Football For Sale

[00:00:00] The Why Curve, with Phil Dobbie and Roger Hearing. Football For Sale. Shock and anger in international football at plans to sell stakes in the championship. And the man in charge could lose his job. But why the horror? Isn't the World Cup already a huge, multi-billion dollar cash machine? Along with all the other major sports championships. Isn't it time to recognise it's all commercial entertainment and can be sold to the highest bidder?

[00:00:25] Or is there still something about sportsmanship and honest competition that needs protection from giant corporations? The Why Curve. So there's the whole question about the sustainability of sport. That one's levelled quite a bit and I suspect we're going to hear that in the next half hour. Yeah. But I just feel as though if a sport is popular,

[00:00:50] there has to be a way that businesses can run those sports without having to get outside funding. I mean, run it as a business. Get money from your supporters. Pay your players. Pay for your stadiums. But there's not enough money in it. That's the problem. I mean, you know, everything we know from the Premier League and everything else is that money just, you know, things get more and more and more expensive. Yeah. Ticket prices go up and up and up. So these private equity firms that are interested are doing it for reasons of benevolence then,

[00:01:20] are they, Roger? Is that what we're talking about? Well, no, but it's all about making money. And that's what I think, you know, I feel quite strongly. I'm not a sports person particularly, but I think it's a form of entertainment. You know, in the same way that Hollywood makes movies or puts on musicals or whatever they do, people pay to see it. That's the deal. And the money rotates through that. Yeah. And the movies are made by film studios and the film studios tend to be separate entities, run for themselves just as football clubs are, for example. Exactly. Exactly.

[00:01:49] So it's, I mean, yeah, you're not getting necessarily private equity investors going, oh, let's buy up this film company. They may merge. Well, you do. You get quite a bit of that with studios in Hollywood at the moment. Well, no, they merge. Studios merge. You're not getting someone saying, well, look, we've got no interest in filmmaking whatsoever. We just want to buy you because we want to rationalise you or push ticket prices up. So I don't know. I don't know. Well, that's the rationalisation that's needed in sport. And that's why, you know, everybody's getting so worked up about this Infantino deal.

[00:02:19] But that's because of the private equity. Anyway, let's talk to our expert on this. But I don't think it's the idea of rationalisation or the idea of more commercialisation. I think the concern is specifically about getting private equity investors involved because they are just in it for money. Someone said to me if Infantino perhaps got it wrong, instead of saying he was going to sell stakes in the next World Cup, he should have said, I'm going to sell stakes at the next World Cup. And then people would just say, fine, put it on the grill.

[00:02:50] That's probably what he's going to be doing. Let's talk to Simon Chadwick, who's Professor of Afro-Asian Sports at Emulon Business School. He joins us now. So, Simon, first of all, what was going through Infantino's mind? This whole idea of, in effect, selling off the World Cup, at least, you know, to an external party that was going to make a chunk of money out of it.

[00:03:11] He must have known that was going to be enormously unpopular with football fans who really are, you know, dedicated to the game and don't want it commercialised. What was going through his head? I think this is a complicated issue that's not just about Infantino. The global sport industry is changing very quickly. It is very dynamic, at times very turbulent.

[00:03:39] You've obviously got big changes around, for example, globalisation and digitalisation that are posing challenges for all sports. And we are seeing other sports responding to changes in our world by being more, use the word aggressive.

[00:03:59] And so if we take, for example, the NBA, you've got the NBA that now is operating in Africa, in the Gulf region, in India, in China. Of course, we're now on the cusp of NBA Europe. And so what I think Infantino and FIFA in general have been trying to do is to ensure that football remains robust and relevant and fit for purpose and can compete with these other rivals.

[00:04:26] Whilst also taking advantage of the opportunities that are available to the sport. And so there is this view out there that football is a commercially immature asset and that there is potential for its further development. And so I think that that's the kind of broad context for this.

[00:04:48] Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of team Infantino on this a bit, which is which is my what is what you're saying, which is that it's an immature in in commercial terms. And in the end, what is the problem with making money out of what is effectively a form of entertainment in the most effective way possible for those who take part? Well, you see, I've got a problem. We talked about this last last week. I've got a problem with it because because there is no danger is that football is going to lose its popularity.

