Football Partnerships

By Alex Kotler

How Revolting!

Manchester United supporters, outraged by the club’s spiraling debt load, have recruited Keith Harris, a football finance specialist and broker, to lead a possible takeover bid.

“You sense that the momentum is gathering and this time these fans truly mean it,” he told the BBC in a recent interview. A United fan for 50 years, Harris is known for the sale of Chelsea FC to Roman Abramovich and Aston Villa FC to Randy Lerner.

The most important question, though, Harris pointed out explicitly: “What you don’t know is whether the Glazers can be made to listen.” Can they and should they?

Watch the Keith Harris interview

LA Sol eclipsed

After one year of operation, Women’s Professional Soccer club and 2009 runner-up LA Sol folded, following failed attempts by the league to sell the team.

Apparently, two original ownership groups pulled out mid-year, leaving LA Galaxy owners Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) to run the team until season’s end.

As the league heads into its second term, in which two new teams will join - the Atlanta Beat and the Philadelphia Independence - one cannot help but remember the fate of the now defunct WUSA. Surely we mustn’t let players like Marta find other leagues in which to flourish, right?

Read Nick Green’s take

But what I meant to say was…

The oft-criticized president of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, has clarified comments which seemed to point to Europe as the preferred choice and likely destination for World Cup 2018.

“I said it’s a possibility only if other associations do not bid. It is not a decision for the executive committee to change that right of every association to bid for a World Cup,” Blatter was quoted by news agency Reuters.

Perhaps, like the fans of Manchester United, we should all revolt against the conspiracy of the misquoting media.

Lubing up for 2010

Castrol has reached an with UEFA to be an official sponsor of UEFA EURO 2012, set to be jointly hosted by Poland and Ukraine.

Awarded with a worldwide rights package for the duration of the tournament, Castrol will provide insight into performances via the Castrol Index, a system that uses playercam technology to analyze and compare the performance of each player throughout the competition.

Grease your wheels in euFootball.biz

The ridiculosity of it all

The Confederation of African Football (CAF) announced that Togo will be banned from the next two Africa Cup of Nations and fined $50,000 due to the team’s withdrawal from this year’s tournament held in Angola.

Readers will remember that the Togolese team was attacked at gunpoint and fired upon. Three people died during the affair, and more were left injured and shaken.

Such a ban is more ridiculous than even the word ridiculosity.

Read more in the Epoch Times

Keith Harris, the banker who brokered Roman Abramovich’s takeover of Chelsea, has said that Premier League clubs have dropped in value by as much as 20 per cent in the past year.

Harris said at the Soccerex London Forum that the UK financial crisis was behind the drop in value and that new investors are unlikely to be able to finance deals by ‘raising debt’, as the Glazers did in 2005 when the Americans bought Manchester United for $1.4 billion.

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Football finance expert Keith Harris, says the Premier League’s record television contract will help revive investors’ interest in English soccer clubs.

The chairman of London-based investment bankers Seymour Pierce believes that the £1.78 million the Premier League will receive for three seasons until May 2013 will promote a “recovery in attitude” towards investment in top-tier clubs.

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Two wealthy American businessmen were forced to cancel plans to bid for English Premier League club Newcastle United, after realising they were exposed to losses of more than $300 million in disgraced hedge fund manager Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme.

Keith Harris, the broker who is handling the sale of Newcastle United, told The Guardian newspaper he had expected the bid last month from the prospective buyers, who had indicated to him their interest in investing in the club.

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By Simon Kuper

What does Keith Harris say when some billionaire comes to him wanting to buy an English football club? Harris reaches for the inside pocket of his immaculate blue suit. “The first thing I do,” says football’s premier dealmaker, “is I produce an imaginary pack of cigarettes and say that buying, owning and actually running a football club is more risky than these are.”

But still the billionaires come. Harris, once a poor kid supporting Manchester United, later chief executive of HSBC Investment Bank, has already brokered five takeovers in the Premier League. Most notably, Harris, the chairman of investment bank Seymour Pierce helped Chelsea sell itself to Roman Abramovich and aided Thailand’s disgraced prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra buy Manchester City. He is now trying to find buyers for Newcastle and Everton.

On Tuesday Harris popped up at the International Football Arena conference in Zurich to tell football’s other unseen moneymen just what is going on in the game.

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