This is essentially a legal argument, most pertinently it neglects to mention that the MLS had opposed league matches from other countries being played on US soil - that is why Relevent went to court (with several cases) in the US so they could promote such games. It also neglects to mention that FIFA appeared in court to support the MLS stance. That knowledge makes the argument somewhat weasely and revisionist.

from The Athletic

A La Liga game in Miami is a grim prospect, but it’s not FIFA’s job to stop it
https://archive.ph/WvXti

Chester Perry wrote: ↑

Mon Apr 15, 2024 10:15 am

FIFA are indeed considering changes to their statues re league games out of the leagues national domain, but as The Financial Times points out - there are other hurdles that may be a bit more complex, particularly for Premier League clubs

League matches in America? Not so fast
https://archive.ph/95k0c

Financialt Times - Broadcast fees.png

Chart showing that domestic TV revenues for football’s big five leagues have peaked, but overseas rights are propelling the Premier League further ahead

The end of a dispute going back six years has reignited the possibility that Europe’s big football leagues could one day play official matches in America, in what could be a transformative commercial goal for the sport.

Fifa said this week that it would consider “changes” to policies that prevent leagues and clubs playing league games outside of their home territories.

The statement followed an agreement to resolve a legal battle with Relevent Sports. The US promoter, which is owned by billionaire Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross and led by chief executive Daniel Sillman, had challenged the world governing body over its ban.

North America has become more important to European football since Fifa stood in the way of Relevent’s attempts to host a La Liga clash between FC Barcelona and Girona in Miami in 2019. Meanwhile, Fifa is ramping up preparations for the 2026 World Cup, which is set to take place in Canada, Mexico and the US.

In turn, America has warmed to football. Lionel Messi wows crowds with his performances for Inter Miami while US investors have poured capital into European football teams.

More importantly, the Premier League and La Liga are making more money than ever in North America thanks to lucrative broadcasting deals.

Somehow, top English and Spanish clubs have signed multibillion dollar media rights deals without playing any games of serious consequence in the region.

Now the question is what could be achieved if the best English and Spanish clubs could play the occasional official match across the pond.

But don’t expect a quick answer. There’s a difference between Fifa changing its stance and the reality of convincing fans and politicians of the merits of going abroad.

La Liga is familiar with the debate. Players and the Spanish football federation raised concerns last time round. Meanwhile, Premier League chief Richard Masters last summer played down the prospect of playing competitive matches in the US.

In any case, the English top flight has learned about both sides of UK government power in the years since Relevent launched its case against Fifa.

The league welcomed the government’s objections to the breakaway European Super League. More recently, however, Masters has warned that UK plans to introduce an independent football regulator could undermine the competition’s global dominance.

Against that backdrop, it would take a brave league to tell fans that clubs can head off to America instead of holding matches in front of their home crowds.

For Relevent, these circumstances mean that winning over Fifa is just the first step to the ultimate dream.

This now all seems done and dusted and as with yesterday's story it has more to do with financiers and legal teams than with the spirit of Football's competition rules. Don't be surprised to see La Liga games there next season (and possibly also in the middle east) and it is certain that Champions League games (most probably the final - will be played there before the decade is out

from The Guardian

Relevent, US Soccer settlement clears way for European league games in US
Relevent owns commercial rights for Uefa competitions
Fifa, a former defendant, studying changes to policy
https://www.theguardian.com/football/20 ... ames-in-us
https://archive.ph/wYs0n

Chester Perry wrote: ↑

Tue Apr 09, 2024 4:15 pm

It has been quite a while since I have posted anything about this, but the legal cases keep on going. However we have finally seen a change - it appears from an out of court agreement that FIFA have been persuaded to consider the rule about in season league games being played in alternative countries that have their own leagues. We can only assume that FIFA now see some $$ signs in this for themselves.

from The Athletic

FIFA reaches agreement in lawsuit seeking to allow domestic club games in foreign countries
https://archive.ph/WU7QN

FIFA are indeed considering changes to their statues re league games out of the leagues national domain, but as The Financial Times points out - there are other hurdles that may be a bit more complex, particularly for Premier League clubs

League matches in America? Not so fast
https://archive.ph/95k0c
Chart showing that domestic TV revenues for football’s big five leagues have peaked, but overseas rights are propelling the Premier League further ahead

The end of a dispute going back six years has reignited the possibility that Europe’s big football leagues could one day play official matches in America, in what could be a transformative commercial goal for the sport.

Fifa said this week that it would consider “changes” to policies that prevent leagues and clubs playing league games outside of their home territories.

The statement followed an agreement to resolve a legal battle with Relevent Sports. The US promoter, which is owned by billionaire Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross and led by chief executive Daniel Sillman, had challenged the world governing body over its ban.

North America has become more important to European football since Fifa stood in the way of Relevent’s attempts to host a La Liga clash between FC Barcelona and Girona in Miami in 2019. Meanwhile, Fifa is ramping up preparations for the 2026 World Cup, which is set to take place in Canada, Mexico and the US.

In turn, America has warmed to football. Lionel Messi wows crowds with his performances for Inter Miami while US investors have poured capital into European football teams.

More importantly, the Premier League and La Liga are making more money than ever in North America thanks to lucrative broadcasting deals.

Somehow, top English and Spanish clubs have signed multibillion dollar media rights deals without playing any games of serious consequence in the region.

Now the question is what could be achieved if the best English and Spanish clubs could play the occasional official match across the pond.

But don’t expect a quick answer. There’s a difference between Fifa changing its stance and the reality of convincing fans and politicians of the merits of going abroad.

La Liga is familiar with the debate. Players and the Spanish football federation raised concerns last time round. Meanwhile, Premier League chief Richard Masters last summer played down the prospect of playing competitive matches in the US.

In any case, the English top flight has learned about both sides of UK government power in the years since Relevent launched its case against Fifa.

The league welcomed the government’s objections to the breakaway European Super League. More recently, however, Masters has warned that UK plans to introduce an independent football regulator could undermine the competition’s global dominance.

Against that backdrop, it would take a brave league to tell fans that clubs can head off to America instead of holding matches in front of their home crowds.

For Relevent, these circumstances mean that winning over Fifa is just the first step to the ultimate dream.

Chester Perry wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 23, 2021 1:50 am

It is a court case (or more strictly a series of court cases that have been running for quite a while now where by Relevent of the summer ICC tournament/friendlies has tried to get legal sanction to stage in season none American League (La Liga was the main option) games on American soil. this week they lost another round - from Reuters - it is a slightly confusing read

FIFA, U.S. Soccer win dismissal of promoter's antitrust lawsuit in New York
Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK, July 20 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Tuesday dismissed a sports promotion company's antitrust lawsuit accusing soccer's world governing body FIFA and the U.S. Soccer Federation of blocking foreign clubs and leagues from staging competitive matches in the United States.

U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni in Manhattan said Relevent Sports LLC failed to show an illegal conspiracy to restrict where teams play, despite a 2018 FIFA policy against official matches outside teams' home territories.

Caproni said that even absent a formal "meeting of the minds" there were "obvious rational reasons" for U.S. Soccer to honor the ban, including the prospect that FIFA might otherwise exclude U.S. men's soccer players and teams from the World Cup.

She also rejected New York-based Relevent's "conclusory" claim that U.S. Soccer and Major League Soccer pushed FIFA for the ban.

"In short, plaintiff's amended complaint is devoid of any factual allegations to support the inference that the defendants in this case agreed with anyone, let alone with all 210 other National Associations and countless leagues and teams, to do anything, including to adhere to the policy," Caproni wrote.

Lawyers for Relevent did not immediately respond to requests for comment. FIFA, U.S. Soccer and their respective lawyers did not immediately respond to similar requests.

Relevent, which organizes the International Champions Cup, wanted to arrange regular season games in the United States from leagues such as Spain's La Liga, its partner in a joint venture.

Some European and South American teams play "friendly" matches in the United States, but not regular season matches.

Caproni gave Relevent until July 30 to decide whether it wants to arbitrate a separate claim against U.S. Soccer for interfering with its business.

It has been quite a while since I have posted anything about this, but the legal cases keep on going. However we have finally seen a change - it appears from an out of court agreement that FIFA have been persuaded to consider the rule about in season league games being played in alternative countries that have their own leagues. We can only assume that FIFA now see some $$ signs in this for themselves.

from The Athletic

FIFA reaches agreement in lawsuit seeking to allow domestic club games in foreign countries
https://archive.ph/WU7QN

I have been posting about American group Relevant and their ambitions in football for years now, though it has been a while since I last posted about them - it seems they feel a need to remind everyone about their existence hence this piece in the Financial Times - though the message doesn't really seem to have changed

Relevent Sports, the billionaire’s media group selling football to America
Company backed by Stephen Ross wants to take advantage of international gold rush in the sport
https://archive.is/1REXi

This is possibly the longest single episode from Unofficial Partner yet - and also one of the most interesting - there is an enormous amount of detail in it so it requires a lot of concentration

UP318 ReThinking Sport: Inside the European Club Association
https://www.unofficialpartner.com/podca ... ssociation

the blurb

Today's guest sits at the epicentre of the football business.

Charlie Marshall is the CEO of The European Club Association (ECA), the hugely influential organisation, which is the only group officially recognised by both UEFA and FIFA as the sole, independent body for football clubs at European level.

We talk about the big issues facing the game in the post-Super League era, as ECA seeks to balance the sometimes conflicting objectives of its constituency of members, from the biggest clubs in the world to some of Europe's minnows and everyone in between.

Topics covered include:

- The changing format and access to Uefa club competitions
- The likely impact of new financial regulations
- The rules on multi club ownership
- The future of the women's game
- Player release for national team competitions
- The commercial management of competitions and revenue distribution among clubs.

Last year, Uefa and the ECA signed a further letter of intent ahead of the creation of a new joint venture to oversee the commercial management of Uefa club competitions.

Uefa Club Competitions SA (UCCSA) oversaw a global agency tender process that led to the Team Marketing agency retaining the mandate to sell broadcast, sponsorship and licensing rights to Uefa club competitions from 2024-25 to 2026-27. The mandate excluded US broadcast rights, which are being sold by the Relevent Sports Group agency over the same period in a deal worth a minimum guarantee of $250m (€260m) per year.

UCCSA is now considering whether to take the commercial rights sales in house from 2027-28 onwards, a process overseen by ECA chair Nasser Al-Khelaifi, who is also chairman of Qatar Sports Investments (QSi) sovereign wealth fund , chair of BeIN Sports, the Qatar based broadcaster, and President of French club PSG.

The fight over who controls European Football is not just being fought out in Europe or European Courts, and as always there are others wanting a share for themselves - from the New York Times

https://archive.ph/9WxIv#selection-297.0-751.171

Super League Bitterness, Now Playing in a New York Court
A lawsuit filed by an American soccer entrepreneur says the head of European soccer declared “war” on him for working with three top soccer teams.

By Tariq Panja - April 15, 2022 - Updated 12:58 p.m. ET

It has been a year since the European Super League was born and collapsed in a two-day soccer supernova of angry statements, legal threats and bad blood. But the project’s repercussions are far from over.

In a court filing this week in New York, a prominent American entrepreneur accused the president of European soccer’s governing body of “declaring war” on him to prevent him from organizing a series of exhibition games in North America featuring three teams — Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus — who remain committed to the idea of a breakaway European league.

The exchange between the promoter, Charlie Stillitano, and the president, Aleksander Ceferin, emerged as part of Stillitano’s employment dispute with Relevent Sports, an events and marketing company owned by the billionaire Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross.

Stillitano had been Relevent’s executive chairman until his departure last spring, when he left the company amid a dispute about a pandemic-related pay cut and a noncompete clause that Relevent had demanded.

In his lawsuit, Stillitano and his lawyers offered details of a text message he received in which they said Ceferin warned Stillitano that working with the three teams would effectively render him an opponent of UEFA, the governing body for European soccer that Ceferin leads.

The message, Stillitano said, came after he had texted Ceferin telling him that Relevent, which for a decade under Stillitano’s leadership had organized exhibition tournaments and games for top European clubs, had forbade him from working with any of the event company’s former clients. Stillitano asked Ceferin, whose organization is part of a partnership with Relevent, for a meeting, telling him that several teams “including the three that have caused issues with UEFA” had approached him to arrange games.

Those teams remain a toxic subject for many European soccer leaders. Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus have sued UEFA in Spain over the Super League failure — an action that forced UEFA to suspend disciplinary actions against the teams — and they are also trying to persuade European regulators that UEFA is abusing its monopoly position to block their efforts.

The implications of the court rulings could lead to a significant change in the decades-long organization of soccer in Europe, and to new legal fights: UEFA has insisted it will resume its efforts to punish the clubs once it has the legal right do so.

Ceferin reminded Stillitano of that in his reply.

“I have heard about your ‘business’ with the three clubs,” Ceferin said in the text message, which was included in Stillitano’s lawsuit. “Those clubs didn’t ‘cause issues with UEFA.’ They tried to destroy UEFA, football and me personally. It’s a shame that you don’t understand it. The fact that you work with them means that me, UEFA or anyone I can have influence on will not have any business or private relation with you until you’re on the other side.”

Stillitano’s lawyers described Ceferin’s message as “threatening.”

“It became clear that Ceferin and UEFA — and by extension their new partner, Relevent — were declaring war on Stillitano for considering an affiliation with the three teams,” the lawyers wrote.

UEFA recently negotiated a contract with Relevent, picking the company as a commercial partner to sell broadcast rights to competitions like the Champions League in North America. The organizations are also discussing the possibility of Relevent’s arranging an off-season competition that would be endorsed by UEFA.

In an interview on Friday, Ceferin said he was not interested in whether or not Stillitano worked with the three clubs. But the mere idea that he would, Ceferin said, was enough to end their relationship.

“When I realized that he is actually cooperating with them at the same time I decided to finish any relationship with him,” Ceferin said. He was more angered, he said, that a private text message had been disclosed in a public filing. “I never spoke with anyone about this because I have more important things to deal with than dealing with Stillitano,” Ceferin said. “By using the private correspondence publicly, Stillitano showed what his moral values are.”

The case is the latest example of ongoing bad blood between UEFA and the three teams, who are among the wealthiest and most powerful in world soccer, and the peripheral damage that the Super League fight continues to cause. It has already destroyed the once-close relationship between Ceferin and the Juventus president Andrea Agnelli; the men have not spoken since last year, even though Ceferin is godfather to Agnelli’s youngest child. Now it is Stillitano who has been cut off.