[00:05:17] It's one of the if not the most popular game in the world and certainly the most popular game outside America. I've got a problem with I don't mind, you know, all the commercialization of the World Cup if it's because that money is being fed back into the sport. We're led to believe. But if that money is being made by a third party, which is in effect, you know, taking a chunk of that money for their own financial gain. That sits badly with people, doesn't it?

[00:05:45] Yeah, I would actually pose a question. I'm a lifelong football fan and I've got my club and my club is a kind of traditional. Northern working class club. So, you know, I understand. You might have to reveal which one that is, Simon. It is. It is Middlesbrough. So, right. OK. And Middlesbrough is my hometown. So Middlesbrough is about as far away from Hollywood as you can possibly get. Oh, for that matter, Wall Street or Silicon Valley.

[00:06:14] So, you know, I do get where the football that many people engage with came from and what it means and what it stands for. In one sense, there is the bottom line for everyone, I think. And Middlesbrough is a great example. You know, in 1986, we went bankrupt. We were on the verge of administration. You know, we were literally half an hour away from ceasing to exist completely. And so the bottom line is you've got to make money to survive, full stop. And surely we can all agree on that.

[00:06:42] But it's what happens beyond that that I think is raising questions. I mean, the interesting thing about that we've not mentioned already, I think, is obviously the FIFA presidency is an elected position. And I think, you know, even going back to Blatter and Haviland and even further, you've obviously, as a candidate, got to win over your constituents in some way.

[00:07:04] And what we've seen, I think, with Infantino is, you know, there's an implied promise in his electoral manifesto that he'll make everyone richer. And if you don't make it, if he doesn't make everyone richer, then obviously he stands to lose the election. And so his private equity play is part of, I think, a much broader portfolio of moves that are designed to ensure that he gets elected again.

[00:07:29] Now, what I think Infantino has been very careful to do always is not to antagonize member associations. And the analogy that I very often use is he's never promised to change the slices of the cake. So he's never said to the Africans, I'm going to I'm going to give you a bigger slice of the cake. He's never said to the Europeans, I'm going to give you a slight, a bigger slice of the cake, because politically that's very, very sensitive. But what he what he has done or effectively he's promised is, well, I'll just bake a bigger cake.

[00:07:58] And so and so what we've seen with that, I mean, ticket pricing, obviously some of the media rights values, the broadcasting rights values that we've seen him trying to secure. And now this private equity move are all part of that. I think obviously where he's falling down. Don't forget the refreshment breaks, by the way. And yeah, hydration breaks, hydration breaks. And you just heard the crowd boo every time. So, you know how well that one went down.

[00:08:25] Anyway, sorry, I interrupted your flow, but I just thought we couldn't ignore that. Yeah, and I think this kind of is it was was Infantino's money ever going to come from, for example, China or was it ever going to come from Saudi Arabia? Well, obviously he explored that. And if you go back to 2018, 2019, instead of visiting Trump, Infantino was spending an awful lot of time with Mohammed bin Salman and with President Xi of China. But, you know, he obviously rolled the dice.

[00:08:54] Private equity in North America is the way to go for sport to become this kind of neoliberal commercial phenomenon. But of course, what he didn't do is he didn't carry everybody else along with him. So I do think that Infantino, he does understand the sport and he does understand the environment within which the sport operates. And clearly there is a choice, particularly in terms of the elections and, you know, how do you make everybody richer?

[00:09:22] But, you know, this is obviously a very personal manifesto for him and what he's singularly or it appears what he's singularly failed to do is to is not to communicate well. And obviously to operate outside established principles of governance. But I think the interesting thing is, you know, he seems to like to play politics with Trump and with President Xi and with Mohammed bin Salman and now with the king of Morocco.

[00:09:48] You know, so he's also spending a lot of time in Morocco, but he hasn't played the politics inside FIFA, the organisation, particularly well. But Simon, what I still don't understand is the outrage, because as you say, he's making a bigger cake. Everyone benefits. The money will trickle down into maybe African clubs, maybe South American clubs, both Africa and South America, it seems, are continuing to support him reasonably enough.

[00:10:12] But why this, you know, pearl clutching about involvement of private equity when if you look anywhere else in the sport, I mean, the Premier League and everywhere else, when people support a team these days, you're actually supporting a company, a commercial company. Why this outrage? It's a really interesting observation that you make, because at the same time, obviously, that Infantino launched his proposals, we've also had, you know, Jeff Bezos is going to buy into Liverpool. Wow, isn't this incredible? Isn't it amazing? Isn't it exciting?

