Why Don't Billionaires Buy Non-League Football Teams?

those of you who grew up playing

championship or football manager or

similar video games will most likely be

familiar with the concept of taking a

football club from nothing building it

up from the ground and watching it grow

until they are able to compete against

the very best i remember one game called

let's make a soccer team on the

playstation 2 which appeared to have

been created by people who only had a

very fleeting understanding of football

where you literally played as the owner

and chairman and well unsurprisingly

given the game's title created your own

football club that game at least as far

as i can recall had been rather clumsily

adapted from a popular video game in

japan and was pretty terrible but on

football manager i used to take the

quest of taking a team from zero to

heroes pretty seriously often going to

the extent of going into the game's

editor database and creating some kind

of alfie afc in my own image but then

again i always was a dreadful narcissist

clearly i am not alone though both in

being a dreadful narcissist of course

and in having done that as a little

while ago someone got in touch with me

and asked if i could make a video about

why billionaires tend to buy fairly

established football clubs rather than

building a minnow or brand new club up

from the ground initially with respect i

thought that it seemed like a bit of a

daft question i mean

why would billionaires buy non-league

football clubs they are far too busy

buying up media corporations trying to

fire themselves into outer space and

posting memes on social media in a sad

but desperate bid to be liked wherever

would they find the time therefore to

take havington waterlooville from the

national league south to the premier

league especially when you factor in all

of those trips to jeffrey epstein's

island but then i started to think about

it about the pipe dream of building a

club up from nothing that i and no doubt

plenty of others had as a child and the

fact that for literal billionaires that

wouldn't be a pipe dream at all it would

be very much attainable then i thought

about the sense of ruthless ambition and

the enormous egos that some billionaires

have especially those who relish the

limelight and i started to think just

like that subscriber yeah hang on a

minute why don't billionaires buy or

start their own non-league football

teams that seems like

just the kind of thing that some of them

would do so naturally i had no other

option but to make an entire video

positing that idea looking to understand

the psychology of why billionaires

actually buy football clubs in the first

place and whether it would be fun to see

them buy your local village team and

turn them into champions league

contenders or whether it would be quite

joy-sapping and dystopian if that

actually were to happen

the first point that i want to address

is how easy it would actually be for a

billionaire to buy a non-league football

team and to climb their way up through

the divisions the answer to that i think

is that it would actually be quite easy

assuming that they had at least some

idea of what they were doing and

appointed semi-competent operators to

carry the project out i think that it is

absolutely feasible that

just supposing mark zuckerberg wanted a

break from harvesting all of our data

and giving testimony before the us

congress so he decided to take over

chipping sodbury town fc of the hellenic

league admittedly this is the hardest

premise to initially buy into but just

stay with me assuming that good old

zuckers did that i do think it is very

probable that he could take them from

step nine which is the level that they

currently play at all the way to the

premier league it's not a bad idea

actually gloucestershire have only got a

couple of fl teams and none in the top

two divisions so there is certainly a

gap in the market you're welcome mark

bizarrely and i had to edit this bit in

despite me picking chipping sudbury out

at absolute random and the town having a

population of just 5 000 people it turns

out that there are two actual

billionaires from there james dyson

founder of dyson limited who lives in

the nearby doddington park an enormous

stately home that was built by slave

owners and harry potter author jk

rowling who was born at the chipping

sudbury maternity hospital and live

locally until the age of four this is a

massive tangent admittedly but what are

the chances of that i pick a random

billionaire and a random tiny town in

gloucestershire and it turns out that

the second and

202nd richest britons happen to have

close ties to the town i feel a bit daft

for picking zuckerberg and not one of

them now i bet he's never even heard of

chipping bloody sudbury i know i hadn't

until about five minutes ago the point

being a billionaire could quite easily

guard a team from step 8 9 or 10 of the

english football league pyramid up to

the football league and i think even the

premier league we have seen

