A rare encounter with Aston Villa’s owner

It’s the transfer saga that has gripped and frustrated football fans in equal measure.

Kylian Mbappé, the biggest star in French football, has told Paris Saint-Germain that he wants to leave the Ligue 1 champions at the end of the season.

The 25-year-old, arguably the natural heir to Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, has been repeatedly linked to Spain’s Real Madrid.

PSG, which signed him for roughly €180mn in 2017, pays up to €200mn a year to retain his services. The club now faces a battle to limit the financial damage during his exit talks. Mbappé’s contract is expiring.

Much will be made of his destination. But make no mistake. Mbappé is a global superstar. Players of his standing have never had so much power.

This week, Egypt’s richest man reveals the lie behind football deals. We look at, what the Super Bowl’s super ratings mean for live sport, and the transactions that signal growing momentum for women’s football.

Do read on — Samuel Agini, sports business reporter

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What football taught Egypt’s richest man

Nassef Sawiris and US billionaire Wes Edens, co-founder of Fortress Investment Group, saved Villa from a financial crisis in 2018 when they bought the team from Chinese businessman Tony Xia.

The duo took a 55 per cent stake for £30mn and stabilised the Birmingham-based club. At the time, Sawiris and Edens pledged to return Villa to “its rightful place in the upper echelons of English football”.

Six years later, it appears that the owners were as good as their word. Villa finished seventh in the Premier League last season and are fighting for Champions League qualification this time around.

They also cashed in on England star Jack Grealish, selling him to Manchester City for £100mn in 2021. Yet in a rare interview with the FT’s Arash Massoudi and Ivan Levingston, Sawiris said he was not in Aston Villa for the money.

But these days, Villa is valued at more than £500mn after Sawiris and Edens agreed the sale of a minority stake in their V Sports vehicle to US investment firm Atairos in December last year. In 2021-22, Villa’s revenue totalled £178mn, generating a net profit of around £336,000, compared with roughly £68mn and losses of £36mn in 2017-18, the final set of results before Sawiris and Edens bought the West Midlands club.

“Anybody who does football and says this is a pure investment, in 95 per cent of the case he’s a liar,” Sawiris said. “It’s a passion. It’s addictive. And it can ruin your weekend and go into the following week.”

“But you can’t be not passionate about it. I underestimated the amount of passion and brain cells that it consumes,” he added.

He also had kind words for manager Unai Emery, who enjoyed success with La Liga clubs Sevilla and Villareal, but struggled in a previous stint in English football at Arsenal.

“Unai has done amazing results with teams that haven’t spent crazy,” Sawiris said. “He pushes everybody hard. He pushes me to work harder for Villa. He pushes the players. He pushes everybody to work hard. He shows up at 7am and leaves last.”

It’s a wild ride that could have been so different. 

Villa made it into the Premier League via the crap shoot Championship play-off final at Wembley Stadium in May 2019, less than a year after the takeover. That match is one of the most nerve-racking occasions in sport, in no small part due to an estimated £170mn financial boost to the victors.

Derby County, the losers that day, went on a downward spiral that nearly ended the two-time champions of England. Mel Morris, who made a fortune on the Candy Crush game and ploughed it into his boyhood club, no longer owns the team, which is now fighting to escape the third tier of English football. 

That’s the cost of chasing the dream in English football. Owners empty their wallets into clubs in the hope of winning Premier League status. 

Despite big money investment, however, clubs remain pillars of their communities. Failing finances have attracted the attention of the UK government, no less. 

To the chagrin of the Premier League, the UK is poised to set up an independent regulator for English football. The body will be tasked with monitoring and promoting financial sustainability. 

The experience of English football has made a lasting impression on Sawiris.

“You really come to the conclusion that attitude and work ethic beats talent any day,” he said.

The Super Bowl’s super ratings and the future of live sport

The Super Bowl this past Sunday became the single most-watched programming in US television since the moon landing, which in the media world is an unambiguous victory for linear networks, the NFL, and advertisers. (Also Beyoncé.) 

If the 123mn US viewers who watched the Kansas City Chiefs defeat the San Francisco 49ers suggests that the death of traditional live television has been greatly exaggerated, consider that just days before the game, three of the biggest titans in entertainment dropped a surprise announcement likely to shake the industry for months if not years to come.

Disney, Warner Brothers Discovery and Fox said they will pool their live sports programming into a comprehensive streaming service. The agreement is tantamount to an industry fantasy of a “Netflix for sports”, with their combined platform touted to showcase some of the biggest events worldwide, from the Fifa World Cup to golf’s Masters Championship to Wimbledon tennis, and fixtures for the NFL, NBA, NHL and more.

There has been, perhaps, no sharper contrast between the present and the future of live sports within the space of one week. Here are some quick takeaways for the broadcasters and the leagues:

• Winners and losers: A clear beneficiary of a three-way sports streaming platform is Fox, which unlike its two partners (Disney’s ESPN+ and Warner’s Max) does not yet have a digital streaming platform of its own. That has put Fox at a relative disadvantage to competitors like Disney, with its linear, cable, and streaming options, for increasingly costly live sports rights.

  On the other hand, digital multichannel distributors like Fubo, which specifically cater to fans of live sports who want to consume content outside the cable bundle, are especially angry. Shares of Fubo fell nearly 33 per cent the day after the Disney/Warner/Fox agreement was announced, and the company said “every consumer in America should be concerned about the intent behind this joint venture and its impact on fair market competition”.

• The sports leagues: Professional sports leagues were blindsided by the streaming agreement. Lawyers for the NFL told Puck they are examining their existing contracts with Disney and Fox for potential opt outs. The NBA told Scoreboard that “we look forward to learning more about this new venture” but stressed that the league is keen to reach more viewers outside of traditional cable. Given that the NBA is currently in talks to decide its next round of rights agreements, the hoops league may have considerable leverage given that Disney and Warner are already its incumbents.

• The grey areas: How much will the streaming service cost? Who will subscribe to it? Fans of specific teams, especially those with direct-to-consumer streaming like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, might already be paying $30 per month for those regional sports networks. The combined sports platform, as yet unnamed, will want to price aggressively to attract new customers, but not so aggressively to trigger price reductions by pay-TV providers.

Highlights

• Clubs spent $2.1mn on female football players in the January transfer window, according to world governing body Fifa, more than 2.7 times the same period a year earlier. The total was almost 11 times as big as what clubs spent on transfers in the same period in 2020. The figures highlight the momentum in the women’s game, but pale in comparison to the $1.46bn spent on male talent. The deals keep coming: this week, Bay FC, which is majority-owned by US investment firm Sixth Street Partners, agreed to sign Zambian forward Racheal Kundananji from Spanish side Madrid CFF.

• Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who is close to completing his acquisition of a stake in Manchester United, is likely to “operate with urgency, trim excess, keep his operating structure as lean as possible”, writes Michael Moritz, who co-authored a book on leadership with former United manager Sir Alex Ferguson.

• Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal told the FT that he would keep fighting to limit Saudi Arabia’s influence over golf, as the PGA Tour considers whether to welcome investment from the kingdom’s $700bn sovereign wealth fund.

Final Whistle

Sebastien Haller’s 81st-minute winner in the Africa Cup of Nations final was celebrated all over Ivory Coast. The 29-year-old striker has had a remarkable journey since being diagnosed with testicular cancer in July 2022. From two operations and chemotherapy to scoring the goal that overcame tournament rivals Nigeria.

His Borussia Dortmund teammates gave him a hero’s welcome on his return to the German club. Well deserved. Watch here.