"If you want some accessible but informative insight into football then I suggest you couldn't do better than the Political Economy of Football website, which is not only intelligible but comes with the added bonus of being written by Addicks fan Wyn Grant." Ben Hayes - Charlton Athletic programme
WG Brighton chairman, poker player and chartered accountant Tony Bloom has increased his loan to the club to £170m. Getting a club into the Premier League and keeping them there is not a cheap hobby. The Bloom family has been involved with the club for about 50 years.
The Seagulls made a loss of £25.9m in the 2015-16 season. Similar figures are expected this season and covering those losses will push his investment towards £200m.
Knocking copy about the Premier League is pretty much standard and we’re seeing a lot of it on the 25th anniversary. A journalist once said I took a Panglossian view of the Premier League, but someone has to recognise that there are positives as well as negatives.
What impact will the promotion of Huddersfield Town AFC to the Premier League have on the local economy? Supposedly Swansea City’s promotion gave a boost of £58m to the local economy in the first season alone. I am sceptical about that figure and think that there were other factors at work in the case of Swansea, a view I expressed when I was interviewed for this blog post by Matthew Engel of The Guardian.
The Premier League started on 15 August 1992. In its first season it was really the old First Division rebadged, still with 22 teams taking part. Only 3,039 watched Wimbledon play Everton at Selhurst Park on a cold Tuesday night in January.
Only 13 foreign players (less than six per cent) took part in the first games. Since then, 1,840 foreign players from 105 countries outside the British Isles have taken part.
Football clubs are in an arms race to get sponsorship logos on players shirt sleeves after the Football League sanctioned opening up the sleeve at the end of last year. The logo has to be placed on the left sleeve.
Proposals to change the format of the FA Cup are being considered. They represent a further downgrading of the competition which was once on a par with the league and arguably a more glamorous trophy to win.
There is a growing expectation that Amazon, Facebook, Google and Twitter could enter the race for the next round of Premier League television rights which will be open to tender towards the end of the year.
Bolton Wanderers are hoping a solution can be found between Dean Holdsworth’s Sports Shield company and its creditors. Sports Shield have a 37.5 per cent stake in the club. The hearing of a winding up order against Sports Shield has been deferred until August 21st.
The whole matter is complicated and the English Football League has become involved. Their agreement is required to a proposed solution. However, there is no impact on the club’s day-to-day operations.
The money man behind the Australian consortium interested in taking over Charlton from unpopular Belgian owner Roland Duchatelet has been identified by fanzine Voice of the Valley. He is Andrew Muir who sold his family owned electrical chain for £585m last year.
Two-thirds of football fans think that clubs focus too much on the global brand at the expense of the local fan base, according to a survey conducted by the Football Supporters’ Federation. Only one third of supporters thinks that the club cares about them.