CEOs in glass houses…
Fair Game’s Matt Riley turns the spotlight on Villa CEO Christian Purslow
VILLA CEO Christian Purslow’s recent rambunctious defence of the Premier League’s business model had one Achilles’ heel. His own club. On Talksport last week, he was the first Premier League figure to rise above the parapet and, coming in the week when cryptocurrency companies are being investigated by the Premier League for their lack of regulation, he is clearly Teflon-coated against irony.
“There's a lot in this report that is good and sensible. Let's talk about finances. I have been banging the drum for three years since I spent one season in the Championship that it is absolutely unbelievable that in one game the playoff final a team can move from having TV money of two and a half million pounds to having TV money the following season of 100 million pounds…surely there's a better way to smooth the financial impact of being promoted or being relegated. I don't need a regulator to do that for me.”
Let’s see what the finance whisperer Swiss Ramble has to say about that. Tweeting yesterday, he noted how the last decade has seen Villa report losses just south of half a billion (with a b) pounds, the highest loss of any clubs in the Premier League last season, when they finished 11th.
Unknowingly (or subconsciously) Purslow evoked the 2005 documentary, The Smartest Guys in The Room that described Enron’s collapse after, ‘light-touch regulation’ executives indulged in financially suicidal schemes often hidden in plain sight. Purslow told us: “We've got smart people who run the Premier League” which spookily echoed Smartest Guys author Bethany McLean:
“The tale of Enron is a story of human weakness, of hubris and greed and rampant self-delusion; of ambition run amok; of a grand experiment in the deregulated world; of a business model that didn’t work; and of smart people who believed their next gamble would cover their last disaster—and who couldn’t admit they were wrong.”
Brentford, run on a ‘Moneyball’ philosophy that avoids casino transfers, would be delighted if, on entering this elite club, they could look under Villa’s financial bonnet to marvel at their 97% wages to turnover ratio last season and how they needed their owners to write off £223 million in debts in the last seven years according to Swiss Ramble.
Acclaimed journalist Jim White posed the inevitable question:
“The government's moving on it…, the opposition's moving on it. This thing's getting the thumbs up. Are Villa and other clubs in the Premier League going to block it?”
The respobnse from CP: “I don't know what block means.”
Kieran Maguire, of the Price of Football, helpfully explained. Tweeting yesterday, be outlined six alternative tactics the footballing haves would roll out:
Chip away
Sneer
False equivalence
Lobby
Cherry pick
Dilute.
Back to Mister Purslow:
“I don't think the problem lies in the Premier League. The solution lies with the Premier League. Everything good in English football sits in the Premier League.’ Let’s just give that revealing assumption time to settle before Purslow returns to the importance of self regulation:
“Be careful about measures that sound in the short term like they might fix a problem but in reality in the long term will make the Premier League less attractive to invest in, less profitable, less capable of generating funds for the rest of the league and making Premier League clubs disadvantaged vis-a-vis their European competitors is a crazy idea.”
Purslow finishes with his fullest brass-neck assumption.
“We killed the super league in 48 hours. It would take her [Tracey Crouch] 48 weeks to hire a regulator.”
It’s always good to wallow in a bit of revisionist history. It wasn’t the fans taking to the streets and demanding their game back. It wasn’t the outpouring of emotion from players and club staff. It was the result of a very clever group of elite footballing supremos who manned the barricades. Purslow stole George Orwell’s thunder
“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”