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David Beckham Goes Sneaker Shopping With Complex

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https://www.netflix.com/watch/81132056?source=35&trackId=254743534

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Beloved worldwide but also a lightning rod for criticism, Neymar shares the highs and lows of his personal life and brilliant football career.

This documentary series features interviews with star footballers Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé and David Beckham.

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Neymar: The Perfect Chaos

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Neymar: The Perfect Chaos

Neymar rises from humble beginnings to become a star with a carefully crafted image and worldwide brand. Yet criticism still follows him at every turn.

Neymar's career and celebrity soar in Barcelona, but a move to Paris, World Cup pressure and a shocking allegation fuel further scrutiny on the player.

As tensions rise with PSG, Neymar takes a step back to rediscover his love for the game and to make a difference in many lives back in his hometown.

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Watch Neymar: The Perfect Chaos | Netflix Official Site

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Beloved worldwide but also a lightning rod for criticism, Neymar shares the highs and lows of his personal life and brilliant football career. Watch trailers & learn more.

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https://en.psg.fr/teams/club/content/paris-saint-germain-announce-a-new-global-flagship-store-in-the-heart-of-new-york-city

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The new store is part of the Club's innovative long-term partnership with Fanatics and will be opened and operated by retail giant Lids. The Club of the French capital is on the way to become one of the greatest and hottest brands in world sport, with further expansion into North America.

The new store will feature one-of-a-kind Paris Saint-Germain apparel, unique Paris Saint-Germain x NY products, and advanced customization section for fans to put their signature on their favorite authentic gear.

Ten years after touring the US for the first time, soccer giant Paris Saint-Germain will open its first ever east coast flagship store in New York City. Located at 587 5th Ave, the brand-new flagship store will be the first-ever official boutique in New York City for an international sports club.

This opening is part of the Club's innovative global merchandising partnership with Fanatics announced in 2020 and will see retailing giant Lids brought in to open an operate the store. It is a new step for Paris Saint-Germain's international development after successfully opening its first US store in collaboration with Fanatics and Lids in Los Angeles one year ago. The PSG official boutique in New York will be the club's largest store outside of France and will add to the club's growing international retail network which now includes three boutiques in Japan (two in Tokyo and one in Nagoya), one in Seoul, South Korea and two in Doha, Qatar.

The new store will feature an extensive product assortment of team jerseys, headwear, accessories, with a full range of Nike and Jordan teamwear, one-of-a-kind collabs, fashion collections and NY-inspired Paris Saint-Germain designs exclusively available at the new location. This one-stop destination for Paris Saint-Germain fans in NYC and those from traveling all over the world, will get to experience a customization station, a signature feature present in many Lids retail locations for fans to further personalize their Paris Saint-Germain gear on-site. In addition, collectibles such as exclusive signed game and non-game jerseys as well as other team items will be available for purchase.

" Once again Paris Saint-Germain is leading the way by bringing a flagship store right to the heart of New York City, one of the world's iconic intersections of sports, culture, and fashion," said Zohar Ravid, Senior Vice-President, Head of Global Corporate Development at Fanatics. " The club is always pushing new boundaries and we are delighted to once again team up with our partners at Lids to expand its global retail presence in a key international market and help the club on its journey to becoming one of the most culturally relevant sports clubs and brands in the world. "

" We are thrilled to bring a globally recognized team and brand with Paris Saint-Germain and flagship store opening in New York City," said Lawrence Berger, Co-Founder and Partner at Ames Watson and Chairman of FanzzLids Holdings, which is the owner of Lids. " This is an exciting moment for Lids and Paris Saint-Germain fans as they now have an exclusive place to purchase the latest fashions, plus the ability to customize product in-store."

" Paris Saint-Germain brand development over the last 10 years is truly unique. Becoming the first sports team to open an official boutique in New York City is a key milestone to establish the club as one of the greatest sports brands in the world." said Fabien Allègre, Brand Director at Paris Saint-Germain. " We are delighted to work with Fanatics to reinforce our presence in North America and to have a retail expert in Lids operating the store. The club is now the number four sports club in the world on social media and our fanbase, worldwide and especially in the US, is growing exponentially. Over 160 million fans follow our team every day. New York is the pinnacle of that growth. We are excited for Paris Saint-Germain supporters from all over the world to experience this new store event and be part of Paris Saint-Germain unique project."

In celebration of this opening, Paris Saint-Germain and NYC-based boutique creative studio, Fly Nowhere have launched an innovative initiative developing special projects and collaboration merchandise. Co-branded product drops will be inspired by local motifs in celebration of PSG landing in New York. These drops will be available exclusively at the PSG NYC and Paris flagship stores.

To celebrate this monumental moment, Lids and Paris Saint-Germain will hold a Grand opening event of the store on Friday, March 18th.

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Paris Saint-Germain announce a new global flagship store in the heart of New York City

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The new store is part of the Club's innovative long-term partnership with Fanatics and will be opened and operated by retail giant Lids. The Club of the French capital is on the way to become one of the greatest and hottest brands in world sport, with further expansion into North America.

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https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11833/12397423/lionel-messi-gone-over-1bn-in-debt-how-do-barcelona-turn-around-their-year-of-crisis

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Barcelona have offloaded players left, right and centre - including Lionel Messi - and are still shackled by more than £1bn of debt. Where do they go from here?

Some eight senior players have left the Nou Camp amid a fire sale to bring the club's wage bill towards something vaguely approaching La Liga's new rules on financial prudence. None of those departures will be felt anywhere near as much as Messi, who even himself did not expect to move on until the morning it was announced.

That the club's greatest player should depart in this way, in tears at a hastily-called press briefing to justify the club's decision, speaks volumes for its decline.

Where once stood an institution that redefined modern footballing philosophy under Pep Guardiola, that even with its influence waning was still content to throw £100m+ on each of Ousmane Dembele, Philippe Coutinho and Antoine Griezmann in recent years, now sits a club accused by even its new president of "disastrous mismanagement" under his predecessor, and still scrambling to stay on the right side of crippling financial boundaries.

The returning chief, Joan Laporta, was the man who first employed Guardiola, who oversaw Barcelona's rise back to the top of European football with Messi leading the way. When he took the presidency again last year, this time his job was to pick up the pieces of Josep Maria Bartomeu's disastrous six-year reign, following his sudden resignation.

He immediately set about mounting an expectations-levelling exercise, once which has proven painful for the club and its fans, and shows little sign of abating for now with the club well over £1bn in debt.

"The base of everything is the previous administration's disastrous management which we inherited," he said during Messi's uncomfortable press conference in early August.

A little over four years ago Barca could field a front three of Neymar, Messi and Luis Suarez, now the bulk of their forward options consist of Sevilla loanee Luuk de Jong, an ageing Sergio Aguero, ex-Middlesbrough striker Martin Braithwaite and Memphis Depay.

Many of those who have kept their roles at the Nou Camp have done so on new reduced terms to keep the club financially viable, to the point where La Liga only permitted Aguero's registration after the transfer window had shut, once Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba had agreed smaller contracts to lower the wage bill further.

La Liga's new rules stipulate clubs can spend 70 per cent of their income on wages. With Messi, Barca would have spent 110 per cent, even without him the figure stood at 95 per cent at the start of August. Griezmann, Junior Firpo, Emerson Royal, Ilaix Moriba, Jean-Clair Todibo, Miralem Pjanic and Francisco Trincao have followed Messi and generated around €130m (£111.5m) in sales.

What happened to Barca's first-choice XI in five years?

The problem is not only the huge transfer fees paid out - it is the quality of players who have arrived, or certainly their fit. Coutinho, Dembele and Griezmann, Barcelona's three most expensive signings for a combined tally of around £350m, have all flopped. "Every year we were a little bit worse," said longstanding centre-back Gerard Pique last year. Quite so - ending La Liga last season in third was their lowest finish since 2008.

A time for prudence

In 2018, Barcelona became the first club in professional sport to post annual revenues in excess of $1bn (£723m). Three years on and forced to sell for what they can get, Barca have made an €80m (£68.6m) loss on Griezmann in just two years. The pandemic has obviously played its part, but if any club were not ready for a rainy day, they were at the top of the list.

"The days of spending like they have in the last few years are over," journalist Carles Ruiperez, who has written about Barca's struggles for Catalonian newspaper La Vanguardia, told Sky Sports. "There is a phrase with which the club summarise the situation: sports policy is subordinate to economic policy until it becomes sustainable again. Obviously, they know that the team is less powerful than last year."

Barcelona's summer business would have enraged fans in years gone by, but in this new era of austerity, there is patience to allow Laporta and his board to rebuild the club's badly damaged foundations.

Things may still get worse before they get better. Last month Laporta announced Barcelona's debts amounted to €1.35bn (£1.16bn), partly accrued from years of lavish spending under Bartomeu, partly due to the pandemic, and partly down to the cost of keeping Lionel Messi at the Nou Camp throughout most of his career.

"I think there's probably more cost-cutting to come," Spanish football expert Terry Gibson told Sky Sports. "I think Barcelona were looking for a better deal from Atletico Madrid for Griezmann which is why it went on so late, and Sevilla are paying some of De Jong's wages for him to play for Barcelona. It just goes to show how much things have changed."

The brightest prospects who remain, Pedri and Frenkie de Jong, are strongly linked with moves away from the Nou Camp in the near future. No one knows for sure how long the era of austerity will last, but Laporta's public estimate is that it will continue for a while yet.

"I think that in a couple of years, the club's economy will be healthy. It's a big challenge but we are capable of overcoming it," he said last month.

Rebuilding from within

How do Barcelona go about rebuilding? As well as cost-cutting, Laporta and manager Ronald Koeman still have a club to run, and nine points from their opening five games, given the financial and emotional turmoil surrounding everything, is a decent return at the start of the new season.

What will be a long-term restoration is being undertaken the traditional Barca way, even if in less-than-ideal circumstances - through La Masia, their world-famous academy. Earlier this month, 18-year-old graduate Ansu Fati inherited Messi's famous number 10 shirt only 41 appearances into his Barcelona career and 10 months since his last, with a knee injury last November still keeping the forward out of action.

Elsewhere, 18-year-old midfielder Pedri has already become a regular for Spain, while it has been suggested manager Koeman's contract will only be renewed if Riqui Puig is given more game time in midfield.

"I think if they go down that road which they are and Koeman is embracing that, then I think the supporters will be patient," Gibson said. "It's a long tradition for Barcelona to produce their own players, and a certain type of player as well at La Masia.

"The fans won't pin the blame on Ronald Koeman, they won't pin the blame on Joan Laporta, the blame has been pinned firmly on the previous regime, and everyone can see their troubles.

"We saw two teenage substitutes come on the other week, Nico Gonzalez, who is a replica for Sergio Busquets, Gavi, who's 17 years old, he came on to make his debut. There's obviously Ansu Fati and Pedri, as well as Ronald Araujo, who is in his early 20s and is an excellent central defender.

"But it makes you realise they were nowhere near being Lionel Messi. It was wishful thinking. It was a dream from Joan Laporta to try and imagine they could keep him."

Wishful thinking is over at the Nou Camp, reality has well and truly bitten. Can Barcelona come back to their former glories? Of course, but not by throwing money at the problem this time. "We need to not try to win La Liga and the Champions League every year," one club official told the Financial Times.

This time three years ago, Barca were favourites to win the continental competition, but enter this year's tournament as 20/1 outsiders. They look likely to make good on scaling back their expectations - but after a summer of chaos and more likely to follow, not necessarily out of choice.

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Lionel Messi gone, over £1bn in debt - how do Barcelona turn around their year of crisis?

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Barcelona are more than £1bn in the red, have let Lionel Messi leave on a free transfer, made a £68m loss on Antoine Griezmann in two years, and have a squad depleted by their mismanagement and financial problems. Will things get worse before they get better at the Nou Camp?

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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/mar/15/barcelona-agree-spotify-sponsorship-deal-including-camp-nou-rebrand

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Barcelona have signed a shirt and stadium sponsorship deal with audio streaming platform Spotify, the club announced on Tuesday.

The brand will appear on the front of the men's and women's team shirts for four seasons from the 2022-23 campaign. The company will also be the first brand to sponsor the club's stadium, which will now be called Spotify Camp Nou.

"The vision for the partnership is to create a new platform to help artists interact with Barcelona's global community of fans," the club said in a statement.

Neither Barcelona nor Spotify confirmed the financial details of the deal but, according to the Catalan radio station Rac1, the agreement is worth €280m (£235m).

Rakuten, the Japanese retailer, has sponsored the men's team since 2017 while the toolmaker Stanley Black & Decker became the official shirt sponsor of the women's team in 2018.

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Barcelona agree Spotify sponsorship deal including Camp Nou rebrand

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The agreement with the streaming giant is reportedly worth €280m, with Barcelona's historic home to be renamed for the first time in the club's history

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https://versus.uk.com/2020/09/shouldnt-surprised-neymars-move-nike-puma/

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After a week of speculation, Neymar's 15-year relationship with Nike has officially come to an end, with the Brazilian superstar swapping the Swoosh for PUMA in one of the biggest brand switches of the modern era. Signing a baller of Neymar's status is a real statement of intent from PUMA, and most certainly a power shift in football's brand wars. And while many were confused as to why the PSG forward would switch sides after being a bonafide face of Nike, make no mistake, this is a win for Neymar too.

What made the news so shocking when it first circulated last weekend, is how central Neymar has been to Nike's marketing efforts over the last few years, with the Brazilian baller more or less teed up as the eventual heir to Cristiano Ronaldo's throne as football's Swoosh King. The player has had a string of signature boot releases, dropped apparel collections, and even became the first football player to receive a Jordan Brand boot. Major moves.

Welcome to the fam @neymarjr #KingIsBack pic.twitter.com/aMPnipZXj9

- PUMA (@PUMA) September 12, 2020

However, those with an eagle eye on the situation could have seen this coming. While CR7 remains one of the best players in the world at the age of 35 - and with no real decline yet in sight - players like Kylian Mbappé and Jadon Sancho have risen up to be very legitimate contenders as the next face of Nike. Just last month, Sancho became the youngest ever player to get a signature boot for the brand. It was a power move for JS7 and confirmation of how much stock the brand are putting in him.

Ultimately, it's meant Neymar has been left in the shadows. It's eerily similar to his situation at Barcelona, when he was always looked at as a backup dancer to Leo Messi.

In this case, Nike equals Barca and PUMA equals PSG. Neymar just wants a chance to be the biggest star of his own show.

At PUMA, Neymar will be undisputed in his claim to be the face of the brand. Currently, the German giants are pushing Antoine Griezmann, Sergio Aguero and Luis Suarez as some of their biggest ambassadors. While Griezmann's star has fallen after a stop-start career at Barca, Aguero and Suarez are both approaching the end of their prime - and neither have the star power that Neymar does.

Jay Z after he helps deliver AC Milan their fifth consecutive UCL in 2026. pic.twitter.com/aZTvt6hz03

- VERSUS (@vsrsus) July 9, 2020

While currently behind adidas and Nike as the biggest brand in football right now - PUMA's stock is rising fast and they're on the brink of a breakthrough. Their close allegiance with Jay Z is helping to bring players like Romelu Lukaku to the family and giving their marketing a more cultured lens than ever before, while rumours are also strong that they've been lining up a deal to bring Raheem Sterling to the brand - with their very real heritage in identity politics and fighting for racial justice likely to be a big pull for the Brent baller.

Financially, PUMA also just recorded its best ever year in 2019 after posting sales of $6 billion. Neymar's arrival will carry that momentum even further forward.

This is a big move. Football's brand wars are about to be taken to the next level.

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Why You Shouldn't Be Surprised by Neymar's Move from Nike to PUMA

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After a week of speculation, Neymar's 15-year relationship with Nike has officially come to an end, with the Brazilian superstar swapping the Swoosh for PUMA in one of the biggest brand switches of the modern era. Signing a baller of Neymar's status is a real statement of intent from PUMA,...

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https://www.footyheadlines.com/2021/01/psg-jordan-deal-extended-until-2022.html

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Paris Saint-Germain's kits will be partly made by the Jordan brand until 2022, it has been confirmed by PSG insiders @lasource75006.

The Jordan PSG partnership began in 2018. PSG reportedly received 200 million euros from the Jordan Brand to produce some of the club's kits for three years until 2021. In April 2020, la source parisienne first leaked that the Jordan PSG deal would be extended.

PSG Jordan Deal To Be Extended Until At Least 2022

PSG Activates Optional Fourth Year Of Jordan Kit Partnership For 2021-22 Season

No financial details of the extended agreement of PSG and Jordan have been revealed by @lasource75006. However, we think that PSG will get a similar amount for that extra year as they have done before - around 67 million Euro (previously 200 million Euro for three years).

Hint At Classy Jordan PSG 2021-2022 Kit? PSG 21-22 Training Kit Leaked

@lasource75006: The basic 3-year #PSG x #Jordan contract has been a real success. Several celebrities, singers, actors, NBA players regularly wear our products. An optional fourth year has been activated by our club for the next season 2021/2022.

Leaked PSG 21-22 training jersey

In fact, leaked products confirm that the Jordan brand will be again present on PSG's kits in the 2021-2022 season.

LEAKED: Paris Saint-Germain 21-22 Home Kit To Be Made By Jordan?

The PSG 21-22 home kit will likely feature the Jordan logoThe PSG 21-22 home kit will be likely the first PSG home shirt to bear the Jordan logo after the Jordan brand previously only made away / third / fourth strips for the club.

Would you like to see more of such partnerships in football? Comment below.

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Paris Saint-Germain's kits will be partly made by the Jordan brand until 2022, it has been confirmed by PSG insiders @lasource75006. The Jordan PSG partnership began in 2018. PSG reportedly received 200 million euros from the Jordan Brand to produce some of the club's kits for three years until 2021.

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https://psgtalk.com/2018/09/what-does-psgs-partnership-with-jordan-brand-mean/

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The much-anticipated Paris Saint-Germain collaboration with Jordan Brand was confirmed and unveiled at the Parc des Princes on September 13, 2018. There had been rumors about the deal earlier in the summer, and the thought of a big club such as PSG teaming up with the iconic brand seemed to make all the sense in the world. By simply roaming the internet and following "football Twitter," you have probably seen leaked photos of the highly sought after kit, but when PSG's official site announced the collaboration, the excitement from fans and even non-PSG fans was beautiful to witness. For a club with so much ambition, even this announcement was massively impressive.

While observing my Twitter feed after the official announcement, I was taken aback by some who were unfamiliar with the Jordan Brand. This was one of the reasons this collaboration is so important. The partnership is not solely for Paris Saint-Germain's exposure as a football club, but also for Jordan, who even though are largely recognized globally, still need to reach pockets of the population who aren't as familiar with the logo as American consumers.

