| Thanks so much for doing this, Nick. In the book, you set out the transition in football club ownership in the Premier League from caravan park owners and package holiday merchants to public investment funds and private equity. Is it fair to say that 20 years ago ownership was a folly, an exercise in vanity or romance or somewhere in between, and at the top level that is essentially gone? Well, there’s definitely still vanity at the top level, but a different kind of vanity. The weird thing about football is that there’s so much money washing around in it, but barely anyone makes any. So sometimes people outside the game take a look at it and think: these guys must be idiots – I could do better. But romance? No, it’s too expensive. The people who have access to the funds you need to buy a big club now, they’re not going to piss it away on a lifesize Subbuteo game. There are two owners in the Premier League who are fans of their clubs, at Brentford and Brighton, but they have been successful because they don’t run it like fans. You don’t get an owner like Jack Walker at Blackburn, a local boy done good who spent enough money on his club to win the title in 1995. From that perspective, there is a kind of innocence lost. When did that start to change? Twenty years ago, as a fan, you knew who owned your own club and a few of the gobbier owners in the media, but you didn’t care about anyone else. Now you’re almost forced to care, and you wonder: if my club had one of these giant owners, would we be doing better? The first deal of this kind that I noticed as a fan was when Sky tried to buy Manchester United, which was eventually blocked by the monopolies and mergers commission in 1999. It was when you saw football becoming an investment vehicle for people with no real connection to the club or the game. It didn’t really exist as a financial mechanism before that. What happened was, there was a curious decade in the 90s where huge amounts of money were coming into the Premier League from TV deals and everything else, and the league’s profile was rocketing. But there were still the lingering effects of a view of football as, in the famous words of a Sunday Times editorial, “a slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people”. So the authorities had sort of written it off, and there wasn’t a lot of thought about who should be entitled to own a football club: it was just, if you can afford it, you were fine. Then the change starts to happen quite rapidly as people like Roman Abramovich at Chelsea and Sheikh Mansour at Manchester City come into the game. And now with Everton being sold last week to a US-based consortium, half of Premier League clubs are US-owned. You talk in the book about how clubs should be viewed as community assets, that they’re fundamentally different to a paperclip business. Is it possible to be a community asset and be owned by an opaquely structured set of financial institutions thousands of miles away? No. A football club is a community asset – it’s about giving people something to be proud of, but it’s also about their impact locally. An investment fund linked to an oil state, for example, just has a different agenda, and the purpose of the club becomes something else. The price of success? | 