For years, Stillitano moved easily among European soccer’s elite, building Relevent’s soccer business by using connections and friendships to arrange matches for top teams, strike multimillion-dollar deals and rub shoulders with legendary players and coaches. But he has for months been embroiled in a dispute with the company over payments and conditions related to his departure last May.

Stillitano contends that Relevent owes him about $1 million in salary and severance payments. Relevent has countered that it ended the payments only after Stillitano breached terms of a noncompete agreement by contacting its clients.

According to the lawsuit, Relevent had been paying Stillitano $650,000 a year until the pandemic, when, citing reduced revenues, it moved to reduce his base pay to $200,000. The company said Stillitano agreed to the reduction; Stillitano’s filing contends the pay cut was actually a deferment, and that he would be repaid at a later date.

But after Stillitano disputed the deferment, his relationship with the company deteriorated to the point that Relevent terminated his contract in May.

Stillitano had little choice but to find new work after that, his lawyers argued. He was “not a wealthy man,” they wrote in the filing, and was therefore required to work.

It is a court case (or more strictly a series of court cases that have been running for quite a while now where by Relevent of the summer ICC tournament/friendlies has tried to get legal sanction to stage in season none American League (La Liga was the main option) games on American soil. this week they lost another round - from Reuters - it is a slightly confusing read

FIFA, U.S. Soccer win dismissal of promoter's antitrust lawsuit in New York
Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK, July 20 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Tuesday dismissed a sports promotion company's antitrust lawsuit accusing soccer's world governing body FIFA and the U.S. Soccer Federation of blocking foreign clubs and leagues from staging competitive matches in the United States.

U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni in Manhattan said Relevent Sports LLC failed to show an illegal conspiracy to restrict where teams play, despite a 2018 FIFA policy against official matches outside teams' home territories.

Caproni said that even absent a formal "meeting of the minds" there were "obvious rational reasons" for U.S. Soccer to honor the ban, including the prospect that FIFA might otherwise exclude U.S. men's soccer players and teams from the World Cup.

She also rejected New York-based Relevent's "conclusory" claim that U.S. Soccer and Major League Soccer pushed FIFA for the ban.

"In short, plaintiff's amended complaint is devoid of any factual allegations to support the inference that the defendants in this case agreed with anyone, let alone with all 210 other National Associations and countless leagues and teams, to do anything, including to adhere to the policy," Caproni wrote.

Lawyers for Relevent did not immediately respond to requests for comment. FIFA, U.S. Soccer and their respective lawyers did not immediately respond to similar requests.

Relevent, which organizes the International Champions Cup, wanted to arrange regular season games in the United States from leagues such as Spain's La Liga, its partner in a joint venture.

Some European and South American teams play "friendly" matches in the United States, but not regular season matches.

Caproni gave Relevent until July 30 to decide whether it wants to arbitrate a separate claim against U.S. Soccer for interfering with its business.

Meanwhile the long running divisions in the running of the Spanish game have come to the fore again as their FA (RFEF) argues for changes that suit UEFA and FIFA, including a reduction in the number of clubs (remember UEFA want 18 by 2024/25 to sit with their expanded Champions League, France have gone with, Italy is voting on it later this year and Germany already has it - La Liga and the Premier League are fighting it)

LaLiga hits back at Rubiales’ ‘irresponsible’ reform claims
SportBusiness Staff
July 15, 2021

LaLiga, the organising body of the top two divisions of Spanish club football, has rejected claims from Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) president Luis Rubiales that it should seek to enact reforms such as fewer match days and hosting games at neutral venues.

Rubiales, speaking at a Desayunos de Europa Press gathering, said that LaLiga needed to move with the times, adding he would seek talks in the coming days with his counterpart Javier Tebas. “We have changed the format of many competitions and the result is there,” Rubiales said.

“With respect, it is necessary to propose that there be fewer (match)days, there be more spectacle. You have to invent and capture the attention of the youngest with emotion.”

He continued: “LaLiga has been immobile. If we change the format we have to do it unanimously. We are going to propose that there be neutral venues for LaLiga matches. That there would be fewer days, that they would generate more income. You could study the Miami game.”

The Relevent Sports agency has been looking to put on official LaLiga matches in the US following a long-term partnership signed with the organisation in August 2018. Indeed, a planned match between FC Barcelona and Girona at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium in January 2019 was cancelled after widespread opposition from various stakeholders.

LaLiga and the RFEF have held a rocky relationship in recent years, marked by disputes over a number of issues. The Provincial Court of Madrid last month ruled in favour of LaLiga in a dispute with the RFEF over the staging of league matches on Mondays and Fridays.

The judgement left LaLiga free to stage matches on these days and came after the dispute went to trial in February 2020, with Madrid’s Commercial Court Number 2 having urged LaLiga and the RFEF to reach an agreement over the matter.

The issue went to trial after the RFEF sought to prevent LaLiga from staging matches on Mondays and Fridays, a move which had proved popular with fans who felt that kick-off times on these days were unsociable. LaLiga wishes to stage matches on these days to increase the number of broadcast opportunities.

In response to Rubiales’ comments, LaLiga sought to point to the success of its current business model, particularly during Covid-19. LaLiga said: “LaLiga will not consider a change in the competition format of any of its categories. The current model, its structure, its competition days, its schedules, etc., have been a great success in recent years.

“Among many other achievements achieved is an increase of spectators in the stadiums of more than 20 per cent; an exponential growth of our national and international audiovisual rights, among which the latest agreement with ESPN in the United States stands out; an economic stability that has made it (LaLiga) the only major league competition with a positive net result in the first season of Covid, etc.

“Therefore, any modification of the current format, or its mere approach, would be irresponsible. And it would also generate uncertainty about other sports and non-professional football, to which LaLiga contributes €125m ($147.7m) per season.

“At LaLiga we are willing to talk with the RFEF on various issues to improve football such as the improvement of the VAR, which we have already proposed days ago; coordinate with the new 1st RFEF (third-tier) category, a common strategy against the European Super League, etc.”

Chester Perry wrote: ↑

Tue Jun 29, 2021 10:17 pm

The vultures are at the door - Private Equity seeks to reshape the Brazilian league model - this is a hugely detailed piece

https://translate.google.com/translate? ... irao.ghtml

Tariq Panja in the New York Times with more detail on that suggested break-away league in Brazil

Brazil’s Top Clubs Are Planning a Breakaway League
JULY 08, 2021

Whenever Rodolfo Landin has turned on his television over the past few weeks to watch matches from this summer’s Copa América, he has done so with mixed emotions.

As the president of Brazil’s most-popular club team, Flamengo, Landin has felt pride in seeing five members of his roster line up for their national teams in the tournament. But he also has watched with increasing frustration because Flamengo has had to make do for a month without those same five key players in the Brazilian championship.

That is because, much to the annoyance of Landin and the leaders of the rest of Brazil’s leading clubs, the country’s national federation, known as the C.B.F., has insisted that league play continue even on dates when South America’s national teams are playing, including competitions like the Copa América, which is being held in Brazil this summer, and next month’s Tokyo Olympics, when Flamengo will be without the services of two other young talents for several weeks.

The brewing resentment over those decisions — not just that teams have lost key players for important league games, but the general sense that club soccer is an afterthought for Brazil’s soccer leaders — has led to a revolt.

After an all-day meeting on June 15 with the heads of 19 of the 20 teams in Brazil’s national league — the president of Sport, a club based in Recife, was resigning that day and did not take part — Landin marched to the C.B.F. headquarters in one of Rio de Janeiro’s upscale beachside suburbs and presented the federation’s leadership a letter. In it, the clubs demanded control of the league, and the right to decide when games would be played and under what conditions.

Essentially, the clubs said, they were prepared to break away from the structures that have underpinned Brazilian soccer for as long as anyone can remember, structures they now say no longer work for them, and form their own competition.

While Brazil’s top clubs have been in discussions about breaking away for some time, Landin and other club executives said, a crisis that has created a leadership vacuum at the federation this year has accelerated the process. Brazil’s soccer federation is currently being run by an interim president, Antonio Nunes, during an internal investigation into allegations of sexual harassment and bullying against the elected president, Rogerio Caboclo. Secret audio recordings recently made public also revealed that Marco Polo del Nero, a former C.B.F. president banned for life by FIFA and indicted on corruption charges by the United States, has been steering key decisions.

“I think the idea was maturing over the years with the club presidents,” Landin said in a telephone interview. But the recent cascade of scandals, he added, may have “helped the clubs to decide that enough is enough and we have to organize ourselves.”

The confrontation at federation headquarters last month did little to dissuade them. No sooner had Landin and the others explained why they wanted to speak to the C.B.F.’s leadership, than Nunes said he felt unwell and left the meeting. The clubs’ letter was instead handed to Fernando Sarney, the federation’s most senior vice president.

The clubs’ plan, initially at least, is to form the league with the federation’s blessing, said Julio Casares, the president of another top club, São Paulo F.C. Casares and several other team presidents interviewed by The New York Times contend the federation is so preoccupied with the national team, a symbol of Brazil around the world as much as a sporting institution, that it has allowed club soccer in the country to languish. “But these players are not born in the national team, they are born in the clubs,” Casares said.

“We don’t want a rupture with the federation,” he said. “We want to work with them.”

The clubs’ argument is that they can take better care of their needs by professionalizing the league’s management — Brazil’s league system is currently run by the federation — and by bringing in executives whose sole mission would be its success. They would not, for example, allow the league’s main broadcaster, Globo, to insist midweek games begin well after 9 p.m. so that they do not clash with the network’s popular soap operas.

While no official breakaway has been announced, the level of consensus is different from previous efforts by the teams to set up their own league. After the top division clubs agreed to the principle of setting up their own competition, a second meeting was held in São Paulo on June 28 that included 20 teams from the second division. Those clubs, too, pronounced themselves eager to be involved in what would be a new two-division setup.

The teams’ intent to proceed is clear in their timeline: They say they want to get arrangements formalized within 120 days, and to take the first steps toward the new league structure as early as next year. Some existing television contracts mean it might take until 2024, at the earliest, before they can fully commercialize what they believe will be a championship that can rival European competitions like Ligue 1, France’s top division, as well as scores of other secondary championships around the world that have lured Brazilian talents with salaries far higher than they can make at home.

Earlier this month, the clubs listened to pitches from groups, domestic and international, eager to play a part in the new championship, which they believe could be worth multiples of its current value. Over a Zoom call, one group that included Charlie Stillitano, the U.S.-based sports entrepreneur connected to the billionaire Stephen Ross’s Relevent Sports, and Ricardo Fort, Coca-Cola’s former head of sports marketing, pitched a plan including the sale of 20 percent of the league to private equity interests in return for as much as $1 billion.

The money would be used to clear huge debts incurred by some of the teams thanks to years of chronic mismanagement. The group, which was assembled by the Brazilian sports lawyer Flavio Zveiter and also includes former senior executives from FIFA and ESPN, discussed how Brazilian teams should follow the example of the Premier League. That league, a breakaway created by leading English teams in 1992, is now the most popular domestic championship in the world.

“We looked and thought, This is a moonshot,” Stillitano said. “The more I looked at it, ‘I said if you do this right, pull this off you are talking about an incredible opportunity.” The group even called on Rick Parry, the Premier League’s first chief executive, to explain what needed to be done.

Not all of the ills of Brazilian soccer can be laid at the door of Brazil’s federation, of course. The clubs, mostly member organizations who elect their own presidents, are often poorly run, with mounting debts linked to unpaid taxes, salaries or transfer fees. Any cash injection, any reformulation, therefore, must have regulation at its center, said Romildo Bolzan Júnior, the president of Grêmio, one of the nation’s biggest teams.

“Money on its own does mean greater organization,” he said. “All of this must be accompanied by a cultural change, better management within clubs and stronger rules on governance.”

Bolzan said he felt the breakaway process was “still fragile,” and recalled moments at the start of the century when similar ideas collapsed amid what he described as “difficult politics.” “Everyone will want to maintain privileges,” he said, “but if we do that the league will not be successful.”

If they get it right, though, Brazilian soccer could find itself on an upward trajectory it has not enjoyed for decades. Fans have become used to seeing their teams, and their league, used as a talent factory for teams elsewhere.

On Monday night, for example, Landin watched with bittersweet feelings as Brazil overcame a stubborn Peru side to reach Saturday’s Copa América final in Rio. (Brazil will face its archrival, Argentina, for the title.) The winning goal was scored by Lucas Paqueta, a former Flamengo player.

Paqueta had played only two seasons at Flamengo before he was sold to A.C. Milan at age 21. His teammate Vinícius Júnior had agreed to join Real Madrid before he had played his first game for Flamengo. Reinier, another prodigiously talented teenager, made the same journey a year later. Most of those exports will only return when their best days are behind them.

That type of player movement, Landin said, is what a stronger, more stable Brazilian championship might be able to correct.

“What happens is, the best soccer players play here until they are 18 or 19 and then after they are 32 when they are getting close to retirement,” he said. “This is really bad, and that’s what really makes me think we need to do something better.”

elwaclaret wrote: ↑

Sun Jul 04, 2021 1:05 am

Get them playing in America ready to move the top franchises into an American World Series Super league?

No, more of anyone can set up in competition to authorised leagues and play anywhere that they want, when they want without sanction of themselves or the players - the particular case in the US with Relevent was all initiated by a Barcelona vs Real Madrid game in Miami in Relevent's summer tournament the ICC - Barcelona have always been keen to play an in season game in the US (or anyway actually that pays enough) Relevent have since become very close to La Liga, including playing a significant role in La Liga's new US TV deal, the biggest ever for soccer over there .

Of course the Premier League concept of the 39th game was interesting because it was not technically in season, but as I understand the points would have counted

Chester Perry wrote: ↑

Sat Jul 03, 2021 4:44 pm

It has been a while since we have heard anything on the long running court hearing about in season league games from La Liga on American soil (which is in contravention of FIFA rules). The recent supreme court case that saw victory for college athletes over the NCAA is now being cited as a reason to rule FIFA's regulations illegal - you would think if that happens then it would help the Super League in their own legal battles.

https://theathletic.com/2673559/2021/06 ... t-lawsuit/

Get them playing in America ready to move the top franchises into an American World Series Super league?

Chester Perry wrote: ↑

Wed Sep 02, 2020 12:35 pm

The long running saga of attempts to get no American League games played on American soil has taken another twist - from SportsBusiness.com

Fifa warned banning international league games on US soil may breach antitrust laws
Bob Williams, US office - September 2, 2020

United States-based international soccer promoters Relevent Sports has been given a rare boost in its repeated attempts to stage official international league matches on US soil.