Those who are familiar with Michael Jordan recognize him as the greatest basketball player to ever lace them up. Many people are fans of Michael Jordan, even if they are not the biggest fan of basketball. But we all know those devoted fans already have their bracket for the 2019 ncaa tourney up and ready to be filled in. Even though Jordan does not compete anymore, the sport is still one to follow, especially with the rise of upcoming talent and standout professionals in the game. His lucrative resume includes six National Basketball Association championships and five NBA Most Valuable Player awards. Throughout his career, Air Jordan exhibited dominance in every aspect of the game and possessed a killer mentality that struck fear into adversaries. While Jordan was becoming the best on the court, his shoes were simultaneously flying off the shelves and became some of the most popular footwear in North America and eventually, the rest of the world.

There is a large section of football fans who don't follow American football or the NBA or even care to begin doing so. The Jordan Brand is largely popular in the NBA, as most aspiring basketball players want to emulate the great Michael Jordan by wearing his iconic #23 on their jersey and wearing shoes with his logo on them. In American football, the NFL will finally permit players to wear their own customized cleats during pregame warmups in the 2018-19 season. This will be the first time Jordan Brand athletes in the NFL will be able to showcase their custom Jumpman cleats.

PSG has become the first football club to have a sponsorship deal with Jordan Brand-but on July 31, 2017, the Charlotte Hornets (owned by Michael Jordan), became the first professional team to have the Jumpman logo as the licensing sponsor on their uniform. This was unusual as it was the first time a single NBA team had a different uniform supplier than the rest of the league, especially given the intricately structured licensing deals in the world of sports. In collegiate athletics, several schools have signed with Jordan Brand including the University of Michigan, University of Florida, University of Oklahoma and Jordan's Alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

For PSG fans who are curious as to what the Jordan sponsorship means for the familiar Nike sponsorship, allow me to explain. Jordan Brand is essentially a subsidiary of Nike. Nike produces athletic footwear and clothing for Jordan. So, by all means, this does not breach any sort of licensing agreement already in place as they are all under the same umbrella. This will be a three-year deal, which includes footwear such as the Jordan 1 and Jordan 5 with the PSG logo on the shoes. There will also be other fashionable, off-pitch PSG apparel for fans to purchase. Paris Saint-Germain will debut the Jordan sponsored kits on September 18, 2018, against Liverpool FC on matchday one of the UEFA Champions League group stage. Paris will wear the Jordan sponsored home and away kits exclusively during European competition.

For the record, a Jordan Brand sponsorship will not bring a midfield to Paris. It won't help the club beat Liverpool at Anfield or even with the Champions League itself. I understand some people are strictly here for the football and football only, and I respect that. If you are truly a supporter of the club, you would be hustling backward to look down upon this partnership. The same way this will enlighten the PSG supporters of the Jordan Brand and their products, this will also enlighten the North American and Asian customers who buy Jordan products to Paris Saint-Germain.

PSG is for the culture, and that phrase is more prevalent now than ever as the club partners up with a brand that is highly regarded in pop culture, hip-hop, and American sports. More importantly, Jordan Brand is highly regarded by the 80s and 90s babies, who are in fact, spending a ton of money, and are dictating what is cool to large corporations and everyday citizens. It's very bold for PSG to try to set themselves up as the "club for the people" as they should be aware of their passionate fanbase who might not be jumping up and down about these ventures that don't correlate to on the pitch production. It's important for PSG to not be tone deaf to the current climate and what effectively grabs people's attention because, how the club markets themselves off the pitch is nearly as important as how they perform on the pitch. This partnership is very tactical from a marketing perspective, and it's been in the works for some time now.

Jordan Brand is a fashion company at its core and Paris is one of the most fashion conscious cities in the world. In 2016, Jordan Bran opened a Jordan-only store called Jordan Bastille in Paris. This was followed up by the Jordan Brand partnering up with the French Basketball Federation as the official uniform supplier for their men, women, and youth teams in November 2017. There's no coincidence that Jordan Brand had already established a relationship with PSG's biggest star Neymar Jr., which makes this partnership more layered that it comes off. On June 3, 2016, Jordan Brand collaborated with the Brazil International for a custom shoe called the Neymar Air Jordan 5 Low. This was the brand's first time taping into the soccer market as Neymar was the game's most electrifying young superstar at the time. This shoe deal was a perfect alliance for the brand to branch off with the most popular sport in the world, and a smart business move from Neymar at a time when he was realizing the rise of his stardom.

PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaifi cited "the ambitions of both brands" in regards to the partnership. Michael Jordan himself stated, "Jordan Brand and Paris Saint-Germain share a distinct position in sports and styles, so to partner with the club is a natural fit." This partnership is reported to generate over €200 million in annual revenues for Nike (per AFP).

The correlation with the ongoing Financial Fair Play investigation by UEFA over PSG's finances is fascinating when looking at Neymar's acquisition last summer, which undoubtedly triggered the investigation. Furthermore, the early relationship between Jordan Brand and Neymar, along with the Jordan Brand PSG kits exclusively being worn during club football's most meaningful tournament, which is governed by UEFA. The deal is inadvertently a big middle finger at UEFA to some degree and systematically in-tune with contemporary pop culture. Of course, there are matters that the club need to address on the pitch when it comes to their lofty ambitions, but it's also perfectly fine to step out of the comfort zone and celebrate a win by PSG off the pitch.

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What Does PSG's Partnership With Jordan Brand Mean? - PSG Talk

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The much-anticipated Paris Saint-Germain collaboration with Jordan Brand was confirmed and unveiled at the Parc des Princes on September 13, 2018. There had been rumors about the deal earlier in the summer, and the thought of a big club such as PSG teaming up with the iconic brand seemed to make all the sense in the world.

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https://interbrand.com/work/beyond-entertainment-beyond-lifestyle-juventus-is-an-identity/

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Moving beyond saturation into growth.

Juventus, one of the world’s best-known football clubs, was looking for new sources of growth. They hoped to build upon their success in Italy to become an icon for a wider audience. The conventional strategy would have been to look for more football fans worldwide. The plan we developed for Juventus was based on the insight that those fans would be hard to convert into customers. We identified an opportunity that was as simple as it was ambitious: spark desire in customers outside of the category of football by bringing to life the new positioning and creating a set of premium, lifestyle experiences that would capture the imaginations of a new generation of supporters.

Launched in 2017, the new Juventus identity took the industry by storm by transforming football into a means for epitomizing an attitude and serving as a platform for innovation and experiences. This appealed to football fans, as well as to entertainment enthusiasts who are further away from football as a sport.

Juventus’s transformation went through various touchpoints: including the Allianz Stadium where fans can live the new experience, a new and unexpected touchpoint like the UNDICI cafè, the fashion and lifestyle apparel collections, and products for fans.

Our work was also recognized among the best design work in the world—awarded two D&AD awards—proving this to be a beautifully successful brand that broke all the rules.

Continuing its longstanding collaboration with Interbrand, the Club recently launched the unique marketing story LIVE AHEADTM. LIVE AHEADTM originated from Juventus’s spirit, DNA and values on and off the pitch. It guides the way the brand expresses itself in order to be both engaging and relevant for fans and non-fans. The concept narrates the story of what it means to own the attitude of a leader: someone who always looks forward. The marketing story is a new expression of the Club’s growth plan, which aims to build a consistent platform that could enhance the new positioning launched in 2017.

LIVE AHEADTM has been developed with the objective of becoming a fil-rouge that leads and connects the brand’s roots—football tradition, excellence, ambition, resilience and great courage—with all of Juventus’ future experiences. The Club plans to continue creating relevant experiences to truly immerse supporters into Juventus’ world, while growing the brand’s awareness and attracting the broader audience of sports and entertainment fans who are looking to explore new grounds.

Passionate fans. Multiple domestic and European titles. Huge potential for growing an international audience. Juventus, one of the world’s best-known football clubs, was well-placed to grow as a team, but their ambitions were higher. It’s one thing to succeed at entertaining your fans. It’s another to build upon that success to become an icon for a wider audience.

Continue reading

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Moving the market multiple beyond the beautiful game - Interbrand

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Work LIDI GRIMALDI,MANAGING DIRECTORINTERBRAND MILAN Moving the market multiple beyond the beautiful gameJUVENTUS Moving beyond saturation into growth. Juventus, one of the world's best-known football clubs, was looking for new sources of growth. They hoped to build upon their success in Italy to become an icon for a wider audience.

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https://www.nssmag.com/en/sports/22640/l-hellas-verona-cambiera-logo-dopo-25-anni

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25 years after the last change, Hellas Verona decides to refresh its logo and take on a new graphic design: in fact, from July 1st we will no longer find the oval logo with the inscription ''Hellas Verona'' in the center, but we will have to get used to seeing a new one, more minimal and that will have a more transversal use.

The process put in place broadly follows a rebranding strategy already seen in 2017 with Juventus which has traced - at least in Italy - the road to markets parallel to that of football such as fashion, communicating the brand image in a much more universal way.

The company's goal is to start the new decade with a more modern logo, so that they can celebrate the next three company anniversaries (the 120th and 125th birthday as well as the 40th anniversary from the Scudetto) by keeping up with the times but without forgetting the origins of the club.

In fact, as we had told here, although our country is historically tied to traditions, it is difficult to find total disconnections between two different versions of the same logo, this is because the companies want to give the fan back an idea of historicity and a sense of belonging that the ''old'' crests are able to evoke.

And it is for this reason that two of the three guiding elements of the new logo lead back to the old one from 1995 and even more to the 1984 version designed by Osvaldo Bagnoli:

the two mastiffs, central elements, evoke the most important Lords of Verona, the Mastino della Scala I and II; the stair with four rungs is the symbol of the city and refers to the Lordship of the Scaligeri; the colors, yellow and blue, return to being two, declinable as needed together with white.

The restyling aims to update and simplify the Hellas Verona brand through flat design, giving cleanliness, linearity and clarity in order to maintain the characteristic brand identity of the Gialloblù, allowing the new logo to be recognizable and reproducible at the same level of the old one.

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Hellas Verona will change its logo after 25 years

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25 years after the last change, Hellas Verona decides to refresh its logo and take on a new graphic design: in fact, from July 1st we will no longer find the oval logo with the inscription ''Hellas Verona'' in the center, but we will have to get used to seeing a new one, more minimal and that will have a more transversal use.

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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/oct/05/west-ham-karren-brady-stadium-move

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West Ham's vice-chair, Karren Brady, has defended the club's controversial move to the London Stadium, insisting the shift from Upton Park had been a success and was a crucial part of "rebranding" the club.

Speaking at a sports business conference, Brady launched a trenchant defence of the route taken by David Gold and David Sullivan since they bought the club in 2010 in the face of criticism from some supporters over their move to the £701m former Olympic Stadium.

"The Olympic Stadium had been built less than, sort of, a mile away from us [sic] and we saw that as a real opportunity to change the brand values of the club. There was a plan to plug the debt, build the future and create the culture," she said.

"Rebranding ourselves was really important with our stadium. We're in the London Stadium. We added the word London to our crest because we felt it had real global appeal. Nobody else does it. We are in the heart of London, in the foothills of the financial sector. We have the best stadium - there are some great stadiums in this country but there is only one Olympic Stadium and it's ours. It's really had a dynamic impact on the things we can do."

She also pointed to the figures to show that the move had been popular with fans, despite some recent complaints over the way it has been handled.

"We had a difficult job to do when we were moving to a new stadium. We sold the stadium out to 52,000 season-ticket holders," Brady said. "We have 10,000 under-16-year-olds who come week in, week out. We have completely sold out hospitality. I have 50,000 people who have paid to join the waiting list to be able to buy a season ticket. We have 36,000 members."

West Ham's move to the London Stadium had been well received by fans, Karren Brady told the Leaders Sports Business Summit. Photograph: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images

She said that when Gold and Sullivan bought the club it was necessary to reduce their debt and overhaul "their culture".

"There were two interesting things about it. One, it had £100m worth of debt. Two, it had no what I would call culture. At football clubs we don't make anything, we don't manufacture anything, we don't really produce anything other than more players," she told the Leaders Sports Business Summit. "So getting the culture right, being a place where something is expected of you, having discipline, planning and process and strategy. That wasn't there."

Brady insisted the fans remained at the heart of what the club was attempting to do. "If you're always driven by money, you lose your traditional values and what you're there for," she said. "The stadium and the league are not what makes a club. It's the people who support it. Protecting their traditions and their values and their integrity in their own brand is very important."

Brady said in the Olympic Stadium, towards which West Ham paid £15m of the £272m conversion costs plus £2.5m in annual rent, they saw an opportunity to rebrand the club. "We have this great stadium and much better prospects and facilities than in our old stadium but we charge a lower price. We offer a more dynamic product at an inferior price. It's been so well received and it comes back to our values and our culture."

But the move has also been marked by unrest in the stands - with supporters complaining of inadequate stewarding, a lacklustre atmosphere and problems with the relocation of like-minded fans to sit next to one another - plus poor results.

Following a convoluted process West Ham were given a 99-year lease to become the stadium's anchor tenant. The vehicle set up by the London Legacy Development Corporation and Newham Council to own the stadium is responsible for matchday costs and stewarding.

In the face of criticism from some fans Brady defended the progress made by the club since she was employed by Gold and Sullivan. "We are in the Olympic Stadium, we have limited outside debt and we are ranked 15th in terms of brand values. We were 115th when I joined the club. We're now 20th in the Deloitte Money League," she said. "We have got the largest amount of season-ticket holders of any London club and the capacity will be increasing to 66,000. We feel we've set out our goals and achieved them."

Improbably, given the furore and discord that have marked the move, Brady also revealed the club were planning a feature film called Iron Men, following the journey of a group of fans from Upton Park to the London Stadium. "We're making a movie called Iron Men. It's about the transition of the values and the history of West Ham supporters from the Boleyn Ground to the London Stadium," she said.

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West Ham's stadium move and 'rebrand' a success, insists Karren Brady

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West Ham's vice-chair, Karren Brady, has defended the club's controversial move to the London Stadium, insisting the shift from Upton Park had been a success and was a crucial part of "rebranding" the club.

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https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2022/may/23/kylian-mbappe-saga-shows-footballs-power-lies-with-players-not-clubs

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o whose side are you on in the fallout following Kylian Mbappé's decision to stay with Paris Saint-Germain? Watching the extraordinary outrage in Spain, with the press accusing the Frenchman of lacking class and La Liga branding the deal as "scandalous", has raised eyebrows. But not as many as PSG being able to stump up a €200m-plus package for the world's best player - despite making a €224m loss last year.

There are no good guys here, only a gnawing unease that the laws of economic gravity are being defied to the further detriment of the game we love. As La Liga put it in an unprecedented attack, the transfer showed that state-owned clubs, such as the Qatar-run PSG, "do not respect and do not want to respect the rules of a sector as important as football" and that "sporting integrity" was at stake.

They are big claims and La Liga has backed them up with a vow to file a complaint to Uefa and the EU. Yet Real Madrid are hardly paragons of virtue in this area. Last year they were central to the European Super League project, which threatened the sporting integrity of European football far more than Mbappé staying with PSG. Recently they were also one of four Spanish clubs ordered by the EU's highest court to pay back millions of euros after it ruled they had benefited from state aid.

PSG have privately brushed off La Liga's attacks, with one executive insisting to me that its €224m loss was allowed under the current Uefa financial fair play rules, which were loosened because of the pandemic. It is also understood that at a PSG board meeting this month it was revealed that Lionel Messi made the club €15m last season, even after all his costs were taken into account.

The message was clear. Yes, Mbappé's deal is crazily expensive. But the club believe they can make that money back and abide by Uefa's new financial fair play rules that come into effect in 2025.

Perhaps. But cynics will hope the rules are more robust than the previous incarnation, which proved easier to circumvent than the Maginot Line - with PSG and Manchester City among those found guilty. There are also well-founded fears that state-run clubs are creating inflationary pressures in the transfer market, while PSG's chief executive Nasser al-Khelaifi's enormous influence across Uefa and the European Club Association is also impossible to ignore.

To my mind, though, the reaction to Mbappé's new deal goes beyond the understandable squeamishness about sovereign wealth funds running clubs. It is also about how easy it is for the teams to entrench their advantage and ruin leagues. Would anyone bet against PSG, who have won eight of the past 10 Ligue 1 titles, winning next year? And the year after that? Or Bayern Munich, who have won 10 Bundesliga titles in a row, another procession?

Of course there are exceptions - look at Manchester United. But while English football is certainly more unpredictable, as was seen again on a dramatic final day, Manchester City have still won four Premier League titles in five years and just eight clubs have finished in the top three in the past 25 years. Eight! - the same number as in the first five years of the Premier League between 1992-93 and 1996-97, when Norwich, Blackburn and Aston Villa all challenged for the title.

Data from the website Sporting Intelligence, which tracks player salaries across multiple leagues and sports, shows there is a strong link between the amount a club spend on wages and where they finish in the table. But it does not have to be that way.

In the US, where salary caps, luxury taxes and drafts for college players ensure that the major leagues are kept spicy and dicey, the difference is stark. Major League Baseball has had eight World Series winners in the past decade and five further teams finishing as runners-up. In other words, 13 of the MLB's 30 teams have fought for the sport's biggest prize in the past 10 years.

In the NHL, meanwhile, 14 of the league's 32 clubs have played in a Stanley Cup final since 2012. In the NFL the figure is 13 out of 32, with some teams able to go from also‑rans to Super Bowl contenders within a couple of years.

Curiously, though, that lack of football's competitive balance has not dented the game's popularity. One explanation, based on detailed analysis of the data by the economists Dr Babatunde Buraimo and Dr Rob Simmons, is that TV audiences are far less interested in watching competitive matches than they once were - and instead they want the big names, regardless of the opposition.

And there is no one bigger than Mbappé right now. According to one football executive I spoke to, the deal emphasises an even bigger shift in power in favour of players, more of whom are content to run down their contracts deliberately so they get all the money from a new deal.

That executive also pointed out that it made sense for Mbappé to wait and play off PSG and Real Madrid. And also for PSG to pay a huge signing-on fee rather than have to sign another player from a competitor club.

It is hard to argue with that. But whether football's ghoulish freakonomics is as beneficial for the rest of us is another matter entirely.

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Kylian Mbappé saga shows football's power lies with players, not clubs | Sean Ingle

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o whose side are you on in the fallout following Kylian Mbappé's decision to stay with Paris Saint-Germain? Watching the extraordinary outrage in Spain, with the press accusing the Frenchman of lacking class and La Liga branding the deal as "scandalous", has raised eyebrows.

