American money and Premier League power: How Covid sparked football’s open conflict | OneFootball

It was the call that senior football figures had been dreading, but knew was inevitable. Most almost smile ruefully now about remembering where they were when told. On Friday 13 March 2020, it was confirmed that Mikel Arteta became the English game’s first major figure to suffer from Covid-19. This was it, as a slow creep suddenly became abrupt upheaval.

What stands out for club officials reflecting now is the crippling uncertainty, the sheer speed of events, and the need for instant, massive decisions. The initial Covid-19 shutdown, which has its fifth anniversary this week, wasn’t just head-spinning but like a parallel reality. That’s fitting, since it changed the entire football world, and continues to have impact.

The moment of realisation with Arteta is telling. After Arsenal’s Europa League elimination to Olympiakos, it quickly became evident that the Basque had symptoms consistent with the virus. One obvious problem was that testing wasn’t immediate at that point, and Arsenal instantly had to deal with a range of other potential complications. The Premier League had to quickly be told that Arsenal couldn’t possibly travel to Manchester City that weekend, because the entire football staff might have been exposed.

That match was off, triggering a chain reaction that was itself almost viral. Portsmouth had hosted Arsenal in the FA Cup the week before, causing concern at Accrington Stanley about their own trip to Fratton Park. The growing feeling through the pyramid was that many clubs were going to refuse to play. The controversy over the Cheltenham Festival – which knowingly went ahead on 10-13 March as the virus spread – also weighed over their thinking. Callum Hudson-Odoi’s positive test at Chelsea then left English football no choice. Competitions had to be postponed.

“Everything moved very fast but my overriding memory is a feeling of calm,” EFL chair Rick Parry says. “We had to make rapid decisions and make them work.”

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Football shut down as Covid-19 spread in the spring of 2020 (Getty Images)

What is most interesting now, and touches on wider themes, is that these first decisions went against initial government guidance. As late as the Thursday of that Olympiakos match, the Conservative administration wanted to carry on. The government believed there was enough money in the game and that the Premier League had to help the lower leagues – a familiar argument.

That stance itself abruptly changed when a Cobra meeting of senior government officials was convened the same day, and the leading English football bodies were told on a direct call that the situation on full attendances at stadiums may have been “misread”. Once this information came out, it meant football showcased the first sign that government policy was about to drastically change away from “herd immunity”. The Arsenal game may have felt utterly trivial next to so many deaths, but it reflected significant societal developments.

What is now much more relevant to football itself, however, is how the Covid-19 shutdown is still having significant impact on the sport.

How couldn’t it, given the sheer shock of what was happening? The speed of change was such that, on 10 March, the World Health Organisation (WHO) was telling Uefa not to call it a “pandemic”. The very next day, it said the opposite. That news broke as fans descended on Anfield for Liverpool’s Champions League match against Atletico Madrid.

Football, like society, went from watching this virus gradually spread around the planet to suddenly seeing it affect next door. One executive at an Italian club was shocked when he called a Premier League counterpart only to be told they were all still in the office, having taken public transport. By then, Atalanta had hosted Valencia in the Champions League, a fixture that the mayor of Bergamo described as a “biological bomb”. The city subsequently became Europe’s epicentre. England soon had its own equivalent in that Liverpool-Atleti match. Diego Costa briefly caused controversy by pretending to cough on reporters in the mixed zone.

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Diego Costa caused alarm when he pretended to cough on reporters (Getty Images)

Criticism of the striker was so severe because everyone was on edge. Underneath the threat to public safety, senior executives were talking about an “existential threat” to football. Its raison d’etre, playing games, was to be cut off.

Uefa eventually took a unilateral decision to suspend matches at an emergency meeting on 17 March, but most of the domestic leagues had already acted. The will was to pause and try and get games back on as soon as possible in order to complete seasons and fulfil broadcasting contracts. That was at least until it became obvious the stop was going to have to be indefinite.

That briefly brought an admirable period of collective spirit and collaboration. Fifa paused their planned expansion of the Club World Cup to allow space in the calendar, with Uefa moving their men’s and women’s European Championships by a year each so as to give the club competitions breathing space. Uefa president Alexander Ceferin is now praised for showing leadership through, especially how the federation dipped into their own reserves to help national associations. He would soon need to show even more.

Executives were by then coming up with all sorts of ideas to stage games, right up to isolated camps in the midlands, as ‘Project Restart’ gradually took form. Club staff realised they now had to get players fit, leading to the anachronistic sight of international stars working out in local parks. Studies were commissioned by companies like StatSports, who supply GPS vests, on key details like how long close-contact periods between duelling players lasted (three seconds) to gauge the risk of the virus spreading during a match.

“What we saw was a real degree of unity and a sense of clubs pulling together,” Parry says.

That was certainly the case in the lower divisions, but significantly tapered the higher you went up.

