"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
The website Growth Business UK has published an interview with the commercial director of five-a-side football promotion company Powerleague.
Nigel Hargreaves joined Powerleague in March 2011 from the Small Sided Football Federation, which he founded in September 2009. Prior to that, he spent eight years at the Football Association as head of strategic development.
Wayne Rooney has topped the Premiership’s replica shirts league published in the Premier League Season Review. Figures are based on the number of official club shirts sold domestically and internationally. In the case of someone like Rooney, the figure would run into millions.
It is the first time that Rooney has topped the league and the first time a United player has taken the top slot since the Cristiano Ronaldo in 2007-8. Another United player, Ryan Giggs, enters the top ten for the first time at the age of 37.
For a Premiership neutral, many of the big questions about the forthcoming season relate to Arsenal. It could be a make or break season for them and Arsene Wenger. I like the kind of football that Wenger provides, but at that level of football, it is also important to win trophies. Should Arsenal fail to qualify for the Champions League next month it will leave a gap of around £25m in their finances.
After two years as the Zamaretto League, the Southern League has recruited Evo-Stik as its new sponsors. They already sponsor the Northern Premier League where their deal is reportedly worth £150,000 a year. The Southern League will receive an estimated £100,000, a great improvement on the £35,000 a year provided by Zamaretto.
Following their last day survival in the Barclays Premier League, Wigan Athletic have frozen their season ticket prices for the fifth season in a row. Even so, their support base remains limited, although if you look at it as a percentage of the local population it’s a great achievement, particularly given the local attachment to rugby league. There’s roughly the same population where I live and we can only sustain a third tier non-league club.
Liverpool FC manager Kenny Dalglish has urged that money be made available for summer spending after the club secured the biggest kit deal in English football history. The £25m-a-year contract with Boston-based Warrior Sports more than doubles Liverpool’s present agreement with Adidas and demonstrates the value of the New England contacts of the new owners.
Liverpool FC have been urged to sign Asian players by their sponsors Standard Chartered. Their sponsorship chief Gavin Laws commented. ‘One appearance from a player, say from Dubai in the Premier League, and you’d have the whole of Dubai watching it.’
Although Standard Chartered is based in London, much of its income comes from the Asian market. Laws felt that the exposure would be commercially beneficial to his company.
The Football Association are looking for new sponsors for the FA Cup and it isn’t proving all that easy which is not that surprising when you consider the state of the economy. Companies dealing with the individual consumer are most likely to be interested, but consumer confidence is flat as incomes are squeezed.
Fans in the UK spend the most on official football fan merchandise (€58) of the ten countries investigated in the latest Sport + Markt report on football merchandising. Yet of the top ten clubs in Europe ranked on merchandising revenue only two Premier League clubs made the the top ten with Liverpool in third and Manchester United sixth. Lyons and Fenerbahce outrank Arsenal and Juventus.
The latest in the three part Financial Times series on ‘football in crisis’ focuses on the supporter, but in particular on ‘the organised supporter’. What is an organised supporter? No definition is offered, but presumably it means someone whose involvement goes beyond attending games and then moaning on message boards and football phone ins about the manager or their favourite scapegoat player.