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https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/12618493/kylian-mbappe-psg-forward-signs-new-contract-with-ligue-1-champions-but-la-liga-is-set-to-file-complaint

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Kylian Mbappe has signed a new three-year contract with Paris Saint-Germain, but LaLiga has said it will file a complaint about the deal after he did not join Real Madrid.

The 23-year-old France international had been widely expected to leave the Ligue 1 champions for Real at the end of the season upon the expiry of his existing deal on June 30.

Real - who were willing to pay €230m to sign the forward on Deadline Day last summer - were ready to give Mbappe a signing-on fee of £110m and wages of £20m-a-year after tax. Their total investment would have been about £300m.

Mbappe was presented on the pitch ahead of PSG's Ligue 1 match at home to Metz - in which he scored a hat-trick - and said: "I would like to announce that I have chosen to extend my contract at Paris Saint-Germain, and of course I am delighted.

"I am convinced that here I can continue to grow at a club that provides everything necessary to perform at the highest level. I am also delighted to continue to play in France, the country where I was born, where I have grown up and where I have made my name."

Mbappe went on to score a hat-trick in the game against Metz as PSG ran out 5-0 winners at the Parc des Princes.

LaLiga furious with 'scandalous' deal

The news of Mbappe's U-turn was met with a vociferous response from Spanish football authorities, with LaLiga saying it will complain to UEFA, French tax authorities and the European Union over PSG's "non-compliance with UEFA's financial fair play".

A statement from LaLiga on Saturday night read: "This type of agreement attacks the economic sustainability of European football, putting at risk hundreds of thousands of jobs and sporting integrity at risk - not only in European competitions, but also in domestic leagues.

"It is scandalous a club like PSG, which last season reported losses of more than €220m, after accumulating losses of more than €700m in prior seasons (while reporting sponsorship income at a doubtful valuation) with a cost of sports staff around €650m for this 2021-22 season, can face an agreement of these characteristics while those clubs that could accept the arrival of the player without seeing their wage bill compromised, are left without being able to sign him.

"For all of the above, LaLiga is going to file a complaint against PSG before UEFA, administrative and tax authorities in France and before the competent bodies of the European Union, to continue defending the economic ecosystem of European football and its sustainability."

The statement concluded the behaviour of PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaifi and his club "endangers European football on the same level as the European Super League".

'PSG won't lose sleep over LaLiga legal action'

French football expert Tom Williams:
"I don't think I've ever seen a rival championship taking umbrage at a player signing a new contract at his club in another championship. I'm not a legal expect but I struggle to see how LaLiga can possibly affect this.

"It's not the first time [LaLiga president] Javier Tebas has been sounding off about the money PSG have and the way they spend it. It is obviously a lot of money that they're having to spend to hold onto Mbappe and question marks will be raised about that.

"As happy as PSG are, is it a great thing for football that this very small handful of clubs have the means they have and are able to spend money like that? It certainly doesn't feel like a good thing for the long-term health of the game.

"In terms of the suggestions of legal action from LaLiga or anything like that I suspect the PSG directors won't be losing too much sleep."

Mbappe mentioned the president in his statement announcing the contract: "I would like to thank the President, Nasser Al-Khelaifi, for his trust, his understanding and his patience.

"I would also like to thank all the fans of Paris Saint-Germain, both in France and around the world, for their support, especially in recent months. Together, side by side and ambitious, we will make magic in Paris."

'Amazing milestone' in PSG's history

Mbappe becomes the highest-paid player in world football on wages of around £1m a week after pocketing a signing-on fee in the region of £100m from PSG. The club have also made concessions over image rights with Mbappe in line to receive bonus payments for goals, Ballon d'Or honours and Champions League success.

PSG chairman and CEO Al-Khelaifi said: " Kylian's commitment to PSG represents an amazing milestone in the history of our club, and a wonderful moment for our fans around the world.

"Since the day Kylian joined our family, he has achieved greatness beyond his years on every single stage. In committing to PSG, he will be the foundation of our club's future both on and off the field.

"I am incredibly proud and very happy - for Kylian, for our fans, and our entire PSG family worldwide - that we will continue our wonderful journey together. For our fans and our club, the greatest chapters of our future lie ahead."

There remain big question marks over the future of PSG head coach Mauricio Pochettino and sporting director Leonardo. PSG want Zinedine Zidane to replace Pochettino this summer.

Why has Mbappe chosen to stay at PSG?

French football expert Jonathan Johnson:
"Money is obviously going to be a big motivating factor, but let's face it, Mbappe would have been well paid at Real Madrid as well.

"You have to look at the sporting aspects of the PSG project; they still haven't won this Champions League title they have been chasing for 10 years or more. It would also be a massive boost for the French game were Mbappe to be the key player for PSG when they bring home what would be just the second-ever Champions League success in France's history.

"This is also a massive boost for Ligue 1 at a time when it is desperately trying to salvage itself after the impact of Covid and trying to keep pace with the top five in Europe before the Champions League reforms come in.

"It's a big boost for PSG and Ligue 1, but also Mbappe. It's a challenge for him to be the difference-maker, the guy that turns PSG from perennial Champions League contenders to getting over the line."

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Kylian Mbappe: PSG forward signs new contract with Ligue 1 champions but LaLiga is set to file complaint

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Kylian Mbappe to become worlds highest-paid footballer after signing three-year PSG deal worth almost £1m a week; Mbappe had reportedly been close to joining Real Madrid on a free transfer this summer; LaLiga to file a complaint about PSG over the deal it describes as scandalous

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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17511321.2019.1582558

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ABSTRACT
Problem gambling is a growing public health issue in the UK. In this paper, we argue that football plays a problematic role in the promotion and normalisation of gambling. Given that sport broadcasts offer gambling (and alcohol) companies a loophole to avoid the post-watershed guidelines, children and young people are also exposed. By marketing gambling in general and to children in particular, football contributes to an increase in the overall 'amount' of gambling in society. In turn, this contributes to an increase in the prevalence of problem gambling (including gambling disorder) and all the associated harms. Furthermore, we argue that a significant amount of gambling profits come from problem gamblers. Therefore, football benefits from, and contributes to, the addictive consumption of gamblers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Gambling Sponsorship and Advertising in British Football: A Critical Account

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ABSTRACT Problem gambling is a growing public health issue in the UK. In this paper, we argue that football plays a problematic role in the promotion and normalisation of gambling. Given that sport broadcasts offer gambling (and alcohol) companies a loophole to avoid the post-watershed guidelines, children and young people are also exposed.

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https://www.goal.com/en/news/football-wasnt-invented-in-1992-but-today-its-a-whole-new/w70lgvhzd8r91r9jz8m1dfikm

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It's often said that football wasn't invented in 1992, whenever the issue of a broken record on the part of a Premier League team or player is brought up.

But there is no denying that a period of disruption took place in the early-to-mid part of the 1990s. And that rupture can be said to have split top-level football history in two.

There are a number of reasons for that.

English football was out in front for innovation when three-points-for-a-win was introduced in 1981. Dwindling crowds and negative play had a detrimental effect on the football product and so it was decided that more attacking football should be encouraged. This was done by cutting the value of a draw in the hope that teams would push forward for a winner.

It was introduced by FIFA for the 1994 World Cup and it wasn't until the 1995-96 season that it was rolled out by various other top leagues around Europe and the world.

Secondly, the offside law has always existed in one form or another - with minor tweaks here and there - but it had its biggest adjustment in 1990.

FIFA and IFAB decided that an attacker would be onside if he or she was level with the second-to-last defender rather than offside if level. It was a small but significant step which gave the impetus to forwards.

"When I went to Arsenal, George Graham worked on the offside trap quite a lot, so the back four we had then with the likes of Tony Adams, we were constantly putting our arms up and appealing to the linesmen to give us the decision," says Viv Anderson, who won two European Cups with Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest.

"But it was one of those rules you've got to get used to as a player, and it was fine."

A further tweak was made in the 1995-96 season which decreed that it wouldn't be an offence to be in an offside position. A player would only be offside at the moment the ball is played if he or she was deemed 'active'. Those adjustments are second nature to players today - most of whom weren't even born when the offside rule was overhauled.

Thirdly, the back-pass rule.

Before 1992, a goalkeeper was permitted to pick up or catch a pass played directly from a team-mate's foot. Negative play - especially at the 1990 World Cup - ensured that FIFA would do all it could to make sure teams would attack more and stop stifling the game and wasting time by going back to base at every opportunity.

It was a seismic shift for goalkeepers, some of whom could scarcely control or pass a ball at all. The modern goalkeeper such as Ederson is as much a part of the build-up play as a striker but there was a time when the goalkeeper was barely more than a shot-stopper.

"My son's in the Under-11s at Man City, and he's been there since he was six or seven, he's been brought up through it," says Anderson.

"I cringe at times because of how they play, with the goalkeeper playing it out to the defenders.

"Peter Shilton wouldn't be happy playing that way because he was never the best with the ball at his feet! But now they play balls in to centre-halves and you can't believe it, even at Under-11s!"

And in 1992 came the Premier League itself. This is where the bone of contention lies. While Sky Sports have more or less monopolised the televised product since its inception, there has been a trend of regarding all records before that date as irrelevant.

But as the rule changes and innovations around this time would indicate, that is entirely fair. It is indeed a whole new ball game.

The Premier League was no simple rebranding exercise. Those clubs broke away from the Football League and set up for themselves. The 1990 World Cup delivered the emotional boost that football needed and made it loved again. Up to that point there had been violence in the stadiums, tragedies, awful facilities and little money.

But the breakaway clubs were given the freedom to start their own broadcast deals. It was the start of modern English football as we know it. The establishment of the Premier League - along with other factors - made English football the most-watched and best-supported in the world.

It's done so by being big, brash, controversial and not always to the tastes of supporters of clubs lower down the food-chain but that doesn't alter its power. The Premier League changed the face of English football forever and gave rise to a situation whereby the best players were no longer looking to leave it, they were clamouring to get in.

And that brings us to the Bosman Ruling. The landmark 1995 case involving Jean-Marc Bosman had a profound effect on the game. Up to that point, a club could demand a transfer fee for a player even if he or she wasn't under contract.

That was challenged in the Bosman case. The ruling made sure players in the European Union and without a contract could freely change clubs without a transfer fee.

Foreign player quotas - with respect to EU nationals - were also abolished.

That altered the game completely. To that point, clubs could only field up to three 'foreign' players in UEFA competition. Many leagues also operated foreign player quotas but these were also done away with as they discriminated against nationals of EU member states.

That paved the way for teams to sign talent from all over to improve their squads. No longer would players be forced to stay put at home to satisfy eligibility criteria. They were set free.

In 1992, the old European Cup became the Champions League. The powers that be had watched with horror in 1987 when Real Madrid eliminated Napoli in the first round of the European Cup thereby depriving Italy - one of the biggest television markets - of its only team in the competition.

From then on plans were afoot for something grander and something safer. The big countries would be able to have their interests protected for longer in the new Champions League and a new era was ushered in.

"It was knockout and you couldn't have a bad night," Anderson says. "If you have a bad night, you're out. I think it's a lot harder to win [the old way].

"It's 19 games or something now in the Champions League to win it, we had around eight games. If you don't perform on the night, you're out."

On the tactical front, the victory won by Johan Cruyff's Dream Team in the Wembley final that year set the trend for the decades to follow. In beating Sampdoria, Cruyff had the vindication he needed to convince a skeptical membership that his methods would work.

A lot of the tactical trends of the past 25 years or so have been based on teams promoting Cruyff's principles or setting out to defy them. Look at the ideological split between Pep Guardiola at one end of the scale and Jose Mourinho at the other for recent examples of this.

Teams were either copying the Cruyff model or seeking to destroy it. Either way, it was a reaction to that 1992 European Cup-winning team.

It has since grown to become the most important club competition on the planet. It is a million miles from the straight knockout tournament of yore. It is an entirely new format and one which redefined the football landscape.

And in that regard, teams would often be showing up to play against sides they knew next to nothing about. It's not like today where clubs have access to the best analysis and scouting tools that money can buy.

"No reams and reams of dossiers and looking on the internet," says Anderson.

"None of that. You just played Cologne, for instance, and you don't know a thing about Cologne until you get on the pitch and that's it.

"Maybe one of the scouts had gone over but I doubt that very much because money was at a premium then."

That is to say nothing of the changes in diet and nutrition which have come along since those days too.

"When I started your pre-match meal was a steak with toast and French mustard," says Anderson. "Everybody had it! As they subsequently learned later, it takes you eight hours to digest a steak!

"You're running around with a steak in your stomach and that was a stable diet, everybody had it. Fillet steak and white toast! It's changed a hell of a lot!"

So, while it may not be true that football was invented in 1992, it's fair to say that it was reinvented around that time.

What we see today may well be the same game, but it's a completely different sport.

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Football wasn't invented in 1992 but it was reinvented | Goal.com

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It's often said that football wasn't invented in 1992, whenever the issue of a broken record on the part of a Premier League team or player is brought up. But there is no denying that a period of disruption took place in the early-to-mid part of the 1990s.

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https://ir.manutd.com/financial-information/annual-reports/2012.aspx

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This site uses cookies. To see how cookies are used, please review our cookie notice. If you agree to our use of cookies, please continue to use our site.

Annual Reports

A hard copy of the company’s latest complete audited financial statements can be obtained free of charge by request to ir@manutd.co.uk.

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A hard copy of the company's latest complete audited financial statements can be obtained free of charge by request to ir@manutd.co.uk.

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https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MANU/manchester-united/financial-statements

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Prices

Financials

Revenue & Profit

Assets & Liabilities

Margins

Price Ratios

Other Ratios

Other Metrics

Income Statement

Balance Sheet

Cash Flow Statement

Key Financial Ratios

For more detailed information on the Income Statement, check out our new definition page here.

Format: Annual

Annual Data | Millions of US $ except per share data

2021-06-30

2020-06-30

2019-06-30

2018-06-30

2017-06-30

2016-06-30

Revenue

$665.032

$641.799

$811.559

$794.76

$737.083

$767.71

Cost Of Goods Sold

-

-

-

-

-

-

Gross Profit

$665.032

$641.799

$811.559

$794.76

$737.083

$767.71

Research And Development Expenses

-

-

-

-

-

-

SG&A Expenses

-

-

-

-

-

-

Other Operating Income Or Expenses

$-714.731

$-635.216

$-746.873

$-735.31

$-634.593

$-665.144

Operating Expenses

$714.731

$635.216

$746.873

$735.31

$634.593

$665.144

Operating Income

$-49.699

$6.583

$64.686

$59.45

$102.49

$102.566

Total Non-Operating Income/Expense

$17.361

$-32.83

$-29.129

$-24.297

$-30.788

$-29.819

Pre-Tax Income

$-32.338

$-26.247

$35.557

$35.153

$71.702

$72.747

Income Taxes

$91.776

$3.045

$11.123

$85.355

$22.017

$18.565

Income After Taxes

$-124.114

$-29.292

$24.434

$-50.203

$49.684

$54.182

Other Income

-

-

-

-

-

-

Income From Continuous Operations

$-124.114

$-29.292

$24.434

$-50.203

$49.684

$54.182

Income From Discontinued Operations

-

-

-

-

-

-

Net Income

$-124.114

$-29.292

$24.434

$-50.203

$49.684

$54.182

EBITDA

$127.928

$161.822

$213.612

$235.928

$259.412

$263.266

EBIT

$-49.699

$6.583

$64.686

$59.45

$102.49

$102.566

Basic Shares Outstanding

163

164

165

164

164

164

Shares Outstanding

163

164

165

164

164

164

Basic EPS

$-0.76

$-0.18

$0.15

$-0.31

$0.30

$0.33

EPS - Earnings Per Share

$-0.76

$-0.18

$0.15

$-0.31

$0.30

$0.33

www.jqwidgets.com

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Manchester United Financial Statements 2011-2022 | MANU

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Ten years of annual and quarterly financial statements and annual report data for Manchester United (MANU). Income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements and key ratios.

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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/jul/16/football.theobserver

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Another summer of discontent is brewing at Manchester United. As usual, the football world is alive with transfer speculation, and not much of it is good for the demanding fans of Britain's biggest club. Rumours of star midfielder Cristiano Ronaldo's imminent departure are jangling the nerves of the Old Trafford faithful. Equally worrying, though, are reports about United's uncertain financial future.

Last week it emerged that the Glazer family, United's American owners, are in talks to borrow up to £500m against the value of future ticket receipts to pay off the debts they acquired during their controversial £800m purchase of the club just over a year ago.

Analysts doubt that United can be aiming to raise quite as much as £500m from ticket revenues alone, calling such a figure 'unrealistic'. Such a sum, after all, would be twice as much as Arsenal has just raised by mortgaging its own future gate receipts to finance the new Emirates Stadium. But there is no doubt that the Glazers, led by Joel Glazer and advised by JP Morgan, want to reorganise their huge pile of debts.

'A refinancing of some sort is definitely being considered, although nothing has been finalised,' a source close to the Glazers said. 'But a securitisation might be considered. Every club is probably wondering whether they should emulate the Arsenal model. The market environment is good and there are increased revenue prospects for Manchester United. The risk profile [of the club] has changed quite a bit since the Glazer family took over.'

It is certainly true that things are looking up for United's business. The recent auction of Premiership broadcasting rights means that domestic TV income will soon earn the club £14m a year more than was anticipated at the time of the Glazer buyout. Vodafone's decision to cut short its shirt sponsorship contract turned out to be a blessing in disguise: US insurer AIG has stepped in with a larger, £14m-a-year, deal. And an expansion of Old Trafford could earn United an extra £10m a year.

Yet talk of refinancing isn't likely to soothe the anxious hearts of ordinary United supporters - and their nervousness is understandable. In the football world, securitisations, which commit clubs to paying off creditors for up to 25 years, in exchange for a large upfront payment, have a bad name.

Financiers have generally been upbeat about the Arsenal deal, which sees the north London club move out of its cramped Highbury headquarters into a 60,000-seat arena with plenty of money-spinning corporate boxes. But etched in fans' memories is the trauma of Leeds United, which borrowed heavily against projected future earnings, then narrowly avoided bankruptcy and the loss of its stadium when those earnings failed to materialise.

That kind of blow-up, at least, shouldn't happen at Old Trafford. Whereas Leeds fatally splurged its borrowings on star players, the Glazers' plan is almost certain to pay off existing debts (charged at punitive rates of interest) with new, cheaper ones. The new debt will also be longer-term, enabling United to spread repayments and making 'disasters' such as a temporary failure to qualify for the lucrative European Champions League more manageable.