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Football gradually allowed fans back to games (PA)

Controversies about wealthy clubs availing of government furlough schemes foreshadowed so much of the infighting to come. Once ‘Restart’ planning got under way, Manchester United’s then executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward couldn’t help remark on the difference to American sport when he rang club co-owner Joel Glazer. The NFL staged two short meetings, one to sort logistics, one for the broadcasting deals. All done.

Two months later, the Premier League was still locked in 20 hours of talks a week. Everyone had a different agenda. Liverpool wanted to complete their first title in 30 years. The bottom six – with Aston Villa’s Christian Purslow, West Ham’s Karren Brady and Brighton’s Paul Barber among the most prominent voices – didn’t feel it fair they might be relegated under changed circumstances.

The Premier League had almost reached an absurd point where it was so valuable to stay in that its games might not be played. “Null and void” became one of the phrases of the time. This controversy was complemented by more unified resistance to Saudi Arabia’s attempt to buy Newcastle United, a process that went on far longer than Covid restrictions.

Football eventually found a way. Germany went first, making history. That prompted a memorable comment from then Tottenham Hotspur manager Jose Mourinho, during one Premier League meeting where rival coaches were expressing concerns. “If you don’t want to play, stay home and watch the Bundesliga!” The Premier League eventually followed with games you couldn’t but watch, due to the fact a unique broadcasting agreement ensured it was on television all the time. The Champions League was then completed with a unique last eight self-contained in Lisbon. That got some executives thinking.

For many senior sources, these developments reflect some of the main legacies of the pandemic for football: more individualism and opportunism.

As one chief executive confides, the financial urgency was such that clubs just had to think about themselves. That wasn’t universal, as illustrated by Port Vale’s Carol Shanahan foregoing the chance of promotion by considering the game’s wider interests.

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Ground staff disinfect St James' Park during the 2020-21 season (Getty Images)

The top end still dictates so much. That was never clearer than with the first major consequence of the initial lockdown: the Super League. The shuddering halt had exposed major fissures in the game. Shocked by lost revenues, and facing growing debts, Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus pushed forward on their grand project. Various sources describe it as “a move of desperation more than greed”, possibly accentuated by the fact these executives were temporarily cut off from the real football world of fans. That is perhaps why they so badly misread the landscape. The Super League was defeated, and Ceferin again displayed admirable leadership.

Except, something curious then happened. Although Uefa had essentially been given a mandate to bring the sport in an opposite direction, they doubled down in the same direction. The new Champions League, commonly seen as a Super League compromise, was agreed upon. A new leadership at the European Club Association had used the crisis to strengthen its position, with Qatar’s Nasser Al Khelaifi named new chairman after the resignation of key Super League figures. That alone deepened the sense of a game being increasingly pulled between the twin poles of the Gulf and the United States.

The Premier League’s own leading American ownerships had been willing partners in the Super League, but soon saw opportunity where there had been defeat. With all of their major continental rivals still struggling financially, and European football in recession from €7bn losses, the English clubs used their immense broadcasting revenues to really maximise a financial advantage. They spent over a billion in the summer of 2021 alone, when continental counterparts could spend nothing.

The widespread view is that this was the moment the Premier League really pulled away from the rest, potentially to a financial position that could never be caught.

That was in turn to only take US influence to another level. A new sphere of investor realised the unique power of the game, especially in terms of the long-term cash flows of broadcasting contracts that few sectors could match. As one executive put it, “you couldn’t go to a family funeral but there was Fulham against West Brom”. It showed the industry was “bulletproof”, making it a safe place to put money amid lower interest rates. This was also as club values had depressed. There was opportunity, as illustrated by one figure.

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The Premier League has grown into an unrivalled financial powerhouse (Action Images via Reuters)

In 2018, private equity and similar “institutional money” in Europe’s five major leagues was at a mere €66.7m. By 2022, it was €4.9bn, with the Chelsea takeover the biggest move. Private equity had even got its hooks into fan-owned clubs like Barcelona and Real Madrid through various commercial deals.

With that kind of money swirling around, and Saudi Arabia accelerating their own plans, it was little wonder there was increased jostling for prominence.

The collective spirit gave way to the greatest political crises the game has seen. Fifa and Uefa are now in a cold war, with proxy battles being fought through competition expansions. That has caused further chaos with the calendar, which was already feeling the stress from the big crunch after the Covid break. This has really been the worst possible time for more fixtures, but we got them. Various stakeholders have meanwhile sought to openly challenge the authority of such regulators through a series of legal cases. It is difficult for them to complain when they have become active players in the race, rather than true regulators.

It is why everyone is watching what happens with England’s independent football regulator with interest, as the idea may spread. That could bring so much full circle since it was an idea which came out of the Super League, which came out of the fissures opened by lockdown. So many of these debates are still going.

The establishment of the independent regulator is going to mark a historic shift, but nothing like the pandemic itself.