It has emerged that the US Justice Department warned global governing body Fifa that banning the se competitive regular-season games could violate American antitrust laws.

“Market allocation is a per se violation of the US antitrust laws,” wrote Makan Delrahim, the assistant attorney general who heads the Justice Department’s antitrust division, in a letter to Fifa president Gianni Infantino and United States Soccer Federation president Cindy Parlow Cone in March.

“Sports organizations are not categorically immune from liability under the rules. In particular, they apply to Fifa and its affiliates, including the United States Soccer Federation, in the same manner that they apply to any other organization whose activities substantially affect the United States. We specifically are concerned that Fifa could violate US antitrust laws by restricting the territory in which teams can play league games,” Delrahim wrote.

Relevent is looking to put on official LaLiga matches in the US following a long-term partnership with the Spanish soccer league. A planned match between FC Barcelona and Girona at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium in January 2019 was cancelled after widespread opposition from various stakeholders.

In April 2019, US Soccer also denied Relevent’s application to host a match between two Ecuadorian clubs.

In September 2019, Relevent filed an antitrust lawsuit against US Soccer in the Southern District of New York, alleging that the federation had conspired with Fifa and Soccer United Marketing – the commercial arm of Major League Soccer – to block official matches from foreign clubs being held in the States.

However, in July US District Judge Valerie Caproni dismissed the antitrust claim.

Relevent was given until September 1 to amend its complaint, which it has done so in a new lawsuit in the Southern District of New York. Relevent included Delrahim’s letter in the amended complaint, in which Fifa has been added as a defendant.

“Now that the government has weighed in, we call upon Fifa and USSF to join us in opening up our borders to the world’s game,” Relevent chief executive Daniel Sillman told the Associated Press in a statement.

Relevent has faced a series of setbacks to get this initiative off the ground. Last November, a Madrid court opted not to grant permission for a match between Villarreal and Atlético Madrid to be held in Miami.

In February, Fifa’s Stakeholders Committee recommended that soccer’s world governing body should formally ban teams from playing official league matches outside of their home territories.

In March, meanwhile, a Madrid court dismissed an appeal from LaLiga against the Spanish Football Federation’s (RFEF) decision not to authorize the Girona-FC Barcelona game in Miami. The Magistrate of Madrid’s Commercial Court No.12 ruled that the RFEF did not engage in unlawful conduct by not facilitating the match.

It has been a while since we have heard anything on the long running court hearing about in season league games from La Liga on American soil (which is in contravention of FIFA rules). The recent supreme court case that saw victory for college athletes over the NCAA is now being cited as a reason to rule FIFA's regulations illegal - you would think if that happens then it would help the Super League in their own legal battles.

https://theathletic.com/2673559/2021/06 ... t-lawsuit/

Chester Perry wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 14, 2021 1:14 pm

Some really interesting background to that La Liga - ESPN US broadcast deal. it comes from the partnership with Relevent who run the international summer pre-season tournament ICC and who also have agreements with UEFA - from SportsBusiness.com

How LaLiga-Relevent Sports partnership in US led to record $1.4bn ESPN media rights deal
Bob Williams, US office
June 10, 2021

• Joint venture partnership has transformed league’s presence and commercial fortunes in region

• Two parties aligned following overwhelming success of El Clasico Miami in July 2017

• Following Mexico expansion, model could now be expanded into further international territories

LaLiga’s recently-secured, record-setting $1.4bn (€1.16bn) media rights deal with ESPN in the United States is the resounding high point thus far in the three-year history of LaLiga North America, the joint venture between LaLiga and Relevent Sports Group.

In August 2018, Relevent Sports – the US-based global soccer promoters best known for running the International Champions Cup tournaments – entered into a 15-year partnership with LaLiga, primarily designed to expand the brand awareness and commercial fortunes of the Spanish top-tier professional soccer organization and its clubs in the US and Canada.

At the time of the announcement, the joint venture’s controversial plans to stage official regular-season LaLiga matches on US soil – an initiative still yet to achieve fruition due to widespread global opposition – understandably grabbed most of the headlines.

One of the key parts of LaLiga North America’s five-pronged business plan, though, was to achieve far greater broadcast distribution for the league in the US, as well as significantly increased media rights revenues.

During the past three years, the organization’s executives and employees have worked tirelessly behind the scenes developing relationships with senior media executives at all the major US networks, creating English- and Spanish-language digital content and original programming, staging a multitude of events and securing sponsorship deals, among other initiatives, all designed to enhance LaLiga’s presence and stature in the crowded and competitive US sporting landscape.

Their hard work has paid off in spades. In May, ESPN and LaLiga announced a wide-ranging long-term media rights deal that will make streaming service ESPN+ the principal English- and Spanish-language home for LaLiga in the US from 2021-22 through 2028-29.

The agreement, which begins in August, is worth $175m per year or $1.4bn total. As such, it is the most lucrative soccer media rights deal ever secured in the US, eclipsing the $1bn paid by NBC Sports for rights to the English Premier League, a six-year deal which runs through the 2021-22 season.

The agreement was made possible after current rights-holder beIN Sports and LaLiga agreed to a “strategic buy back” of rights in North America in order to facilitate the deal with the Walt Disney Co., ESPN’s parent company. The Qatar-based broadcaster described LaLiga’s repurchase of the rights from 2021-22 to 2023-24 – the final three seasons of the existing beIN contract – as “significant.”

The new rights deal will give LaLiga a far greater platform to grow its brand in the US due to ESPN’s far stronger position in the US media landscape than beIN Sports, which has struggled to maintain its presence in the region in recent years after it was dropped by Comcast Xfinity and AT&T’s DirecTV in a dispute over carriage fees.

ESPN is already the home of the Copa del Rey, Copa de la Reina, and Supercopa de España, and has an expansive international soccer portfolio on streaming service ESPN+, which is now up to approximately 13.8 million subscribers.

The achievement is all the more remarkable considering LaLiga North America had just one employee when it started in August 2018 – the former Televisa and Univision executive Boris Gartner – and a highly-optimistic business plan that had been laid out by Relevent Sports.

“This didn’t happen out of chance or we were in the right place at the right time…we really worked our ass off for the past three years to get to this point,” Gartner, LaLiga North America’s chief executive, tells SportBusiness. “I cannot tell you how satisfying it is to go back to the first board meeting we had with the proposed plan and you look back three years later how it’s played out exactly as we planned. We knew that the theory was the right one and that execution would be key to it.

“Now we have a [media rights] deal that goes through the 2028-29 season, we’re now adding Mexico, we have 15 years (plus a possible five-year extension) of the joint venture that’s going to be incredibly good for LaLiga, the clubs and for soccer in the US, for Relevent…and it’s opening up a whole new set of opportunities in this business throughout the world,” Gartner says.

El Clasico Miami cemented relationship
The origins of the LaLiga-Relevent Sports partnership can be directly traced back to El Clasico Miami, the first staging of the iconic Real Madrid v FC Barcelona rivalry in the US, which took place at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, Florida, in July 2017, as part of the ICC men’s tournament.

More than 66,000 fans attended the high-profile global event, which generated a reported $38m in direct revenue, and was, notably, given widespread coverage by ESPN, the US media rights holder of the ICC.

From December 2016 until July 2017, Relevent Sports worked tirelessly with LaLiga president Javier Tebas, his management team and both Real Madrid and FC Barcelona to secure their blessing to allow the ICC to stage El Clasico on American soil.

Through that process, Relevent Sports began to build a close relationship with Tebas and with the management team of LaLiga.

In turn, Relevent executives began to better understand and appreciate what Tebas and his team had done to professionalize and commercialize LaLiga business operations, which included the introduction of centralized TV rights and international growth through the LaLiga Global Network, which has placed around 45 business associates across international territories.

At the time, LaLiga used a traditional agency model to sell its media rights globally and was committed to a long-term US broadcast relationship with beIN Sports, which remains a valued global partner of the league.

Relevent executives, though, felt that LaLiga stood a far greater chance of securing broader distribution in the valuable American market, as well as increased media revenues, with the help of a local partner with extensive experience of the local market and widespread contacts.

“We felt that there was an opportunity to find a local partner who would have boots on the ground that could help [Tebas] grow the audience and ultimately find wider distribution and dollars, which his clubs would want, in a better way that was done in a traditional agency model,” explains Danny Sillman, Relevent Sports chief executive.

“Rather they could [utilize] someone like Relevent who could be a catalyst to grow through activations, youth events, grassroots, content development and distribution…but effectively getting LaLiga closer to its fans,” he says.

In April 2017, Relevent Sports pitched the idea of a joint venture partnership to Tebas, which was favorably received by the league and its clubs.

As part of this process, Stephen Ross, the billionaire owner of Relevent Sports as well as the National Football League’s Miami Dolphins, provided crucial in-depth detail to LaLiga executives into how the NFL had grown its brand internationally through regular-season games in London and how the ICC had helped European clubs grow in the US.

Relevent thought it had a deal with LaLiga. Spanish regulators, however, ruled that a request for proposal (RFP) was required for such a deal. In a further surprise, LaLiga executives then informed Relevent that the agency would have to compete with major rivals such as Endeavor, Wasserman, CAA, and Elevate for the joint venture partnership.

Two days before El Clasico Miami, all the interested parties met with LaLiga in the US to pitch their case for the venture. Thanks in large part to the success of the Real Madrid v FC Barcelona fixture, Relevent was awarded the deal shortly afterwards.

The two parties then had to negotiate the agreement and in August 2018 a 15-year partnership, with potential for a five-year extension, was finalized. Gartner was brought in to run the entity, with the full support of Relevent staff.

Relevent’s plan to move beyond events into media business
LaLiga North America is a 50-50 joint venture partnership between Relevent and LaLiga. It currently covers the US and Canada, and recently announced plans to expand its business operations into Mexico.

As part of the agreement, Relevent Sports provided start-up capital – believed to be around $10m – and the pulling power of the ICC tournaments, as well as the experience and expertise of its staff. LaLiga, for its part, contributed its wider intellectual property including original programming, content, licensing, merchandising, sponsorship rights, and grassroots activations.

Notably, LaLiga North America also secured the rights to broker LaLiga media rights deals in the region. Previously, the Mediapro agency provided this service.

After costs are covered, LaLiga and Relevent split the revenues of sponsorship deals – for example with Camarena Tequila, Verizon, and PointsBet. LaLiga North America also earns a commission on media rights sales, which is split 50-50 between Relevent and the league. The media rights revenue itself goes to the LaLiga and the clubs.

Starting with just one staff member in August 2018, the New York City-based LaLiga North America now has 25 people on staff – 10 employees on the business front, including one in Toronto, and 15 employees operating its English- and Spanish-language content unit in Guadalajara, Mexico. Soon, three more staff members will be added in Mexico.

In the build-up to El Clasico Miami, Relevent Sports had been looking to expand its business operations beyond events and into the media industry. It was natural, then, that Relevent executives looked to seize on the opportunity to develop a wider, more meaningful partnership with LaLiga as the two parties forged strong ties in late 2016 and early 2017.

“It was an opportunistic relationship that developed through El Clasico with LaLiga where we were able to grab the bull by the horns and partner with them to grow a media business,” Sillman says.

“It was always part of our growth plan but it was really serendipitous in the relationship with LaLiga in 2017 in seeing how progressive their management team was, how thoughtful they were with international growth that it was the right time and the right partner,” he says.

Making transition from beIN Sports to ESPN
To some surprise, in August 2019 LaLiga signed an extension to its long-standing partnership in the US and Canada with beIN Sports through to the end of the 2023-24 season.

At the time, beIN Sports was suffering from a series of carriage issues, which severely hampered its distribution across the US, and it was believed that LaLiga would seek a new broadcast partner.

But due to the fact that beIN is a valued international media rights partner of LaLiga and offered lucrative renewal terms in the States – believed to be $130m per season – LaLiga decided to stay with the network.

As part of the deal with Relevent to establish LaLiga North America in 2018, LaLiga also retained the right to renew with beIN in the US when their agreement ended in 2020, a deal that was eventually struck a year early.

“The renewal terms at the time were great [financially]. Beyond the renewal option that LaLiga had, we collectively decided at that moment that it was the best decision we could make,” Gartner says. “At that point we had also created the content studio in Guadalajara and were cranking out content every week in English and Spanish and we thought that was a patch where we could overcompensate for the lack of distribution.”

According to Sillman, the beIN Sports deal also served a purpose “because of the value that it established for the league in this territory.”

From the outset of the creation of LaLiga North America, its staff members were constantly speaking to executives from the likes of CBS, ESPN, NBC, DAZN, and Turner Sports trying to gauge their interest in LaLiga and global soccer rights in the build-up to the 2026 Fifa World Cup, which is being held in the US, Canada and Mexico.

When LaLiga executives came to the conclusion that the league would be better off moving on from beIN, and arranged a deal to buy back its rights from the network and try to sell them to another major US broadcaster, there was no shortage of offers.

“There was no one who said they weren’t interested, it was just a matter of finding the right fit and the right price,” Gartner says. “One of the key pieces was not having the rights split by language [English and Spanish] on different networks.”

SportBusiness understands that ESPN sought to acquire LaLiga rights for two main reasons.

Firstly, streaming service ESPN+ is believed to be lagging behind on its Hispanic subscriber targets and LaLiga offers immense strategic value to secure these goals.

Secondly, ESPN is doubtful that it will succeed in acquiring US rights to the English Premier League next year and, after recently losing the rights to Serie A to CBS Sports, LaLiga acts as something of an insurance policy.

Joint venture partnership could be replicated in other markets
According to Sillman, Relevent Sports has the capacity to partner with other global soccer leagues in a similar venture in the US but will instead focus on growing its successful partnership with LaLiga internationally.

“Right now we’re really focused on LaLiga,” Sillman says. “We have a great partner. We found someone in Javier Tebas and the clubs and the management team that we trust, which is paramount to everything. For now we’re very focused on how do we scale that relationship into Mexico and Central America and other territories?”

The success of the LaLiga North America operation has proven that it is a model that could be replicated in other markets. Following LaLiga North America’s recent expansion into Mexico, it is possible that the joint venture could expand into other international territories depending on the nuances of those local markets.

“We made significant commitments to LaLiga in 2017 and 2018 and to look back now and to have over-delivered to those clubs is just fire for us to keep growing the model,” Sillman says. “We had always had interest in scaling the business but we couldn’t do it until we proved that it had worked.

