UEFA Europa Conference League - Alkmaar, Legia and Zrinjski

[Lastfootstamper]

I don't want champions league. It's just full of all the worst ****** in world football.

[algy]

Article from The Athletic...

Big Six? Great Eight? Is there a route into England’s elite for Newcastle, Brighton and Villa?
Jordan Campbell
May 20, 2023

In June 2018, Southampton vice-chairman Les Reed had Norwich City midfielder James Maddison sitting in his office with a contract ready to be signed. He hoped the 21-year-old would get their strategy of spotting and polishing up potential back on track.

Having risen from administration in League One in 2009 to consecutive Premier League finishes of eighth, seventh, sixth and eighth between 2013-14 and 2016-17, the poster boys of sustainable success in English football had dropped to 17th.

By this point, however, Leicester City had usurped them as the best of the rest outside the top six. They had done what Southampton had failed to by obliterating the glass ceiling to win the league title in 2015-16 and, after reaching the Champions League quarter-finals in their debut appearance, they had deeper pockets.

Even so, Reed maintains it only became a tug of war because the strategy that had elevated them to such heights had been diluted by the Chinese owners who had taken over the club in 2017.

“Maddison was ready to join but I couldn’t get authority from China and that let Leicester in,” Reed tells The Athletic.

“The way we ran our recruitment allowed us to make decisions very quickly under (previous owner) Katharina Liebherr as I had authority to spend £10m or £15m on a player.

“We had been buying players who were our first-choice targets but the new owners brought a completely different approach. When you slow the process down, you lose the ability to get into players quickly before the others, so we were ending up with our third or fourth choice in some cases.

“Those are the fine lines in the Premier League. It’s so competitive that a few wrong decisions at that level can leave you struggling.”

In many ways, the Maddison deal is the juncture at which the seemingly infallible plan of buying low and selling high at both clubs started to stray into something less disciplined, before eventually failing.

For Southampton, the inability to convert their interest was evidence of systemic recruitment issues, the very thing that had propelled them to such heights.

For Leicester, the England midfielder should have gone on to be their next big sale but his continued presence in the team five years later is emblematic of a team that has been allowed to drift into staleness.

Both clubs have held the baton as the Premier League’s model club but, with Southampton relegated and Leicester on the brink, they also serve as a cautionary tale as to how quickly that status can unravel.

Now there is a new batch of clubs who fancy their chances of invading the top six, part of a growing Premier League middle class, but what lessons can be learned from those who did so but couldn’t make their success permanent?

Is it even possible, once you’ve disrupted the natural order, to stay there?

Last month, Aston Villa manager Unai Emery declared the ‘big six’ dead. The Spaniard considers the tag obsolete, suggesting that the clique has been extended to as wide as a top ten.

When a term designed to differentiate an exclusive group ends up encompassing exactly half of the competitors, it is perhaps time to retire words like ‘big’ or ‘top’ as adjectives, but Emery made a pertinent point about the Premier League’s direction of travel towards a quasi-Super League.

Mikel Arteta has said that this year’s Premier League is the strongest he has seen in 22 years. This is a division that has included Todd Boehly’s Chelsea being steered like a man who drives an automatic but was sold a manual, a Tottenham team piggy-backing on Harry Kane, a Liverpool team defending as if unaware of the offside rule for the first seven months and a Manchester United who may be better but endure away trips as well as a SpaceX flight.

It looks inevitable that most of the top six teams will be stronger next season. With Newcastle already in third, less than two years after being purchased by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), it seems inevitable that they will cement their place in a new top seven, too.

They need to be treated as a different beast to Brighton and Aston Villa but are we nearing the point where the sheer depth of the league puts the established order under threat, or are they just the latest pretenders who will be in the mix for a few years before dropping away?

The make-up of the top six was set in since 2009-10 where City have maintained their presence ever since and Spurs did so for 13 consecutive seasons. There was a five-year period between 2014-15 and 2018-19 when the top six almost wrote itself, bar Leicester’s title win messing with the matrix, but there are always disruptors who attempt to rearrange the order.

