The difference in global football, or soccer from the United States perspective, is that most of the global leagues that play soccer have promotion and relegation. There’s this possibility of moving up a division or down a division, and that has a lot of implications for the revenue model.
There’s a risk associated with it that isn’t in the United States. I like to think that the United States is a capitalist economy with a socialist sports ban, whereas with European soccer, and around the globe for that matter, they tend to have a more socialistic economic environment, but also a very capitalistic methodology for promotion and relegation.
The primary risk in European football is moving down into a lower league and therefore not having access to the same revenue sources and sponsorship. That said, the power teams are forced to really buy players and bring the strongest team to the field so that they don’t get relegated. That in itself is problematic for ownership and problematic for the leagues because they have to be concerned that teams don’t overspend to forestall the possibility of relegation. The leagues, like the European Premier League and many of the other lesser leagues, have this concept of financial fair play, where you’re not allowed to overspend in pursuit of wins and losses to prevent you from being relegated.
Franchises tend to be owned, usually, by a principal owner. That’s one person who, for the most part, leads something of a larger group. That’s not always the case, but in the United States and the rest of the world nowadays, most ownerships look pretty much the same. The interesting thing about them, though, is that they’re much more international wherever you go around the world. They’re different owners from different countries, stretching across the world. So sports, which we used to pay more attention to on a local level than global, are now becoming much more global overall.
In a way, it has almost flipped in the sense that the global sports impact has now reached the local level. We can look at some examples, like Chelsea Football Club, which has a Russian billionaire as its owner, in the heart of London, and is one of the most popular clubs on the planet. And its reach goes everywhere around the world, including, increasingly, the United States. It extends even as far as New York City, where it has certain partnerships, not only in business, but also certainly in government and in the nonprofit world. So, as you can see, the reach that it has goes quite a long way.
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