“When you’re successful it doesn’t mean anything but give you the opportunity to do the next thing – and that is how we see it. This is a proof of concept to keep scaling and expanding. It’s the start line for what we can do for LaLiga and the sport and gives us the credibility to go explore expanding our media business,” he says.

the La Liga/Relevent partnership is to expand into Mexico - from Sportico,com

LALIGA’S JOINT VENTURE WITH RELEVENT IS EXPANDING TO MEXICO
Eben Novy-Williams
BY EBEN NOVY-WILLIAMS

June 3, 2021 5:55am

AP / MEHANIQ TWENTY20 / DESIGNED BY MARIO PAULIS
LaLiga North America, the 50-50 joint venture between Spain’s top soccer league and Relevent Sports Group, is expanding its relationship to include Mexico.

LaLiga clubs have voted to extend the scope of the group, which spent the last three years growing the league’s commercial footprint in the U.S. and Canada. That include media rights—the joint venture negotiated LaLiga’s new $1.4 billion deal with ESPN, the richest U.S. TV deal for a European league ever.

The plan will be similar in Mexico. LaLiga’s media deal with Televisa’s SKY Sports expires in a few years, so that will be top priority, but the group will also focus on studio shows, corporate partnerships, grassroots efforts, and possibly hosting a LaLiga regular season match in Mexico—all things it believes will make those live rights more valuable.

“In Mexico, soccer is the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 sport,” LaLiga North America CEO Boris Gartner said in an interview. “So the opportunity is a little different than in the U.S. We don’t have to build that momentum for soccer. We just need to make sure we are getting the league and clubs closer to the fans.”

Top European clubs like Real Madrid and Barcelona, and the leagues they play in, have hit a saturation point in their home markets, creating a desire to grow fan bases and revenue in new places. The U.S., with its 331 million people and robust media infrastructure, is LaLiga’s most important market outside of Spain, and the league believes Mexico could develop into another critical region.

Not only is soccer the most popular sport in Mexico, but Spanish is also its native language. Adding Mexico will also give LaLiga North America a presence in all three countries co-hosting the 2026 men’s World Cup, generating synergies that will help the joint venture work across the region.

“It allows you to have much larger conversations with brand partners and media partners in terms of how they can promote the league, the players and the clubs directly,” said Daniel Sillman, CEO of Relevent Sports Group and a LaLiga North America board member. “A brand may have interest now in promoting across all the key territories, instead of just being hyper focused in one, and we’ll benefit from the tailwinds of the World Cup as well.”

LaLiga North America was formed in 2018 in partnership with Relevent, a soccer media and event organizer backed by Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross. Relevent, which has positioned itself as a conduit for the sport in North America and Asia, also runs the International Champions Cup, an annual summer tournament featuring soccer’s biggest club teams.

The joint venture has helped LaLiga behave in North America more like a media company than a league. And if live game rights are the measuring stick, the first three years in the U.S. and Canada have been a success. The $1.4 billion deal with ESPN, announced last month, is both a big revenue increase and a transition away from a partnership with beIN Sports that many believed was holding the league back.

Revenue from corporate partnerships has also grown, including U.S. deals with Verizon, PointsBet and Herbalife. Sponsorship money was $0 in the group’s first year, $2 million in its second and $4 million in its third. The joint venture has already booked $7 million for the upcoming season, Gartner said.

In some ways, LaLiga North America is already well-positioned for expansion into Mexico. The group started the 2020-21 season with 14 weekly shows, a combination of English- and Spanish-language programming specifically for fans in the region. Much of that content comes from the group’s studios in Guadalajara, and the joint venture has a handful of executives (including Gartner, a former Televisa exec) with prior professional experience in Mexico.

“We have a team that’s been built, the investment is there, and our content team is already based in Guadalajara,” Gartner said. “This isn’t something we need to stand up again from scratch, so any revenue that we generate will be incremental for the joint venture.”

Chester Perry wrote: ↑

Sat May 15, 2021 11:50 pm

Missed this during my stepping away from the board this week - La Liga has signed the biggest ever overseas league deal in the US with ESPN - note the length, 8 years, exactly what Claire Enders has been talking about as necessary to bring in the larger numbers (hence the Premier League role over deal domestically) - You would imagine that this will have the Premier League hopeful for their own deal which should be sealed in the next few months. This deal for la Liga comes in the week after spanish courts came down on La Liga's side after Real Madrid tried to block the collective agreements (https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/la- ... management) - from SportsProMedia

ESPN secures ‘US$1.4bn’ La Liga US rights deal until 2029
Eight-year agreement sees Spanish soccer league buyout BeIN Sports’ contract.

Posted: May 14 2021 By: Sam Carp

- ESPN+ to stream 380 top-flight games per season
- Deal is the most valuable US media rights contract for an overseas soccer league, reports Sportico
- La Liga’s US broadcast partnership with BeIN originally due to run until end of 2023/24 season

Disney-owned sports broadcaster ESPN has secured rights in the US to La Liga until the end of the 2028/29 season.

Financial terms of the eight-year deal were not made public, but Sportico reports that ESPN will pay the Spanish soccer body US$175 million a year, equal to some US$1.4 billion over the duration of the agreement. The sports business outlet added that it is now the most valuable US media rights contract for an overseas soccer league.

Starting from the 2021/22 season, the deal will bring live and on-demand coverage of 380 top-flight matches a year to ESPN+, the broadcaster’s subscription streaming service. ESPN+ will also show a selection of games from La Liga SmartBank, Spanish soccer’s second tier, including five promotion playoffs. All fixtures will be available in both English and Spanish.

Select matches will air across ESPN’s linear networks each season, while coverage and highlights will also be available on SportsCenter and other ESPN studio programmes, as well as on the broadcaster’s digital and social platforms.

The expansive deal also includes a variety of surround programming, including match previews, highlights and magazine shows.

“We are absolutely thrilled to bring La Liga to ESPN in the US,” said La Liga president Javier Tebas. “This is an historic eight-season agreement in US soccer broadcasting that speaks to the power of La Liga and its clubs in the largest media market in the world and will bring the world’s best soccer league to American screens in a more comprehensive and modern way than ever before.”

The deal further bolsters the lineup of soccer on ESPN+, which also includes Spain’s Copa Del Rey knockout tournament, Germany’s top-flight Bundesliga and Major League Soccer (MLS), among others.

Burke Magnus, executive vice president of programming and original content at ESPN, added: “As the sport of soccer continues its ascendance in the US market, we are incredibly excited to work with La Liga to establish a deeper connection to American fans through our company’s industry-leading streaming platforms, television networks, and digital and social media assets.”

In order to agree the deal with ESPN, La Liga had to buy back its US media rights from Qatar-based broadcaster BeIN Sports, which was due to be the league’s exclusive broadcast partner in the country until the end of the 2023/24 season.

BeIN said in a statement that the arrangement is ‘strategically and commercially beneficial’ to the two parties, who remain partners in markets such as France, Australia, and the Middle East and North Africa.

Commenting on the move, Richard Verow, chief sports officer at BeIN Media Group, said that the broadcaster still has “significant ambitions” for the US market, where it holds rights to properties such as French soccer’s Ligue 1, South America’s Copa Libertadores and the Africa Cup of Nations.

“Like broadcasters all over the world, we are constantly assessing our rights portfolio across all our markets to ensure financial discipline, commercial and strategic sense, and – crucially – long term growth,” Verow added. “This arrangement with La Liga in the US and Canada reflects that, sacrificing a short-term gain for long-term wins and sustainability in North America.

“Financial discipline has never been more important in the current context, where you have a ferociously competitive US market, coupled with constantly changing viewing habits, all complicated further by the pandemic and rampant piracy.”

North America is an important strategic market for La Liga, which in 2018 signed up to a 15-year joint venture with US sports and entertainment company Relevent Sports to grow its brand in the region. The league’s new deal with ESPN will put it alongside a number of other premium sports properties and also expose it to a broad US audience, with Disney reporting this week that ESPN+ now has 13.8 million subscribers.

Some really interesting background to that La Liga - ESPN US broadcast deal. it comes from the partnership with Relevent who run the international summer pre-season tournament ICC and who also have agreements with UEFA - from SportsBusiness.com

How LaLiga-Relevent Sports partnership in US led to record $1.4bn ESPN media rights deal
Bob Williams, US office
June 10, 2021

• Joint venture partnership has transformed league’s presence and commercial fortunes in region

• Two parties aligned following overwhelming success of El Clasico Miami in July 2017

• Following Mexico expansion, model could now be expanded into further international territories

LaLiga’s recently-secured, record-setting $1.4bn (€1.16bn) media rights deal with ESPN in the United States is the resounding high point thus far in the three-year history of LaLiga North America, the joint venture between LaLiga and Relevent Sports Group.

In August 2018, Relevent Sports – the US-based global soccer promoters best known for running the International Champions Cup tournaments – entered into a 15-year partnership with LaLiga, primarily designed to expand the brand awareness and commercial fortunes of the Spanish top-tier professional soccer organization and its clubs in the US and Canada.

At the time of the announcement, the joint venture’s controversial plans to stage official regular-season LaLiga matches on US soil – an initiative still yet to achieve fruition due to widespread global opposition – understandably grabbed most of the headlines.

One of the key parts of LaLiga North America’s five-pronged business plan, though, was to achieve far greater broadcast distribution for the league in the US, as well as significantly increased media rights revenues.

During the past three years, the organization’s executives and employees have worked tirelessly behind the scenes developing relationships with senior media executives at all the major US networks, creating English- and Spanish-language digital content and original programming, staging a multitude of events and securing sponsorship deals, among other initiatives, all designed to enhance LaLiga’s presence and stature in the crowded and competitive US sporting landscape.

Their hard work has paid off in spades. In May, ESPN and LaLiga announced a wide-ranging long-term media rights deal that will make streaming service ESPN+ the principal English- and Spanish-language home for LaLiga in the US from 2021-22 through 2028-29.

The agreement, which begins in August, is worth $175m per year or $1.4bn total. As such, it is the most lucrative soccer media rights deal ever secured in the US, eclipsing the $1bn paid by NBC Sports for rights to the English Premier League, a six-year deal which runs through the 2021-22 season.

The agreement was made possible after current rights-holder beIN Sports and LaLiga agreed to a “strategic buy back” of rights in North America in order to facilitate the deal with the Walt Disney Co., ESPN’s parent company. The Qatar-based broadcaster described LaLiga’s repurchase of the rights from 2021-22 to 2023-24 – the final three seasons of the existing beIN contract – as “significant.”

The new rights deal will give LaLiga a far greater platform to grow its brand in the US due to ESPN’s far stronger position in the US media landscape than beIN Sports, which has struggled to maintain its presence in the region in recent years after it was dropped by Comcast Xfinity and AT&T’s DirecTV in a dispute over carriage fees.

ESPN is already the home of the Copa del Rey, Copa de la Reina, and Supercopa de España, and has an expansive international soccer portfolio on streaming service ESPN+, which is now up to approximately 13.8 million subscribers.

The achievement is all the more remarkable considering LaLiga North America had just one employee when it started in August 2018 – the former Televisa and Univision executive Boris Gartner – and a highly-optimistic business plan that had been laid out by Relevent Sports.

“This didn’t happen out of chance or we were in the right place at the right time…we really worked our ass off for the past three years to get to this point,” Gartner, LaLiga North America’s chief executive, tells SportBusiness. “I cannot tell you how satisfying it is to go back to the first board meeting we had with the proposed plan and you look back three years later how it’s played out exactly as we planned. We knew that the theory was the right one and that execution would be key to it.

“Now we have a [media rights] deal that goes through the 2028-29 season, we’re now adding Mexico, we have 15 years (plus a possible five-year extension) of the joint venture that’s going to be incredibly good for LaLiga, the clubs and for soccer in the US, for Relevent…and it’s opening up a whole new set of opportunities in this business throughout the world,” Gartner says.

El Clasico Miami cemented relationship
The origins of the LaLiga-Relevent Sports partnership can be directly traced back to El Clasico Miami, the first staging of the iconic Real Madrid v FC Barcelona rivalry in the US, which took place at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, Florida, in July 2017, as part of the ICC men’s tournament.

More than 66,000 fans attended the high-profile global event, which generated a reported $38m in direct revenue, and was, notably, given widespread coverage by ESPN, the US media rights holder of the ICC.

From December 2016 until July 2017, Relevent Sports worked tirelessly with LaLiga president Javier Tebas, his management team and both Real Madrid and FC Barcelona to secure their blessing to allow the ICC to stage El Clasico on American soil.

Through that process, Relevent Sports began to build a close relationship with Tebas and with the management team of LaLiga.

In turn, Relevent executives began to better understand and appreciate what Tebas and his team had done to professionalize and commercialize LaLiga business operations, which included the introduction of centralized TV rights and international growth through the LaLiga Global Network, which has placed around 45 business associates across international territories.

At the time, LaLiga used a traditional agency model to sell its media rights globally and was committed to a long-term US broadcast relationship with beIN Sports, which remains a valued global partner of the league.

Relevent executives, though, felt that LaLiga stood a far greater chance of securing broader distribution in the valuable American market, as well as increased media revenues, with the help of a local partner with extensive experience of the local market and widespread contacts.

“We felt that there was an opportunity to find a local partner who would have boots on the ground that could help [Tebas] grow the audience and ultimately find wider distribution and dollars, which his clubs would want, in a better way that was done in a traditional agency model,” explains Danny Sillman, Relevent Sports chief executive.

“Rather they could [utilize] someone like Relevent who could be a catalyst to grow through activations, youth events, grassroots, content development and distribution…but effectively getting LaLiga closer to its fans,” he says.

In April 2017, Relevent Sports pitched the idea of a joint venture partnership to Tebas, which was favorably received by the league and its clubs.

As part of this process, Stephen Ross, the billionaire owner of Relevent Sports as well as the National Football League’s Miami Dolphins, provided crucial in-depth detail to LaLiga executives into how the NFL had grown its brand internationally through regular-season games in London and how the ICC had helped European clubs grow in the US.

Relevent thought it had a deal with LaLiga. Spanish regulators, however, ruled that a request for proposal (RFP) was required for such a deal. In a further surprise, LaLiga executives then informed Relevent that the agency would have to compete with major rivals such as Endeavor, Wasserman, CAA, and Elevate for the joint venture partnership.

Two days before El Clasico Miami, all the interested parties met with LaLiga in the US to pitch their case for the venture. Thanks in large part to the success of the Real Madrid v FC Barcelona fixture, Relevent was awarded the deal shortly afterwards.