The depth of the Premier League’s quality is shown in the global club rankings produced by Omar Chaudhuri, chief intelligence officer at Twenty First Group, a consultancy that provides sports intelligence to clubs, leagues and governing bodies.

Their model gauges the gap between the Premier League and the next-best league to be bigger than the gap between any two leagues in world football.  The Premier League has 11 clubs in the world’s top 30, compared to five for Spain, four Italy, four for Germany and six in total from other leagues. England used to have between six and eight at most.

In some respects, it is a form of underachievement, given English clubs occupied 16 of the top 30 spots in the latest Deloitte Money League, but the trend shows the Premier League is pulling away.

Why has the dominance of the top six been so entrenched?

Football finance expert Kieran Maguire points to the most recent booms in TV rights money, pinpointing 2014 and 2017 as pivotal moments in the top six solidifying an insurmountable financial advantage.

On both occasions, there was around a 70 per cent increase in the overall TV revenue pot. The fight between UK broadcasters BT and Sky over market share led to the former paying an astronomical £1.2 billion for exclusivity on Champions League rights, which sees English clubs benefit through the TV pool workings.

“For a club unlike Newcastle to make it into the top six is pushing it because it becomes a virtuous circle. You’ve got to become a disruptor and make it to the Champions League for a start,” Maguire says.

“The competition is worth a minimum of £30 million. If you do well it’s worth double and if you establish yourself then the payments from the ten-year co-efficient shares means it is potentially £100m within a few years. If you get to the latter stages consistently then it is potentially £150m.”

He pitches the Champions League as 3.5 times more lucrative than the Europa League and reforms to the competition from season 2024-25 mean that the Premier League will likely have five Champions League spots.

An additional berth will be given to each of the two countries whose clubs collectively performed best in Europe the previous year — the Premier League has fallen into that category in six of the past seven seasons — so next season could be even more crucial with potentially half the league in contention for five spots compared to what has traditionally been six scrapping over four.

This game of musical chairs can be cut-throat. Build a team like Leicester who became champions with the 15th largest wage budget in a league that had only ever gone to the top three spenders? They’ll view you as an existential threat, flick the cartel switch and try to ensure you never get another sniff.

That’s what happened in 2016 as the big six forced through changes to how overseas TV revenue is split. At the outset of the Premier League it was split evenly due to it being loss-making but in recent years overseas rights have overtaken the domestic rights, so the top six argued it should be based on where teams finish. Since 2017, 50 per cent of the increased overseas revenue is split evenly and the rest is split on position.

Richard Battle, founding director of Left Field Football Consulting which works with clubs on strategy and analytics, spent a season at Everton as head of football strategy so he knows how challenging it is to break into this elite group.

“What makes the current grouping of ‘big six’ clubs different from those in the past is that the label is as fitting in terms of financial performance as it is in league performance,” he says.

“In 2021-22, Tottenham and Arsenal ranked fifth and sixth out of the group in revenue terms, with revenue of €523m and €433m.

“The next highest was West Ham with €301m. That represents a revenue gap of €130m between the ‘big 6’ and the ‘peloton’, even in a season where neither North London club played in the Champions League. In other words, it will take more than just qualification for the Champions League to close the gap financially.”

The way Spurs forced their way in is proof that it isn’t just nine-figure ownership investment required to get there, clubs can grow this organically through having on-field success.

“In 2007-08, Spurs finished 11th and revenues that were 55 per cent less than the top club in the league. They were able to break the stranglehold of the then ‘big 4′ in 2010, get into the Champions League, and since then the gap to the highest-earning club has effectively halved, to 28 per cent,” says Chaudhuri.

“In that time, Spurs’ commercial revenue, generated primarily from sponsorships, has grown nearly five-fold, compared to West Ham — a London rival and suitable comparator club — whose commercial revenue has ‘only’ doubled.”

“Commercial income is increasingly important for clubs, because it’s the one area of income that is theoretically totally ‘open market’. Spurs’ growth in commercial income has even enabled them to overtake Arsenal since 2018.

“It is a long-term game and sponsors will wait to see if you’re a one-season wonder or the real deal.”