[00:10:40] And I think that there is this kind of dichotomy. I'm from Liverpool. I can imagine how well that's going to go down. Yeah, well, but there hasn't been the kind of universal condemnation. And I think, obviously, you know, Liverpool is Liverpool and what happens in Liverpool, I'm not going to say stays in Liverpool, but certainly that's a local conversation to have.

[00:11:03] But I think, obviously, such is the global domain of FIFA and of the World Cup and such is this sense of, you know, kind of collective interest and collective well-being that the way that I always see this, you know, if you're king of the world, what do you do? And I think the FIFA presidency, you know, is almost like being a little bit like being king of the world and to try and communicate your ideas and carry your constituency with you is an incredibly difficult task.

[00:11:31] What I find really interesting about all of this is that we're constantly being told, you know, that now we're almost sophisticated consumers and we want multi-screen viewership. You know, we want mobile services. We want fantastic food and beverage services. And yet when it comes down to, for example, private equity, it comes down to the commercial and industrial development of the sport. A lot of people generally tend to object.

[00:12:00] And so I do think what we what either we don't realise or what FIFA doesn't realise or maybe football more generally doesn't realise is what exactly do football fans want? Because if you want this old school, you know, standing in the wet in Scunthorpe on a Wednesday night in November, if that's what you want, then, you know, that's a very different kind of iteration of the game.

[00:12:26] Then the iteration of the game that we now seem to have where you can enjoy craft beer at halftime and enjoy super fast Wi-Fi whilst you're sat in your padded seat. And saying I personally, I do wonder who are we as fans? Who are we and what do we actually want? So, I mean, there will be some people going, yeah, well, we'd rather have that standing outside in the cold than the game being overly commercialised.

[00:12:54] But I mean, it can be commercialised without it going to private equity. So that craft beer, you will pay craft beer prices for that craft beer. So someone's making the money from that. It doesn't have to be an investor. It just needs to be a craft beer operator that's given the franchise to set that up.

[00:13:10] As a, for example, I think that the reason why people are upset about private equity is because somebody who's investing in the business doesn't necessarily have to have any interest at all in football and is just, you know, the Australian expression is clipping the ticket. They're just taking their portion out of it all. It's just the investment for them. I mean, there's other ways that you could raise money and actually have fans involved. You could list, for example, so people could buy equities in the game.

[00:13:36] So at least then everyone is getting a return if they choose to. But private equity firms, you know, are notorious for just getting in, very often cost cutting or doing whatever they can to get the maximum return without any interest in the game. And I think that's the risk. I think that's what people are upset about or worried about. Yeah, yeah. And I would agree with that because obviously in across sport globally, there's been a debate about this for some years.

[00:14:04] And we've seen, for example, in Italian football, in German football, also in rugby concerns being raised about the kind of creep of private equity investment in not just in football, but in other sports too. And I entirely take your point. But it's a bit of a conundrum because at the same time, if you look at the history of flotations, if you also look at initiatives such as the Supporters Direct Movement.

[00:14:32] So the Supporters Direct Movement was set up in England in 2000. And the scheme essentially was a very Blairite project, which was to encourage more democratic ownership in football and to help fans essentially buy their football clubs if that's what they wanted to do. And it simply didn't work. And it didn't work for two reasons. It's because putting your money where your mouth is is something very different to complaining about what is happening to your club.

[00:15:00] But I think in cases where fans were actively engaged and buying parts of their clubs, in many cases, they were making exactly the same decision making mistakes as others were already making anyway.

[00:15:15] And I think this is really the kind of juxtapositional dilemma that we now have is that effectively the kind of football that romantically many of us have in our heads is primarily a kind of late 19th, early 20th century phenomenon based on identity and locality and family and all these other things. But the world has moved on since then.

[00:15:39] And you've got to ask, well, instead of this thinking about is it private equity against fans or is there another form? You know, it is almost as though we need to start all over again in terms of our thinking. Yeah. And I think this is where it's interesting. And just to pick you up on that point, because I mean, I'm not a football fan. I put that out there. But I was asking people about support and a lot of younger people supporting teams. It seems less the team. It's more the individuals. It's Messi or Ronaldo, whatever it is.

[00:16:07] And it almost becomes, it seems to me, a parallel with show business, like making films. You know, people like very much a particular actor. So they go and see the films of that actor. Isn't that a better, more modern way of thinking about it? It's an end form of entertainment featuring people you really like and you'll pay to go and see it. And this really goes back to a point that you made earlier, which is that somehow we all assume that football has always been popular and it's always going to continue being popular.

