to vote for it you're not going to get 14 to vote for that. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas, so you've hit the nail on the head. I cannot see under the governance of the Premier League a vote to reduce the size of the Premier League. And yet there are all sorts of other considerations. At least this question acknowledges it is essentially contradictory because the crucial ingredient of American sport is closed leagues without promotion and relegation.

26:15Henry:And this person is basically saying with promotion and relegation, can you have the kind of values and commercial models? Well, that is a very clever and interesting observation that the single biggest deterrent for investment in English football by American investors is the risk of relegation. And yet, notwithstanding that dramatic fundamental difference to their own experiences in America, we still see a majority of owners in the Premier League now being American investment groups and a steady stream of American investment. And they've bought into a different model. And the model is living the dream, the pyramid investment, maybe in the championship and moving up into the Premier League investment at the bottom end of the Premier League and establishing yourself higher up.