The difficulty of being Southampton in 2016 or Brighton in 2023 is that they become victims of their own success. The club becomes known for how smoothly it operates, it becomes the envy of others and the big guns soon gather to feast on the top talents.

Brighton may lose Alexis Mac Allister and Moises Caicedo this summer. Their manager Roberto De Zerbi is also attracting attention, having only taken over in September from Graham Potter, who had been poached by Chelsea.

“Get your recruitment right and then subtly move to the next level. Don’t start spending fortunes on a marquee player where you’re relying on one player,” says Les Reed, reflecting on what he learned from the golden years and the rougher end period he experienced at Southampton between 2010 and 2018. Reed was head of football development and support from 2010 to 2014, with Nicola Cortes in charge of football operations, a role Reed took up subsequently.

“Keep the same process, just fine-tune it. Some clubs get to a certain level and pat themselves on the back. I think that’s what the Chinese owners thought: that there was a Virgil [van Dijk] around every corner.

“Brighton get it. I’ve had loads of discussions with those guys and they know what is required and that it’s not a given. They could drop a couple of places but I think they know what they need to do to keep there and keep prodding at the top six.”

Southampton built a formidable side under Mauricio Pochettino and then Ronald Koeman, at one point achieving the enviable ambition of having a 50-50 split between academy players and project players in their starting XI.

Victor Wanyama, Dejan Lovren, Sadio Mane, Morgan Schneiderlin, Nathaniel Clyne and Virgil van Dijk brought in around £215 million within four season to showcase their recruitment expertise. Luke Shaw, Adam Lallana and Callum Chambers were sold for a further £85 million and cemented the academy’s prestige derived from producing Gareth Bale, Theo Walcott and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain a generation earlier.

“Is there a route in? Yes, but the funding gap is a reality so you need to approach it in a different way.

“We took advantage of the unconscious bias that is in scouting by investing in Sportscode and hiring our own analysts using our own algorithms. We bought licences for every league so we had all this data coming in and created a bespoke server to store it all and a cinema to show it on, which allowed us to interrogate quickly.”

Southampton had coped with the churn by sourcing Dusan Tadic, Oriel Romeu, Graziano Pelle and Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg as replacements and promoting James Ward-Prowse from within, but those increased funds led to far less success shopping at the next price tier.

Since 2016-17, the year the drop-off in their level began, Southampton spent £15 million or more on a player 14 times with only Hojbjerg considered a success. Sofiane Boufal, Guido Carrillo, Mario Lemina, Wesley Hoedt and Danny Ings were all bought and either sold or freed at a combined loss of nearly £88 million. After five consecutive seasons in the bottom half, they will be a Championship side next season.

“It was about succession and Toby Alderweireld replaced Van Dijk, Graziano Pelle replaced Ricky Lambert, Dusan Tadic replaced Lallana. They were never going to play together. We had to accept they were going to go once we had exposed them. You can’t say, ‘Ah another one is gone’, you’ve just got to keep doing it.

“After Pochettino we realised we had to start scouting coaches so we had a succession plan but that is more difficult and it becomes hard when you don’t have stability.”

It is not just the players or managers they come for. Reed hired three heads of recruitment in Dave Burke, Paul Mitchell and Ross Wilson but they all moved on between 2012 and 2019. Martyn Glover then took over but he joined Leicester last year and his replacement Joe Shields only spent three months at the club before jumping ship to Chelsea. Now, Tom Stockwell, the brains behind the black box, is joining Nottingham Forest and data scientist Alex Kleyn is going to Manchester United.

David Reddin had worked with the British & Irish Lions, England Rugby, British Olympics and the FA on performance and strategy. He founded Pitch 32, a company which provides football club investors with long-term advice across all areas, and is also chief football officer at third-tier Spanish club CD Castellon where the ambition is to disrupt the league system and reach La Liga inside six seasons.

“Clubs need to define what they can do better or differently to their peers to change their odds of performance. And ideally build protective moats to prevent others overcoming it,” says Reddin.