[00:16:34] But if you look at, for example, Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences, there is perhaps less engagement with the sport than arguably there has ever been. And that is thanks to, for example, console gaming. And if we look at market growth in console gaming and esports, it is outstripping anything that football really has ever done.

[00:16:59] And so what we're seeing is eight-year-olds, instead of going to their local team and watching local people kick a ball around, what they're doing is they're online and they're playing whichever game they choose to play. But the other thing that you point out, I think is really important too, is for me, I was born and wrote up in the town. And my dad said, hey, this is your team and away we go. And the rest is history and I'll die someday and I'll still be a supporter of that team.

[00:17:28] But instead, what you've got is, as you say, I think younger audiences are following players. And we saw this phenomenon begin to emerge in, for example, East Asia initially. But increasingly, it's also happening too in Europe and elsewhere in the world. And players and teams, they're just characters or settings in the drama of entertainment products. And those entertainment products could be movies. They could be documentaries.

[00:17:57] They could be console games. And so we are in a very, very different environment. And I think one of the things that really worries me is just how easily people assume that, well, football's always been here and it's always been popular and it will continue to be so. Certainly when I go to countries, we take China again. China's not a football nation and it never will be. It's a basketball nation, but it's also an e-sports nation too.

[00:18:23] And I think that these alternatives will rival football. And by the time we get into 2050, we get into 2075, there's no guarantee whatsoever that the kind of rituals that we've become used to over the last century will still be there. Well, I'm not quite sure how having the son-in-law of the U.S. president investing money into it, though, is going to make that any different.

[00:18:50] I think it's the brother of the son-in-law or something like that. Right. Okay. Brother of the son-in-law. It is. Yeah. Yeah. So how is, in any case, the injection of cash, how is that going to make any difference? How is that going to save the game? I guess they might just put a bit more razzmatazz into it. Is that the idea?

[00:19:11] I think football needs to be leaner and fitter and more agile and not only responsive to the environment in which it operates, but capable of continuing to shape that environment around it. But I think what's particularly interesting about the private equity angle is that, for me, this is a neoliberal pitch.

[00:19:40] And the neoliberal pitch is personified by what we just saw in the 2026 World Cup. So take dynamic ticket pricing. So you don't make it as a governing body. You don't make a decision on ticket prices that enable a broad cross-section of society to be able to attend games. You open it to free market forces. And those free market forces obviously were enabled by digital technology.

[00:20:09] And my first degree was economics. This is classic free market economics. Let supply and demand decide the prices and you enable those markets to function by making available perfect information, which, as I say, mobile phones and websites and apps enable you to do. So I think the neoliberal... For that individual game. So that's a...

[00:20:36] So you get into a World Cup, for example, and there'll be people who pay high prices for that. Won't be the same people who go and see that game, that team play week after week. So you could easily fool yourself that that's the model going forwards. But those high spenders are not going to be the regular spenders. And that's... You could make a mistake in that, I think. Well, I think that dynamic ticket pricing is... It already is operational and has been functioning in the United States since 2009.

[00:21:06] And it's coming to a turnstile in the EU very soon. And that would be my position on this. And this drives to the very heart, I think, of the industrialisation, the commercialisation of football, but also the neoliberalisation of football. And that is the influence of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. And what we are seeing, I think, is if football is going to remain popular, it's going to remain relevant.

[00:21:33] And all those other things I talked about, agility and so forth. I think Infantino and others within the game are making that neoliberal free market pitch that somehow market forces will help to create the relevance and the efficiency and ultimately the profitability of the sport. But, of course, that stands as a juxtaposition with people who think, well, it's a kind of social institution. It's part of our local culture.

[00:22:04] But, you know, this conflict is not going away. And I think, if anything, it's going to creep even more. So how do you create that efficiency, though? So let's look at Middlesbrough, for example. And by the way, you should go on the road. You might find there's more goals being scored up in Newcastle. But in Middlesbrough, what went wrong? How come it got to the stage where it was on the verge of bankruptcy? Was it just not enough people going to games?

