This column realises it is showing its age by moaning about how short football’s summer break has become — but has there actually been one this year?
At the Olympic Games, the men’s football tournament, which feels like the end of a very long 2023-24 campaign, finishes in Paris on Friday. The gold medal match kicks off at 5pm UK time, three hours before the new English Football League (EFL) season — comprising the second, third and fourth tiers — starts with games in Blackburn, Preston, Barnsley and Chesterfield.
The Austrian, Belgian, Scandinavian, Scottish and Swiss leagues started last week, while the qualifying rounds of UEFA’s club competitions have been going on for a month.
Oh well, at least we still have a week to do our fantasy football teams.
Wait… what? The EFL has launched one, too? And it starts tomorrow? Even the fantasy football off-seasons are getting shorter — the Euro 2024 game only finished a month ago.
“We got to the point where it became a question of, ‘Why aren’t we doing this?’,” explains EFL chief commercial officer Ben Wright. “We’ve been looking at it for two or three years as part of a wider data strategy. It’s about engagement. It’s about getting people to talk about stuff in a more specific and passionate way.
“This isn’t about a direct commercial return, but there is an interest in the data side. We have about 1.5million central data records, but a lot of those have been with us for a fair amount of time, so it’s a database with limitations. Getting a better insight into how people engage with us and our clubs has value.
“We could have put a sponsor on the game already but we haven’t and I’m not sure we will. We might integrate them via the prizes we offer, but the real value is getting to know our audience better.”
Preston North End’s Deepdale will be the setting for one of the Championship season openers (Ben Roberts/Getty Images)
For the EFL, there were two key reasons for not waiting any longer to join the fantasy fun. The first was watching Fantasy Premier League go from a niche game, played by only 76,000 people in its first season in 2002, to the content-creating, conversation-continuing, data-mining machine it has become, played by 11 million fans around the globe.
The second was the arrival of a broadcast platform that could really support a game based on people getting slightly obsessed about players they would not normally care about. Announced in May, the EFL’s new domestic broadcast deal with Sky Sports will see the British pay-TV giant show 1,059 EFL games a season for the next five years.
“That’s where (the fantasy game) crosses over with the TV deal because people talk about it mostly when watching football,” says Wright.
In terms of how you play Fantasy EFL, here is a piece we prepared earlier, but the scoring is basically the same as FPL, but you only choose seven players every weekend and they have no prices, so you can load up with Blackburn Rovers’ prolific midfielder Sammie Szmodics, Birmingham City striker Alfie May and Wrexham star Paul Mullin… but so will everyone else.
You can also change all your players every weekend and, in a nice wrinkle, you also choose two clubs every weekend, with five points for a home win, seven for an away win, and two for an away win.
Why seven players and two clubs? Because seven and two makes 72. Geddit?
“We want to appeal to the big fantasy league fans but also more casual EFL supporters,” says Wright. “That’s one of the reasons we’ve got no prices. With the number of players we’ve got, it would have been quite difficult to manage a budget.”
The game was developed by Genius Sports, a UK-based tech firm that provides sports data to the betting industry, broadcasters and leagues.
“By the start of the season, we’ll be into six figures in terms of people playing,” adds Wright. “I’m not sure benchmarking ourselves against the PL game is particularly relevant.”
For what it is worth, FPL, the daddy of fantasy football leagues, actually shrunk for the first time last season, with the number of players falling from a record 11,447,105 in 2022-23 to 10,904,158.
That prompted a refresh, with the game making several changes to how you score points, make transfers and play your chips. It appears to have done the trick, with the Premier League telling us that nearly 2.3million had signed up within eight days of launching the game, up 30 per cent on the same day in 2023.
Blackburn’s Sammie Szmodics will be in a lot of Fantasy EPL teams (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
So, all is well in fantasy land. The situation in the actual Premier League is… a little sleepy.
There are still three weeks of the summer transfer window to go, but the three most expensive signings by English teams are Leny Yoro, Amadou Onana and Maximilian Kilman. Anyone picking those three for their FPL teams?
There are several likely reasons for clubs’ cautious approach. The first is that the Premier League’s post-pandemic splurge could not continue.
You only have to recall last season’s points deductions to know that some clubs have no room for manoeuvre at all and several more have to be creative, as we have already seen with the number of deals before the first ‘deadline day’ of the summer, June 30.
Even clubs without immediate concerns over their position regarding the league’s profit and sustainability rules (PSR) are not as flush as they once were. Only four of them made pre-tax profits in 2022-23 — Brighton & Hove Albion (£133million; $169m), Manchester City (£80million), Bournemouth (£44million) and Brentford (£9million) — and the whole league combined to lose a staggering £685million. That was the league’s fifth consecutive aggregate loss and the 2022-23 season was 14 per cent worse than the season before.
So, maybe everyone is just trying to lose less money. Either that or they are watching the Olympics.
It is a similar story in football’s mergers and acquisitions market, which was looking a little frothy after Sir Jim Ratcliffe agreed to spend £1.3billion on just over a quarter of Manchester United late last year. That valued the club at almost double its market capitalisation.
Since then… not so much.
Brentford, available via a call to merchant bank Rothschild & Co, have had no serious nibbles at their £400million price tag. Wolverhampton Wanderers have been semi-officially on the market for over a year. Tottenham Hotspur, another one in Rothschild’s shop window, have been open to offers for a long time but nobody is getting close to their £3.75billion price tag (or is likely to).