multi-millionaires do it at clubs like

fleetwood town reaching the footballing

that is not the premier league as well

as even more emphatic examples from

overseas it is eminently doable

precisely because in the modern game

wage expenditure and league finishes

correlate so strongly that at the

beginning of any given season you can

almost predict how a league table will

shape up at the end of the season based

upon that criteria alone in four out of

europe's top five leagues this season

the team with the highest wage bill won

the division and that pattern continues

if you look at the teams that qualified

for europe finished in mid-table and

were relegated there are of course a

couple of under and overachievers each

season brentford perhaps being the most

notable from the premier league this

season meanwhile manchester united

continue to prove that if you try hard

enough you can still bugger it up and be

an exception to the rule but by and

large over time you're standing within

any given league or league system and

the amount of money that you spend on

paying your players will align very

evenly indeed so i don't think that it

is the impossibility of the size and

scale of the challenge that is

convincing bill gates to stay away from

buying beverly town fc i mean admittedly

i haven't asked him but i would be

fairly surprised

rather than asking why billionaires

don't buy non-league football teams

though we should start by asking why do

they buy football teams at all i would

argue that there are three main reasons

one money they're simply seeking profit

and or asset diversification

two politics either to extend their

political reach and contacts change the

perception of them or the institution

that they represent or to gain

legitimacy and affection often referred

to as sports washing and very often a

combination of all of the above and

three an actual passion for and interest

in football of course two or even three

of those factors can all intertwine it

is perfectly possible for some despot

dictator or warlord with more than a

billion dollars to have a genuine

interest in football or for someone

whose primary motivation is making even

more money to still be a football fan

and to enjoy the ride and it's even

possible that some western asian royal

might find that football is not just a

great investment in terms of laundering

their and their country's reputations

but that it can also be a very shrewd

financial investment and particularly

good in terms of diversification as you

could well argue has been the case at

manchester city who shake man saw anders

city football group acquired for just

210 million pounds in 2008. the club is

now valued as being worth 3.37 billion

pounds however

you can also see why all three

motivations are unlikely to lead any one

of the world's more than 2 500

billionaires straight into taking on the

challenge of buying a non-league team in

the first instance so those motivated

primarily by money first and foremost

just because buying a team in the

premier league or in europe's other top

flights outside of a handful of genuine

super clubs such as manchester city now

it isn't actually very expensive

newcastle united for example sold for

just 300 million pounds this season

despite having been in the premier

league for the last five years having a

large stadium and among the largest

domestic fan bases in the division that

is less than the amount that it would

cost you to buy the cheapest nfl or even

mls team and it means that an individual

saudi royal paid more for a piece of art

in 2016 than his entire family and

indeed country paid to acquire a premier

league football team so

it is not like that there is any great

incentive for billionaires at least to

go out in search of a cheaper option and

to create

a lot more unnecessary hard work for

themselves the challenge of getting

newcastle united into the premier league

top four or top six is a relatively

modest one when compared with trying to

do likewise at yeovil town woking or

even nearby gateshead i think that there

is an argument that if you were purely

motivated by extracting every pound of

possible profit out of an operation and

you did things right perhaps you could

make more by buying a non-league team

for effectively nothing and taking them

all the way to the premier league but

you would be looking at a much longer

time frame of course and you would be

taking on far greater risk for the sake

of maybe and it would be a speculative

assessment 50 to 150 million pounds at

the very most which is peanuts to a lot

of these people in any investment that

is driven purely by profit which is most

investments of course risk is a very

significant consideration and reducing

risk whilst maximizing profit tends to

be the sole aim of the game so there are

just more negatives than positives from

that perspective to buying a non-league

or even lower league team in terms of

the practicalities you have also got to

think about how you are actually going

to build the club up it is not

