The Billionaires Club
The Unstoppable Rise of Football's
Super-Rich Owners
James Montague
Bloomsbury
330 pages; Rs 499
Once the semi-final line-up for the World Cup emerged, journos spotted the obvious: That 40 of 92 players remaining in the tournament have played in the 2017-18 English Premier League (EPL). One helpful analyst, Aaakash Sanketh, drilled down further to reveal the top four clubs with the most players in the semis. No surprise, they are EPL clubs — Tottenham Hotspur (nine), Manchester City and Manchester United (seven each) and Chelsea (five).
Had these enthusiasts read The Billionaires Club: The Unstoppable Rise of Football's Super-Rich Owners, they would have noticed another fact: That three of the four teams above are foreign-owned. The red half of Manchester (United) is owned by an American family, the blue half (City) by UAE royalty and Chelsea by the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. The "English" in the EPL label could be comfortably replaced with "Global," since 13 of the 20 teams are owned by businessmen (yes, all men!) from America, Russia, Thailand, the Gulf and even Italy.
Most of us take European football's foreign owners as a fact of life, but their rise is a recent phenomenon — about two decades old — and they have changed the face of the sport dramatically. This is the transformation that James Montague traces in this book, published late last year but available in India last month.
Mr Montague is one of the more versatile football journalists, linking his passion for the game to the wider global cultural and political milieu. His 2014 book Thirty-One Nil: On the Road With Football's Outsiders: A World Cup Odyssey was a fascinating account of the hundreds of tiny nations — from Palestine to Samoa — that begin their journey to qualify for the king of tournaments every four years.
That was the view from bottom-up; The Billionaires Club is the outlook from top-down. Like many seasoned sports journalists, Mr Montague rues the transformation of football from its modest working class roots to an unabashedly capitalist global marketing industry. "Gone were the days that Manchester United could be controlled by a successful local butcher, as Louis Edwards had done when he took control of the club in 1964. Now only plutocrats, oligarchs, royalty and global captains of industry need apply, untethered from geographical constraints," he writes in the introduction.
This book seeks to answer some questions: "Who is this new breed of super-rich football owner? … And most puzzling of all, why did they sink huge fortunes into football in the first place?"
Being a conscientious journalist, Mr Montague travels from the boondocks of the US and Bangladesh to the glittering cities and foetid labour camps of the Gulf for answers. Thanks to assiduous coverage of the brash new owners in the popular press, much of what Mr Montague writes is not novel. Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich shadowy empire; Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan and his princely deep pockets that turned Manchester City into a front runner; Thaksin Shinawatra's rise and fall as Thailand's prime minister and Manchester City owner; his countryman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, the duty-free baron whose Leicester City unexpectedly won the Premier League in the 2015-16 season; all of this is well documented.
The more compelling sections of the book are on what drives this ownership. With the exception of the American owners, who, characteristically, hope to reap profit from their investment, the new breed of owners has very different motives. Not all of them are arrivistes looking for the "vanity buy". In the case of Qatar, reviled for its corruption-ridden winning bid for the 2022 World Cup, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, a football fanatic (who knew!), investment in football is seen as a blueprint for building talent and establishing world dominance in the sport. These chapters are among the most interesting in the book.
Mr Montague has also devoted considerable attention to the labour practices that prompted moral outrage in the West about holding the World Cup in Qatar. He describes kafala, a variation of the old indentured labour system that bring South Asian and African labour to build the glittering cities of the Gulf kingdoms and traces in detail horror stories of torture and exploitation, especially among illiterate Bangladeshi workers.
Improbably, it was the World Cup bid and the worldwide focus on labour standards that resulted in some grudging improvements by the Qataris. FIFA chief Gianni Infantino even attended a match in a tournament called Workers' Cup in which a workers' team fielded by Larsen & Toubro (incorrectly described as a "Danish-Indian company") and surprisingly comprising Ghanaians, played against a local realtor called the Taleb Group. Mr Infantino's visit was meant to confirm that the reforms had been implemented. They had, but for a minuscule proportion of the workforce. Mr Montague sneaks into the larger camps far away from the city centre to discover Dickensian squalor on a mammoth scale.
His revulsion is understandable even if his grasp of the grim realities of the global labour market is not. Though he doesn't present it that way, The Billionaire Club could well be the story of globalisation through football. If he were to follow through on the momentum of this book, his next one should be on the sweatshops producing the merchandise that retails at extortionate mark-ups at Europe's biggest football clubs.
