Tom Brady must get bored easily. After America’s superstar quarterback retired (for a second time) in March, he invested in a Las Vegas women’s basketball team, sorted out his divorce, bought a racing boat team with Rafael Nadal and, this summer, became a minority owner of Birmingham City. A few weeks ago, it was announced that he’d had a meaningful chat with Wayne Rooney, the club’s new manager. ‘It’s important for the players to see Tom Brady have an involvement. It’s very clear that Tom is fully involved in the club’ said Rooney, clearly aware that fans might be sceptical.
Brady is just one of several American celebrities who have invested in British football over the past few years. Although the celebs may be serious converts to football, most are too poor to buy a top club outright. Instead they are lured into partnerships with American hedge funds with promises of being able to do good deeds in the ‘local community’ and, ultimately, indulging their saviour complexes in vowing to save a struggling club. The set up is perfect for celebrities who hold no real stake in the club but can still appear as the face of the takeover. For them club ownership is a hobby, but for the financial backers it is a pure money making exercise, sometimes at the expense of fans.
Most celebrity investors want to emulate the Wrexham Football Club’s recent successes. Wrexham, the third oldest football club in the world, was wallowing in football’s fifth tier until Hollywood’s Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney stepped in and bought the team in its entirety two years ago. New sponsorship deals were signed using the duo’s celeb profiles and a successful documentary increased revenues, allowing the club to buy better players. The club was promoted back into the football league last season and enjoys an international profile on par with some top flight clubs. Tom Brady was following the story more closely than most. ‘The thrill of victory,’ he said after Wrexham’s promotion game. It was no surprise that just three months after Wrexham’s success, he emerged as Birmingham City’s new minority owner.
But Brady is powerless to mimic Wrexham’s revival in Birmingham. He doesn’t own the club outright so is subservient to the main shareholder, a hedge fund run by a US financier called Tom Wagner. Brady has been installed as the chairman of the advisory board where he was given the Sisyphean task of making the club ‘a respected leader in nutrition, health, wellness and recovery across the world of football.’ Under no circumstances, Wagner says, will Brady be used for ‘promotional purposes’. It was the first lie of the new regime and an unnecessary one. Wagner knows Brady’s profile will raise the club’s attraction in lucrative foreign markets, particularly America. The pair did the same last October when they bought a minor American sports team. During that takeover Wagner was clear: ‘Tom has a pretty gigantic media reach and I think his involvement should draw substantial interest to the league.’
The overall project in Birmingham is sound: Wagner has promised to invest in the stadium and return the club to sensible financial management. But it’s a bad sign that the American corporates are already skirting around basic truths with the fans.
Bournemouth’s new owners have a similar setup to Wagner and Brady, but it’s more transparent. The Premier League club was bought by the billionaire American sports investor Bill Foley with Hollywood A-Lister Michael B. Jordan as his co-investor partner. Self-described ‘dictator’ Foley has already told his junior partners, ‘there is nothing more limiting than being a limiting partner of Bill Foley.’ Even the coaching staff say it as it is: ‘Jordan’s involved in drumming up the interest and trying to create more support.’ There’s little else to it. The relationship between most football fans and owners is fundamentally a cynical one. The owner is, in essence, the steward of the club, investing to improve the team’s chance of success in order to raise value and withdraw some profits during years of plenty, all while under constant scrutiny from fans.
It’s a bad sign that the American corporates are already skirting around basic truths with the fans
Burnley’s fanbase has experienced the ups and downs of this relationship over the past three seasons. The club’s American hedge fund owners initially faced distrust from fans when they took over three years ago. It was the first time the team had been owned by a non-local businessman in the club’s 140-year history. The disillusionment only grew after the club was relegated from the Premier League during the new owners’ second year in control. However, they invested in some promising players and brought in an even more promising manager and were promoted the following season. Now some two-thirds of Burnley fans have more faith in the owners than they had just after the takeover.
The Burnley owners are capitalising on last year’s success. Like Wrexham, they commissioned a documentary, Mission to Burnley, which managed to film their promotion season. They’ve also followed the trend of opening the club to US celebrity investment. The new minority owners are a mix of seven American sports stars and social media types including the YouTube ‘sports and comedy group’ Dude Perfect. The latter investors may have left some Burnley fans a bit bemused. After all, why are people who make videos about throwing a ping pong ball into a cup from far away minority owners of such a historic club? Dude Perfect has more than 60 million followers and 16 billion views on social media, mostly from a teenage audience, making them the second largest sporting channel on the website. Burnley’s ownership see a small portion of these fans as a potential global fanbase which could grow the club’s value. The YouTube stars were in turn supposedly attracted to the club by the prospect of the documentary which they say ‘captures [the owner’s] vision’. Just like Brady, they want to be part of the future mythology of a team. But what will happen to their enthusiasm for ‘the community’ and ‘exciting football club’ if the club suffers another relegation? They’ll probably go back to YouTube and forget Burnley and its dedicated fanbase.
Most US takeovers don’t bother with the façade of celebrity investment. At first glance Everton’s prospective new owners are another identikit US private equity firm called 777 Partners. However they’ve been rather outspoken over their intentions for developing the club, obsessing over the ‘hyper commercialisation’ of football and want to sell everything from hot dogs and beers to insurance to fans. Talk of ‘assets’ instead of players, ‘monetisation’ instead of success and ‘customers’ over fans may fill supporters with dread, but the brazen business talk is strangely refreshing. If a club’s value and revenues are derived from competition winnings and the subsequent increased television rights, then an owner’s competence is all that matters. Everton’s outgoing owner Farhad Moshiri might lament the end of the ‘days of a benefactor owner’ but he and his board were despised by fans for their abysmal management of the club which has only just survived back-to-back relegation scares.
It’s the same across the rest of the Premier League. Some 90% of Newcastle supporters’ trust members were in favour selling the club to the Saudi government if it meant getting rid of their ex-owner, the retail tycoon Mike Ashley who was reluctant to buy expensive players. Manchester fans would gladly welcome Qatari ownership over the current mismanagement of the Glazer family. As long as the team is performing well and the club’s finances are stable, most fans don’t care who owns their club and care even less about any celebrity mascot brought in to try and placate them. In the end it’s hedge funds who will keep the rewards. The celebrities will move onto some other short-lived passion project, leaving the clubs off none the better and the fans none the wiser.
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