necessarily a case of build it and they

will come if you were to take ownership

of olston football club in cumbria for

example in a town of barely a thousand

people and with no major towns or cities

for miles around the closest probably

being carlyle that already has a fairly

popular football club with locals even

if you were to become the best team in

all of europe you're probably going to

do well to attract crowds of more than

10 000 unless you were to build your own

high-speed rail network connecting the

rest of england to your ground in which

case it is unlikely to be a profitable

endeavor whatever happens on the pitch

that is of course a very extreme example

but it is hard to gain support as an

unestablished football club milton

keynes dons were founded almost 20 years

ago now in the largest settlement and

now city in all of buckinghamshire which

has a population of more than half a

million people lucky i'm sure that is

not milton keynes although milton keynes

is still pretty big yet even in a

stadium which can accommodate more than

30 000 fans and in a season in which

they almost won promotion from league

one mk dons still had an average of

fewer than 10 000 fans at their home

games this season that is less than half

the average attendance at ipswich town

this season despite ipswich having a

smaller stadium fewer than half as many

inhabitants as milton keynes and

finishing 11th in league one this season

because ipswich are 143 years old they

have generational support behind them

something which cannot be bought or

gained overnight even manchester city

who were among the best supported teams

in england even before shakeman saw

bought them in 2008 are still mars

behind the likes of liverpool and

manchester united when it comes to

domestic and international support

despite being the most successful team

in english football over the past decade

as for groups two and three it makes

absolutely no sense for someone who is

politically motivated and particularly

those who are in search of a rapidly

laundered reputation and hordes of

adoring football fans to buy a

non-league team newcastle united and

manchester city had among the largest

fan bases in england before being bought

by royals or states in the middle east

and charles c were also one of the

biggest teams in the country before

roman abramovich arrived despite some of

the teasing that all three of those team

supporters get in fact if you look at

owners in that second bracket they

almost all target very large teams

because no other teams would capably

serve their purposes as for group 3

billionaires who are actually passionate

about football

often they are passionate about a

specific club that they support and

invariably therefore it is that club

that they want to buy own and help to

develop so

you have got the likes of tony bloom at

brighton matthew bennem at brentford and

delia smith at norwich not all

billionaires of course but you get the

idea

so the only billionaire who is ever

likely to buy a non-league football club

is either one who is so ham-fisted that

they won't spend as much money on a

premier league team as they would on a

piece of art or even as much on a

championship or league one team as they

would on a week away with their kids or

one who is passionate about football but

is unable to buy the club that they

actually support presumably because the

existing owner is unwilling to sell up

or because they are looking to buy a

football club that competes in a market

outside of the one that the team they

actually support competes in and

they really

really want a project i am making it

sound extremely unlikely but

it is not as though it has never

happened in 2009 austria's wealthiest

person dietrich mike shitz who is worth

an estimated 26 billion dollars bought

non-league german outfit ssv mark

ranstad who competed in germany's

regional fifth tier at the time through

his private company red bull mike schitz

was only actually interested in

acquiring mark randstead's league

license so that he wouldn't have to

start out at the absolute foot of the

german football league pyramid and he

immediately did away with mark

randstad's name colours and all of their

club's tradition instead he plastered

the name red bull onto everything and

mimicked his company's colours just as

he had already done at red bull salzburg

except unlike in salzburg he couldn't

actually rename machrinstad as red bull

leipzig due to the fb rules around

football clubs not being allowed to

include corporate names instead

therefore mightshit's renamed ssv

machrinstad as rosenball sport leipzig

frequently shortened to just rb leipzig

nicknamed them the red bulls and renamed

the xentral stadium as the red bull

arena might shitz didn't actually buy

ssv macrinstad because he wanted to take

on the challenge of taking a club all

the way from the fifth to the first era

of german football but simply because no

teams at any higher levels would sell to

him he and red bull had spent years

trying to buy an established german