The two parties then had to negotiate the agreement and in August 2018 a 15-year partnership, with potential for a five-year extension, was finalized. Gartner was brought in to run the entity, with the full support of Relevent staff.

Relevent’s plan to move beyond events into media business
LaLiga North America is a 50-50 joint venture partnership between Relevent and LaLiga. It currently covers the US and Canada, and recently announced plans to expand its business operations into Mexico.

As part of the agreement, Relevent Sports provided start-up capital – believed to be around $10m – and the pulling power of the ICC tournaments, as well as the experience and expertise of its staff. LaLiga, for its part, contributed its wider intellectual property including original programming, content, licensing, merchandising, sponsorship rights, and grassroots activations.

Notably, LaLiga North America also secured the rights to broker LaLiga media rights deals in the region. Previously, the Mediapro agency provided this service.

After costs are covered, LaLiga and Relevent split the revenues of sponsorship deals – for example with Camarena Tequila, Verizon, and PointsBet. LaLiga North America also earns a commission on media rights sales, which is split 50-50 between Relevent and the league. The media rights revenue itself goes to the LaLiga and the clubs.

Starting with just one staff member in August 2018, the New York City-based LaLiga North America now has 25 people on staff – 10 employees on the business front, including one in Toronto, and 15 employees operating its English- and Spanish-language content unit in Guadalajara, Mexico. Soon, three more staff members will be added in Mexico.

In the build-up to El Clasico Miami, Relevent Sports had been looking to expand its business operations beyond events and into the media industry. It was natural, then, that Relevent executives looked to seize on the opportunity to develop a wider, more meaningful partnership with LaLiga as the two parties forged strong ties in late 2016 and early 2017.

“It was an opportunistic relationship that developed through El Clasico with LaLiga where we were able to grab the bull by the horns and partner with them to grow a media business,” Sillman says.

“It was always part of our growth plan but it was really serendipitous in the relationship with LaLiga in 2017 in seeing how progressive their management team was, how thoughtful they were with international growth that it was the right time and the right partner,” he says.

Making transition from beIN Sports to ESPN
To some surprise, in August 2019 LaLiga signed an extension to its long-standing partnership in the US and Canada with beIN Sports through to the end of the 2023-24 season.

At the time, beIN Sports was suffering from a series of carriage issues, which severely hampered its distribution across the US, and it was believed that LaLiga would seek a new broadcast partner.

But due to the fact that beIN is a valued international media rights partner of LaLiga and offered lucrative renewal terms in the States – believed to be $130m per season – LaLiga decided to stay with the network.

As part of the deal with Relevent to establish LaLiga North America in 2018, LaLiga also retained the right to renew with beIN in the US when their agreement ended in 2020, a deal that was eventually struck a year early.

“The renewal terms at the time were great [financially]. Beyond the renewal option that LaLiga had, we collectively decided at that moment that it was the best decision we could make,” Gartner says. “At that point we had also created the content studio in Guadalajara and were cranking out content every week in English and Spanish and we thought that was a patch where we could overcompensate for the lack of distribution.”

According to Sillman, the beIN Sports deal also served a purpose “because of the value that it established for the league in this territory.”

From the outset of the creation of LaLiga North America, its staff members were constantly speaking to executives from the likes of CBS, ESPN, NBC, DAZN, and Turner Sports trying to gauge their interest in LaLiga and global soccer rights in the build-up to the 2026 Fifa World Cup, which is being held in the US, Canada and Mexico.

When LaLiga executives came to the conclusion that the league would be better off moving on from beIN, and arranged a deal to buy back its rights from the network and try to sell them to another major US broadcaster, there was no shortage of offers.

“There was no one who said they weren’t interested, it was just a matter of finding the right fit and the right price,” Gartner says. “One of the key pieces was not having the rights split by language [English and Spanish] on different networks.”

SportBusiness understands that ESPN sought to acquire LaLiga rights for two main reasons.

Firstly, streaming service ESPN+ is believed to be lagging behind on its Hispanic subscriber targets and LaLiga offers immense strategic value to secure these goals.

Secondly, ESPN is doubtful that it will succeed in acquiring US rights to the English Premier League next year and, after recently losing the rights to Serie A to CBS Sports, LaLiga acts as something of an insurance policy.

Joint venture partnership could be replicated in other markets
According to Sillman, Relevent Sports has the capacity to partner with other global soccer leagues in a similar venture in the US but will instead focus on growing its successful partnership with LaLiga internationally.

“Right now we’re really focused on LaLiga,” Sillman says. “We have a great partner. We found someone in Javier Tebas and the clubs and the management team that we trust, which is paramount to everything. For now we’re very focused on how do we scale that relationship into Mexico and Central America and other territories?”

The success of the LaLiga North America operation has proven that it is a model that could be replicated in other markets. Following LaLiga North America’s recent expansion into Mexico, it is possible that the joint venture could expand into other international territories depending on the nuances of those local markets.

“We made significant commitments to LaLiga in 2017 and 2018 and to look back now and to have over-delivered to those clubs is just fire for us to keep growing the model,” Sillman says. “We had always had interest in scaling the business but we couldn’t do it until we proved that it had worked.

“When you’re successful it doesn’t mean anything but give you the opportunity to do the next thing – and that is how we see it. This is a proof of concept to keep scaling and expanding. It’s the start line for what we can do for LaLiga and the sport and gives us the credibility to go explore expanding our media business,” he says.

Missed this during my stepping away from the board this week - La Liga has signed the biggest ever overseas league deal in the US with ESPN - note the length, 8 years, exactly what Claire Enders has been talking about as necessary to bring in the larger numbers (hence the Premier League role over deal domestically) - You would imagine that this will have the Premier League hopeful for their own deal which should be sealed in the next few months. This deal for la Liga comes in the week after spanish courts came down on La Liga's side after Real Madrid tried to block the collective agreements (https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/la- ... management) - from SportsProMedia

ESPN secures ‘US$1.4bn’ La Liga US rights deal until 2029
Eight-year agreement sees Spanish soccer league buyout BeIN Sports’ contract.

Posted: May 14 2021 By: Sam Carp

- ESPN+ to stream 380 top-flight games per season
- Deal is the most valuable US media rights contract for an overseas soccer league, reports Sportico
- La Liga’s US broadcast partnership with BeIN originally due to run until end of 2023/24 season

Disney-owned sports broadcaster ESPN has secured rights in the US to La Liga until the end of the 2028/29 season.

Financial terms of the eight-year deal were not made public, but Sportico reports that ESPN will pay the Spanish soccer body US$175 million a year, equal to some US$1.4 billion over the duration of the agreement. The sports business outlet added that it is now the most valuable US media rights contract for an overseas soccer league.

Starting from the 2021/22 season, the deal will bring live and on-demand coverage of 380 top-flight matches a year to ESPN+, the broadcaster’s subscription streaming service. ESPN+ will also show a selection of games from La Liga SmartBank, Spanish soccer’s second tier, including five promotion playoffs. All fixtures will be available in both English and Spanish.

Select matches will air across ESPN’s linear networks each season, while coverage and highlights will also be available on SportsCenter and other ESPN studio programmes, as well as on the broadcaster’s digital and social platforms.

The expansive deal also includes a variety of surround programming, including match previews, highlights and magazine shows.

“We are absolutely thrilled to bring La Liga to ESPN in the US,” said La Liga president Javier Tebas. “This is an historic eight-season agreement in US soccer broadcasting that speaks to the power of La Liga and its clubs in the largest media market in the world and will bring the world’s best soccer league to American screens in a more comprehensive and modern way than ever before.”

The deal further bolsters the lineup of soccer on ESPN+, which also includes Spain’s Copa Del Rey knockout tournament, Germany’s top-flight Bundesliga and Major League Soccer (MLS), among others.

Burke Magnus, executive vice president of programming and original content at ESPN, added: “As the sport of soccer continues its ascendance in the US market, we are incredibly excited to work with La Liga to establish a deeper connection to American fans through our company’s industry-leading streaming platforms, television networks, and digital and social media assets.”

In order to agree the deal with ESPN, La Liga had to buy back its US media rights from Qatar-based broadcaster BeIN Sports, which was due to be the league’s exclusive broadcast partner in the country until the end of the 2023/24 season.

BeIN said in a statement that the arrangement is ‘strategically and commercially beneficial’ to the two parties, who remain partners in markets such as France, Australia, and the Middle East and North Africa.

Commenting on the move, Richard Verow, chief sports officer at BeIN Media Group, said that the broadcaster still has “significant ambitions” for the US market, where it holds rights to properties such as French soccer’s Ligue 1, South America’s Copa Libertadores and the Africa Cup of Nations.

“Like broadcasters all over the world, we are constantly assessing our rights portfolio across all our markets to ensure financial discipline, commercial and strategic sense, and – crucially – long term growth,” Verow added. “This arrangement with La Liga in the US and Canada reflects that, sacrificing a short-term gain for long-term wins and sustainability in North America.

“Financial discipline has never been more important in the current context, where you have a ferociously competitive US market, coupled with constantly changing viewing habits, all complicated further by the pandemic and rampant piracy.”

North America is an important strategic market for La Liga, which in 2018 signed up to a 15-year joint venture with US sports and entertainment company Relevent Sports to grow its brand in the region. The league’s new deal with ESPN will put it alongside a number of other premium sports properties and also expose it to a broad US audience, with Disney reporting this week that ESPN+ now has 13.8 million subscribers.

Chester Perry wrote: ↑

Tue Apr 13, 2021 2:06 am

Australian news outlets are reporting that Manchester United are in talks to by The Central Coast Mariners and are also looking to relocate then in Sidney - from the Sidney Morning Herald

Manchester United in talks to buy Central Coast Mariners, and move them

By Dominic Bossi
April 13, 2021 — 6.00am

One of the most popular teams in world football is looking to establish a franchise club in the A-League with Manchester United having entered into talks to purchase the licence of Central Coast Mariners and relocate the club to Sydney.

The 20-time English champions have held lengthy discussions with Mariners owner Mike Charlesworth in the UK about buying the licence of Central Coast and turning the club into a sister club of the Red Devils.

A deal is yet to be done but sources with knowledge of the discussions suggest Manchester United are willing to come to the rescue of the cash-strapped Mariners. That could come at the expense of the club’s affiliation with the Central Coast region and be rebranded.

The proposed takeover could see the Mariners uprooted from their spiritual home on the Central Coast and relocated to Sydney’s northern suburbs, with games likely to be at North Sydney or Brookvale.

Any transfer of club licence, rebranding and relocation of teams must be signed off by Football Australia after gaining the approval of the majority of A-League clubs, but it’s understood several are already supportive of the prospect of the Red Devils entering the competition hoping it will increase the interest and investment in the league.

United’s discussions with the Mariners flags their intentions to follow in the footsteps of their cross-town rivals, Manchester City, and build a global network of affiliated clubs, particularly within range of the lucrative Asian football market.

City expanded their network of feeder and sister clubs with the purchase of Melbourne Heart in 2014, rebranding the A-League club as Melbourne City and incorporating it into the City Football Group global network.

City paid more than $11 million for an 80 per-cent stake in Melbourne Heart in 2014 before buying the remaining 20 per-cent for $2.25 million. A price tag for the licence of the Mariners is yet to be agreed upon with United but any fee would be but a drop in the ocean for one of the wealthiest sporting brands in the world.

Owned by the wealthy American Glazer family, Manchester United’s revenue was $905 million last year and the club was listed as the tenth most valuable sporting team in the world by Forbes in 2020, said to be worth more than $5 billion. In the last summer transfer window, the club’s net expenditure on players was $101 million. Of all football clubs, they have the third largest social media following with just shy of 150 million.

Despite the gulf in stature between the two clubs, the Mariners have a longstanding close tie with Manchester United's inner sanctum. The Red Devils' assistant coach, Mike Phelan, was appointed sporting director of Central Coast in late 2018.

United is arguably the most well-supported overseas team among Australian football fans. They attracted a sell-out crowd of more than 83,000 when they came to Sydney in 2013 to play the A-League All Stars at ANZ Stadium. Fourteen years earlier, the Red Devils drew a combined attendance of 148,000 when they played Australia in two exhibition games at the MCG and Stadium Australia.

The cash-strapped Mariners have consistently struggled financially and have been in a desperate hunt for investment in recent years. That search was accelerated in August when Charlesworth announced his intention to cut all ties with the club by selling his entire stake, and did not rule out enticing investors with commercial property and a training base in Tuggerah that is affiliated with the Mariners but privately owned by him.

The Herald and Age sought comment from Charlesworth and Football Australia on Monday.

Charlesworth has previously held sale talks with Singapore-based consortium First11 Capital, which included former young Socceroos Zac Anderson and Kaz Patafta, as well as Sydney businessman Abdul Helou. Neither parties managed to strike a deal with Charlesworth.

The news of Manchester United's prospective purchase of Central Coast Mariners appears wide of the mark - there is real intent from an American Investor though and he is familiar to this thread - from SportsProMedia

US investors sign letter of intent in move to acquire Central Coast Mariners stake
Jordan Gardner and Brett Johnson want to move A-league club to Gold Coast.

Posted: April 14 2021 By: Tom King

- Mariners dismissed Manchester United takeover talks
- Mariners and United have previous ties

While Manchester United have dampened speculation around their interest in buying the Australian soccer club, a second party is in negotiations about buying the Central Coast Mariners' licence and relocating it to the Gold Coast.

US-based investors Jordan Gardner and Brett Johnson, are said to have signed a letter of intent with Mariners owner Mike Charlesworth, and have been in talks for almost a year.

Johnson is one of three investors who recently purchased English third-tier outfit Ipswich Town and is also a part-owner in second-tier US side Phoenix Rising.

Gardner, who penned an editorial series for SportsPro earlier this year, is an investor in several football clubs across Europe including Swansea City in the UK and Dundalk FC in the Republic of Ireland.

He is currently the chairman, co-owner and managing partner at FC Helsingør, an American-owned football club in Denmark, and was previously vice president, investment and business strategy for the digital media company JugoTv before it was acquired by Relevent Sports Group. He was also the owner and chief executive of a live event ticketing and technology company based in San Francisco.

Pending approval from the Australian Premier Leagues and Football Australia (FA), it is thought Gardner and Johnson want to relocate the A-League club to the Gold Coast. Investors have previously avoided the region due to its lack of population and infrastructure.

While English giants United have a recent tangible link with the Mariners, it was not a commercial one. Mike Phelan, United assistant manager, worked remotely as the sporting director at the Central Coast Mariners in 2018 before joining Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s management team in 2019.

