The Sunday News
AFTER an intoxicating summer in which England reached the semi-final of the World Cup in Russia, English football fans face the prospect of seeing Wembley Stadium, the national squad’s home, fall into the hands of a foreigner. This is the sacred turf where England won the World Cup in 1966. Many fans are far from happy.
The potential buyer is an American, Shahid Khan. He already owns an English Premier League football club, Fulham, as well as the Jacksonville Jaguars, a National Football League (NFL) franchise.
The Jaguars have been playing NFL games at Wembley since 2013. Mr Khan wants to stage more such matches there, so he is offering £600m ($780m) to Wembley’s owner, the Football Association (FA), to buy the stadium outright.
The FA, which runs the grassroots side of the game in England, is hard-up. Its bosses see this as a one-off opportunity to overhaul the tens of thousands of muddy pitches and freezing club houses that make up the country’s dilapidated football infrastructure.
The deal, already agreed on by the FA’s board, will be put to its 127-member council on October 11th.
No one doubts that the English game needs an injection of cash. Football’s Premier League might be the richest in the world, but the grassroots remain in poor shape.
In a survey of the 29 000 affiliated clubs, 49% reported that at least five fixtures per season were cancelled because of frozen or waterlogged pitches. But many argue that selling Wembley is not the best way to fund a modernisation of the game.
For a start, there is the valuation. The FA bought Wembley stadium in 1999 for £103m and completely rebuilt it, demolishing its old twin towers and installing a giant arch designed by Lord Foster. Costs overran, eventually totting up to £757m, £161m of which was funded by lottery and government money.
Under the deal with Mr Khan, the FA would keep most of the stadium’s hospitality rights, valued at about £300m. But the cash that it received would be substantially below what the FA has spent on the site since 1999.
Given that house prices in London have tripled since then, it looks to many like a bad deal. But the market for 90 000-seat stadiums is rather different from that for three-bedroom semis.
Valuing Wembley is particularly hard, as it is almost unique in not being part of a rich Premier League club. Twickenham stadium, owned by the Rugby Football Union, is the only comparable asset in London, points out JLL, a property services company.
The FA says that the offer meets a valuation that it commissioned from Rothschild, a bank.
Mr Khan is the sole bidder, so there is little pressure on him to improve his offer. If the FA does sell up, it will be saying goodbye to its only substantial asset.
The proposed deal excludes branding rights, meaning that England will at least be spared the indignity of Wembley being renamed by a commercial sponsor.
The FA is also seeking assurances that Wembley would still stage “major fixtures and events currently hosted at the stadium”.
But the FA already concedes that England’s autumn international matches would have to be moved elsewhere to accommodate more NFL games.
Moreover, many doubt that this sale would achieve the “transformation” of the grassroots game that the FA promises. The public money that was used to build the stadium would have to be repaid (though the government might channel it back into football).
The rest could quickly disappear if spent helping 29 000 clubs.
“It seems like a short-term fix,” argues David Webber, a sports expert at Southampton Solent University. A bit like many England managers’ coaching methods. — Theeconomist.com