Financially, securitisation seems a prudent course. But it is unlikely to receive much support from the fans, who were used to United being debt-free before the highly leveraged Glazer buyout.

In fact, a securitisation only underlines what has always rankled most among many United supporters: that the new owner is taking money out of 'their' club, rather than putting it in; and using that money to pay for the very takeover that they so bitterly opposed.

It also means that there could be less cash available to spend on players. 'This deal may or may not help the Glazers out of a debt hole,' says Oliver Houston of the Manchester United Supporters' Trust. 'But if most of the club's income is going to the banks and bondholders, how can it be good for the club and its attempts to keep up with the big clubs in England and Europe?'

Houston also stresses the risks inherent in long-term debt, and says that United could end up paying more in total. Yet it certainly behoves the Glazers to rid themselves of at least some of their more expensive obligations. The family owes £265m to JP Morgan, secured against the club's assets, and - most pressing of all - £275m to three US hedge funds, at a short-term rate of up to 20 per cent.

How cleanly United could replace this debt with something cheaper depends on the detail of its current covenants. It could, for instance, face early redemption penalties. And new lenders, mindful of any existing charges on United's assets or revenue streams, might not be willing to extend the very best interest rates to the club. United might find it difficult, for example, to match the 5.28% rate enjoyed by the asset-backed bonds that Arsenal is releasing on to the market.

On the other hand, the Glazers might be able to negotiate with financial institutions to secure a deal that trumps Arsenal's, says Stephen Schechter, an investment banker who specialises in football securitisations. Schechter, who has masterminded deals for Southampton and Newcastle United among others, suggests, as an example, that some investors might waive some of their insurance demands in Manchester United's case and even buy an 'unwrapped' bond issue.

It all depends, he says, on what exactly is being mortgaged. Fixed income streams such as sponsorship and TV money might actually get a better credit rating - and a lower interest rate - than ticket receipts. 'There are many variables to consider when it comes to future matchday earnings,' Schechter says. 'A lot can happen in 25 years. For instance, there's talk that the Premiership might be cut from 20 to 18 teams in the future. That would take 150,000 seats out of the equation directly.'

Although Old Trafford's matchday revenues outstrip those of other clubs, with games nearly always sold out, dips in the team's future performance could lead to empty seats, Schechter adds; and Manchester, unlike London, may not be a big enough city to automatically replace droves of disaffected fans.

For that reason, Schechter suggests, supporters can rest assured that the Glazer family will invest enough money in new players to make United a Premiership-winning side. 'Football is an entertainment business, and the Glazers are very smart people. They know that football fans are fickle.'

Yet how much is enough? United have already spent £60m less this summer than arch-rival Chelsea, whose purchases of Michael Ballack and Andriy Shevchenko were financed by the bottomless resources of Roman Abramovich, billionaire owner of the London club. To compete in future, United may need some very clever bankers indeed.

Man Utd - Results 2005
Living on tick is not always the answer Leeds United
The club raised £60m six years ago through mortgaging its future gate receipts over a 25-year period. This contributed to a massive debt stockpile, and when heavy spending on players failed to secure Champions League qualification, the club struggled to meet its debt repayments.
Leicester City
The East Midlands club borrowed £28m in a securitisation, saddling itself with about £2.5m of repayments a year. But then it was relegated in 2001. The stadium it had raised the money to build hosts the likes of Plymouth Argyle and Burnley, rather than Man U and Arsenal, as it had hoped.
Arsenal
The club is selling £260m of bonds this month based on future match day revenues. The money is for a new 60,000-seat stadium, with the club confident it can exploit pent-up demand for tickets. This is seen as a successful deal that has rekindled the market's interest in football debt.

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Another summer of discontent is brewing at Manchester United. As usual, the football world is alive with transfer speculation, and not much of it is good for the demanding fans of Britain's biggest club. Rumours of star midfielder Cristiano Ronaldo's imminent departure are jangling the nerves of the Old Trafford faithful.

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https://www.statista.com/statistics/271665/revenue-of-manchester-united/

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Manchester United is one of the, if not the most successful football clubs in the Premier League, generating a total revenue of 580.4 million euros during the 2019/20 season. As of 2019, Manchester United exhibited the highest team brand value as well as the most Premier League titles with a total of 20.
Not everyone likes Manchester United, but most do

When, during a survey from Summer 2018, people, interested in football, were asked which Premier League club their favorite is, the largest share, of 22.6 percent, answered Manchester United as their favorite club. However, not everyone is a fan. During the same survey, when asked about how they feel about Manchester United personally, 35 percent of respondents either stated they don't like the club or even hate it.
Biggest revenue, biggest stadium
There are various contributing factors to generating the highest revenue for Manchester United. While the overall average attendance at Premier League matches comes to roughly 38.5 thousand, is the average attendance of Manchester United much higher considering their stadium capacity of approximately 75 thousand with an average stadium utilization of over 95 percent. These figures are also reflected in the value of jersey kit sponsorships with Manchester raking in 47 million British pounds via Chevrolet in season 2018/19.

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Revenue of Manchester United 2005-2020 | Statista

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Manchester United is one of the, if not the most successful football clubs in the Premier League, generating a total revenue of 580.4 million euros during the 2019/20 season. As of 2019, Manchester United exhibited the highest team brand value as well as the most Premier League titles with a total of 20.

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https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/glazer-family-have-drained-ps1billion-from-manchester-united-10244576.html

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The Glazer family has been accused of draining £1billion from Manchester United and wrecking the club's chances of dominating Europe.

The Manchester United Supporters Trust (MUST) chose the 10-year anniversary of the Glazers' takeover to launch a fresh attack on the American family.

The Glazers' £790million leveraged buyout of United in 2005 caused uproar among the club's fans and sparked the creation of breakaway club FC United.

Ten years on, MUST is still unhappy about the way the family borrowed against the club to finance their takeover.

"Not investing a single penny might be considered an 'ownership crime' by fans at most clubs but far worse than that they (the Glazers) have actually extracted colossal sums from Manchester United," MUST said in a press release.

"When all interest and charges on their leveraged buyout is added up, plus money they've paid themselves, plus related debt still on the club, they've taken more than £1 BILLION and it's still rising.

"No owner in the history of football in any country, ever, has taken so much money from a club."

Manchester United signings made in the Glazer years

Summer 2005

Edwin van der Sar - Fulham - £1m
Park Ji-Sung - PSV - £4m
Ben Foster - Stoke - £1m

GETTY IMAGES

Manchester United signings made in the Glazer years

Summer 2007

Owen Hargreaves - Bayern Munich - £17m
Anderson - Porto - £27m
Tomasz Kuszczak - West Brom - £2.1m
Nani - Sporting Lisbon - £25.5m
Carlos Tevez - West Ham

GETTY IMAGES

Manchester United signings made in the Glazer years

Summer 2008

Rafael Da Silva - Fluminense
Fabio Da Silva - Fluminense
Dimitar Berbatov - Tottenham - £30.75m

GETTY IMAGES

Manchester United signings made in the Glazer years

Summer 2009

Luis Antonio Valencia - Wigan - £16m
Michael Owen - Newcastle
Gabriel Obertain - Bordeaux - £3m
Mame Biram Diouf - Molde

GETTY IMAGES

Manchester United signings made in the Glazer years

Summer 2011

Phil Jones - Blackburn - £16.5m
Ashley Young - Aston Villa - £17m
David de Gea - Atletico Madrid - £18.9m

Getty Images

Manchester United signings made in the Glazer years

Summer 2012

Nick Powell - Crewe - £4m
Shinji Kagawa - Borussia Dortmund - £12m
Robin van Persie - Arsenal - £24m
Alexander Buttner- Vitesse Arnhem

GETTY IMAGES

Manchester United signings made in the Glazer years

Summer 2014

Ander Herrera - Athletic Bilbao - £29m
Luke Shaw - £27m
Andreas Pereira - PSV Eindhoven
Marcos Rojo - Sporting Lisbon - £16m
Angel Di Maria - Real Madrid - £59.7m
Daley Blind - Ajax - £13.8m

GETTY IMAGES

Despite the controversy surrounding the Glazers, United have enjoyed success on the pitch under their stewardship.

In the last 10 years they have won the Barclays Premier League five times and in 2008 they lifted the Champions League for the third time in the club's history.

MUST says had it not been for mismanagement from the Glazers, United would have eclipsed Liverpool's British record of winning the competition five times.

"When the Glazers took over in 2005 we already had an exciting young squad including Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney," the MUST statement added.

"With continued investment that squad should have gone on to dominate Europe for years but the Glazer era squandered that golden chance and although still successful on the pitch it has to go down, in Europe in particular, as a decade of wasted opportunity.

"United should have knocked Liverpool off their European perch too by surpassing their five European Cups.

"It seems very likely we would have done had it not been for financial austerity imposed by the Glazers' ownership."

MUST said the Glazers had "botched" the appointment of Sir Alex Ferguson's successor and that of chief executive David Gill.

The fans' group did admit its relationship with the club had improved over the last two years, though.

"Despite the huge damage inflicted over the last 10 years things are undoubtedly beginning to look positive again in 2015," MUST said.

"Relations between fans and the senior management team have improved vastly in the last two years with genuine dialogue and regular meetings established.

"The costs of servicing the remaining debt are now down to manageable levels and Manchester United is climbing back to the position of financial superiority it occupied for nine years prior to the Glazers arrival.

"It's just a shame we had to go through all the pain and waste of the last decade simply to allow a family with no connection to Manchester United to enrich themselves at the expense of our club and fans."

Manchester United refused to comment on MUST's statement.

Glazer family have 'drained £1billion from Manchester United' and

Glazer family have 'drained £1billion from Manchester United' and

Supporters' group hits out at owners 10 years after takeover at Old Trafford

Glazer family have 'drained £1billion from Manchester United' and

Supporters hold posters opposing Manchester United's US owners

ANDREW YATES/AFP/Getty Images

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Glazer family have 'drained £1billion from Manchester United'

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The Glazer family has been accused of draining £1billion from Manchester United and wrecking the club's chances of dominating Europe. The Manchester United Supporters Trust (MUST) chose the 10-year anniversary of the Glazers' takeover to launch a fresh attack on the American family.

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Design Museum; Designing the beautiful game

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Design Museum; Designing the beautiful game

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The takeover of Sky Sports and the Premier League – 1500 words – For my first point, I will explain how the introduction of Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of Sky Sport revived the footballing industry, and the Premier League rebrand allowed more income and a higher budget to draw the fans back into the game. I will be investigating how the impact of Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of Sky Sports intertwined with the change in culture after Euro 96.

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Branding within Manchester United – 1500 words – As one of football’s most iconic football clubs, Manchester United is known for utilising its fame and creating a brand identity like no other. However, I will be comparing the club’s status before and after the takeover of the Glazers in 2006.

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Branding within PSG – 1500 words – Similarly to Manchester United, PSG are a modern take on how branding within football can create status as well as a club’s reputation. I will be exploring the infamous recent history of the club’s financial fair-trade scenarios and how it has impacted the feelings of fans towards the club. Also, I will investigate how the club has become a global success after its signing of international players and sponsorship with Jordan.

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Sponsorships and endorsement with footballers – 1500 words – The requirements of footballer’s uniforms have gradually developed over the past two decades. Since the signing of the likes of David Beckham and Neymar, footballers have had more freedom in what their appearance and kit can feature. I will be exploring how this has developed over time and how it has become a gateway to historical contracts, a boom in profits and the influence it has on their audience and street culture.

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Conclusion – 500 words – To conclude my dissertation, I will reflect upon the points made within the previous chapters to finalise the main point of the essay thus having an overall perception of how branding has impacted football. I will consider both points for and against to ensure the debate is neutral.  I aim to show my opinions without developing a first-person persona to avoid contradicting the writing style of the essay and to keep continuity. Throughout the summary, I will  talk about how the research has impacted my thoughts on the main question and how the knowledge I have gained has benefited my degree.

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500 words – Introducing the key question and explaining how I will show a fair and neutral example to lead to a final concluded answer. I will include an anecdote/story referring to the history of the World Cup over the last century demonstrating how money and marketing have changed it into something completely different to where it originated. This helps paint a picture for the audience/reader to understand the direction my work will pursue. I aim to show international football at the beginning to differentiate the money involved within club football and the more impact it has on consumers.

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PRIMARY RESEARCH Interview-Liam - Adidas HQ (June)
PRIMARY RESEARCH:: Interview-Sam - FA Statistic Analysis-Algorithm and data (June)
SECONDARY RESEARCH: Study and read Professional football clubs' retail branding strategies (July)

SECONDARY RESEARCH: Consistently keep up to date with the Sky Sports Show (Weekly)
PRIMARY RESEARCH: Attend the Design Museum's exhibition (Designing the Beautiful Game) and take photos and notes.

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End of June

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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293018236_Globalisation_and_sports_branding_the_case_of_Manchester_United

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https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/15/manchester-city-football-group-ferran-soriano

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n 19 December 2009, Pep Guardiola stood and wept in the middle of Zayed Sports City Stadium in Abu Dhabi. The 38-year-old Barcelona manager clasped a hand across his face as his body gave way to huge, shoulder-heaving sobs. Zlatan Ibrahimović, the club's towering Swedish striker, wrapped a tattooed arm around Guardiola's neck and then gave him a vigorous push in order to jolt him out of it. But Guardiola could not stop. It was a strange place for the world's most celebrated football coach to break down: Barcelona had just won a game that few people watched on television to secure one of football's most obscure titles, the Fifa Club World Cup. But the victory secured an unbreakable record: Barcelona had won all six titles available to any club in a single year. That is why Pep was sobbing.

Back at home in Barcelona, it was a bittersweet moment for Ferran Soriano. A hairdresser's son from the city's working-class district of Poblenou, Soriano had become one of FC Barcelona's top executives - and had helped build what could now claim to be the greatest football team the world had ever seen. "I was happy, but it was also painful not to be there when the team reached its pinnacle," he told me. Instead, he picked up the phone and called Guardiola.

Soriano had overseen Barcelona's finances for five years until 2008, and the club's record owed much to the ideas he had developed after running a US-style political campaign to bring a group of swashbuckling, sharp-suited young men to power at elections for a new board of directors in 2003. He had even written a book, La Pelota no entra por azar ("The ball doesn't go in by chance"), in which he argued that Barcelona's success - and, by inference, that record - was the result of good, creative business management. Vicious political infighting had driven him to resign from the club the previous year. But even before that, he had seen one of his more ambitious ideas - to set up franchise clubs in other countries - thwarted at Barcelona. This was a step too far for a club owned by 143,000 voting fans, firmly rooted in their city and Catalonia.

But Soriano's big idea has now been brought to life by two men who were watching very closely on the night Guardiola wept in Abu Dhabi: one is a member of the United Arab Emirates' ruling family, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, and the other is Khaldoon al-Mubarak, a youthful executive and adviser to the royal family. With their backing, Soriano is now upending football's established order by building its first true multinational corporation - a Coca-Cola of soccer.

That corporation is City Football Group (CFG). It already owns, or co-owns, six clubs on four continents, and the contracts of 240 male professional players and two dozen women. Hundreds more carefully picked teenagers and younger children who aspire to greatness play in CFG's lower teams. The longterm ambition is huge. The company will trawl the world for players - shaping and polishing them in state-of-the-art academies and training facilities across several continents, selling them on or sending the best to the clubs it will own (and improve) in a dozen or so countries. Supplied and shielded by the vessels around it, the flagship of this new football flotilla - Manchester City FC - will continue its already startling rise to become the world's greatest club.

That is the Soriano idea - or at least, a simplified version of a complex plan. The corporation is only four years old, but it is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful forces in the world's favourite sport - watched with awe, envy and fear by those who wonder if it could become football's own Google or Facebook.

n a game where top players cost £200m, televised matches attract audiences of hundreds of millions and club owners are among the wealthiest potentates on the planet, no expense is spared in seeking any competitive edge. Once upon a time, money alone was enough to make the difference (if it was spent wisely), but that is no longer the case, in part because there is so much of it sloshing around the game.

When Manchester City won the Premier League in 2012, Sheikh Mansour was widely accused of "buying the title for £1bn" - the amount of money he had poured into City since purchasing the club four years earlier. It was City's first league title in 44 years, and grown men cried when Sergio Agüero's goal in the penultimate minute of the season's final game secured the title. Mansour watched it on television: he had only ever been to one match at City's Etihad stadium, and did not enjoy the fuss his visit caused. In the hours that followed, his phone hummed, filling up with 2,500 messages.

But this was also the end of an era. European football's regulator, Uefa, had brought in new rules designed to stop clubs spending much more than they earned. Critics dismissed Mansour as a spoiled hobbyist, and even today some wonder to what extent his "private" ownership might become an instrument of Abu Dhabi's soft power. But his few public statements made it clear that he had bought City - and ploughed money into it - as a genuine, long-term investment because "in cold business terms, Premiership football is one of the best entertainment products in the world".

The ambition, then, was double - he intended to win at both football and business. But with the Uefa spending brake, that was about to become much tougher. He needed something new. Could City win without losing money?

In fact, when Soriano's gang of smart young businessmen took over Barcelona in 2003, it was a loss-making club. As finance chief, Soriano helped deliver a spiralling "virtuous circle" of high investment, trophies and then even higher revenues. Forceful and analytical, he had built and sold a global consultancy business by the age of 33; at Barcelona, where he was nicknamed both "the Panzer" and "the Computer", he made a strong-willed but sensible counterpoint to the club's mercurial president, Joan Laporta. But Soriano also saw Barcelona as something far bigger than a city club, while realising that the global football business itself was poised to enter a new era. In 2006, at a talk Soriano delivered at Birkbeck College in London, he presented 28 slides that set out his early vision. Thanks to the phenomenal growth in their worldwide fan bases, he noted, big clubs were being transformed from promoters and organisers "of local events, like a circus" into "global entertainment companies like Walt Disney". If big clubs seized the opportunity to "capture the growth and become global franchises", they would soon stand apart from their rivals, creating a new, world-conquering elite.

"He thought, and thinks, in a different way to most other people in football," says Simon Chadwick, now a professor at Salford University, who had invited Soriano to give the talk at Birkbeck. At the time, Soriano himself was disappointed to find English football so in thrall to a model in which managers such as Arsène Wenger and Alex Ferguson appeared to run their own clubs, while "the level of conceptualisation of the business model was zero". Even the language was telling. "They called the coach 'manager', as if he managed everything," Soriano recalled.