[00:22:33] What was happening there? Obviously, these were very different times from the 70s, the 80s and hooliganism and outdated stadiums and poor management. And obviously, football has been on a journey, certainly since 1992. Not just the kind of commercialisation, but I would say the industrialisation of football, too. But, you know, just to use one example, I find it really interesting that nowadays,

[00:23:04] certain club officials would see selling seat tickets as the equivalent of selling hotel rooms. And so in terms of the efficiency, one of the key metrics for hotel managers is, you know, how many of your rooms are filled and for how long or what? You know, how much what's the revenue yield of your room? And this is kind of immediately we started to use these words, which if you go back to 1876, it's 150 years of Middlesbrough this season.

[00:23:31] We didn't talk about revenue yield or capacity utilisation or metrics like how many seats have you filled. But that's where we are now. And so that's where that efficiency is creeping in. And to a certain extent, I don't think that this is necessarily a big issue, because as we said, you know, financially, you have to be sustainable to survive. And the market determines it. But I mean, we've talked a lot about football, but you mentioned a couple of other sports.

[00:24:01] But it occurs to me that one of the big experiments in golf, the live experiment, didn't really work. The moving away from the PGA, trying to change it in what seemed a very big commercial move, including obviously a lot of Saudi money going into it, didn't really work. So sometimes those things aren't necessarily the way forward. I mean, I do. And this has been one of the big contests over the last 10 or 15 years is market versus state.

[00:24:28] And obviously, live golf with significant state investment didn't work. And now what it appears to be that we're on the cusp of at live is private equity investments, supplementing state involvement. But if you look at, for example, China's great football revolution of 10 years ago, with very, very heavy state presence, it didn't work. And so I think, you know, to a certain extent, sport is in football and other sports, it's kind of feeling its way through this.

[00:24:57] But what I think increasingly has been happening over, certainly over the last 10, but I think probably over the last 20, 25, 30 years too, is that, you know, time and time again, markets and investors have served as the basis for improving the sport, certainly in terms of stadiums and the efficiency of ticket sales

[00:25:23] and the kind of revenues that are being made available for player signings, for example. And so, you know, at this point in contemporary economic history, I would say, is that neoliberalism and markets appear to be winning. And what I always find, and you probably already know this, is if you do any work inside, not just football, but sport more generally, what talks louder than almost anything else?

[00:25:52] It's not history or heritage or location or identity or family, it's money. And particularly when you're into this whole arena of sign the best players, because if you've got the best players, you'll play better. And if you play better, you might win the league. And if you win the league, you might get promoted or you might go to the Champions League. You know, the seductive appeal of money and the promise of money wins or trumps anything else that's not on our path. And to your point, if you've got those good players, people are going to pay more for the tickets to go and see those games.

[00:26:20] But is there also, so, I mean, we're seeing quite a few advances in the game of cricket as well. So the purists were horrified initially at the idea of one-day matches, let alone 2020. And, you know, now we're seeing quite a lot of various versions of 2020 being vamped up for younger audiences. So if the danger is that we need to spend money on football to try and make it sustainable,

[00:26:47] does it need just a bit more razzmatazz as well to try and make the game survive? So we get the younger crowds in. And is money needed to make that happen? Or is it just thinking more carefully about how the game's played? I love the late Sean Locke. He said we could make football more exciting by allowing two balls on the field at the same time. So go at each goal simultaneously. It's not a bad idea.

[00:27:11] Well, if you go back to the 1994 World Cup in the United States, obviously this summer we've had discussions about hydration breaks and quarters and halftime entertainment and whatever else. But back in 1994, there was a pretty serious discussion, which you may recall, about making the goals bigger. And the logic was that American audiences, you know, when having watched a nil-nil draw would just be switched off from the sport.

[00:27:40] But if you had bigger goals and, you know, kind of 10-10 draws, it would be much more entertaining. And no goalie. That's why cricket never took off there as well. It was just very, very slow and not really amounting to much. It ain't baseball. Cricket in the United States is a really interesting one. Because, of course, what you've now got is you've clearly got new formats which are faster and more dynamic, more engaging. But as you may know, the T20 World Cup a couple of years ago was held in the United States.

[00:28:06] You've got Indian diaspora communities, particularly in places like Silicon Valley. So you've got Sundar Pinchard, the CEO of Google, who's a huge cricket fan and was pivotal in taking the T20 to the United States. So, you know, I think cricket's really interesting because if I go back 20 years ago and I was trying to talk to my master's students about what is the future of cricket. Cricket seems to have kind of revolutionized.