football club such as sarks and leipzig

kemi leipzig sankt paoli 1860 munich

fortuna dusseldorf and locomotive

leipzig focusing most of their efforts

on struggling east german outfits who

they hoped would be more receptive to

their ideas and vids in each and every

instance once red bulls intentions

became clear that is to fully re-brand

the club just as they had done in

salzburg fear supporter backlash

scuppered any chance of a deal being

struck it took them more than three

years and at least six sets of

negotiations failing before they finally

settled for a fifth tier team because no

one at any level above that wanted to

become a marketing ploy for a company

that sells fizzy sugary energy drinks

that act as a laxative and stop you from

being able to sleep for a week

or is that just me

we do also see it typically on a much

smaller scale than leipzig who are a

pretty extreme example and are now one

of the three or four best teams in the

bundesliga competing to finish second

each season in england scotland spain

and indeed just about everywhere it is

extremely prevalent in the highland and

lowland leagues up in scotland where you

have had some teams in recent years

bankrolled by multi-millionaires signing

players from scottish league one or even

scottish championship teams such for the

wages that they were offering for these

players to come and play in pub car

parks and school playing fields most

wicks in the spanish league system you

have got fc andorra who competed in the

fifth tier of spanish football when

gerrard pk bought the club during the

2018-19 season but has just won

promotion to the segunda division or la

liga ii this season the second tier of

spanish football in the english league

system nationally sad wrexham afc were

recently bought by hollywood actors ryan

reynolds and the other one whose name i

always forget and though they failed to

win promotion this season after

finishing second and losing to grimsby

town in the playoff semi-finals you

suspect that it is only a matter of time

given the scale of their investment

relative to the league that they are

playing in admittedly all of those

examples are owned by multi-millionaires

rather than fully reptilian billionaires

but the concept is still the same that

was a joke by the way the reptilian bit

before all the billionaire sims and elon

musk stands come after me in the

comments

there are examples of some other actual

billionaires though peter lim bought 50

of salford city in 2014 shortly after

the club one promotion to the seventh

tier of english football joining

co-owners gary neville phil neville ryan

giggs nikki butt and paul scholes who

each own 10

of the club alongside him salford

reached the fl in 2019 following

enormous investment by non-league

standards both on and off the pitch

though lim's ownership stake has since

been reduced to 40

due to david beckham acquiring a 10

interest in the le2 team back in germany

1899 hoffenheim probably provides the

most extreme example anywhere in the

world at least as far as i'm aware of a

billionaire bankrolling a football club

from nothing to the top flight during

the modern era hoffenheim is literally a

village which has a population of just 3

000 people hoffenheim are a village

football club therefore and when

billionaire dietmar hop first decided to

invest in his local village club

following a particularly devastating

defeat in 1990

their league status reflected that fact

hoffenheim competed in the chrysler the

lowest level of football in the german

pyramid which covers steps 8 through to

14. by the end of the decade hoffenheim

had climbed all the way from the eighth

to the fifth tier and during the

mid-2000s hops investment stepped up a

notch as he publicly set his sights on

the seemingly unthinkable target of

reaching the bundesliga it took just

three years mass demanded by ralph

rangnick for hoffenheim to do it and in

2009 hop built a 30 thousand plus seater

stadium for a football club that i will

remind you represents a village of 3 000

people the stadium isn't actually in

hoffenheim anymore it is in the nearby

town of sinsheim but even the population

of sinsheim is only 35 000 despite

having finished as high as third and

fourth in the bundesliga in recent years

and having had famous european knights

against the likes of liverpool and

manchester city only last place greiter

fert had a lower average attendance than

hoffenheim in the bundesliga this season

as they averaged just 12

190 fans inside of the 30 150 capacity

rhine necro arena that reflects the

difficulties that i spoke about earlier

on

of actually building a fan base when you

build a football club up from the ground

regardless of success hop is reported to

have invested 350 million euros into

hoffenheim and in return he has become

one of the most hated figures in all of

german football thoughts of artificially

inflated the standard and standing of a

plastic football club and he is

frequently taunted ridiculed and abused

by opposition fans many of whom view him

