Leicester City's run to the title outlines the struggles that American owners have had in making Premier League club's successful.
When the season began late last summer in England’s Barclays Premier League, Leicester City was coming off a 14th-place finish from the prior year and was — famously, now — established as a 5000-to-1 shot to win the 2015-16 championship.
By comparison, as the season advanced, the mathematical probability of a club winning the league with American investors either in control or owning a substantial stake was better than 1-in-3.
Leicester’s comfortable romp to the title is being viewed as one of the greatest upsets in the history of world sport. But why is it starting to feel like an American owner somehow getting his hands on the BPL trophy would come as an even greater surprise?
It’s not that it’s never happened. In fact, Manchester United has won five league championships since the Glazer family took control of the club in 2005. But ManU won eight times under Sir Alex Ferguson before the Glazers came along, so it hardly seems like they’re responsible. And they’ve already bungled the transition following Ferguson’s retirement twice.
The short history of American ownership in the Premier League has included very little celebration but a whole lot of frustration and a burgeoning incidence of relegation.
There are American owners at Arsenal (Stan Kroenke), Aston Villa (Randy Lerner), Liverpool (John Henry), Manchester United (the Glazer family) and Sunderland (Ellis Short), and investors at Bournemouth (Matt Hulsizer) and Crystal Palace (Joshua Harris/David Blitzer). On average, they are 33 points behind champion Leicester.
Once winners of the European Cup, the forerunner of the current Champions League, Aston Villa is nearing the end of one of the worst Premier League seasons ever and will be relegated from the division for the first time ever. Sunderland is currently in position to be dropped, as well, although it still has three games to fight its way out of that predicament.
Arsenal hasn’t won a league title in more than a decade. Liverpool’s most important trophy under Henry was a single League Cup, and it has reached the Champions League only once in his tenure. ManU may miss the Champions League for a second time in three years after qualifying 18 consecutive times under Ferguson.
To call this all a disaster might be overstating things, but it’s not good.
Save perhaps for those who’ve seen their teams relegated, the American owners generally have seen the value of their investments in English football grow. But so have the concerns, in a number of areas:
1. Spending. The fundamental difference between the prototypical American owner and the oil barons behind some of England’s most successful clubs is the drive to run the soccer club as a business. Chelsea’s Roman Abramovich and Manchester City’s Sheikh Mansour frequently have displayed no particular concern for the bottom line, something that isn’t going to happen with even the billionaire class of Americans who buy into the league.
But it isn’t just about how much a team spends. It’s about how the team spends. At one point early in Lerner’s ownership, Aston Villa spent more than $280 million on player acquisitions, according to London newspaper The Sun. The team finished in sixth place from 2008 to 2010, but when other clubs started shopping for Villa players and the money to replace them no longer was plentiful, manager Martin O’Neill bolted — five days before the start of the season.
Manchester United flashed the second-most cash in world soccer history in the summer of 2014 to make new manager Louis van Gaal feel welcome. The players bought: flops Radamel Falcao, Angel di Maria and Marcos Rojo, among them. Subsequent buys Bastian Schweinsteiger and Memphis Depay also have failed to elevate the team. That same summer, Liverpool was more or less forced to sell superstar striker Luis Suarez to Barcelona for nearly $110 million, but a big chunk of that money was misspent on failures Lazar Markovic and Mario Balotelli.
American owners buying into American leagues almost never have to concern themselves with the value a foreign league might place on one of their prized talents, and they absolutely never have to cope with the specter of megawealthy teams such as FC Barcelona and Real Madrid, which essentially have no constraints on their spending other than the ineffectual European “financial fair play” regulations.
2. Culture. The American presence in the Premier League continues to be viewed skeptically by the natives, even though U.S. owners have been prominent for more than half of a history that dates to 1992.
The most obvious example of this has been the antipathy directed toward the Glazers, who bought into Manchester United in 2003 and effectively took control of the club in 2005. The financially intricate nature of the deal, which effectively loaded hundreds of millions in debt onto the ManU books, freaked out thousands of Red Devils fans. They protested outside Old Trafford in 2005, with signs that somewhat ironically claimed ManU was “not for sale.”
They still were at it in 2010.
All this preceded the issues with replacing Ferguson, whose retirement was a little like trying to replace Bob Knight in NCAA basketball: Only Knight could win at Knight's pace with Knight's players. ManU learned this by hiring overmatched David Moyes away from Everton. He did not even finish his first season. The club then lured Netherlands national team manager van Gaal; in his second season, van Gaal gets a shot at his first trophy in the FA Cup final May 21 against Crystal Palace.
The problem with the early anti-Glazer vitriol is the Glazers never got in Ferguson’s way as he won five BPL titles following their entry into the club. And the family has overseen an increase in the value of the club from $1.5 billion at the time it took control to an estimated $3.1 billion now. A large portion of the debt has been repaid, and whatever remains is insignificant compared to the capital appreciation that has occurred.
But the romantic notion that persists among many who follow the BPL that its clubs ought not to be viewed as business ventures continues to drive a wedge between many native supporters and the foreigners who control the teams.
3. Aspirations. One persistent problem for American owners is what they want their clubs to achieve relative to what seems reasonable, an equation that will be out of whack for years now that the Leicester miracle has occurred.
Aston Villa’s three straight sixth-place finishes now seem remarkable, but those weren’t exactly what fans were promised either by declaration (Lerner said at the time of purchase the club could compete “at the highest level within the Premiership and in Europe”) or implication (given the amount of transfer money spent).
Since its near-perfect 2003-04 title run with the “Invincibles,” who did not lose a single Premier League game, Arsenal has steadily achieved the top-four finishes to qualify for Champions League participation. But it hasn’t again won the league, with or without Kroenke as a part of the operation. He has trusted 20-year manager Arsene Wenger, and Wenger has returned two FA Cups, the revenue that goes to Champions League participants, and nothing more.
Americans Shahid Khan and Short bought into lower-end Premiership clubs during this decade; Khan since has seen Fulham relegated to the Championship and flirt with another drop this season, and Short’s Sunderland squad must rally in the final two weeks to escape relegation from the Premier League.
There seems little doubt that investment in the Premier League has been lucrative for those who’ve entered, but achievement is far more elusive. In salary-cap leagues such as the NFL and NHL, it’s difficult merely to spend one's way to a championship, and that’s true to an extent in the NBA pending an owner’s willingness to be slammed by the luxury tax. In English and European soccer, however, there is literally always someone with more resources (and less common sense) unless you’re in control at Real Madrid or Barcelona.
Unless one can use an abundance of damaging injuries as the excuse, Arsenal’s failure to win the title in this particular season may be a referendum on the ability of Wenger’s current approach to producing a champion. Wenger was allowed the funds to buy forward Alexis Sanchez when he was available following a stellar performance at the 2014 World Cup, and German midfielder Mesut Ozil the year before that.
Leicester City had no such players. No one who was a World Cup star. No one with a World Cup gold medal. Neither was it burdened with an American owner, though. That wasn’t the key to it all, was it?