[00:28:35] And, you know, we've got to tip our hats, I think, to the IPL in India for prompting this revolution. But this takes me to the kind of initial point or initial question about football. I think a lot of people across the world somehow tend to think that football is at the cutting edge of everything. And actually, it isn't. I think industrially, it's actually lagging some way behind other industrial sectors in terms of the innovativeness and dynamism of the decisions that are made within the sport.

[00:29:04] And I think also in terms of, if you like, the governance and format, it's actually a fairly slow moving and actually quite cumbersome sport in the way that it hasn't really adapted to the apparent demands, not just of fans, but of a changing world. So, you know, we mentioned cricket.

[00:29:25] But if you look at, for example, Formula One motor racing, which has gone from 0 to 60 in a matter of a decade, and partly that is because of Netflix and Drive to Survive. But I think also the new owners of Formula One have sought to, they've changed the rules, they've changed competition formats, they've tried to make it a more kind of equitable and egalitarian sport.

[00:29:48] And yet football seems to be still trundling along based on, you know, sets of rules and structures that were created late 19th, early 20th century. So what you're saying, Simon, is that we have to embrace that, you know, all the pearl clutching over Infantino. Get real, guys. You've got to move forward. You've got to accept that money is what makes the difference.

[00:30:09] And that's what the sport needs. And, you know, all this identification with either a nationality, I suppose, or a local club isn't really the way forward for the game. I'm a big book fan. And when I was younger, if you want to buy a book, go to a bookshop. But of course, there aren't any bookshops anymore because people weren't going to bookshops.

[00:30:31] And for that matter, people don't really read books too much, certainly in some markets across the world. So there are certain things that many of us hold dear that over the last 50 years have changed out of all proportion, out of all recognition. And some of them no longer exist. And yet I think there is something about football that many of us cling on to for whatever reason.

[00:30:56] We cling on to it. And I think that is actually detrimental to the long term well-being and health of the sport. And I mean, I'll say, Roger, I'll say, I think it was you, Roger, who said it. I think they're an element. Get real. Get real. You know, for most of us, the cars we drive, the telephones we use, the places we buy food, the things we do with our leisure time, where we go on holiday, everything has changed.

[00:31:25] And yet trundling along somewhere behind is football. And yet the World Cup is a major event. I don't know how many I've read, a figure of six billion engagements. So in other words, how many people have watched at least, you know, one game? So if you watched 10, you'd be 10 of those six billion. But still, these are massive numbers of people who get involved in the World Cup. And people find it exciting.

[00:31:49] And I just feel as though if a local club can't make money, given the level of support that there is for the sport, whether it's through dynamic pricing or whatever, they need to be able to turn to make a profit. So if they're not making enough in the stores, if they're not getting enough people into the games, they need to market better. They are a business. I just wonder why they can't do that without getting other investors on board,

[00:32:16] particularly investors who are not going to see that money going back to the people who support the sport. They're people who are going to try and make a profit from it for themselves. And that means that they either have to charge people more, which is fine if they're prepared to pay. And if they're not prepared to pay, then that approach isn't going to work for them, which means they then go to plan B, which is how can we cut costs? And if they're going to cut costs, that means they pay the players less or they consolidate clubs or they find some other ways of cutting costs.

[00:32:44] I mean, that doesn't look like a positive step forward to me. It is really interesting that, for example, in Walsall, the owner of Walsall 15, 20 years ago said, essentially, we're a local club for local people. We're never going to get to the Premier League and we're certainly never going to get to the Champions League. And that caused considerable consternation in West Midlands because a lot of Walsall fans were saying, well, hey, what about ambition? What about the dream?

[00:33:14] And I think that's an interesting thing is the ambition and the dream and the fantasy compared to the economic realities of things. But nevertheless, I think the owner of Walsall, it was actually quite a smart and sensible thing to say, which in terms of markets and the way markets function and products and brands, you have your position in the market. And I think Walsall has operated quite tidily, never reaching the Champions League, never winning the Premier League. He's lived up to his promise. Yeah, he's lived up to his promise.

[00:33:44] It's passed the Ron Seale test. It does what they are saying. But I think the other thing to keep in mind is, and again, a lot of people have this in mind that somehow football is this behemoth. And certainly the World Cup is a behemoth, but mostly football is not. Most football clubs, and for that matter, most football associations around the world are little more than small businesses.