With his abrupt departure from Barcelona in 2008, Soriano's dream of turning that club into a global franchise, with a first satellite team in the US, was definitively dashed. Instead, Soriano threw himself into running an airline, Spanair. But five years after his presentation in London, as Mansour sought a fresh competitive edge, both on and off the field, Soriano found himself, in October 2011, sitting down for a 7am meeting in a Mayfair hotel with the globetrotting New York lawyer Marty Edelman - who was tempting him back into football.

Edelman had been drafted on to City's board by Mansour, working alongside his appointed chairman, the US-educated Khaldoon al-Mubarak, from the very beginning. Edelman, a real estate expert, was already a trusted adviser in Abu Dhabi, and the choice of an American was an early sign of the club's new cosmopolitanism. Soriano initially brushed off City's advances. He was used to associating Manchester with its glittering rival United, and he still distrusted what he called "the stereotype of the rich owner". (In his book, he had even described City as a club that provoked "savage inflation" through "irrational investment".) But the two sides were slowly discovering shared values. Chief among them was ambition - and with that came a willingness to challenge the status quo.

Even then, it was an off-and-on affair. Meetings followed in Paris and Abu Dhabi, before, in April 2012, Soriano was sneaked through Manchester airport (where the club says it "can get people in without anyone knowing they have arrived") and taken to a room at the Lowry Hotel booked in someone else's name. A former rugby second-row forward, Soriano is, at 6ft 3in, difficult to hide. By now it was a mutual seduction, with City wanting to persuade him that, with Mansour's long-term commitment, the club could be as great as Barcelona. Soriano, in turn, pitched a mould-breaking plan that required deep pockets, imagination and a steady nerve. Both sides agreed that City should aspire to being the world's top club - a position long held by either Real Madrid, Barcelona or Manchester United. "And I mean number one - not number two or three," Soriano told me.

he idea of becoming the world's biggest club was not just vanity or business machismo. Soriano had spotted long before that a tiny group of elite clubs would capture the new global market, but he also wanted to build something "far bigger". Football clubs, he pointed out, were massive brands but absurdly small businesses: a team with a global following of 500 million fans might have an income of only €500m. "That's one euro per fan," he says, "which is utterly ridiculous." In business terms, this was "a combination of a lot of love and, literally, no love" - because fans in, say, Indonesia spent nothing on their club. "So what can we do? The answer was pretty simple, maybe too simple, but very bold. You have to be global but local. You have to go to Indonesia and open a shop." He outlined his idea for a corporation that would have both a global brand - in Manchester City - and lots of local brands, developing talent through a network of clubs that would also provide a pipeline of players for City. He knew this might sound far-fetched. "If I had pitched this idea to Real Madrid, the answer would be 'you're crazy' - and that is actually what had happened in Barcelona," he told me.

But City was already going through a revolution, and was ready for more. For Edelman, the plan put flesh on the skeleton built with Mansour's millions. "Any great idea needs to have a host, right? And we were a great host," Edelman told me at his Park Avenue offices. "You couldn't take Ferran's idea and just put it on a blank sheet." Soriano's idea (which he now terms his "artistic challenge") was a way of taking Mansour's original vision - summed up in his early pledge to build "a structure for the future, not just a team of all-stars" - and putting it "on steroids", in Edelman's words.

Soriano started work as CEO of Manchester City on Saturday 1 September 2012. Two days later, he arrived in New York to create a new football club. This meant paying $100m (£74m) for a spot in Major League Soccer (MLS), the professional league for the US and Canada, and building a team from nothing. Seeking a local partner, Edelman eventually took Soriano to see Hank and Hal Steinbrenner, the owners of the New York Yankees. The brothers had inherited their baseball team, but Hank is a soccer fan who played at college and coached his local high-school team. It was one of the quickest deals Edelman had ever seen struck, taking "about 15 seconds" to agree it. "It just worked," he told me. The Yankees took 20% of the new team and offered their stadium as a temporary home. (It still is, though it takes 72 hours to transform it from a baseball field into a soccer pitch.) The team, baptised New York City Football Club, began playing in 2015. Forbes now values it at $275m (£205m). To fans it is "NYCFC", or simply "New York City" - a marketer's dream. "Our brand is perfect, because it is 'City' and we know we can add that word to any city," observed Soriano, who began his working life marketing detergents.

When I first visited the Etihad campus in March, the wall behind the reception desk bore the shields of City, NYCFC and two other clubs: Melbourne City, and Yokohama F Marinos, a Japanese club in which CFG owns a minority stake. Melbourne Heart, as the Australian club was originally known, had only been founded in 2009. It won its first major trophy last season, just two years after City bought it and changed its name, and changed its colours to sky blue. "It's like being a start-up tech firm, and Apple buying you," Scott Munn, the club's founding CEO, told me. East Manchester, in this analogy, will become the Silicon Valley of soccer. A modest cluster of other football businesses is even forming in the area - making the Californian analogy even more apt.

By the time I returned two months later, City had bought yet another club, this time in Uruguay - Atlético Torque, a second-division side that was founded in 2007 and became professional only in 2012. At the company's annual staff meeting in May, a representative from the new outpost began his presentation with a map of South America and a large arrow pointing to Uruguay. "Nobody knows what is Torque. Nobody knows where is Torque," he admitted, only half-jokingly. (It is in Uruguay's capital, Montevideo.) "In this room we have as many people as go to a Torque match." The ambition, however, was for the club to rise to the first division, finish in the top four and qualify for continent-wide competitions - and this in a country that produces world-class players such as Barcelona's Luis Suárez or Paris Saint-Germain's Edinson Cavani. Rather more mysteriously, the club also aimed to "sign and register players from all across South America". The latter was the result of a cold statistical analysis, which had revealed that Uruguay was the biggest per-capita exporter of professional footballers - an astounding £25m-a-year business. And this was despite the fact that many small clubs often sold talented players cheaply when they were still teenagers. "It's astonishing," Soriano said. "We are big, and will hold on to them longer" - making them even more valuable.

The next time I saw Soriano - at his holiday apartment in the small Catalan beach resort of Tamariu - it was July, and he had closed yet another deal just a day earlier. For €3.5m (£3.1m), City had purchased 44% of Girona, a club in Spain's top division. This was a far bigger fish. As he sat on a balcony overlooking the bay in shorts and a T-shirt - pulling data on fan numbers and television rights out of a battered laptop - Soriano looked happy (and not just because, in Tamariu, he can make work calls from his balcony and then pop down to join his two "Mancunian" infant daughters on the beach).

"When we agreed the price last year, it was in the second division. Now it's in the first," he said. On 29 October this year, with help from players loaned by Manchester City, the newly promoted team convincingly beat Real Madrid in their first meeting. The injection of CFG cash and know-how at Torque has had an even more dramatic effect. Last month it finished top of Uruguay's second division, meaning it has already been promoted - just six months after it was bought.

oriano is convinced that football will eventually become the biggest sport in almost every country in the world, "including the United States and India," he says. So how far will CFG go? "We're open. In Africa we have a relationship with an academy in Ghana. And we've been looking at opportunities in South Africa," he said. CFG already has a close relationship with Atlético Venezuela in Caracas; Soriano also mentioned Malaysia and Vietnam. The limit, he suggested, was two or three clubs per continent. But the next major purchase may well be in China, where the group is "actively looking" to buy a club.

In October 2015, China's football-loving president, Xi Jinping, visited City's Etihad stadium; two months later, Chinese investors bought 13% of CFG for $400m (£265m), valuing the whole at $3bn. This was probably well over 30% more than Mansour had pumped into it (no exact figures are available). Soriano has been watching the dramatic, chaotic evolution of Chinese soccer - a pet project for Xi - ever since he arrived in Manchester. At first, Soriano was put off by rumours of chaos and corruption, and then by a price bubble. "The market is now more rational and the league is more structured," he says.

Xi wants China to create 50,000 special "soccer schools" within 10 years - partly to get deskbound schoolchildren fit - and to make ready 140,000 pitches. Soriano sees an opportunity to teach millions of children soccer, which "might be bigger than the business of Manchester City". It is a reminder that CFG - which recently put $16m into a joint venture to own and operate five-a-side urban pitches in the US - is interested in the entire sector, not just clubs.

CFG is not the only owner of multiple clubs - and some other teams are experimenting with modest forms of integration - but the others are largely just investment portfolios. CFG is the only owner that has consciously established a single corporate culture around the world, which in some cases extends to wearing the same sky-blue shirts. Fernando Pons, a sports business partner at Deloitte in Spain, sees this as a prime example of what consultants have dubbed "glocalisation" - a concept that implies taking a global product, but adapting to local markets. "A Girona or New York City fan will almost certainly also become a City fan," he said. It also means that the advertising for Nissan, SAP and Wix that is seen at the Etihad stadium in Manchester will be replicated in Melbourne or New York - and that players from the US or Australia will be able to travel off-season to the world's most advanced training centre, built on 34 hectares of land beside the Etihad and equipped with sophisticated extras such as hyperbaric and hypoxic chambers that can simulate high altitude or boost blood oxygen levels.

What seems to excite Soriano most, however, is the vast pool of players and the range of clubs they can play in. CFG almost certainly already owns the contracts of more professional soccer players than anyone else in the world, and that number is only set to go higher. So while "entertainment" and running clubs is the group's first business, he explained, "business number two is player development". The inspiration is Barcelona's famous and much-copied Masia youth academy, which, for about €2m each, produced legendary players such as Lionel Messi, Andrés Iniesta, Xavi, Carles Puyol and Guardiola. At today's prices, the same group would cost closer to €1bn. "We are globalising the Barça model," Soriano said.

The logic behind this was made even more clear - in the same week we met in July - by the widespread amazement over the £198m fee that the Qatari owners of Paris Saint-Germain had agreed to pay Barcelona for the Brazilian star Neymar. Transfer records are smashed almost yearly, and Soriano now sees this inflation as an inevitable part of the game, now driven not by wealthy owners but demanding fans.

"Why is that? It's very simple: the industry is growing," he explained. "Ultimately, it goes back to the clients - these are the fans, who want to watch good football and are ready to pay. So clubs have more money to spend, but the number of highly skilled or top players generated each year does not change."

"This is a typical 'make-or-buy' challenge. You can't buy in the market, so you have to make," Soriano said. "This means spending a lot of money - on academies, coaches, but also in transfers for young players. It's like venture capital in that if you invest 10 million each in 10 players, you just need one to get to the top who is going to be worth 100 million."

For Manchester City, the expanding web of CFG clubs solves a particularly English problem, which occurs when promising footballers hit 17 or 18. Soriano calls this "the development gap", and it may explain why England's national team performs so badly. "If the player is top quality, he needs to play competitive football to develop. It's not only for the technical aspect of the game, but also for the pressure. The under-21 or under-19 competitions in England don't provide this, because games aren't in front of a lot of fans and there isn't enough competitive tension," he said. If Spain and Germany are much better at developing players, he says, it is because clubs such as Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich all have reserve teams that play in their countries' second or third division against other professional clubs - not in a separate league, as English youth teams do. "If you manage a boy who has talent and is promising, who is 18 or 19, you can have him training with the first team, but playing in the second, where games are difficult, competitive and you play before crowds of 30,000."

Because Premier League clubs are not allowed to field second teams, the primary way to develop promising young players who are not quite ready is to loan them to another club, usually in a lower division; Manchester City, for example, currently has around 20 players out on loan. But once a player is loaned out, the parent club loses control over their development - as Chelsea can testify, having bought up so many young players that more than 30 are on loan at 24 different clubs. At worst, this leads to the warehousing of players and the ruining of promising careers. CFG's integrated web of clubs, all (in theory) playing the same style of football, is meant to solve that. "In this system we control exactly what they do. The coaching is exactly the same. The playing style is exactly the same," Soriano said.

If this vision works out, successful players will progress from, say, Torque to New York, and then to Girona, and then - eventually - to Manchester City. CFG will not "own" them, since they will belong to the individual clubs, who must compete against outside bidders and pay transfer fees where appropriate. But CFG clubs will have insider information on the players, who can, in turn, be confident of fitting in with the style at all the other CFG clubs - while transfer income will end up back in a single corporate pot. In May, club officials gave me the example of the Australian midfielder Aaron Mooy, who joined Melbourne City in 2014 and was the team's player of the year in his first two seasons. CFG decided Mooy was good enough to play in England, and Melbourne sold him to Manchester City for £425,000 in June 2016. But Mooy did not play for the club - he was immediately loaned to Huddersfield Town, who were then a second-division team. After helping them win promotion to the Premier League, Mooy was then sold to Huddersfield - for £10m. The deal shows how CFG can leverage its insider knowledge of players to simply trade them, even if they never actually play in Manchester. The profit from this one transaction, incidentally, was some 40% more than it cost to buy the entire Melbourne club.

iring Pep Guardiola was always part of Soriano's big plan - though enticing him to Manchester required time and patience. One of Soriano's first City hires was Barcelona's former director of football, the man responsible for buying new players and helping to choose coaches, Txiki Begiristain. "Immediately we went to talk to Pep, because Pep was the best coach in the world," Soriano told me. Guardiola had just left Barcelona and was determined to enjoy a sabbatical year in New York. "So we said: 'OK, come next year'," Soriano recalled. "And [the next year] he said: 'I'm sorry, I want to go to Bayern Munich'. So we said: 'OK, come in three years.' And he came." This kind of patience is only available when your owner has no need to cash in and, in a fast-moving sport where fans demand instant results, knows how to play a waiting game.

Guardiola's prime task is to meet Soriano's definition of a "number one" club by winning at least one title per season. "That doesn't mean you win every year, but that in five seasons you win five trophies. It means getting to April with possibilities of winning the Premier League and playing in the semi-finals of the Champions League," he explained. City have only managed the latter once - in 2015/16, the season before Guardiola arrived - but the target implies winning the Champions League every four years.

But an implicit part of Guardiola's job, away from the merry-go-round of matches and press conferences, is to help engineer something that may ultimately prove more valuable - a recognisable and entertaining playing style across all of CFG's teams and players. Again, the model comes from Barcelona, where players moved seamlessly from junior teams to the Camp Nou because all had learned the same Cruyff-style soccer. In the CFG model, clubs and academies in a dozen countries should be doing the same - creating a frictionless supply line of players who automatically know how to play Pep-style and can slip in and out of the group's teams. Soriano says that will allow "a more seamless movement of players", with the best ending up at City.

This may prove more challenging than it sounds. On a warm August afternoon this year, as smoke rose from dozens of tailgate barbecues in gravel-covered parking lots, I joined fans wearing the sky-blue colour of NYCFC as they trooped into the New York Red Bulls stadium in Harrison, New Jersey. David Villa - the 35-year-old former Barcelona player - led them to a 1-1 draw in what has already become New York's "classic" football derby. But this was relatively scrappy football - the kind played in the second or third divisions of England or Spain.

A few days earlier, I had watched coach Patrick Vieira - who moved here from managing City's "elite development" under-23 team - train his squad on a pitch in leafy Westchester County, north of New York City. When I asked Vieira, a former Arsenal captain who finished his playing career in Manchester, if his team - whose salaries, under MLS rules, are capped well below Premier League level - always played "City football", he admitted that it did not. "You can't play the same football in New York as in Manchester, because of the players," he said. "What we have in common is a philosophy to play what we call 'beautiful football' - the offensive game, to try to have possession, create chances, score goals and play attractive football. The level will be different, but the philosophy tries to be the same."

s CFG grows and its impact is felt around the world, its rivals are beginning to fear its size, and hover, hawk-like, over its accounts. Javier Tebas, the outspoken lawyer who presides over Spain's La Liga, clipped CFG's wings when it appeared on his territory this summer, accusing Girona of misrepresenting the details of five players loaned by City. The club was forced to increase the accounting value of those players - a measure that, given Spain's budget cap system, left Girona with 4% less money to spend on players' wages. "We had to correct certain market values ... so that loaning of players did not represent unfair competition," explained Tebas. Girona are still trying to get that decision overturned.

At the Soccerex football business conference in September, Tebas took aim at Manchester again, accusing City of circumventing the rules by taking hidden state aid in the form of sponsorship contracts with public companies from Abu Dhabi. (He had similar complaints about Paris Saint-Germain's Qatari owners, who he claimed were "pissing in the swimming pool" of European football.) In Tebas's view, what is provoking inflation in transfer fees and player wages is not fan demand, but Gulf cash and so-called "state clubs" - including "Manchester City and its oil". City not only denied this, but threatened to sue him - and Uefa has ignored Tebas's demands that it investigate the club's finances. But the vocal hostility from the head of a league dominated by Real Madrid and Barcelona is a sign that the latter two - whose not-for-profit, member-controlled structure prevents them taking the CFG route to global expansion - are starting to feel threatened.

But Tebas's suggestion that CFG uses its muscle to push the regulatory boundaries is not without merit. In 2014, Uefa punished City with a €20m fine for breaking the financial fair play rules in previous seasons. The Australian league, meanwhile, introduced new rules last year after CFG circumvented the league's ban on transfer fees between clubs with a ruse that one critic dubbed "farcical". Manchester City bought a local player called Anthony Cáceres - "outbidding" Australian clubs by paying a transfer fee - before loaning him straight to Melbourne. The league responded by banning the practice for the first year after signing.

The same ownership whose deep pockets have enabled these global ambitions may also be a source of further difficulties - in part because the desire to protect Abu Dhabi's image looms large at CFG. This has become more challenging as the emirate's ambitious mega-projects, such as the collection of museums on Saadiyat Island, attract the attention of human rights organisations, who accuse the UAE of violating the rights of migrant construction workers. When emails from the Emirati embassy in Washington were leaked earlier this year, among them was a memo revealing that CFG's directors had fretted about a proposal to build an NYCFC stadium on parkland in Queens - where there was already public opposition to such a project - out of fear that stadium critics would attack Abu Dhabi's involvement, targeting its attitude to "gay [rights], women, wealth, Israel". The project was abandoned, and NYCFC still does not have its own stadium.

here is a central paradox to the economics of football. While the global business has long expanded at annual rates of 10% or more, few clubs have ever made much profit, let alone paid owners an annual dividend. Even the mighty Premier League clubs have, jointly, posted pre-tax losses in three of the last five seasons. And yet the price of clubs keeps rising. Mansour, for example, was estimated to have paid around twice as much for City as the previous owner, the exiled former prime minister of Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra, had done just 15 months earlier.

Soriano says that sports franchises are exposed, week-in, week-out, to such relentless competition that they are driven to constantly reinvest profits - meaning that owners only really make money by selling. Others see football clubs as a "rarity" for ultra-rich collectors - with billionaires queueing to join the small, exclusive club of those who own famous clubs. These are also incredibly resilient assets: Manchester City, founded by vicar's daughter Anna Connell to keep working men off booze and brawling in 1880, is one of many now in their second century. "How many companies that were on the New York stock exchange in 1917 still exist?" Soriano asks.

