I don't think member-owned clubs can be considered archaic.
Besides, Barcelona is not in a worse position than Chelsea. And if in the event that things were extremely bad, the club could be put up for sale and half the planet would kill themselves to buy it, taking an amount much higher than what was paid for Chelsea.
But how would you sell it? Again, Barca itself isnt necessarily the issue. If the Superleague had gone through you would be one of the biggest names in the world in the only league of importance, in the most popular sport. And I do believe when I say that that the Superleague was meant to be an NFL-like league eventually, not just a competition, and for Madrid and Barca an escape from La Liga.
But the idea of doing it was so soundly rejected… that doesn’t seem like a way out anymore.
Do the sociology have to agree to sell? Is it publicly traded? In the IS people have often talked about how hard it would be to engineer a sale of the Packers …. In a similar situation.
FFP will get challenged eventually. You can prescribe that treats can’t spend money they don’t have. But telling a team they can’t spend money they DO have to compete with the United’s, City’s, Madrids of the world … just because they don’t sell as many jerseys or have an historic following? There are competitive monopoly issues there; especially if UEFA tried to step in and throw different rules in.
FFP was about keeping the historic powers in power, and keeping teams from destroying themselves through mismanagement. That’s why AC Milan was punished so quickly.
If they had wanted real parity they would have gone with a hard cap, and equal distribution of money. The extra funds popular teams made could give them an advantage in academies, facilities, development…. But everything else would be even. BUT then you could have the danger of powers failing, maybe even relegation. No one wants to entertain that.
Chelsea is in a dominant position. It may not seem like it now. But heck, they could even acquire 6th street and slowly leverage their way into owning you guys. They pulled a similar trick to pick up 30% of the Lakers, and now full ownership is an inevitability.
A lot of people throw out asset figures for ME powers and other groups. But those figures are their total assets, including fixed assets, the businesses they own outside of sports, their real estate, etc.
Clearlake has 77B JUST for sporting investment. The members have a lot more worth than that. That is what they pooled together just for sports. And nearly 38B of that is pure cash. They determine how much they get from media content … because they own the media the content will appear on. And it’s structured in such a way that while Clearlake controls each team, they have technically different owners. SO, if The Dodgers agreed to share revenue with Chelsea in exchange for Chelsea content that didn’t violate game broadcast agreements … they could do that.
That’s just one example.
They will spend until Chelsea have the best of everything, and a scouting and development model that, like the one they have for MLB, will be unlike anything European football has seen before. That is just what they do. “Losing” 500m a year is nothing to them; Just the cost of the foundation.
What the fix in controlling the pipeline for baseball talent, especially in Central and South America, cost billions and us truly astonishing.
As a side note…. I saw when we were going after Endrick people were talking about how Boehly would be totally lost in South America and out of his depth …. Which was so ironically funny.
The only analogy I can give is if Florentino Perez was a super billionaire and part of a group that owned Real Madrid , and they went and purchased an NBA team, and Americans laughed and said they would t know how to handle superstars or massive brands on the scale of the Lakers or Celtics.