A week ago (22/06/2023), Chelsea purchased a majority stake in Strasbourg, worth about £65m, or one Kai Havertz. This amounts to nearly 100% of the club, The Guardian reported, and Strasbourg's president, Marc Keller, also appeared to be over the moon with the deal, saying it would "enable the club to further its ambition".
That sounds nice - a club playing in a town of about 280,000 people, now linked to a club that has won the Champions League twice in the last decade. Why should anyone be unhappy at this?
Firstly, it's hardly like Strasbourg is an unknown club that needs Chelsea to survive. Strasbourg rebuilt themselves brilliantly after nearly dissolving in 2010, winning four promotions in seven years and finishing 15th in Ligue 1 last season. They are former Ligue 1 winners, albeit back in 1979, and they played in the Europa League in 2019 after winning the Coupe de la Ligue.
If anything, Chelsea was the last potential owner that Strasbourg needed. Of course, many fans wouldn't be happy - treating football clubs like companies that can be acquired and sold, like assets, goes against what football stands for - the fans should always come first, not profiteering.
Yet this isn't the first time a football club has bought another football club. Just look a few league places above Chelsea, and you'll find treble winners Manchester City. If you think Chelsea's purchase of Strasbourg is unsportsmanlike, then City must look hellish; City Football Group own 13 football clubs, including:
- Palermo in Italy, who, similarly to Strasbourg, was refounded after financial issues in 2019, and who play in Serie B
- Troyes in France, recently relegated from Ligue 1
- Girona in Spain, who finished 10th in La Liga, and
- New York City, Melbourne City and Montevideo City in the US, Australia and Uruguay, all with sadly homogenous badges to Manchester City (it's like they're not even hiding it)
There's also Red Bull - the energy drink giant owns Red Bull Salzburg (fourteen time winners of the Austrian Bundesliga since being bought); RB Leipzig (who went from the regional leagues to the Champions League in eight years), as well as clubs in the US, Brazil and Ghana.
People have also got in on the act of buying multiple clubs. The owner of Brighton and Hove Albion, Tony Bloom, for example, also owns Union Saint-Gilloise in Belgium, who have gone from the second tier to Champions League football in just four years, battling for the Belgian title along the way.
In fairness, all of these examples could be called success stories, and that's not surprising - the people and corporations buying these clubs are all wealthy and clearly want other clubs to succeed, otherwise, they wouldn't buy a second, third, or even thirteenth football club.
The problems are largely all centred around the identities of the clubs: Melbourne City used to be called Melbourne Heart and played in red before City Football Group turned them into an Australian Man City. Red Bull Salzburg used to be called Austria (later Casino) Salzburg and reached a European final in 1994 - a decade before Red Bull bought them. RB Leipzig took the place of SSV Markranstadt in the German leagues in 2009. This last one seems to be the most egregious as well - Markranstadt is a town of only 15,000 people - unlike Leipzig's 624,000 - so the club arguably meant more to the town than RB Leipzig might have meant for Leipzig which already had two other football clubs in the area.
This all got to the point where UEFA said in February this year that multi-club ownership "has the potential to pose a material threat to the integrity of European club competitions" (source - The Guardian). It already has - Red Bull Salzburg faced off with RB Leipzig in the Europa League in 2018, and players are transferred between clubs with the same owners (Taty Castellanos has played for Montevideo City, New York City and Girona, all in City Football Group).
But one must admit that multi-club ownership can have certain benefits for players - for example, it is easier to move to a high-profile club, like Manchester City, if you already play for a club owned by City Football Club, like Castellanos. As well as this, the money spent by these owners has gone to building academies all over the world, with City Football Group now having six academies open across four different continents - surely this can only lead to more players developing and having a greater chance of reaching the top of football?
There are also certainly worse fates than being owned by another football club - your club could merge and be moved down the leagues (like Dyskobolia in Poland in 2008); your club could go into liquidation or be expelled from the football leagues (like Bury in 2019). There are also examples of owners having stakes in clubs in the same league, like Alisher Usmanov and Farhad Moshiri with Arsenal and Everton - surely this could act as a conflict of interest? And let's not forget that many clubs already have links with other clubs, such as Chelsea with Dutch outfit Vitesse (albeit only an affiliation, not a direct ownership).
The problem largely lies in that football has now become almost business-like, with players sold for eye-watering amounts: the fact that Declan Rice is worth more than Strasbourg by about £40m, for example, could be seen as contentious.
So to answer the question I set out at the start - many might disagree with multi-club ownership, but the issue certainly isn't going away, not least since UEFA said the ownership rules "need a rethink" (source - BBC Sport) back in March this year.
Either way, when the football season starts again, there's a good chance everyone will forget about these issues and simply cheer their favourite football club on (club-owned or not) when they score.
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