Ultimately, value comes from combining talent and emotion - meaning players and the fans who adore them. This is the "love" Soriano talks about, which CFG must turn into money if it is to become the successful multinational corporation that the owners want. If Guardiola ever sobs for City - something only likely if he wins another Champions League trophy, which Soriano hopes will happen this season - then fans of one of England's most historic football clubs will happily give themselves up to adoration. Many more might follow them.

But CFG's multinational corporate model somehow obliges us to take a more hard-nosed view of how much this "love" is really worth. Will CFG ever match a Coca-Cola, Disney or Google for size or value? Manchester City will have to win many more games, and many titles, before that happens - by which time, if the model works, other football multinationals might have appeared, all of them transforming love into money at a global scale. In the hard world of business, of course, there is only one way we will ever find out the "true" monetary value of CFG's global juggernaut, on the day Mansour, or someone else, sells the company, and the market renders its own judgment - and puts a price on all that love.

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

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Manchester City's plan for global domination

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n 19 December 2009, Pep Guardiola stood and wept in the middle of Zayed Sports City Stadium in Abu Dhabi. The 38-year-old Barcelona manager clasped a hand across his face as his body gave way to huge, shoulder-heaving sobs.

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https://www.soccerbible.com/performance/football-apparel/2019/10/juventus-debut-adidas-x-palace-collaboration/

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The club have managed to keep the collaborative fourth kit under wraps until the very last minute before kick off when the players took off their jackets to reveal the landmark collab for the team photo. Rumours began circulating that a reveal was imminent when Cristiano Ronaldo and co turned up to the stadium wearing a brand new all-white tracksuit, dual-branded with the Palace and adidas logos, and that reveal was confirmed when the players warmed up in a new training wear range.

The London skate label have linked up with the Three Stripes to embellish the predominantly white training apparel with neon green splashes and statement logo placements on the back. The tracksuits take on a throwback feel, a look we tipped to be a new trend for 2020. The home kit has been modified with those neon hits on the Juventus crests, sleeves, names & numbers and adidas x Palace logo, while a distorted graphic interrupts the stripes on the jersey and socks.

The full collection will include a black colourway of the training apparel as well as co-branded scarves, hats and lifestyle pieces in the coming days (stay tuned for official drop date). The Palace x adidas link up is a significant step for the Three Stripes in terms of transitioning the brand into lifestyle circles while competing with the success Nike have had with the Jordan x PSG collab. Are we looking at a new era of football replica?

Palace and adidas are long-time collaborative partners having linked up for football styled collections in the past, as well as a successful Wimbledon tennis collection last summer, but now they've become the first skateboard brand to stake their claim in the world of professional football.

By designing and co-branding an official jersey, PALACE have created a collection of apparel that pays tribute to some classic Juventus releases, combining retro sportswear silhouettes from the adidas archive with motifs and colours synonymous with the Turin club.

Stay tuned for a first look at the full Juventus x adidas x Palace collection and official drop date...

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Juventus Debut adidas x Palace Collaboration - SoccerBible

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The club have managed to keep the collaborative fourth kit under wraps until the very last minute before kick off when the players took off their jackets to reveal the landmark collab for the team photo.

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https://www.soccerbible.com/performance/football-apparel/2020/10/adidas-x-pharrell-launch-humanrace-jersey-collection/

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If you thought kit culture had peaked, think again. Adidas and Humanrace unveil their collaborative football jerseys for Arsenal, Bayern Munich, Juventus, Man United & Real Madrid. Adidas collaborator and Humanrace Creative Director, Pharrell Williams, draws inspiration from the adidas archives to honour each football club's history with reimagined jersey designs, and you want them all.

Smart project, but this is the sort of thing that never features on pitch is it? Wrong. The pre-match jerseys will be worn from Oct 24 by Arsenal, Manchester United, and Real Madrid, while Juventus and Bayern go one better by wearing theirs competitively - Juve this weekend against Verona, and Bayern in the next round of the German Cup.

Each of the co-created jerseys - designed together with Humanrace Creative Director and long-term adidas collaborator Pharrell Williams - were informed by each club's past, with their legacies serving as the foundations of the design process. These moments were reimagined to reflect today's football culture through the lens of the Humanrace design ethos; inspired by and in celebration of the imperfect beauty of the human spirit.

Each jersey is unified by the hand-painted aesthetic, which was central to the process led by Pharrell, with the iconic shirts redesigned in a traditional artistic format. Starting out on a simple cotton t-shirt, the reverse engineered design process was centred around a raw, human and expressive hand-drawn technique on a simple piece of canvas. All intricate details are reimagined in paint format, from club crest to partner logos, to create a look unified by style. From there, Pharrell worked collaboratively with the adidas design team to create elite performance jerseys, featuring the very best in adidas technology.

Speaking about the collection, Pharrell Williams said; "History is what shapes the future, and sometimes in order to look forwards, first we need to look back. The most important part of the process with this collection was to learn of each club's legacies and how each defining moment of their histories were captured and preserved from a design perspective. Each of the new jerseys are symbols of the five club's legacies and a true celebration of the universality of sport."

Working closely with each of the five teams, Humanrace FC brings together the clubs for the first time in a shared celebration of the human spirit. Pharrell and the adidas design team's joint ambition was for this to demonstrate football is for everyone and the human race at its best - uniting together while celebrating our differences.

For the Juventus jersey, the Human Race FC team looked back into the adidas archive to discover its pink shirt from the 2015-16 season - the first season of the adidas and Juventus partnership. The bold and vivid colour blurred the lines between sport and style and became an instant icon of modern football culture. Further cementing its place in history, this was also the year the club took home the season's domestic treble.

The collection launches with a short film shining a light on the humans shaping creativity and football culture - today and in the future - as they share their own unique stories. This includes London grassroots team Romance FC, who have also had a bespoke shirt created for them to play in this season.

A reimagined Predator Mutator HU football boot headlines the footwear collection from a performance point of view, while Manchester United and Arsenal also receive bespoke Predator TR editions to match their Humanrace jerseys.

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adidas x Pharrell Launch Human Race Jersey Collection - SoccerBible

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If you thought kit culture had peaked, think again. Adidas and Humanrace unveil their collaborative football jerseys for Arsenal, Bayern Munich, Juventus, Man United & Real Madrid. Adidas collaborator and Humanrace Creative Director, Pharrell Williams, draws inspiration from the adidas archives to honour each football club's history with reimagined jersey designs, and you want them all.

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https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/vetements-football-jerseys-buy/

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In the current fashion zeitgeist, sportswear and bootlegging still reign supreme. Combining the two with aplomb is Les Vêtements de Football, a brand from Milan-based magazine NSS who have just dropped their second capsule collection. While it may not be farfetched to imagine a future whereby luxury houses actually do design international football kits, Les Vêtements De Football is already there interpreting brands such as Acne Studios, Vetements and Comme Des Garçons through the lens of vintage football shirts.

Featuring iconic team strips from Germany, England, Scotland and Holland, each jersey has various brand labels printed on the front with fashion and football references ranging from 'Balenciagoal', to the not-so-subtle 'HOOLIGANS'.

Ironic, eye-catching and totally emblematic of the status quo, peep some of our favourites below.
Our designated shopping section features products that we love and want to share with you. Highsnobiety has affiliate marketing partnerships, which means we may receive a commission from your purchase.

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Les Vêtements De Football Bootleg Jerseys: Here's Where to Buy

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In the current fashion zeitgeist, sportswear and bootlegging still reign supreme. Combining the two with aplomb is Les Vêtements de Football, a brand from Milan-based magazine NSS who have just dropped their second capsule collection.

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https://www.netflix.com/watch/81002655?trackId=255824129

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This docuseries chronicles the rise of superstar Michael Jordan and the 1990s Chicago Bulls, with unaired footage from an unforgettable 1997-98 season.

Starring: Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman

Scoring an Emmy for Outstanding Documentary Series, this slam-dunk show features Michael Jordan, Phil Jackson and more.

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The Last Dance

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The Last Dance

Flashbacks chronicle Michael Jordan's college and early NBA days. The Bulls make a preseason trip to Paris amid tension with GM Jerry Krause.

Scottie Pippen rises from obscurity to become one of the NBA's best players. An injury early in Michael's career sows distrust with Bulls management.

Dennis Rodman's attitude and energy help the team win, but bring the drama off the court. The Bulls struggle to overcome the Pistons in the late '80s.

Phil Jackson's unique philosophy and demeanor take the Bulls to the next level. The team finally gets past Detroit and earns a shot at an NBA title.

From Air Jordan and "Be Like Mike" to the '92 NBA Finals and the Olympic Dream Team, Michael becomes a global cultural icon unlike any other.

A revealing book and scrutiny of his gambling put a dent in Michael's reputation, but he remains focused on winning a third straight title in 1993.

Crushed by the death of his father, a mentally exhausted Michael retires in 1993 — to play baseball. The Bulls move on with Scottie in the lead role.

Michael's return energizes the Bulls, the city and the NBA, but a playoff loss in 1995 fuels him to work harder than ever to get back on top.

The Bulls face stiff challenges to their reign in 1997 against Utah and in 1998 versus Indiana. Role player Steve Kerr makes his mark on the dynasty.

Battered and exhausted, the Bulls conclude their "Last Dance" with a sixth championship. Michael, Phil and others reflect on the end of the dynasty.

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After moving from New York City to Indiana, a 12-year-old navigates his parents' divorce, his impending bar mitzvah and his new school's social circles.

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SECONDARY RESEARCH: Watch and take notes throughout Netflix's Neymar: The Perfect Chaos and The Last Dance (September)
SECONDARY RESEARCH: Study and read The dynamics of brand equity, co-branding and sponsorship in professional sports. (September)

PRIMARY RESEARCH: Create an online survey and publish it digitally through social media platforms to gain the public's opinion. (June)

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http://www.sportmont.ucg.ac.me/clanci/SM_February_2019_Jankovic_75-78.pdf

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https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/02756661311310440/full/html

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To read the full version of this content please select one of the options below:

Ram Herstein (Head of the MBA program, Department of Business Management, Jerusalem Academic Center - The Lander Institute, Jerusalem, Israel)

Ron Berger (Head of Marketing, Department of Business Management, Jerusalem Academic Center - The Lander Institute, Jerusalem, Israel.)

Abstract

Design/methodology/approach

- A new framework is presented that is based on four different alternatives for city re‐branding strategies based on sport events. These four re‐branding strategies are derived from two main dimensions: the locus of the sports event (local vs international) and the longevity of the sports event (one‐off vs continual).

Keywords

Citation

Herstein, R. and Berger, R. (2013), "Much more than sports: sports events as stimuli for city re‐branding", Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 34 No. 2, pp. 38-44. https://doi.org/10.1108/02756661311310440

Publisher
:
Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Much more than sports: sports events as stimuli for city re‐branding

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
To read the full version of this content please select one of the options below: Ram Herstein (Head of the MBA program, Department of Business Management, Jerusalem Academic Center - The Lander Institute, Jerusalem, Israel) Ron Berger (Head of Marketing, Department of Business Management, Jerusalem Academic Center - The Lander Institute, Jerusalem, Israel.)

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https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJSMM.2010.029711

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Abstract

Globalisation has been one of the most significant determinants of growth in the sports industry worldwide, especially with the increasing importance of brand creation, brand awareness, brand image, brand identity and brand equity. Professional sports teams have become top sports brands through leverage with major company sponsors. Sports marketers have had to become much more entrepreneurial to create competitive advantage for sports organisations and deliver relationship value to consumers. Company sponsorships are prominent drivers of brand strategy around the world. They help create an extended consumer experience and are becoming a strategic vehicle for creating co-branding partnerships between sports organisations and multinational companies. This study reports data from a survey of the top marketing and communications executives in sports and company organisations in New Zealand and as well as a qualitative content analysis of core documents and websites. The study provides insights for sports marketers seeking to: use sponsorship as a prominent driver of brand strategy; employ co-branding as a strategy to create an extended consumer experience; build strong brands through efficient co-branding articulation strategies. The study also provides recommendations for sports organisations and companies to formulate their marketing communications and brand strategies from the perspective of a co-branding relationship.

Keywords

sport brands, co-branding, brand equity, sport sponsorship, professional sports, sport management, sport marketing, brand strategies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The dynamics of brand equity, co-branding and sponsorship in professional sports

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Globalisation has been one of the most significant determinants of growth in the sports industry worldwide, especially with the increasing importance of brand creation, brand awareness, brand image, brand identity and brand equity. Professional sports teams have become top sports brands through leve…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
To read the full version of this content please select one of the options below:

Abstract

Purpose

While some football clubs are recognised as popular brands, little is known about the way they leverage their brand in their merchandise retailing. To address this gap the purpose of this paper is to investigate retail branding strategies used by professional football clubs through brand equity and supply chain management. In particular, it analyses the type of product merchandised, the reasons for selling certain products and the ways through which football clubs merchandise, including their partners in distribution channels.

Design/methodology/approach

A qualitative approach was undertaken involving content analysis of 22 Scottish professional football clubs' websites and annual reports, and semi-structured interviews with seven football clubs retail managers and four supply chain partners. Transcribed data were coded and thematically organised through an inductive process using the qualitative data analysis software NVivo 10.

Findings

Three types of merchandise have been identified: basic, fashion and short season. Building brand equity is considered the main motive for retailing merchandise. Some football clubs use intermediaries or outsourcers to respond to sudden consumer demands and to ensure high levels of service, whereas others have an integrated supply chain which allows for greater control.

Research limitations/implications

This paper contributes to the discussion on the role of retailing in football club brand equity. It suggests initiating intermediaries in the distribution channels to build brand equity thus enabling clubs to become more responsive to consumer demand.

Originality/value

This is the first paper to look at retail branding strategies of professional football clubs.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Stephen Morrow for his assistance in writing this paper.

Citation

Szymoszowskyj, A., Winand, M., Kolyperas, D. and Sparks, L. (2016), "Professional football clubs retail branding strategies", Sport, Business and Management, Vol. 6 No. 5, pp. 579-598. https://doi.org/10.1108/SBM-09-2016-0048

Publisher
:
Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright

© 2022 Emerald Publishing Limited

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Professional football clubs retail branding strategies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
To read the full version of this content please select one of the options below: While some football clubs are recognised as popular brands, little is known about the way they leverage their brand in their merchandise retailing.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JBS-04-2017-0053/full/html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
To read the full version of this content please select one of the options below:

Abstract

Purpose

This research aims to examine the fundamental elements regarding Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) marketing strategy. Specifically, the objective of this analysis is the implementation of globalizing the club brand of PSG.

Design/methodology/approach

The author held three 2-h face-to-face meetings. Given that the main criterion in the choice of the respondent for a case study was the quality of the information that could be obtained during the interview, the professionals were selected because of their direct involvement in the PSG's global marketing strategy. Data collection was conducted with the aid of several in-depth interviews with the Deputy General Manager (in charge of commercial activities), Frédéric Longuépée, the Corporate and Brand Communications Manager, Nicolas Serres and the Brand Diversification and Development Manager (in charge of eSports), Fabien Allègre.

Findings

It appears that since the acquisition of PSG by Qatar Sports Investments, the club has entered a new era and has set in motion a strategy to compete with the biggest sports brands in the world. The results of this research reveal that the globalization strategy of PSG is itself part of Qatar's internationalization approach. The findings also suggest that the global marketing strategy of the club is based on three key steps. First was the reorganization of the club to create an omnisports brand with a new CEO at its head, which is highlighted here. The rebuilding of the brand followed, through the creation of new identity and logotype, the acquisition of brands-athletes and controlled communication. Finally, the development of the club which is based on the diversification of growth drivers.

Originality/value

Overall, these results contribute to the enrichment of sports clubs and global marketing research This research offers a unique perspective and insights on the marketing strategic globalization of a professional sports club linked with the internationalization of a country. Best practices become visible through this analysis, which might serve as guidelines in other contexts.

Keywords

Citation

Chanavat, N. (2017), "French football, foreign investors: global sports as country branding", Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 38 No. 6, pp. 3-10. https://doi.org/10.1108/JBS-04-2017-0053

Publisher
:
Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright

© 2022 Emerald Publishing Limited

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
French football, foreign investors: global sports as country branding

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
To read the full version of this content please select one of the options below: This research aims to examine the fundamental elements regarding Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) marketing strategy. Specifically, the objective of this analysis is the implementation of globalizing the club brand of PSG. The author held three 2-h face-to-face meetings.

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SECONDARY RESEARCH: Watch BBC's The Rise of the Premier League (June)
SECONDARY RESEARCH: Watch and study Sky's The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty (June)
SECONDARY RESEARCH: Read articles focusing on the rebrand of the premier league such as the Guardian's published piece: Deceit, determination and Murdoch's millions: how Premier League was born (June)
SECONDARY RESEARCH: Read and study Sports Journalists and England’s Barclays Premier League: A Case Study Examining Reporters’ Takes on Modern Footbal.

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ick Parry is showing me the most important document in the recent history of British sport. He has a photo of it on his phone. "Here it is in my handwriting," he says. "Graham was upstairs, waiting for me to tell him, and I'd forgotten to put FA. So that's Graham's writing on the top going 'by the way, that's the FA Premier League'."

"Graham" is Graham Kelly, the former chief executive of the Football Association. In 1991 he hired Parry to help him with a problem. Out of that problem was born a football competition that has become a global brand, a sporting hegemon and a form of soft power for the United Kingdom in the 21st century. But visible even in its totemic "founders' agreement", the document on Parry's phone, were the tensions that would make the Premier League sometimes as reviled as it was beloved.

The Premier League turns 25 this summer and there is much to celebrate. It is by far the most popular national football competition in the world, watched avidly on television by fans in 210 countries. At home, capacity crowds attend fiercely competitive matches in brand new stadiums, largely free from disorder or disruption. The competition has dozens of star players, almost all the most famous managers, and creates enough drama to feed a relentless media appetite. It is also, again by far, football's richest competition, generating £4.865bn in revenue during the 2015-16 season, according to the financial analysts Deloitte.

The story of how the Premier League came into being is one of determination and deceit, of clubbable bureaucracy coming face to face with free-wheeling entrepreneurialism. In effect it is a story of its age, the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Thatcherism had smashed post-war orthodoxies but created little in its place. Football, the national game, was on its knees: stigmatised as a crucible for hooliganism, grieving after the tragedy of Hillsborough. The sport was loathed by government and struggling to make ends meet. Yet a great opportunity was approaching and a small number of ambitious men were ready to seize it.