Rothschild is also meant to be helping the late David Gold’s family sell the 25 per cent stake it owns in West Ham United, but the only interested party with the means to close the deal has been the club’s second-largest single shareholder, the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky. According to the football finance rumour mill, the club’s largest shareholder, David Sullivan, is not so keen on that idea.
Travel south of the river to Crystal Palace and you find the same dynamic. John Textor, the largest shareholder, is desperate to either buy enough shares to become the majority owner at Selhurst Park or offload his 45 per cent stake so he can add another English club to his Eagle Football Group.
John Textor earlier this summer (Franck Fife/AFP/Getty Images)
The American wants to float Eagle Football in New York and needs an English club to sweeten the offer. However, minority stakes as large as his at Palace are hard to sell (some in the business call them ‘the most expensive season tickets in sports’), particularly when you want a profit on the £117.5million you spent acquiring it.
Textor’s most likely buyer is one of his fellow shareholders, or a combination of them, but they seem pretty happy with the status quo and have only made lowball offers.
Which brings us to Everton. Textor linked himself with the Merseyside club this summer, but they have been for sale for over two years and have seen at least four different takeover attempts falter for one reason or another.
Nobody has yet publicly come forward to pick up the deal left on the table by the Friedkin Group last month.
Textor is still in the market for an English club so he cannot be completely discounted, but he has also been looking at opportunities in the Championship in recent weeks and still has his Palace situation to sort out.
The disparity between sellers and buyers goes far below the Premier League, with dozens of clubs in the EFL and non-League looking for investment.
Take Salford City. This month, former footballer turned media pundit/property developer/fashion icon Gary Neville bought the 40 per cent stake in the League Two club that Peter Lim had owned.
The Singaporean businessman had initially purchased a 50 per cent stake in Salford in 2014, with Gary Neville, his brother Phil and their “Class of ’92” team-mates, Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes taking 10 per cent stakes each. Lim then sold 10 per cent to David Beckham in 2019 to complete the set of that vintage Manchester United academy crop in the Salford ownership group.
But Gary Neville’s move is only meant to be temporary.
Gary Neville watching Salford City in February (Ian Hodgson/PA Images/Getty Images)
In a statement announcing the change of control, Butt, now Salford’s chief executive, said: “We continue to explore options to work with additional strategic partners to assist us in achieving our ambitions for the club.”
Which is all perfectly sensible. Unfortunately, they have been looking for “strategic partners” all year, as Lim, who also owns La Liga’s Valencia, made it clear he no longer wanted to fund Salford’s substantial annual losses.
But Lim appears to have got tired of waiting, so Neville has been forced to fill the breach.
For how long, who knows? But it could be a while if he and his partners are unwilling to lower their £30million valuation of the club, who finished 20th in League Two last season, nine points and three places above the relegation zone.
Speaking of the National League, it had some good news to share this week — and not a moment too soon, either, as its new season kicks off on Saturday.
With its long-running deal with TNT Sports, formerly known as BT Sport, expiring last season, the fifth and sixth tiers of English football were hurtling towards a blackout until late last month when it announced a seven-year global deal with sports streaming platform DAZN.
In what looks like a win-win, DAZN is getting a lot of fresh content for a sum coyly described as “seven figures per season”, while the National League gets an international audience and a long-term partner.
The most interesting part of the deal is that it is a hybrid between a league going it alone, direct to the consumer, and a more traditional rights deal with a platform that just adds the new inventory to its bundle.
Following criticism from the co-owner of former member club Wrexham (you may have heard of him, a Canadian chap called Ryan Reynolds, an actor, apparently), the league set up its own streaming service, NLTV, in 2022.
DAZN is effectively adding that to its platform and repackaging it as a standalone channel on its app, much like the NFL Game Pass is available as a separate DAZN product in the UK. So, National League fans who do not like boxing or MMA can have their football without the fighting.
And because the deal was a little bit “lastminute.com”, as a National League club executive put it, there is going to be an interim period, starting with the resurgent Southend United’s home game against York City on Saturday, when DAZN provides “enhanced coverage” for three games in August that will be available via NLTV.
That means a few extra cameras, fun graphics, a proper commentary team and a pre-game chitchat — the stuff Reynolds wanted two years ago. The selection of a game of the weekend for the extra bells and whistles will continue on NLTV until the autumn when the whole channel migrates to DAZN’s platform.
Ryan Reynolds has pushed for better broadcasting (Jan Kruger/Getty Images)
Non-League football is not for everyone, of course. It must be particularly tough on clubs playing European football only five years ago.
Spare a thought, then, for fans of Bordeaux, who have been in limbo since French football’s financial watchdog relegated them to the third tier for financial reasons in July.
It was hoped that a takeover by Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group would reverse that decision and get the six-time French champions moving in the right direction again, but that deal collapsed amid concerns over the scale of the club’s debts.
That rubber-stamped the relegation to the semi-pro Championnat National and the news has got worse since then. The French football authorities are so worried about Bordeaux’s financial strength that they have knocked them down to National 2, the fourth tier. An administrative relegation of two divisions.
A local consortium of fans is trying to put a rescue package together while appealing against the second demotion, but the clock is ticking and liquidation is not out of the question. This would be a dreadful outcome for all concerned and a cautionary tale for the entire game.
And on that cheery note, this column is clocking off for a short summer break. We will be back before the second Lord’s Test match of the summer, which, of course, is another sign of football’s mission creep.
(Top photo: George Wood/Getty Images)
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