[00:34:13] And they have the same challenges that other small businesses do, which is paying market rates, attracting talent, keeping that talent, having the professional approach that is needed to be successful, finding backing, finding funding and so forth. And certainly a lot of football clubs that I've been into, certainly lower down the league pyramid in England, they're just struggling to survive on a weekly basis. And they don't have the expertise. And so it is almost so.

[00:34:42] We need a new deal for football. If we love it so much and we want it to have a future, it does need a new deal. And that new deal, instead of Infantino charging like a bull at the gate with his private equity schemes, I think football in general needs to have a frank conversation with itself about what its long-term future is going to be. So, Simon, as we kind of draw this to a kind of conclusion, what you're saying is the dream, if that's what we're talking about, whether it's Middlesbrough or Walsall or wherever,

[00:35:13] get real, the dream isn't where it is at the moment for the future. It's economic reality. It's hard-edged neoliberalism to kind of get the thing working and competing in the world. Yeah, essentially. And I do think there's a separate debate still to be had about private equity. Because you alluded to it earlier, what do private equity investors want? Do they really care about anything other than money? And that's a very important conversation to have.

[00:35:42] But I do think for others amongst us, whether we're fans, diehard fans, casual fans, commercial partners, broadcasters, governors, even towns and cities where these institutions are based, we've just got to get real and have a frank conversation about what happens next.

[00:36:03] Because unless we have such conversations, you will see, we've already seen the creep of big money investors and some states successfully investing in clubs and institutions too. And yet for many of us, we somehow feel alienated and disenfranchised and threatened. And yet it's difficult to see. And just to say, there's no way a football regulator is addressing these issues.

[00:36:32] Because obviously English football now has a regulator. But that's kind of tinkering at the edges, I think, of much more fundamental decisions. Well, Simon, up the borough. And look, I started my broadcast career at Radio T, so I know that part of the world. But grew up in that part of the world. He covered their initial matches, I think, in 1870. I would be the worst football commentator in the world, I have to tell you that.

[00:37:01] But anyway, good to talk. And yeah, let's hope it gets sorted out. But the game is here for keeps, isn't it? I'm not sure. Wow. Okay. All right. Good to talk about it. Gosh. Okay. Interesting. Thank you. Thanks very much, Simon. Anyway, a debate's going to run and run, isn't it? Clearly. It will. Well, but yeah. Now, anyway, at least in Fantino, we're not going to throw him in prison. I feel like we should.

[00:37:27] Well, former heads of FIFA have certainly been threatened with it, if you may remember the corruption scandal. Well, let's hope not, because there's no room left in prison. That's the... There isn't. I mean, we've been teetering at the edge, haven't we, in the UK? And in fact, of course, one of the first things that the new Labour government did was let a whole load of people go, because there just wasn't... Well, they got to. Find some space. Yeah. And it's become a real political hot potato, as we know.

[00:37:53] But there's some interesting situation, because we, as a country, we are much more likely to imprison people. We imprison a higher proportion of the population than any comparable country in Europe. In Europe, I was going to say, yeah. The United States, of course. No, not the United States. The United States by proportion is way higher, isn't it? That's a... Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy there. But, you know, we imprison more people proportionally than France or Germany or Italy. And why do we do it?

[00:38:21] And the other interesting thing which has come up is that over the last decade or so, sentences for the same crimes have gone up as well. So we're imprisoning more people for longer, which is hence the problem. Because of the whole rage thing, isn't it? You know, the politicians have said we're going to get tough on crime. And then that has meant that they get involved in putting minimum sentences on, that judges have to adhere to. So there's a lot going on. So we've got a lot to learn from the rest of Europe, Ben, in that case, haven't we?

[00:38:49] Or they've got a lot to learn a lot from us. Maybe they're too lenient. Look more people up. Yeah, exactly. Well, it could argue that. But then they have to build more prison. I mean, it's a really difficult one. And actually, I mean, the central question, as always, is, you know, when you let people out, have you done anything to make it less likely that they'll do anything in the future? I mean, the only argument for prison in some ways is for that period of time they're in prison. Yeah. They aren't on the streets doing the crime. But anyway, we can explore all this and the ideas behind it when we next talk. Yeah.

[00:39:18] And I feel like we should do it next week. How does that sound to you? Why not? Hang on. Let me look. Yeah. No, no. That'll work. Yeah. Absolutely. In that case, we'll do it next week on the Y-Curve. We'll see you then. The Y. Curve. The Y-Curve.