The Brisbane Herald also reported that Mariners sources claimed they have not yet shared their recent financials with the Premier League club.

The ideal scenario for incumbent owner Charlesworth is to sell the Mariners licence or secure the management rights to Central Coast Stadium, which would be a significant shift in the long-term sustainability of the A-League outfit.

Part 3 of Jordan Gardner's "An expert’s guide to owning a European soccer club" from SportsProMedia

An expert’s guide to owning a European soccer club - part three: The first 90 days
In the third instalment of a four-part weekly series, Jordan Gardner, an American sports executive who is currently chairman and co-owner of Danish side FC Helsingør, outlines what to expect in the first 90 days of ownership at a European soccer club.

By Jordan Gardner Posted: February 11 2021

After all the excitement and media buzz of a takeover has died down, the hard work begins and the challenges of owning and operating a soccer club quickly become apparent. The first 90 days after a club acquisition are the most important and potentially decisive period of time for a new ownership group, and can often be predictive of future success or failure.

In part one of this series, I described the motivations of individuals, private equity and institutional investors who look towards European soccer for investment opportunities. In part two, I discussed building the right investment thesis and thoroughly assessing the purchase of a European soccer club. This instalment will focus on the first 90 days after the closing of a club acquisition, with a focus on my personal experiences at FC Helsingør after our takeover in the spring of 2019.

Evaluating club assets
The most important post-closing task is analysing a club’s assets both on and off the pitch.

Since most clubs in Europe have minimal real estate assets, the most important club assets are the players, staff and people connected to the club. Hard questions must be asked: Does club leadership have a well thought-out, long-term business plan that has been communicated to key staff members? Is the sporting staff making sound decisions when it comes to roster construction, player management and recruitment? Has the club’s chief executive built a strong organisation culture and do the club’s employees enjoy coming to work everyday?

When we purchased a controlling ownership stake of FC Helsingør in March 2019, it was apparent very quickly that the club had problems that needed to be urgently addressed. Throughout our conversations, we were looking for indicators of a positive work environment, an efficient and streamlined organisation, and forward-thinking and ambitious employees.

Many of the players were disinterested, thinking they were too good to be at our club. The coaching staff was constantly changing formations and tactical strategy from match to match in an incoherent way that led to confusion and poor results. Several staff members we spoke with were on the verge of quitting because they felt underappreciated, and were not treated with the respect they deserved from club leadership.

Unfortunately, every conversation we had - from the players on the pitch, to the employees in the front office - showed signs of a poor work environment, something that would need to be quickly and decisively addressed.

Making decisive changes
Being a successful owner of a professional sports club requires making difficult and unpopular decisions, including potentially significant personnel changes. However, the quicker and more decisive a new ownership group recognises that these decisions must be made, no matter how unpleasant, the better.

With our acquisition in Denmark, I don’t think I was prepared for the amount of change that was needed, as my hope was many of the key staff members would be assets to our new ownership moving forward. Ultimately, over a period of six to nine months I made wholesale organisational changes including replacing staff in all key areas of the organisation, bringing in a new chief executive, finance director, head coach, and sporting director.

The prior chief executive had led the club with an iron fist, creating an environment of mistrust between employees and staff. The head of finance was months behind in many important aspects of the club’s bookkeeping. The sporting staff had no direction, with players who did not want to be at the club, and staff who felt they had no leadership.

What we discovered sounds surprising, but the landscape of European soccer is filled with clubs run in a similar manner. This type of club management shows why there is an opportunity for good management to have a significant impact as many clubs are run quite poorly.

In retrospect, my only regret was not making these decisive changes in the first days and weeks after the acquisition, rather than delaying these hard decisions on the hope that things would change for the better.

Patience is key
Once decisive changes are made, it’s important to take a step back and give the key staff members time to implement a new vision and build a positive culture. New ownership groups can at times fail to give their key staff members the tools to be successful and back away from keeping their original vision.

At FC Helsingør, we empowered our new chief executive Jim Kirks and new coach Morten Eskesen to change the club’s culture and build a successful organisation from the ground up. We felt it was crucial to empower, delegate and trust these key executives to implement our long-term vision for the club. While it took some time, both men were able to bring positive cultural change to the club, which resulted in a promotion after one season with vastly improved performances on the field. In the front office, the new lean and efficient management team quickly professionalised the club, improving all aspects of commercial operations.

While these organisational changes paid dividends for us, it’s not always clear in the moment if these decisions are the right ones. In Major League Soccer (MLS), expansion club Inter Miami CF fired their head coach, sporting director and chief business officer less than 12 months after the team's first official match. Was this the correct decision? Only time will tell. However, it’s very possible they have been too focused on a poor inaugural season on the pitch, and are making potentially rash decisions without giving their original leadership team the proper time to build the organisation and execute their plan.

The first 90 days is a crucial opportunity for new ownership to implement its vision and set a soccer club on a new trajectory. Putting in the hard work during this important time to evaluate the organisation, make changes where needed and stick to a sound business plan will set up any ownership group for success.

Ultimately, not every group will succeed, but following a well thought-out plan and being patient throughout the process will give any group the best chance to have success on and off the field.
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About the author: Jordan Gardner is an American sports executive and investor in several soccer clubs across Europe including Swansea City AFC in the United Kingdom and Dundalk FC in the Republic of Ireland. He is currently the chairman, co-owner and managing partner at FC Helsingør, an American-owned soccer club in Denmark, and was previously vice president, investment and business strategy for the digital media company JUGOtv before it was acquired by Relevent Sports Group. He was also the owner and chief executive of a live event ticketing and technology company based in San Francisco, California.

Part Two of SportsProMedia's new four part series from Jordan Gardner - this week the focus is on due diligence - this is the third recent series from SportsProMedia that I have posted in the last month which has enormous interest and input to our potential understand of what our new owners could be doing, it is essential reading.

An expert’s guide to owning a European soccer club - part two: Due diligence
In the second of a four-part weekly series, Jordan Gardner, an American sports executive who is currently chairman and co-owner of Danish side FC Helsingør, outlines how to build the right investment thesis and thoroughly assess the purchase of a European soccer club.

By Jordan GardnerPosted: February 4 2021

As European soccer has grown and become more professionalised over the last decade, we have seen increased interest in ownership and investment in the sport.

Much of this interest has come from developing soccer markets like China, the United States and countries in the Middle East. The motivations of investors from these different markets have varied greatly, but the importance of building a sound investment thesis and doing proper due diligence before purchase has never been more important. While some investment groups overlook these important steps, any sophisticated investor will approach buying a soccer club in the same way they would any merger and acquisition outside of the sports world.

In part one of this series, I described the motivations of individuals, private equity and institutional investors who look towards European soccer for investment opportunities. This instalment will focus on the next steps investors take going through the acquisition process, and what goes on behind the scenes.

Building the right investment thesis
As investors become more serious about an acquisition, it is vitally important that they lay out a proper business plan and investment thesis. What will be the core focus of this business? Will it be selling players? Aiming for promotion? Qualifying for European tournaments?

While most clubs focus on a combination of these areas, some investment groups struggle without a core investment thesis. Many groups make the mistake of assuming they can succeed by managing these clubs “better and smarter than anyone else". American groups in particular are often guilty of assuming “best practices from North American sports” will automatically result in success, rather than a well thought-out business plan.

While the investment thesis varies depending on the size of the club, the current infrastructure, market characteristics and the motivations of that particular prospective ownership group, it is important that investors have a concrete plan. These groups need to be laser focused on analysing all aspects of the due diligence process through the lens of whatever the chosen business plan is.

The soccer culture and challenges in each country
A mistake that foreign ownership groups sometimes make is underestimating the inherent cultural, language and sporting difference between each league and country in Europe. Both on and off the pitch, the way the game is played, the way businesses are run, and the way people in each country interact with the game can be drastically different.

Clubs in Spain and Portugal, for instance, generally play a more open, attacking style with a focus on technique, bringing in many players from Latin America due to the cultural and language similarities. Teams in France have a tendency to bring in more players from French speaking countries in Africa, which have created a strong pipeline of talent and made the French leagues a focus for scouts from the biggest clubs in Europe.

Even off the pitch, it’s vital that potential investors understand both the opportunity and challenges in each market. Italian clubs, for example, generally have poor infrastructure compared to their European counterparts, and endemic corruption can make operating a soccer club in that country challenging

English soccer's Premier League and the lower divisions in the English Football League (EFL) are dealing with a new set of challenges related to Brexit, as clubs will have significantly more hurdles in the future obtaining work permits for players from abroad. Clubs like Brentford in the second-tier Championship have made good work of recruiting undervalued talent from Scandinavia and continental Europe, and Brexit will fundamentally disrupt this successful model. In France, strict labour laws make it nearly impossible to reduce front office payroll expenses and cut costs, something many foreign investors are unaware of.

Regardless, each market is unique both on and off the pitch, and it’s crucial that potential investors understand the intricacies of each country and league as they go through the acquisition process.

Building relationships and boots on the ground
The business side of soccer is very relationship driven, and building trust with key stakeholders throughout the acquisition process is crucial. During our purchase of FC Helsingør, I spent the better part of six months on the ground building relationships at the club, interviewing key staff members and ingraining myself in the local community as much as possible. This was extremely important as I was able to identify weak points in the organisation, and gain the trust from local stakeholders who knew we would treat the club with care and respect. My goal was to invest the time and energy in advance, so that there were fewer surprises after the purchase was complete.

When American billionaire Rocco Commisso purchased ACF Fiorentina in the summer of 2019, he described the deal as the "quickest closing in soccer history".

"From a letter of intent, I think it was less than two and a half weeks before I did signing and closing," Commisso said, speaking to Forbes. "We signed and closed on the same day, which means I didn't do any due diligence between signing the contract and closing on the contract, which typically takes two or three months."

While the exact purchase price was not disclosed, it is remarkable that Commisso made a purchase of between US$150 million to US$200 million without doing any due diligence. To no one’s surprise, it was only after the sale closed that the new ownership group learned that a third party agent held secret contracts with the club’s top players, something that should have been discovered during a proper diligence process.

According to the New York Times, the newly discovered agreements 'effectively gave a soccer agent, named in February as part of a money laundering investigation in Spain, permission to find buyers for at least five members of Fiorentina’s roster. In return, the agent would be paid a commission. If Fiorentina balked at completing any deal the agent brought to the club, he would receive a penalty fee instead.'

This is just one example of how important the diligence process is, and how no deal is worth rushing through. There is a temptation to close these deals as quickly as possible, but this should be a reminder to be smart, strategic and patient throughout the acquisition process.

Managing expectations and mitigating risk
No club acquisition is entirely risk free. However, with proper due diligence, the magnitude of problems and surprises that arise can be severely reduced. The sport of soccer in Europe has inherent risk, whether that is relegation, or injuries to top players, or just bad luck on the pitch, so it is crucially important that club leadership mitigate off the field risk as much as possible.

There is immense opportunity in European soccer to run these clubs smarter and more efficiently than the status quo, but the first step is to be humble and take the necessary time to do proper due diligence, be patient, and feel comfortable with the entire acquisition process.


About the author: Jordan Gardner is an American sports executive and investor in several soccer clubs across Europe including Swansea City AFC in the United Kingdom and Dundalk FC in the Republic of Ireland. He is currently the chairman, co-owner and managing partner at FC Helsingør, an American-owned soccer club in Denmark, and was previously vice president, investment and business strategy for the digital media company JUGOtv before it was acquired by Relevent Sports Group. He was also the owner and chief executive of a live event ticketing and technology company based in San Francisco, California.

The long running saga of attempts to get no American League games played on American soil has taken another twist - from SportsBusiness.com

Fifa warned banning international league games on US soil may breach antitrust laws
Bob Williams, US office - September 2, 2020

United States-based international soccer promoters Relevent Sports has been given a rare boost in its repeated attempts to stage official international league matches on US soil.

It has emerged that the US Justice Department warned global governing body Fifa that banning the se competitive regular-season games could violate American antitrust laws.

“Market allocation is a per se violation of the US antitrust laws,” wrote Makan Delrahim, the assistant attorney general who heads the Justice Department’s antitrust division, in a letter to Fifa president Gianni Infantino and United States Soccer Federation president Cindy Parlow Cone in March.

“Sports organizations are not categorically immune from liability under the rules. In particular, they apply to Fifa and its affiliates, including the United States Soccer Federation, in the same manner that they apply to any other organization whose activities substantially affect the United States. We specifically are concerned that Fifa could violate US antitrust laws by restricting the territory in which teams can play league games,” Delrahim wrote.

Relevent is looking to put on official LaLiga matches in the US following a long-term partnership with the Spanish soccer league. A planned match between FC Barcelona and Girona at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium in January 2019 was cancelled after widespread opposition from various stakeholders.

In April 2019, US Soccer also denied Relevent’s application to host a match between two Ecuadorian clubs.

In September 2019, Relevent filed an antitrust lawsuit against US Soccer in the Southern District of New York, alleging that the federation had conspired with Fifa and Soccer United Marketing – the commercial arm of Major League Soccer – to block official matches from foreign clubs being held in the States.

However, in July US District Judge Valerie Caproni dismissed the antitrust claim.

Relevent was given until September 1 to amend its complaint, which it has done so in a new lawsuit in the Southern District of New York. Relevent included Delrahim’s letter in the amended complaint, in which Fifa has been added as a defendant.

“Now that the government has weighed in, we call upon Fifa and USSF to join us in opening up our borders to the world’s game,” Relevent chief executive Daniel Sillman told the Associated Press in a statement.

Relevent has faced a series of setbacks to get this initiative off the ground. Last November, a Madrid court opted not to grant permission for a match between Villarreal and Atlético Madrid to be held in Miami.

In February, Fifa’s Stakeholders Committee recommended that soccer’s world governing body should formally ban teams from playing official league matches outside of their home territories.

In March, meanwhile, a Madrid court dismissed an appeal from LaLiga against the Spanish Football Federation’s (RFEF) decision not to authorize the Girona-FC Barcelona game in Miami. The Magistrate of Madrid’s Commercial Court No.12 ruled that the RFEF did not engage in unlawful conduct by not facilitating the match.

The ongoing efforts by Relevant (organisers of the International Challenge Cup - the psuedo summer Champions League) to get domestic League games played in other countries has been stalled yet again, this time by a US Federal Judge - from SportsBusiness.com

Federal judge dismisses Relevent Sports’ antitrust claim against US Soccer
Bob Williams, US office - July 22, 2020

United States-based international soccer promoters Relevent Sports has suffered yet another damaging blow in its repeated attempts to stage official international league matches on US soil.