“City have a moat around global clubs and therefore talent. No other group will touch that for years, if at all. Brighton and maybe Brentford have a moat around data and insight for recruitment and performance. It’s hard to replicate that as both clubs benefit from the expertise and skill of their owners’ related gambling businesses with hundreds of employees, which is not something a club can do alone.

“Interestingly, perhaps if the Super League is truly dead and Financial Fair Play becomes more of a reality, then opportunities for disrupters with a definitive external advantage become bigger. I still believe most clubs miss a lot of disruptive opportunities as football doesn’t yet embrace many practices which are standard elsewhere.”

For Leicester, the story of decline has been sharper but also brought on by a budget that was growing out of control.

They had their own steady stream of transfer revenue with N’Golo Kante, Danny Drinkwater, Riyad Mahrez, Harry Maguire and Ben Chilwell all contributing to an annual banker that totalled more than £250 million. It funded most of their subsequent re-investment but then COVID-19 came along and killed their revenue streams, an impact the top clubs were better equipped to deal with.

Leicester chased the top six but club officials knew it was a moving target and the model of selling a player every year stopped in 2020-21 even though they spent significantly. Keeping hold of assets would have been been justified had they made the Champions League but when Brendan Rodgers’ side blew fourth place down the home stretch in both the 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons, before missing out on Europe by four points last season, that absent revenue took its toll.

Leicester’s wages-to-income ratio went well past UEFA’s 70 per cent red line, which saw Rodgers’ request for upgrades last summer met with the reality that they couldn’t buy before they sold.

Still, much like Villa are pouring resources into their academy in an attempt to produce more players like Jack Grealish (whose move to Manchester City has ensured Villa still have room to spend heavily this summer), Leicester had commenced building work to fit 8,000 new seats in their stadium and build a sprawling complex in the surrounding area to grow new revenue streams.

They are still pressing ahead with it but it is now the turn of Villa and Brighton to have their go at finding a way to disrupt the top six.

[Dave]

I have absolutely zero excitement about this. Yes it’s progress, but it could well be at the detriment of our next season. Perhaps I’m tainted from the O’Neill days of surrender “to concentrate on the league”. But I can’t see the real benefits unless we play the second stringers. I’d rather we finished in the top 6 next season and/or win a domestic trophy. This just seems like a whole lot of extra hoops to jump through to get the Europa.

If we finish in the top six, will that be exciting or something that there's no point being happy about because it'll just be a distraction the following season?

As PWS is fond of saying, complaining about qualifying for Europe because it might distract us from qualifying for Europe the following season seems a little masochistic.

[OCD]

"This is a division that has included Todd Boehly’s Chelsea being steered like a man who drives an automatic but was sold a manual, a Tottenham team piggy-backing on Harry Kane, a Liverpool team defending as if unaware of the offside rule for the first seven months and a Manchester United who may be better but endure away trips as well as a SpaceX flight."

My favourite bit.

[pauliewalnuts]

Newcastle apparently about to sign £25m a year shirt sponsorship deal with Sela, an events company backed by the Saudi PIF which owns, errr, Newcastle United.

And so it starts.

[edgysatsuma89]

Newcastle apparently about to sign £25m a year shirt sponsorship deal with Sela, an events company backed by the Saudi PIF which owns, errr, Newcastle United.

And so it starts.

Why isn't it a rule that sponsors can't have any links to the ownership? It seems pretty obvious. Or is there one and there is some sneaky loop hole or some shit?

[Meanwood Villa]

We've done fuck all of note in the league for over a decade, and have spent most of it being very shit, we're not really in a position to think the Conference is below us.

The odd shiny moment aside, we've done fuck all for the majority of the past 40 years. We are a big club, we are bigger club in our own eyes than understood or appreciated by most of the football watching population. Getting back into Europe for next season would be a magnificent achievement. We can dream of loftier ambitions after we take the first step back to national and continental relevance.

Yeah, absolutely.  As has been gone over before, over the past 100 years our trophy cabinet has been quite bare really.  Looking purely in terms of trophies, you can pretty much split it in to three short bursts:

- (Big gap from 1921 onwards)
- FA Cup (1957) and League Cup (1961*)
- League Cup (1975), League Cup (1977), League (1981), European Cup (1982)
- League Cup (1994), League Cup (1996)
- (Big gap in the 21st century)

I mean, whilst there's definitely clubs that have worse records than us ... it's not setting the world alight either.

