Finance in sport: should we invest in football clubs?
Football and the first billion-pound player
Football is booming right now. You might have noticed. The amount of money being spent on young people that are good at kicking round things has grown exponentially over the past two decades.
The £12.5m paid for Gianluca Vialli in 1992 (the year the Premier League began) through to the £200m shelled out for Neymar in 2017 represents a compound annual growth rate of 20.3% in world record fees.
If this rate of growth is maintained, that means we are nine years away from a £1bn footballer. Even excluding Neymar’s 2017 transfer fee, we get a compound annual growth rate of 15% between 1992-2016. That would give us a £1bn transfer in 11-12 years’ time...
But football as a sector - is it really worthy of investment? Isn’t it characterized by desperate swings in profitability and littered with bankruptcies? Doesn’t most of the profit go straight to players and agents?
Tottenham Hotspur, Aston Villa, Birmingham City, Charlton Athletic and Newcastle United have all taken themselves off the stock market in the past.
The changing face of football finance
Established fund manager Nick Train holds shares in Manchester United, Juventus and Celtic across...