Relevent is looking to put on official LaLiga matches in the US following a long-term partnership with the Spanish soccer league. A planned match between FC Barcelona and Girona at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium in January 2019 was cancelled after widespread opposition from various stakeholders.

In April 2019, US Soccer also denied Relevent’s application to host a match between two Ecuadorian clubs.

Last September, Relevent Sports filed an antitrust lawsuit against the United States Soccer Federation in the Southern District of New York, alleging that the federation had conspired with global governing body Fifa and Soccer United Marketing – the commercial arm of Major League Soccer – to block official matches from foreign clubs being held in the States.

However, US District Judge Valerie Caproni has dismissed the antitrust claim against US Soccer, which was defended by international law firm Latham & Watkins LLP.

“Plaintiff alleges no facts to support the inference that, in adhering to the Fifa directive, USSF actually entered an agreement with Fifa to restrict output,” Caproni wrote.

Relevent now has until September 1 to amend its complaint.

“We are evaluating the decision, which gives us the option to refile the antitrust case and go forward, as well as pursue the tort claim in arbitration,” Relevent said in a statement. “We’re considering what our options are.”

It is the latest blow for Relevent and LaLiga on this issue. Last November, a Madrid court opted not to grant permission for a match between Villarreal and Atlético Madrid to be held in Miami.

In February, Fifa’s Stakeholders Committee recommended that soccer’s world governing body should formally ban teams from playing official league matches outside of their home territories.

In March, meanwhile, a Madrid court dismissed an appeal from LaLiga against the Spanish Football Federation’s (RFEF) decision not to authorize the Girona-FC Barcelona game in Miami. The Magistrate of Madrid’s Commercial Court No.12 ruled that the RFEF did not engage in unlawful conduct by not facilitating the match.

It is also the latest legal victory for US Soccer this year. In February, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that Fifa was not legally required to enforce promotion and relegation in the US soccer pyramid.

In May, a federal judge dismissed key parts of the US women’s national team’s wage discrimination lawsuit against the federation. This bitter lawsuit has since been appealed by the players, though it appears that a settlement will be sought between the two parties.

Another legal battle with the US Soccer Foundation over trademarks was settled in May.

An article from Sports ilustrated's si.com on the chakkenges La Liga is facing in cracking the US TV marker

La Liga's North American Project and Its Hurdles in Cracking the U.S. Market
Spain's top flight is dying to gain a stronger foothold in North America, but a couple of significant obstacles remain despite the progress made so far.

BRIAN STRAUS JUL 2, 2020

Soccer has returned to our TV screens, and while the game on the grass remains mostly the same, the surroundings are a reminder of the times. The stands are empty and silent, and different leagues and teams are confronting that atmospheric issue in different ways. Some leave the seats bare. Others use tarps, fans in cardboard form, scarves, mannequins that may or may not be sex dolls or advertising to fill the empty space.

Then there’s La Liga, which took a novel approach. The stands in Spanish stadiums remain deserted in real life, but on TV they’re filled with a computer-generated crowd. The shimmering mosaic of shapes and colors makes it seem that from a distance, the place is packed. With a few keyboard strokes, La Liga generated an impression of passion where there’d been a void.

It’s a modern solution to a modern challenge, as well as a symbolic sign that La Liga, despite its success on the field, is willing to try something new to build an audience. Outside Spain, the audience it covets more than any other is in the USA. There, La Liga has another modern challenge. And, it hopes, a modern solution.

“For us, the USA is, after Spain, the most important country that we need to actually activate,” La Liga president Javier Tebas told Sports Illustrated. “The league has to make an effort to attract American viewers and supporters. We need to find those supporters.”

Tebas referenced the population, the maturity of the TV and sports marketing industries and the country’s “purchasing power”—all of it still a relatively untapped resource for a highly regarded league that’s been in business since 1929.

“It’s a constant job we need to do. It’s not enough to play some games in the USA. You need to do many other things. You need to have a digital strategy, audiovisual distribution, many other things,” Tebas said. “And we are working on that, actively. You always need to better yourself, because you better yourself or you die.”

The playing field is now world-wide. At the highest level, pro soccer has transformed from a parochial, community-oriented activity to something resembling a global arms race, where viewers and dollars—especially in Asia and the Americas—are increasingly important as player salaries and competitive stakes rise. To be bigger, leagues have to look beyond their borders.

La Liga has done so broadly, with the placement of individual employees they call “delegates” in 43 countries around the world. And it’s done so more narrowly, with the opening of 11 international offices, including one in Mexico City. Then there’s the USA, which is getting a level of attention and investment that’s unique in international soccer.

The process began in the summer of 2017, when Barcelona and Real Madrid—the rivals who are in some ways La Liga’s greatest asset and in others a significant liability—played a friendly outside Miami. The International Champions Cup game at Hard Rock Stadium drew more than 66,000 fans and generated some $38 million in direct revenue. That led to a conversation between La Liga and Relevent, the ICC organizer controlled by Dolphins owner Stephen Ross.

“Relevent pitched La Liga and said, ‘You can’t expect to come to the U.S. every four years to try to renegotiate your TV rights and see an uptick in the value of those rights if you’re not working to develop the market—doing stuff day-in and day-out to help grow the value of the brand,’” Boris Gartner said.

Gartner, a former Televisa and Univision executive from Colombia, now runs the result of those conversations. Two years ago, La Liga and Relevent formed La Liga North America. It’s a 15-year, 50/50 joint venture designed to generate marketing and sponsorship opportunities in the USA and Canada and to, as Gartner said, do the day-to-day work that’ll build La Liga’s brand equity. Relevent has invested close to $10 million so far, Gartner confirmed.

“You ask any international football executive, and they all pretend to have or want to have a U.S. strategy,” he said. “But very few of them are willing to commit the money and resources to actually do that.”

Why the investment? Why the effort? Because even if La Liga is No. 1 on the field—it leads UEFA’s coefficient ranking by a healthy margin, although the Premier League has gained ground over the past three seasons—it’s far from No. 1 in Tebas’s No. 2 market.

Liga MX’s popularity is buttressed by the nearly 40 million U.S. residents who identify as Mexican or Mexican-American. The EPL is the sport’s most glamorous domestic circuit. It features a relatively significant amount of top-to-bottom competitiveness and its clubs, especially those beyond the title contenders, are well-branded and recognizable. It’s also benefited from its NBC platform since 2013. And then there’s the Bundesliga, whose games were on Fox for five years and whose clubs field more Americans abroad than any other major league (not to mention the best Canadian prospect ever).

“We’ve been at this almost two years—not even two years,” Gartner said. “The Premier League, as a presence in this country, they’ve been at it for much, much longer. We need to catch up. I think even as we accelerate our growth, there’s a ton more that needs to be done.”

From a distance, La Liga faces two significant obstacles—one of which isn’t entirely of its own making. There’s a reason the excitement and publicity that surrounded sports’ return from the pandemic pause fell more generously on the Premier League and Bundesliga: the decline of La Liga’s American TV partner, BeIN Sports. The Qatari company broadcasts Spanish matches in 17 territories around the world, Gartner said, but it’s U.S. audience plunged two years ago when BeIN was dropped by both Comcast and DirecTV. The network fell from around 55 million subscribers during the 2017-18 season (English and Spanish language combined) to 27 million.

And after a renewal was triggered last year, La Liga now is tied to the network for four more seasons, until 2024.

“It means we have narrower reach, so we have been developing other strategies,” Tebas said. “I think a balance needs to be struck between what you get paid and the exposure you have.”

Gartner has no choice but to look for silver linings. One is that the money is decent. BeIN pays La Liga “just under” the $167 million per season the Premier League nets from NBC. Another is that the league feels valued.

“When you are the core property for a network, they’re going to give you disproportionate amounts of attention and promotion and everything that comes with it,” Gartner said. “The other thing is understanding where some of the competing leagues are in the landscape, and you see Serie A is on [ESPN] Plus. The Bundesliga was buried on Fox somewhere and now it’s going to [ESPN] Plus. The Champions League had a big window on Univision but is buried on B/R Live. The fact that we had an outlet with English and Spanish, with a linear presence and that we were going to be the core property for it … you have to build a balance with that scale and the value of your rights.”

He continued, “Everything we do is governed by what clubs want or need. You sit down with clubs and you ask them, ‘What do you want, more distribution or more revenue?’ They’ll all tell you that philosophically they want more distribution, they’re in this for the long run, get their property in front of as many people as possible. Well that means the revenue you’re receiving is 20% less. Then they’ll say, ‘Actually hold on ….’”

That makes sense, because in La Liga every cent matters. It matters because the league is ruled by the two wealthiest clubs in the sport. That’s the second obstacle. Barcelona and Real Madrid attract the the interest and fascination of the world. They play in La Liga, but they’re bigger than La Liga. Their domestic dominance makes many games, besides the ones against each other, almost moot. And the shadow cast by El Clásico renders so many smaller clubs in Spain, like the Osasunas and Levantes, almost anonymous beyond its borders.

Barcelona and Madrid have combined to win 14 of the past 15 La Liga titles, and it’ll be 15 of 16 by the end of this month. And even though the Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1 are each currently ruled by one club, that hasn’t historically been the case. Teams in those countries have had the chance to build up their trophy cases, and thus a bit of renown. Only five Spanish clubs have won at least three top-tier championships. Compare that to England (14), Germany (12), Italy (eight), France (14) and Mexico (12).

The recent Europa League success of Sevilla (five titles) and Atlético Madrid (three) speaks to La Liga’s quality. But the fact that those two clubs have combined to beat out both Barça and Madrid just once in that 15-year span demonstrates how high the hurdle is.

Tebas, Gartner and their colleagues want to grow La Liga, and to do so, they’ll have to get American fans to become more familiar with the other 18 clubs. Where’s Real Sociedad from? Who’s the best player on Leganés? What are Valladolid’s colors? Those questions and identities matter when you’re trying to build interest in an inclusive, season-long narrative.

“The history of Spanish soccer has been built on the pillars of Real Madrid and Barcelona, and that is a reality we can’t deny. But even with that reality, La Liga, together with the Premier League, is one of the biggest leagues in the world,” Tebas said. "What we need is for other clubs to grow in the same way. We don’t want to do anything artificial. We want things to be as natural as possible so other clubs might appear, such as Atlético and Sevilla. They are also winning titles and eventually, they’ll be as competitive as Madrid or Barcelona.”

Tebas took a massive step toward helping Atleti, Sevilla and the rest of the league compete back in 2015, when TV rights were centralized for the first time. Previously, each club marketed its broadcast rights separately, which left almost nothing for mid-size and smaller clubs. According to La Liga, the TV revenue gap between the biggest and smallest teams used to be 12:1. Following the 2018-19 season, it had dropped to 3.5:1.

Money earned through participation and success in continental competition still isn’t shared, which skews the ratios further in favor of Madrid, Barcelona and to a lesser degree the likes of Atleti or Valencia. But it’s not as bad as it was. It’s a start.

Meanwhile, La Liga North America will try to balance the appeal of its most valuable asset with the need to make the competition about more than just El Clásico.

“It would be crazy for us, as a league in the U.S. trying to grow the brand and the value to not leverage the existing, overwhelming dominance and fandom that Real Madrid and Barcelona have,” Gartner said. “It would be equally crazy and equally stupid not to use the platform that we have and the access that we have, driven by those two teams and arguably Atlético as well, to promote and push the other 17-18 teams.”

Augmenting BeIN’s production with its own digital content is a massive part of the joint venture’s strategy. It produces 12 weekly shows—six in Spanish and six in English—geared toward American audiences. Former U.S. international Jimmy Conrad is among its presenters. Overall, video views on social media and YouTube have increased nearly four-fold to more than 7 million this season.

“We try to tell many stories about the clubs, sentimental stories and stories out of the ordinary not strictly related to sports,” Tebas said.

“We can build a content piece around Messi and it would have millions of views, because at the end of the day, it’s Messi. It requires a bit more research and knowledge of the competition and your audience, but you can achieve this same scale and views with 10 smaller stories that probably will have deeper engagement,” Gartner said. “If I tell a [Real] Betis story with Andrés Guardado and Diego Lainez, yes, it’ll be a fraction of a Messi story, but the engagement it’ll drive from U.S. Hispanics with Mexican descent is crazy.”

Gartner said he’s a big believer in demographics as destiny. La Liga North America is a “long-term play.” The growing Hispanic population in the U.S., which includes a lot of first- and second-generation natives with a cultural predisposition to soccer, is the primary initial target for the joint venture’s initiatives.

“The country is getting more brown and more young and more diverse, and these people are already bought into soccer,” he said. “If you’re trying to get the full picture of the country, all demos, [soccer] might [rank] fourth. But what’s the growing demo, and where’s that growth coming from? A young, diverse, multicultural audience that favors soccer.”

In addition to content and sponsorship (its announced three partners so far, with two more coming), La Liga North America has gotten involved with youth soccer, launching academy and camp programs in Miami and Toronto and partnering with U.S. Club Soccer. At a higher level, its La Liga ProPlayer program creates a pathway for older Spanish academy players to move to the USA, attend college, earn a scholarship and play soccer. Twenty-six players from 21 first- or second-division La Liga teams took advantage in 2019, bringing the gospel of Spanish soccer with them. For fans, its working with bars and restaurants in different cities to create “permanent homes” for La Liga broadcasts.

The joint venture's holy grail, however, is the game itself. It’s as novel an idea as the virtual fans—play an official league match on American soil. On the pyramid of pillars underpinning La Liga North America, staging a game (or several) in the USA is at the top. It's unprecedented, and it's controversial. The first attempt, a Girona-Barcelona meeting in Miami in January 2019, was abandoned when the parties ran out of time to secure approval. The Spanish federation (RFEF), U.S. Soccer Federation, UEFA and Concacaf all had to sign off.

“We still strongly believe that having an official league match is the right step in the evolution of the growth of international soccer in the U.S., but also La Liga. If you follow the international strategy of all the American leagues, it was clearly along the same lines,” Gartner said, referring to the NFL, NHL, NBA and MLB all playing regular-season games abroad.

Not everyone feels that way. FIFA president Gianni Infantino lacks jurisdiction, but didn’t seem thrilled with the idea in 2018, when he told Sports Illustrated, “I think I would prefer much more a great MLS game in the U.S. rather than La Liga being in the U.S.” The RFEF and USSF, which partners with MLS through Soccer United Marketing, are even less enthused. Both want to protect their turf. La Liga sued the RFEF in Spain in late 2018, and Relevent filed a federal antitrust case against U.S. Soccer in April 2019 that’s still in its early stages.