I'd be happy if we started winning trophies, regardless of what they are

- 2024 Conference League and League Cup
- 2025 Europa League and FA Cup
- 2026 Premier League
- 2027 Champions League, League Cup and FA Cup (again)

Why aren't we doing the quadruple in 2027? Emery out.

[Meanwood Villa]

Re the Athletic article, it emphasises what a challenge it is to get into the European places given the massive financial disadvantage we have compared to those teams who've been doing it for years. Another reason why we should grab any opportunity we get. Everyone assumes we will be better next season and I hope we are, but it ain't necessarily so.

[Meanwood Villa]

Also had no idea Southampton finished as high as 6th. I guess Leicester winning the league took the attention away. Us being shite probably meant I wasn't paying much attention either.

[tomd2103]

Re the Athletic article, it emphasises what a challenge it is to get into the European places given the massive financial disadvantage we have compared to those teams who've been doing it for years. Another reason why we should grab any opportunity we get. Everyone assumes we will be better next season and I hope we are, but it ain't necessarily so.

It's a good article.  It not only emphasises what a challenge it is to get to the top six, but also how difficult it is to stay there when you do. 

I was listening to a discussion on the radio the other day where someone was saying how far ahead Brighton's scouting and player identification system is compared to other clubs.  Listening to it, I couldn't help but think of the film "Moneyball" and how in simple terms (though I'm sure it was a bit more complex in real life) after having their best players continually picked off by wealthier teams, the Oakland A's devised a player identification process which enabled them to compete on a budget they could afford.

As the article explains though, that model can be fraught with danger though as it only needs one cycle of losing your best players and recruiting poorly to replace them and you slip away.  That's the challenge we are facing over the next few years. 

[AV82EC]

I’d disagree we’re in the same position as a Brighton Brentford or Southampton. We have the advantage of the extra level of support that being in a large metro area and surrounding hinterland brings. Our turnover is already overshadowing the likes of these clubs as we can haul in our 40k soon to be 50k fans and leverage that to our benefit. The difficulty is broaching the gap to Spurs/Arsenal from a base of £200+m to £350-£400m. As West Ham have found despite all the advantages of being in that there London and having a “free” 60k stadium it doesn’t just happen without both football operations expertise (Moyes really?) and huge commercial deals.

[tomd2103]

I’d disagree we’re in the same position as a Brighton Brentford or Southampton. We have the advantage of the extra level of support that being in a large metro area and surrounding hinterland brings. Our turnover is already overshadowing the likes of these clubs as we can haul in our 40k soon to be 50k fans and leverage that to our benefit. The difficulty is broaching the gap to Spurs/Arsenal from a base of £200+m to £350-£400m. As West Ham have found despite all the advantages of being in that there London and having a “free” 60k stadium it doesn’t just happen without both football operations expertise (Moyes really?) and huge commercial deals.

I agree with that and we potentially have greater spending power than any of those other clubs as well.  West Ham are a small fish in the big London pond and are a very mediocre club that benefit from a media love-in.

We, on the other hand, are comfortably the biggest club between London and Manchester and have a lot more potential if we can get things right.

[pauliewalnuts]

I recall an article by a football economist fifteen years ago about why are on a different level in terms of potential compared to our peers. 

The depressing part obvs that fifteen years later we haven’t fulfilled it

I’ll try to find the article.

[ChicagoLion]

I have said for years we have done nothing to recognise the level of support we traditionally had from the shires surrounding Birmingham.
Of course this plays into the hands that lot regarding them being the only real team in Brum which is petty and childish.
But our potential catchment area is huge.

[pauliewalnuts]

I have said for years we have done nothing to recognise the level of support we traditionally had from the shires surrounding Birmingham.
Of course this plays into the hands that lot regarding them being the only real team in Brum which is petty and childish.

No it doesn't - we've got massive support both in the city AND in the shires.