First among those men were Greg Dyke and David Dein. Dein was then deputy chairman of Arsenal, one of the Big Five, the clubs with the most storied heritage and the greatest crowds in English football (the other four were Manchester United, Liverpool, Everton and Tottenham Hotspur). Dein was fascinated by the high-rolling razzmatazz of American sport and frustrated by the endless sub-committees of the Football League, the competition to which his club then belonged. Dyke, meanwhile, was at that time both chief executive of London Weekend Television and the chairman of ITV Sport and liked watching football almost as much as he liked doing deals.

The two men, who remain good friends, had first met in 1988 at a fashionable Japanese restaurant called Suntory. Dyke wanted to show the Big Five's matches on ITV and offered to buy their rights separately from the rest of the 22 clubs who formed the League's elite First Division. If such a plan were to have come to pass it would in effect have amounted to a breakaway competition.

The Football League found out about the discussion and went into conniptions; so desperate were they to prevent such a deal they sold TV rights to the entire First Division for four years on terms that suited both broadcaster and clubs. ITV could show matches at a new time of 5pm on Sunday and the clubs got to keep 75% of the money, rather than sharing 50% with lower league clubs as had previously been the case.

"That year I bought the whole of the Football League for the cost of one match now. And I got shit for it at ITV for paying too much," says Dyke, now in a fashionable "kitchen" in Soho. When the deal began to approach its end the Big Five were keen to make more money still but Dyke did not believe it was possible. "I had a dinner at LWT with the Big Five and I said: 'We're not going to get this deal again. The League are better organised. We're not going to get the same deal, so what are we going to do?'

"David Dein said: 'It's time to break away.' They were going to break away and had worked out that the absolutely crucial element of this was the FA. If they could get the governing body on side, then they could do it."

In most of the conversations that helped inform this article, the word most commonly used in relation to the Football Association was "tragedy". The Premier League could not exist without the FA, it is registered at companies house as the Football Association Premier League, and yet the parent exerts almost no control over the child.

As evinced by Graham Kelly's amendment to the founders' agreement, the parentage was uncertain even at its conception. In 2017, many of the problems afflicting the English game, from the lack of young English players in the top flight to the feeling of disenchantment some have with the cost of watching the game, would seem soluble if the interests of the game's governing body were aligned with that of its most valuable asset.

In 1991, however, the FA was not looking over the horizon. It was worried about a newly aggressive Football League. Spurred by the threat of the 1988 breakaway, the League had produced a manifesto, One Game, One Team, One Voice, which mooted a holistic approach to the development of all levels of football, with the League at its centre, of course. This was particularly galling for Kelly, who had left the League for the FA just months previously. When the Big Five, through their ambassadors Dein and Liverpool's Noel White, approached him with the intention to secede once again, they found a receptive audience.

After meeting the pair, Kelly got straight to work. The FA commissioned an executive from Saatchi & Saatchi, Alex Fynn, to imagine how a new league might be organised and the revenues it might generate. Kelly also hired Parry, then a management consultant at Ernst & Young, to act as emissary to the Big Five.

"The first few weeks I was doing the running around and there were regular meetings of the five clubs," says Parry. These meetings were conducted in secret, though perhaps they could have been more discreet; one with Manchester United's Martin Edwards was held at a Manchester hotel under the name "Martin and co". "Against all expectations, the First Division had just gone back from 20 to 22 clubs, which was hardly helpful to the England team. We envisaged a reduction to 18 clubs. David was very keen on it, others much less so, they were conscious of loss of revenue."

A reduction to 18 clubs was also part of Fynn's plan. He had calculated the substantial revenues available from increased TV exposure. Off the back of them he envisaged a restructuring of the entire league system, with an elite division resting on a pyramid of regional competitions. There would be more "event" matches, the England team would benefit and, crucially, the FA would take a significant percentage of any broadcast revenue (up to 40%) to reinvest in the national and grassroots game. In effect, England would become more like Germany. Fynn presented his plan to the FA's board full of optimism.

By the time the FA announced plans for a breakaway league on 5 April 1991, only a desire to reduce the division to 18 clubs remained. The new league had become simply a transfer of power, from the Football League to the FA. The League immediately began legal proceedings. It also observed that all clubs registered in the League needed to serve a notice period of three years before quitting; a potentially fatal clause because clubs would have to resign not knowing if, by the time the breakaway eventually arrived, they would even be in it or not.

Still, plans for the competition, now known as the Premier League (the title having been adjudged less confrontational than the original "Super League") pushed relentlessly onwards. With more and more clubs interested, a meeting was convened with the FA to discuss the fine print. It was to be a fateful meeting.

Dein describes the encounter as "probably a missed opportunity". Held at the FA's Lancaster Gate offices, it was conducted by the FA's chairman, Sir Bert Millichip, later to be dubbed by Brian Glanville as Bert the Inert. His counterparts were a gaggle of football chairmen desperate to take control of their own destiny. The agenda soon turned to the reduction to 18 clubs. Some of the smaller teams, worried about being excluded, wanted to know if this was mandatory. Sir Bert shrugged his shoulders and said: "It's your league, you decide."

"I was looking at Graham and thinking: 'Hang on, isn't that pretty fundamental?'," says Parry of the moment the FA ceded control of the direction of English football. "It took me by surprise, I think it took everybody by surprise. He was referring to the 18 clubs, but the message people heard was 'it's our league, we'll make the big decisions'."

Fynn is more scathing of the way the FA let go of the reins. "They were a poorly run organisation," he says. "They felt their way of doing things was threatened by the Football League and their first priority was to head that off. In backing breakaway clubs they saw a way to destroy the power of the Football League. All I can say is that they were incompetent and that they had no vision; how could a 42-game league help the England team?"

We knew we had an airplane on the runway ready to take off, but we didn't know how high it was going to fly

It was an historic moment, the blazers hustled by the suits. For those who have since watched the England team struggle or seen their club fall ever further behind the zenith of the domestic game, with the chance of winning the Premier League not even a dream, it is indeed a sporting tragedy. But at that very moment something miraculous also happened, a piece of administrative genius that would capture another, vastly greater audience. Within minutes of Millichip's fateful words, the clubs had heard enough. They announced they would design the league among themselves. Millichip, in a further act of anachronistic gentlemanliness, offered them a conference room next door. The clubs took it and appointed Parry, who had been working in a second role for Kelly as ambassador on behalf of the breakaway, to a third job: that of chairman of the putative league.

In that meeting, which lasted less than two hours, the clubs and Parry created the founders' agreement. It is not legally binding but it has acquired a kind of sanctity, close to that of a religious text. Inside were two simple changes that were to prove incredibly profound. The first was that, within the Premier League, everything would be voted on by the clubs, every club would have one vote, and every vote would require a two-thirds majority to pass. There would be no committees or sub-committees. Secondly, at the behest of the smaller clubs, all TV revenue would be split in a new way. The Premier League would no longer share its money with the lower divisions. But neither would the Big Five take a share commensurate to their size. All money would be divided 50-25-25. 50% was to be split equally between the clubs, 25% according to the league position achieved in the previous season and only 25% dependent on the number of times a club appeared on TV. (A footnote: any international TV revenues, which then were nigh-on zero, were to be divided equally.)

Soon The Premier League announced itself as a legal entity separate from the FA. It may have ditched first the Football League, then the FA before it had even come into existence, but it had also created a framework that would not have been possible under either. By streamlining its governance, the Premier League was more agile than its predecessors. By altering the TV formula, each club had a stake in making it work. This would not have been possible under either. It was one ideally suited to a new era, in which television would become the most important way to consume the sport, and where that sport would be less a competition between domestic tribes and more an internationalised branch of the entertainment industry.

According to Dein: "To make an omelette you need to break some eggs and we broke a lot of eggs at the time. We were forming a new legal entity, rebranding ourselves with a far improved voting structure where we could be master of our own destiny. We had the opportunity to drive the game forward for the benefit of all stakeholders. We knew we had an airplane on the runway ready to take off, but we didn't know how high it was going to fly."

The Football League went on to lose its case in the High Court. The clubs tendered their resignation and Parry physically handed 22 letters to the League at its base in Lytham St Annes. "They invited me in and gave me a cup of tea," he says. "They were nice people." The clubs were bought out of their notice period, with the FA bizarrely offering to foot the bill. A deal brokering relegation and promotion with the League was also agreed. The Premier League, ultimately to be comprised of 20 teams, was set to launch in August 1992. Now all this broadcast-friendly creation needed was to make sure it got on to TV.

Waiting, ready to return to the centre of the story, was Greg Dyke. The idea conceived in Suntory had come to fruition; the Big Five could now sign a new, lucrative deal with ITV without having to pass a share of the money down the leagues. But there were two complications: first, under the new League's constitution, Crystal Palace and Chelsea had as much clout as Spurs or Everton and they resented Dyke for the way the previous deal had been arranged; second, and the significance of this change should hardly need stating, Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB was now an interested party. While Dyke re-established contact with the Big Five, Murdoch went to work on Parry.

While others would later be flown to private islands, Parry had to make do with a trip to Sky's payments processing centre in Livingston. The company at that time was mired in debts of more than £2bn but, flattered as he may have been, Parry saw the potential to build a partnership that ran deeper than one game a week on a Sunday afternoon.

"The relationship with Sky is one of the key reasons for the success of the Premier League," Parry says. "Look at the energy they've put into growing the game and promoting it. [Former Sky chief executive] Sam Chisholm memorably said it was the greatest corporate romance of all time."

Get your arse here and blow them out of the water

ITV thought they were in the driving seat. Trevor East, then Dyke's deputy and later to become head of Sky Sports, believed he and Parry had come to an understanding while watching Nigel Benn fight Hector Abel Lescano in December 1991. But Parry denied this had happened. By 18 May 1992, however, at the meeting where the Premier League were to select a TV partner, only one bid was up for voting on and that was Sky's. What happened that day slipped into Premier League folklore almost immediately. East had arrived early at the Royal Lancaster Hotel with envelopes under his arm. A deadline for bids had been set for the previous midnight, but East chose to ignore it. He presented the clubs with a proposal that would yield £262m over five years for 30 live games a season. When Parry found out he immediately called Chisholm, who woke up Murdoch in New York, who authorised another bid.

Less effective, but certainly as dramatic, was the performance of Alan Sugar. Along with Terry Venables, Sugar had recently acquired control of Spurs. He also had a deal to manufacture Sky's satellite dishes. With Venables suddenly called from the meeting, Sugar held Spurs' once solid ITV vote in his hands. After seeing East's revised bid he tore into the lobby of the hotel, got Chisholm on the phone and demanded he "get your fucking arse round here and blow them out of the water". Dyke says: "We said: 'Who are you speaking to?' and he said: 'I'm talking to my girlfriend!'" Parry recalls: "Sam was saying to him: 'Get off the bloody phone, I'm trying to get this thing sorted!'"

Sky came back with a vastly improved deal worth £42m more over the five years than ITV were willing to pay. They would show 60 games a season and promised a return for Match of the Day, with the BBC paying for highlights. This was the deal that was put to Premier League clubs. It was passed 14 to 6.

Dyke is now phlegmatic about the decision. "I was a bit naive, because it was always going to end up on pay TV at some stage," he says. "If we'd have won you'd just have had a single Sunday afternoon game like we'd done the previous four years. We might have won it that time but in the end pay TV would have won out."

Such were Sky's debts that, had they lost, they might not even have been in business by the time the next negotiation came along. But they won. On
16 August 1992 Richard Keys presented the first Super Sunday, Nottingham Forest versus Liverpool. The Premier League era had begun.

This article was amended on 24 July 2017 to remove a quote from Greg Dyke that said Rick Parry had been flown up to meet Rupert Murdoch in person.

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Deceit, determination and Murdoch's millions: how Premier League was born

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ick Parry is showing me the most important document in the recent history of British sport. He has a photo of it on his phone. "Here it is in my handwriting," he says. "Graham was upstairs, waiting for me to tell him, and I'd forgotten to put FA.

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https://www.twitch.tv/fabrizioromano

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All under one roof: The Essential Football Show preview & review, Super Sunday reaction, Monday Night Football talking points and more...

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Listen to The Sky Sports Football Podcast on Spotify. All under one roof: The Essential Football Show preview & review, Super Sunday reaction, Monday Night Football talking points and more...

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Once finishing writing my dissertation, I will consistently review the work to look for minor tweaks and errors. Ideally, I aim to begin this at the start of December; it will allow me enough time to continue to find research as more news potentially unravels.

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End of October

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End of November

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End of September

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SECONDARY RESEARCH: Study and read the Globalisation and sports branding: the case of Manchester United (July)
SECONDARY RESEARCH: Watch and take notes of The United Way (July)
SECONDARY RESEARCH: Read the biography of Joel Glazer ( July)

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End of August

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https://www.forbes.com/profile/glazer-1/

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mirror-next-hop.forbes.com | Access denied (403)

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For further information, do not hesitate to contact us.

Ref: 104.154.50.183 2022-05-28T15:52:19.552Z

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63 Glazer family on the 2015 America's Richest Families - After Malcolm Glazer died in May 2014, the family was left without its leader, but still firmly in control of an impressive real estate and global sports empire.

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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10443794/

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Videos1

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Director

Mat Hodgson

Writers

Eric Cantona

Mat Hodgson

Patrick Nathanson

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The history of Manchester United, using unseen footage.

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football

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Discover what makes Manchester United one of the most iconic clubs in the world.

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5/10

Horrible documentary

Rubbish documentary not enough information and Eric cantona camera hogging and saying stupid quotes all way through.

jonesy-61128

May 26, 2021

Release date

May 10, 2021 (United Kingdom)

Country of origin

United Kingdom

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English

French

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Lịch Sử Manchester United

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The United Way: Directed by Mat Hodgson. With Eric Cantona, Ken Ramsden, Ken Merrett, Rosemary Blakeley. The history of Manchester United, using unseen footage.

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https://www.sky.com/watch/title/series/ed3c7e15-1f36-4cc9-8eec-054437ccff3e/the-rise-of-the-murdoch-dynasty-ed3c7e15-1f36-4cc9-8eec-054437ccff3e

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The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty overview

The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty

The Comeback. Rupert Murdoch masterminds an extraordinary comeback involving the Brexit vote and Trump. Adult themes.

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The Comeback. Rupert Murdoch masterminds an extraordinary comeback involving the Brexit vote and Trump. Adult themes.

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End of July

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https://www.fourfourtwo.com/features/euro-96-the-untold-story

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It's the early hours of Thursday, June 27, 1996 and England's Euro 96 is over. The street cleaners brush away the last of the debris, the plug has been pulled on Wembley's floodlights, and the Twin Towers are left alone to ruminate once more on a nation's heartache.

A group of young men huddle in a bar, not wanting to go to bed, not wanting to say goodbye, because that would confirm it really is all over. They sit, talking about the match and the six weeks before it. This is the England squad, freshly knocked out of their own European Championship by the old enemy, Germany - using their old weapon, penalties.

"After the semi-final, we'd been told we could drive home, but not one of us did," remembers Teddy Sheringham. "The atmosphere was dead... dead... dead. The bubbly nature of the squad had gone, but no one wanted to leave. Even in defeat there was a togetherness. So we all stayed there, had a few beers and reminisced."

It all ended in beers. To the press and the public, it had started the same way, with the squad vilified for its boozy antics on a pre-tournament tour to Hong Kong. Overpaid, overindulged and overly intoxicated off the pitch, this England team were stagnant and predictable on it. They were nobody's heroes.

Over the course of five encounters at Wembley, however, that slowly changed. With each scintillating performance, the Euro 96 vintage became England's last truly great football team. They may have lost a tournament, but they won a nation.

This is how they did it...

A new boss

(Image credit: PA Images)

As 1993 became the World Cup year of 1994, the country clamoured for one man. The Graham Taylor years had produced nothing of note, beside references to root vegetables. English football's allotment had become a quagmire, and it was the rich soil provided by Terry Venables that most people agreed was the antidote.

Unlike Taylor, Venables was seen as a forward-thinking coach: a man who had worked abroad, who could improve and motivate players - and serve drinks to the press at his Kensington nightclub.

His first game, in March 1994, was a 1-0 win over European champions Denmark, followed by a healthy 5-0 hammering of World Cup-bound Greece. That the latter was seen by just 23,000 fans at Wembley showed how the nation - despite the Venables factor - was yet to buy into the idea of a new dawn.

The friendlies were clunky, but to the players, there was an air of change. The approach was less rigid; the training and matches geared toward different tactics.

"England don't have friendly games," explains Alan Shearer. "If you play badly, you're still going to get hammered. We worked on different systems, though, and we were becoming a flexible squad."

That flexibility was clear in the inclusion of players such as Gareth Southgate, a ball-playing defender happy in midfield, while youth was represented in the forms of Robbie Fowler, Sol Campbell, Gary Neville and Phil Neville.

The nation was unconvinced. England went into the tournament ranked 14th in Europe. As ever, the left side was an issue: Graeme Le Saux had broken his leg, and neither Steve McManaman nor Darren Anderton felt natural there. Venables' Christmas Tree formation was ridiculed, and to sections of the press, the squad had a cliquey feel in which players were picked on reputation rather than merit.

"I'd played under Terry at Spurs and he got me involved straight away," continues Sheringham. "My association with him didn't go down well with the press, who said I was one of Terry's boys."

Sheringham wasn't the only one dealing with flak. Since scoring a brace against the USA in September 1994, Shearer had failed to score in any of his previous dozen international appearances leading up to Euro 96 - and the knives were out.

"My confidence wasn't great," recalls the former striker. "There were question marks everywhere against my ability at this level. But you have to keep belief; I was still scoring for fun at Blackburn. The best thing Terry did for me, about a month before the tournament, was to take me aside and say, 'You'll be starting - you're my centre-forward'. I thought, 'Wow, what a boost'."

"There was no doubt that he would play," Venables later told FourFourTwo. "He was, quite simply, a goalscorer. You can never leave a player like that out."

Venables always remained bullish, even saying, "I won't be satisfied unless we get to the final". Few, however, were buying it.

"The friendlies hadn't gone too well," journalist Brian Woolnough, then of The Sun, commented in 2012. "Terry and the team were taking a lot of stick - mostly from me and my paper - but he was adamant. 'Judge me when it matters,' he'd say. He must have said it 50 times."

Venables saw things that perhaps others didn't

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England at Euro 96: The untold story of the summer football almost came home

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It's the early hours of Thursday, June 27, 1996 and England's Euro 96 is over. The street cleaners brush away the last of the debris, the plug has been pulled on Wembley's floodlights, and the Twin Towers are left alone to ruminate once more on a nation's heartache.