It may be a while before La Liga can stage its game here, if ever. But both sides of the joint venture are willing to put in the time. Again, this was a 15-year agreement. The BeIN deal runs another four seasons, and the 2026 World Cup is just beyond that as another tantalizing catalyst.

“You have highly motivated parties in Relevent, Stephen Ross, Tebas and La Liga, to try and pull that off,” Gartner said. “Just from a U.S. perspective, to fuel the growth of the league here, there would be no bigger stunt than this. It you think about the growth of the value of international football—not just La Liga and not just the two teams that come—it’ll help grow the value of the TV rights even more, the commercial value, and that revenue gets distributed to all 42 teams [in the Spanish first and second divisions]. It will fuel the growth of the other teams.”

FIFA has turned to an American financial advisory firm to jump-start its efforts to secure the $1 billion it will require to successfully launch its inaugural 24-team Club World Cup next year.

Hiring the firm, the Raine Group, which has experience in closing deals in the sports sector, suggests that a tender process begun by FIFA in December has failed to secure a backer capable of meeting the organization’s requirements to finance the 2021 Club World Cup, which was awarded to China last year.
FIFA Set to Reward China With World Cup for ClubsOct. 20, 2019

Much of the money is needed to secure the participation of the top European clubs, which are seeking privileged status and would essentially become joint owners of the event.
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Last month, leaders from a group of elite European clubs, including Liverpool, Juventus and Barcelona, traveled to FIFA’s headquarters in Zurich. According to people familiar with their plans and a document summarizing their meeting obtained by The New York Times, they discussed the creation of a joint venture between FIFA and the European Club Association, a status that would elevate their interests above participating teams from soccer’s five other regional confederations. The talks centered on financial incentives, and the possibility of including as many as 12 European teams, four more than the current format, which caps European involvement at eight.

Reaching agreement for the tournament has been a fraught process. The project has fractured the relationship between FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, and the head of European soccer, Aleksander Ceferin, and faced opposition from the sport’s biggest clubs and leagues. FIFA wants its new tournament to eventually have a stature similar to the World Cup’s, an aspiration that would threaten the status of UEFA’s Champions League, which is currently the world’s richest club championship.

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Attempts by FIFA to close an agreement for the tournament in 2018 with a group led by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank foundered when Infantino failed to get the support of the FIFA Council. At the time, several members of the FIFA board — led by Ceferin — complained of not being told enough information about the project. A FIFA analysis, reported by The Times in 2018, concluded the organization needed to raise $650 million to $1 billion for the tournament to be viable.
For Infantino, the stakes are high. As well as stoking tension with Ceferin, the discussions around new club arrangements — which would prioritize Europe’s involvement over clubs from the rest of the world — have also led to a breakdown in relations between Infantino and Alejandro Domínguez, the leader of the sport in South America and a longtime Infantino ally.

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Domínguez, annoyed at being sidelined when South American teams were among a group that met with Infantino, signed an agreement to work on joint projects with UEFA’s Ceferin earlier this month. A few days later, FIFA scrapped a FIFA Council meeting set to be hosted by Domínguez in Asunción, Paraguay, where his organization, CONMEBOL, is based.
FIFA largely blamed costs for scrapping the event, but Domínguez reacted with fury, demanding, in a letter to FIFA, a detailed breakdown on how much FIFA spent to host similar meetings recently in India, Rwanda and China.

After finally bowing to the creation of the tournament, UEFA has so far stymied FIFA’s efforts to secure the participation of the continent’s top teams for the inaugural event next year. It has demanded the field should include winners of its second-tier Europa League competition, while FIFA wants only the continent’s best teams.

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The clubs are taking advantage of the tensions. As well as talking to FIFA about the quadrennial World Cup, Europe’s biggest teams have also met with the American billionaire Stephen M. Ross, who is seeking to get them to commit more formally to an annual preseason tournament. Ross’s company, Relevent Sports Group, has held talks with both UEFA and FIFA about securing their backing for an annual event in which participating clubs could secure about $10 million per tournament and an equity stake, provided they commit to several editions of the competition.

FIFA hopes the new revenue stream from an expanded Club World Cup will allow it to invest more in developing the game around the world. But the financial demands of the top teams could make that difficult: Those teams want a model similar to the Champions League, where more than 90 percent of the income is paid out in prize money.

Because of the early opposition to its project, FIFA has found itself in a hurry to get the financing it requires. Some groups that showed initial interest in the event, like Suning Holdings Group, which is based in China, owns the Italian team Inter Milan and is one of the biggest Chinese investors in soccer, declined to make an offer after complaining that there was a lack of detail in FIFA’s tender request.

By hiring Raine to manage the process, FIFA is enlisting an organization well versed in securing deals for sports entities, and one with a presence in China. Led by the banker Joe Ravitch, the firm helped the English soccer champion Manchester City sell a stake worth $500 million to the American investment group Silver Lake Partners in November. And City’s Premier League rival Chelsea has directed any parties interested in acquiring the club from its Russian owner, Roman Abramovich, toward Ravitch.

If you read yesterday's piece by Jonathan Wilson in the Guardian (linked above) you will find this sits well as a companion piece - from the New York Times

It’s Time to Ask What Africa Needs
Yes, Europe’s interests are important. But they shouldn’t be allowed to drive every decision in soccer.
Rory Smith - Jan. 25, 2020

The ideas just keep coming. From Europe’s leading clubs: a proposal to expand the Champions League, to squeeze four more lucrative matchdays into the competition’s format. From UEFA: a whole new trophy to win, but one for countries that feel (rightly) excluded from the Champions League.

From FIFA: another new tournament, this one in the summer and based on the Club World Cup — the one that was, in itself, an expansion of the old Intercontinental Cup — but bigger, richer, and more in China. And, as my colleague Tariq Panja reported this week, from Stephen M. Ross and his Relevent Sports team: a version of the International Champions Cup that is conspicuously more than a meaningless preseason moneymaking exercise.

They are all, for now, under consideration, despite the endless warnings from FIFPro — the global players’ union — and from a number of leading managers, not least Jürgen Klopp, that players are already facing the risk of burnout, that soccer is in danger of strangling its golden goose. The meetings still go on, in locked rooms and hushed tones in five-star hotels, the workshopping, the brainstorming. There is no such thing as a bad idea.

Last week, it was confirmed that this year’s African Cup of Nations — Africa’s equivalent of the Copa América, or the European Championship — would, in fact, be next year’s African Cup of Nations: Cameroon, the host, has noted that it is far too hot to play the tournament in June and July, and so it has shifted it, quite understandably, to January. (The fact its summer dates would have clashed with the new Club World Cup was a factor, too).

This is, in many ways, not a new idea: the Cup of Nations always used to be played in the (European) winter, until it was decided in 2017 that it should be played, instead, in the (European) summer.

The thinking was flawed — it did not require a meteorologist to work out that temperatures would rule out a swath of countries as potential hosts — but the logic was simple: pretty much all of Africa’s highest-profile players work for clubs in Europe. Switching it to the off-season made sense for them, and for their employers.

The switch back, then, is not exactly popular: Everyone in the corridors of power might be willing to contemplate almost any other proposal for new tournaments or ruining existing ones, but the restoration of a historic, important competition to its usual dates is universally seen as A Bad Thing. Have the African authorities not thought about what effect they will have on the integrity of the Premier League at all?

There will come a point when this Eurocentric thinking has to stop. Yes, that is where all the money is. Yes, that is the economic engine financing the global game. But it is not the limit of soccer’s horizons. It does not own the game.

Making sure everything works well for Europe will, eventually, have damaging consequences elsewhere: in terms of attendance and interest in local competitions (which has already happened across Africa) and, possibly, down the line, in the development of players. Europe has to start thinking of itself as the tip of the pyramid: the summit, yes, but in quite a bit of trouble if the rest of the edifice is not secure.

There is one idea for a new competition that appeals. It came, back in November, from an unlikely source: Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, the concept that a stopped clock is right twice in a day fitted out in a finely-tailored suit. On a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Infantino suggested that a Pan-African league should be under consideration.

His theory was, obviously, based on money: he thought that such a competition might be able to command revenues of $200 million a year. But there is a sound logic behind it.

Africa is home to a couple of dozen major clubs: Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates in South Africa; Al Ahly and Zamalek in Egypt; Espérance and Étoile du Sahel in Tunisia; DR Congo’s TP Mazembe; and Ghana’s Asante Kotoko, among others. A league of 20 teams, as Infantino suggested, would be of a far higher standard than any of the national competitions they currently call home.

That would be beneficial, of course, for players, and the prospect of selling continental broadcast rights would help improve facilities and infrastructure. It might, even, enable teams to hold on to some of their brightest prospects for just a little longer, delaying the exodus for Europe.

It might, in other words, provide the basis for another pole to emerge in soccer’s firmament: not enough to compete with Europe, but to rebalance things just a little. Soccer is weaker if western Europe has a monopoly on talent, on wealth, on power, as it does now. It is healthier if Africa — and Asia, North and South America and the rest — can make decisions without having to think how Europe will react. This might be a step on that road.

As the big six campaign for the end of FA cup replays and even the end of the League cup (it is not just Pep you know https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/statu ... 9263354880) so that they can play more lucrative games elsewhere (expanded Uefa club competitions, FIFA Club competitions and pre (even mid) season tournaments) the promoter of the Champions cup is beginging to wonder why he is not making any money - @TariqPanja in the New York Times

Envisioning a Champions League on Tour, a Soccer Investor Demands More for His Money
The International Champions Cup, which brings Europe’s top clubs to North America, has been lucrative for the teams but not the organizer. Now there is a threat to end the event unless teams agree to make the competition more serious.

By Tariq Panja - Jan. 21, 2020 - Updated 2:35 a.m. ET

Stephen M. Ross, the real estate developer and principal owner of the Miami Dolphins, flew to Paris this month to speak with leaders of Europe’s most powerful soccer clubs, teams that have benefited from the billionaire’s largess in bankrolling a summer tournament in the United States and beyond.

For seven years Ross has plowed millions into the International Champions Cup, an annual showcase that has become very lucrative for the superstar-laden clubs that receive a coveted spot in the competition. But for Ross and RSE Ventures — the sports investment company he co-founded that controls the I.C.C. — the price of running the event has grown to more than $100 million, with no signs of a profit.

Addressing management and owners from the likes of Manchester United, Juventus, Paris St.-Germain and Liverpool, Ross and RSE executives said something had to change — organizers could not keep losing money.

According to multiple people familiar with the talks who requested anonymity to discuss a private meeting, the clubs were told that either the event — which teams treat as little more than a preseason tuneup — had to become more meaningful or RSE would be forced to turn off the spigot.

While the I.C.C.’s games have drawn some of the biggest crowds in soccer history — 109,318 squeezed into Michigan Stadium in 2014 to watch Manchester United beat Real Madrid, 3-1 — it has failed to attract the type of investment from broadcasters and commercial partners that is necessary for a profitable future.

Since the event coincides with Europe’s preseason, most clubs use it as an opportunity to build up players’ fitness and test out new, unproven talent. Top performers and big names often play limited minutes — if any — to the annoyance of fans.

Ross’s group wants the teams to commit to a tournament with legitimate stakes, one with the kind of competitive tension seen in other events — something akin to taking the Champions League, Europe’s wildly popular club competition, on tour.

The teams were told that, if they agreed, they could make much more money than they currently do from I.C.C. games, while Ross would finally be able to see his investment pay off.

Ross’s trip included a meeting with European soccer’s governing body, UEFA. The I.C.C. organizers want to secure UEFA’s backing for any new event by having it partner with them or allow them to use its branding to give the tournament the sheen of excellence and importance they crave.

The clubs acknowledged that the tournament needed changes, but no decisions were reached in Paris. Instead, the teams agreed to set up a joint working group with Relevent to study whether another high-profile event was desirable or feasible in global soccer’s increasingly crowded calendar. They are expected to report back in the spring.

The talks came during a critical time for global soccer, as the game’s influencers are competing to shape the future of the sport and carve out their own interests.

A week after the meeting in Paris, some of the same club officials traveled to Zurich for talks with Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA. Under Infantino, FIFA has created its own international club tournament, a 24-team event to be held every four years, starting in China in 2021.

The fortunes of FIFA’s new event depend on the complete buy-in of its 12 European participants, and their meeting with FIFA concluded with the clubs asking for a seat at the decision-making table and the ability to have some control over the tournament, similar to an agreement they already have with UEFA for European club tournaments.

A FIFA spokesman declined to comment.

Player unions may offer resistance to the I.C.C.’s plan, as they become increasingly wary of stakeholders adding to players’ workloads in pursuit of new revenue streams. Two days after the meeting in Paris, FIFPro, the main global player’s union, announced it had founded a new council that includes Vincent Kompany, the Belgian star who has spoken out about the number of games players are expected to appear in.

Top leagues may also be an obstacle. They have been largely opposed to suggestions for new competitions.

The Champions League itself is expected to add at least four more games starting in the 2024 season, and may even overhaul the competition entirely by implementing a so-called Swiss model. Under that proposal, all participants would play 10 games in a league format, with the top eight teams qualifying directly for the knockout stages, while the 16 teams below would compete in a playoff to join them.

The idea of Champions League on tour, similar to what the I.C.C. would like to become, isn’t a new one. In fact, UEFA was considering a something along those lines when Infantino was its chief administrator, before he was elected FIFA’s president in 2016.

To earn UEFA’s seal, the I.C.C. would most likely have to modify its invitation-only model, according to a person familiar with the talks. Clubs would have to be considered on merit, the person said, rather than factors like marketability and the size of their fan bases.

If such an event came to fruition, it could compete with FIFA’s competition and create another front in the often bitter relationship between soccer’s two most powerful figures, Infantino and UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin.

The two have spent much of the last two years clashing over various issues, including FIFA’s World Cup. Most recently, tempers flared after details leaked from a meeting between Infantino and Florentino Pérez, the Real Madrid president, over Pérez’s desire to create a Super League that would unmoor the biggest teams from the domestic competitions in which they have played for decades.

While this sounds like a commercial spat over defending home league audiences, I see this as the opening salvo of a commercial desire to franchise club football at the very top level

Relevent Sports who run the pre-season International Champions Cup have launched against the United States Soccer Federation and FIFA to overturn a ruling banning National League games from countries outside the US being played in the country. No doubt they will cite the NFL, NBA and MLB but they do not have the global importance of football

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- This is going to run and run - remember it started with talk of the 39th game for the Premier League