as almost the personification of the

commercialization of football and a

physical embodiment of the notion of

buying success in football rather than

earning it but the reality is almost all

success in football now is bought sure

bayern munich are a footballing

institution in germany with one of the

largest fan bases and trophy cabinets in

world football but the reason that they

are still so successful is because they

spend by far the most money and have by

far the best players of any german

football club in modern football it

doesn't matter how well you run a club

you cannot win the premier league title

with a championship budget and you

cannot hopefully sustain success unless

you bring your wage expenditure in line

with the level at which you intend to

compete and that

surely is the biggest problem football

clubs should not be dependent upon the

whims of billionaires by whatever motive

they decide to take over your club and

you shouldn't need a sugar daddy by

necessity to climb the football league

pyramid it wasn't always thus or at

least it wasn't always thus to this

extent there was a time when the likes

of tottenham and derby county could win

promotion from the second division and

win the first division title during

their first season up as newly promoted

teams without significantly altering

their level of investment during the

premier league era we have had one

genuinely remarkable title winning team

only leicester city in 2016 of course

and even they had spent heavily by

championship standards and spent around

70 million pounds in the two summers

following promotion before they won the

league it was still absolutely

remarkable please do not get me wrong

and i doubt we'll see the like of it

again until something radical changes in

terms of the structure of the game but

it does just go to show how the role of

money in the game has changed over the

last 20 30 and 40 years and how it has

put football clubs certainly in england

almost entirely at the behest of

extremely wealthy and often rather

unsavory characters what's more this

situation isn't as some people suppose

entirely inevitable in the case of

billionaires who buy football clubs to

extract money out of them whilst owning

them and then to sell them for a massive

profit clearly those clubs would be

better off being owned by the fans or

some kind of supporters trust lots of

people seem to have this notion that a

fan owned manchester united for example

wouldn't be able to spend as much money

as they do now when in fact they could

spend a lot more since they wouldn't

have to send the glazers hundreds of

millions of pounds to service the debts

that they used to buy the club just as

the likes of real madrid and bayern

munich who are also fan-owned and

generate enormous revenue do not have

that wealth extracted by a billionaire

several thousand miles away but

i should stop because i am in danger of

drifting off topic and onto a topic that

i have talked about at length many times

on this channel in the past ultimately

billionaires don't tend to buy

non-league football teams because they

rarely run parallel to the reasons why

they want to buy football clubs in the

first place and in the very rare

circumstances when they do while success

on the pitch is very attainable if you

hire the right people and invest a fat

wad of cash success off it is rather

more difficult and you are liable to

become far more disliked than if you had

just bought an already established club

funnily enough i do think that if one

billionaire had taken over a non-league

team years ago and had done reasonably

well with it loads of them probably

would have followed in their footsteps

do you know what i mean you can just

imagine non-league football being turned

into a pissing contest between shallow

and increasingly balding men whose

primary motive wouldn't be money

politics or passion but just one-upping

elon jeff larry and bill they would

probably plaster their company names all

over the place and in the club's name

just like matchups has done at a whole

load of clubs and we would have tesla

talker united amazon aldershot town and

virgin kers and ashton all vying for the

premier league title every season

following their four or five straight

promotions mima manchester united and

liverpool are now fighting it out for

survival in league one due to their

refusal to rename themselves and there

are no actual fans there anymore even

actual kurz and ashton fans got bored of

it the games are just broadcast on the

metaverse and only the owners that have

bought the necessary nfts to be granted

access to watch the game tune in which

is just the owners forcing football fans

to take up an interest in another sport

until a massive asteroid comes and

finally puts us out of the sordid misery

that we have got ourselves into

thinking about it it's probably a good

thing that more billionaires don't mind

on league teams sounds awful

that is it for today's video thank you

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