Prazy offers to buy Manchester United, Chelsea who spends without counting on the transfers market … The English championship attracts investors ready to pay billions.
by Eric Albert ( London, correspondence)
Will the British government whistle the end of the match? Thursday, February 23, after years of procrastination, he will publish a “white paper” which must, in principle, suggest the creation of an English football regulator. After three decades of hyperinflation of expenses, it is a question of putting some order in the financing of clubs.
The year 2023 began with an avalanche of billions in the world of the English round ball. Friday, February 17, two offers were officially submitted for the takeover of Manchester United, after its owners, the American family Glazer, decided to sell it.
One comes from a British billionaire, Jim Ratcliffe, who made a fortune in petrochemicals at the head of Ineos and also has the OGC Nice. The other emanates from Qatar, in the person of Sheikh Jassim Hamad Al Thani, member of the royal family, president of one of the Qatari banks, Qib. Officially, because UEFA prohibits meetings in the Champions League between two clubs with the same owner, it is not the same shareholder as that of PSG, in this case Qatar Sports Investments. Manchester United Prix, fourth European football budget? Around 6 billion euros, according to the British media, even if no official figure has been confirmed.
Furthermore, Tottenham Hotspur, ninth largest budget for European football, has received an unsolicited offer. The American businessman Jahm Najafi, emigrant of Iran at the age of 12, who built an empire present in Formula 1, extreme sports, and Portuguese, Spanish, Belgian and German footballs, offers 3 , 5 billion euros, according to the Financial Times. What obviously annoy the president of the London club, Daniel Levy: “We are in a league which sees more and more money of sovereign funds and financial consortium; a league where purchasing power is in the hands of some- some who dominate the market and have the capacity to handle it. “
We must add the acquisition, in 2022, of Chelsea for 2.8 billion euros (and 2 billion euros in investment promises) by a consortium led by the American financier Todd Boehly. A few months earlier, the Saudi Arabian Sovereign Fund had got hold of Newcastle United. 2> “The British market is doped”
What transformation for English football! In 1992, when the Premier League was created, the era of the Hooligans was not far away, the places standing in the stands still existed and the best footballers then left for Italy. Three decades later, English football financially crushes the rest of Europe. “There is a permanent increase: the millionaires have been replaced by the multimillionaires, who have been replaced by the billionaires, themselves replaced by the multimillionaires,” said Kieran Maguire, specialist in the football economy at the University of Liverpool .
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