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Fifa has been accused of failing to stop migrant worker abuses in Qatar in a new report by Amnesty International, which for the first time highlights mistreatment of employees at a 2022 World Cup venue.

The 50-page report claims that construction staff working on the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha were housed in squalid conditions, had their passports confiscated and had pay withheld for several months.

The findings are based on interviews by researchers with 132 migrant workers rebuilding the Khalifa Stadium, which is due to host one of the semi-finals in 2022. A further 99 migrants interviewed worked on landscaping in the surrounding Aspire Zone sports complex, where Bayern Munich, Everton and Paris Saint-Germain trained this winter.

All those interviewed, mostly from India, Bangladesh

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Qatar World Cup 'built on workers' rights abuse'

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Fifa has been accused of failing to stop migrant worker abuses in Qatar in a new report by Amnesty International, which for the first time highlights mistreatment of employees at a 2022 World Cup venue.

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An examination of how much the World Cup in Qatar in 2022 has cost in terms of money and human lives.

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residential candidate was not the title Kylian Mbappé was aiming for at the start of the campaign. However, some of those uninspired by the choice in France's presidential elections last month crossed out the names Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen to scrawl "Mbappé" on their ballot papers instead. With his humble smile, tailored suit and nonchalant waves to fans outside the Parc des Princes, there was something presidential to Mbappé's media address following his shock signing of a new three-year PSG contract. The new power that comes with it could match his presidential demeanour.

Mbappé's decision to stay at PSG, a fanciful situation a few months ago, marks the start of sweeping changes within the club. Leonardo, the sporting director, has already exited for the second time and the coach, Mauricio Pochettino, is widely expected to follow. Large parts of an unwieldy squad are finally expected to be sold too, something Leonardo struggled with, while PSG's prolific but little-used academy could finally take on genuine importance.

As well as what is reported as a gargantuan €100m signing bonus and a €50m salary, Mbappé is expected to take a meaningful role in PSG's wider decision-making. His influence is already shaping the club. The appointment of Luís Campos as sporting director - a friend of Mbappé's from their days at Monaco - was borne out of contract talks between Mbappé and PSG. The player's continued presence influenced Campos's acceptance.

Pochettino's position, meanwhile, has improved thanks to Mbappé, who spoke of his "great relationship" with the coach. That directly contradicts the club's position under Leonardo, who repeatedly offered Pochettino's job to Zinedine Zidane, but Pochettino could yet see out the final year of his deal. Although he waved away the suggestion, Mbappé's oversight could extend to transfers. According to L'Équipe, he has agreed to the potential sale of Neymar this summer.

While traditionalists will balk at a player wielding such political power, Mbappé's new status represents an interesting footballing experiment. Although concessions made to Mbappé were primarily borne out of desperation, as PSG feared the loss of perhaps the world's best player to a major rival for free, player power of this sort could make sense for modern football, under the right circumstances.

Having handled the relentless coverage of his future with poise and humour while his performances have only improved, Mbappé's reputation has grown inside and outside PSG. Giving footballers too much influence at clubs could cause problems - given their egos, inexperience and the fact that transfer decisions directly affect their own futures, and that too much power could undercut the coach's authority - but there's little doubting Mbappé's maturity, intellect and, now, dedication.

Kylian Mbappé poses with a scarf in front of fans after deciding to stay in Paris. Photograph: Julien Hekimian/PSG/Getty Images

He is the club's highest-paid, most valuable and most influential component. PSG might argue that no one is more crucial to their success than Mbappé, so why not at least consult him on major decisions? PSG's established hierarchy, despite a decade of trying, have hardly become a bastion of competence amid constant infighting between various coaches, sporting directors and leaders as well as a failed transfer policy. While the whims of other players have been pandered to by the club, this would be a first for decision-making power.

Mbappé's decision to stay at PSG could prove seismic for the landscape of European football. Despite some strong displays in European competitions this season, the quality at the top of La Liga is diminishing. It was previously the league that drew the world's very best talent but, having lost Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, Spanish football has also missed out on this generation's two leading forwards, with Mbappé staying in Paris and Erling Haaland, who was chased by Madrid and Barcelona, signing for Manchester City.

While the Premier League's financial power may have stretched its lead on interest, prestige, resources and player-for-player (although perhaps not team-for-team) quality, the other four of the traditional big five leagues are concertinaing together in these areas. The interest generated by Mbappé's continued presence in Ligue 1 helps the league's status and potentially its ability to compete financially. It's something Emmanuel Macron, the French president, was well aware of, repeatedly speaking with Mbappé as he mulled over his choices. Both Macron and the club leant heavily on Mbappé's alleged "responsibility" to France and Ligue 1. "I heard the call of the homeland and of the capital city," Mbappé explained.

The manner of Mbappé's decision could have personal as well as continental implications. Having idolised Cristiano Ronaldo as a youngster, Mbappé is clearly drawn to football's grandest institution. He is still just 23, so joining Madrid at some point likely remains a target. His talent would no doubt override everything else, but Florentino Pérez, the Real Madrid president, is a proud master of an even prouder club. Mbappé called him personally to explain his decision to stay, but Pérez is seething and may take some time to cool down.

Hell hath no fury like a Real Madrid fan scorned. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

After months of being close to certain Mbappé would join, even reportedly planning an unveiling and telling other prospective signings, Spanish football has been deflated and infuriated by Mbappé's change of mind. If Mbappé joins Madrid at the end of this three-year contract, or even beforehand to incur a huge transfer fee, he may face some opposition.

Antoine Griezmann rejected Barcelona publicly via his La Decision documentary in 2018 before moving a year later. The Frenchman was not welcomed warmly by his new, recently jilted, teammates and fans. Mbappé could face a similar sentiment from Madrid fans and players, should he eventually move to Spain.

For now, his change of heart is a major political triumph for PSG, and especially the club's Qatari owners. For the world's leading player - albeit a local already playing for them - to reject a move to Spain, despite Real Madrid reportedly making a comparable, perhaps even slightly better, financial offer, shows the standing PSG now enjoy. They will argue it represents tangible proof that PSG are becoming one of the world's major sporting brands, a stated aim when they acquired the club a decade ago.

Nasser Al-Khelaifi is the PSG president and he carries the financial muscle, but Mbappé could soon become the epicentre of power at the Parc des Princes. If a ballot were to be held on who PSG's true leader might be, there'd be no need to cross out the names Al-Khelaifi, Pochettino and Campos. Mbappé's would be the only option.

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Kylian Mbappé's new contract makes him the most powerful figure at PSG

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residential candidate was not the title Kylian Mbappé was aiming for at the start of the campaign. However, some of those uninspired by the choice in France's presidential elections last month crossed out the names Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen to scrawl "Mbappé" on their ballot papers instead.

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After overwhelming support for the return of the Hammerettes, the club is pleased to confirm half-time dancers will be back on Saturday

The club are trialling two different groups with one team performing this weekend against Bolton Wanderers and the others for the visit of Wolverhampton Wanderers on Tuesday 23 February.

Thousands of votes, emails and correspondence were received, with 95 per cent of supporters calling for the half-time entertainment to come back to the Boleyn. The online poll came as the club continues to look for ways to improve the matchday experience for supporters and all suggestions are welcome.

With huge nationwide attention, including coverage on TV, online and in national papers, the club would welcome interest from organisations wanting to sponsor the half-time dancers.

Anyone interested in getting involved in sponsorship for this or any of the other exciting matchday opportunities, should email [email protected] with 'Half-time entertainment' in the subject field.

The Hammerettes made their first appearance back on 17 January 1970 at the first division fixture against Manchester United. A popular addition, the official matchday programme carried a feature that had the simple heading of: 'The Hammerettes'.

A black and white photo appeared in the next programme against Coventry City on 7 February 1970 before the first colour picture was used in the matchday programme against Tottenham Hotspur on 17 October.

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Hammerettes: an update | West Ham United F.C.

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After overwhelming support for the return of the Hammerettes, the club is pleased to confirm half-time dancers will be back on Saturday The club are trialling two different groups with one team performing this weekend against Bolton Wanderers and the others for the visit of Wolverhampton Wanderers on Tuesday 23 February.

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It's official. Kylian Mbappe has turned down a move to Real Madrid and has signed a new three-year deal at Paris Saint-Germain.

It had long looked like the 23-year-old would be heading to the Santiago Bernabeu on a free transfer, but he's spurned Los Blancos' advances and is staying at Parc des Princes.

PSG announced the news shortly before kick-off for their last game of the season at home to Metz on Saturday evening.

Son choix est fait ! Kylian Mbappé va prolonger de trois ans avec le PSG et sera sous contrat jusqu'en 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣5️⃣ ? #PSG #RealMadrid #Mbappe pic.twitter.com/5BwXhQ83Kg
- 90min ?? (@90minFR) May 21, 2022

"I always said that Paris is my home. I want to win titles here and have fun together as always. Thank you". ⭐️ #Mbappé

Kylian here @ Parc des Princes before the game ⤵️?? pic.twitter.com/Vu4jRhSHIa
- Fabrizio Romano (@FabrizioRomano) May 21, 2022

?? ?? ?????????... @KMbappe pic.twitter.com/1PB7LtSZHy
- Ligue 1 English (@Ligue1_ENG) May 21, 2022

Mbappe lied. Point blank. He told Real Madrid he was coming, he gave them his word.

At the last second, after Real Madrid gave up on Erling Haaland just because of him, he went back on his word.

Nobody can trust him now. A man is as good as his word. And his means nothing.
- The Real Champs (@TheRealChampsFS) May 21, 2022

PSG fans were over the moon with the news.

Official | La Liga have decided to file a complaint against PSG regarding their disregard of Fair Play in their transfer deals (specifically Mbappe)
Statement: "This is a scandal. We will now report PSG to Uefa, French autorities and EU authorities." https://t.co/NS2r5afOqx
- Real Madrid Info ³⁵ (@RMadridInfo) May 21, 2022

PSG's wage bill was €503m in 2020-21, a season in which they made a loss of €224m.

La Liga's statement this evening about Mbappé is obviously partly sour grapes. But. PSG's spending is ludicrous.

Nation state club ownership: urgh. pic.twitter.com/eHNWM3pGjS
- Nick Harris (@sportingintel) May 21, 2022

Boy from Paris winning PSG the CL, the holy grail they've chased for over a decade for the first time ever would be some story - there's a hint of romance and mysticism for Mbappe staying at PSG. Madrid will obviously go back for him in like 3 years they'd be stupid not to
- Zak (@ZG1999_) May 21, 2022

Mbappe is incredibly smart. Winning the 15th CL for Madrid pales in comparison to winning the first CL in Paris' history.

PSG are one of the best-marketed clubs in the world, the possibilities for him are endless if he wins the CL. If he doesn't, he's young enough to move.
- ExpectedChelsea (@ExpectedChelsea) May 21, 2022

Mbappe is a Parisian too so winning them a CL would be even sweeter for him, unfinished business. Get it done by age 25/26 then cut ?
- Chiddy ?? (@chiddyafc) May 21, 2022

Mbappe meeting Madrid in the CL next season will be interesting ?
- naaj? (@najaatoo) May 21, 2022

Understandably, Real Madrid fans were not happy and set out to remind PSG that they knocked them out of this season's Champions League.

Meanwhile, La Liga have insisted that they will report PSG to UEFA and the EU over Mbappe's deal.

Now that Mbappe has confirmed his plans, there now only remains one big question: can he finally help PSG win their first ever Champions League?

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Twitter reacts to Kylian Mbappe signing new PSG contract

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It's official. Kylian Mbappe has turned down a move to Real Madrid and has signed a new three-year deal at Paris Saint-Germain. It had long looked like the 23-year-old would be heading to the Santiago Bernabeu on a free transfer, but he's spurned Los Blancos' advances and is staying at Parc des Princes.

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Twenty years ago, the most popular man in the country at the time posed for the cover of the UK's best-selling gay magazine.

I was deputy editor of when David Beckham, then captain of the England football team, bleached his hair and sat for our photographer. I saw the positive impact it had just as the country was emerging from a period of extreme tabloid homophobia - similar to the way trans people are demonised now.

In 2002, for a straight man to be found attractive by a gay man was seen as a threat that warranted a hostile response. Of course, Beckham didn't change this single-handed, and homophobia persists today - but for this handsome, fashion-conscious icon of masculinity to state that he welcomed and celebrated the gay gaze was a cultural game-changer. He won over our hearts, as well as our more superficial instincts.

He's currently in the process of trading away decades of goodwill. As his bank balance is going up, I think that in the eyes of much of the public, his credibility is going down. But this sorry episode contains a wider lesson about how inauthentic and broken the whole world truly is.

Today, it often feels like there are few people to look up to in public life. Almost everything is driven or corrupted by money. Our leaders are cynical, our journalists are compromised, and many of our heroes are hollow. Appalling politicians rebuild their reputations on reality TV; our democracy is owned by the billionaire media; apparently authentic "influencers" promote things they are paid to care about; and even on an individual level, almost all of the choices open to us are ethically dubious at best.

Reduced from citizens to "consumers", most of us are part of this disconnection from integrity to the point where society is looking distinctly dystopian. We think signing e-petitions is enough; we buy fast fashion and tell ourselves - even as the world burns - that our brand choices are enough to save our children from the climate crisis.

Maybe money always overrides ethical considerations - but now the consequences are genuinely a threat to the survival of our children. I know how that sounds, but it is true.

How many people calling out Beckham still bank with Barclays, one of the leading UK funders of the fossil fuels that are already killing people, including LGBT+ people? How many are still drinking Coca-Cola, the world's No 1 plastic polluter, even when we know microplastics are being detected in our blood? How many people tweet rage at protesters, telling them to "Go and protest in China!", while continuing to buy Chinese-manufactured stuff, often for their kids - the same kids who at this point genuinely do not have a safe long-term future?

This isn't airy-fairy "whataboutery". It's real, it's dangerous, and it's happening right now. Pakistan's record monsoon affected tens of millions of people. In Nigeria, 600 people have died and 1.4 million have been displaced by recent floods. And 20,000 people are believed to have died as a result of the record-breaking European heatwave this summer. Where is the outrage? Where are the radio phone-ins and TV discussions for these people?

And this threat may overwhelm us all. As UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said at the Cop27 climate conference (sponsored by Coca-Cola!), we are "doomed" on our current path. Hundreds of millions of people, maybe more, may die: men, women, children, gay, straight, bi, trans, Black, brown and white people - and everyone else. And we are mostly sitting back watching it happen, praying someone else will force the political change we desperately need.
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We even criticise celebrities who say they're worried about it. When David Attenborough appears on TV literally warning that "the collapse of civilisation is on the horizon", Twitter is flooded with people saying how much they love him - but there's less focus on his message, which seem to go in one ear and out the other.

I'm certainly not defending Beckham. In my view, the criticism of him is valid - Qatar 's stance on gay and human rights is appalling - but it's easy to focus on such an apparent expression of hypocrisy without looking at the wider problems.

I'm not perfect, and it's true that we are all stuck in this toxic, deadly system. But we are now at a point where we have to face the fact that the entire system is killing us, be it sports organisations awarding major events to oppressive regimes or us all remaining silent as the world slips into climate breakdown.
Matthew Todd is the author of 'Straight Jacket' and 'Pride' and is a former editor of Attitude magazine
So yes, let's make noise about Beckham and the homophobic regime in Qatar, but let's also take a long hard look in the mirror and join the demands for major systemic change - before time is called on all of us.

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Opinion: I helped David Beckham become a gay icon - and for what?

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Twenty years ago, the most popular man in the country at the time posed for the cover of the UK's best-selling gay magazine. I was deputy editor of when David Beckham, then captain of the England football team, bleached his hair and sat for our photographer.

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The club have managed to keep the collaborative fourth kit under wraps until the very last minute before kick off when the players took off their jackets to reveal the landmark collab for the team photo. Rumours began circulating that a reveal was imminent when Cristiano Ronaldo and co turned up to the stadium wearing a brand new all-white tracksuit, dual-branded with the Palace and adidas logos, and that reveal was confirmed when the players warmed up in a new training wear range.

The London skate label have linked up with the Three Stripes to embellish the predominantly white training apparel with neon green splashes and statement logo placements on the back. The tracksuits take on a throwback feel, a look we tipped to be a new trend for 2020. The home kit has been modified with those neon hits on the Juventus crests, sleeves, names & numbers and adidas x Palace logo, while a distorted graphic interrupts the stripes on the jersey and socks.

The full collection will include a black colourway of the training apparel as well as co-branded scarves, hats and lifestyle pieces in the coming days (stay tuned for official drop date). The Palace x adidas link up is a significant step for the Three Stripes in terms of transitioning the brand into lifestyle circles while competing with the success Nike have had with the Jordan x PSG collab. Are we looking at a new era of football replica?

Palace and adidas are long-time collaborative partners having linked up for football styled collections in the past, as well as a successful Wimbledon tennis collection last summer, but now they've become the first skateboard brand to stake their claim in the world of professional football.

By designing and co-branding an official jersey, PALACE have created a collection of apparel that pays tribute to some classic Juventus releases, combining retro sportswear silhouettes from the adidas archive with motifs and colours synonymous with the Turin club.

Stay tuned for a first look at the full Juventus x adidas x Palace collection and official drop date...

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Juventus Debut adidas x Palace Collaboration - SoccerBible

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The club have managed to keep the collaborative fourth kit under wraps until the very last minute before kick off when the players took off their jackets to reveal the landmark collab for the team photo.

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If you thought kit culture had peaked, think again. Adidas and Humanrace unveil their collaborative football jerseys for Arsenal, Bayern Munich, Juventus, Man United & Real Madrid. Adidas collaborator and Humanrace Creative Director, Pharrell Williams, draws inspiration from the adidas archives to honour each football club's history with reimagined jersey designs, and you want them all.

Smart project, but this is the sort of thing that never features on pitch is it? Wrong. The pre-match jerseys will be worn from Oct 24 by Arsenal, Manchester United, and Real Madrid, while Juventus and Bayern go one better by wearing theirs competitively - Juve this weekend against Verona, and Bayern in the next round of the German Cup.

Each of the co-created jerseys - designed together with Humanrace Creative Director and long-term adidas collaborator Pharrell Williams - were informed by each club's past, with their legacies serving as the foundations of the design process. These moments were reimagined to reflect today's football culture through the lens of the Humanrace design ethos; inspired by and in celebration of the imperfect beauty of the human spirit.

Each jersey is unified by the hand-painted aesthetic, which was central to the process led by Pharrell, with the iconic shirts redesigned in a traditional artistic format. Starting out on a simple cotton t-shirt, the reverse engineered design process was centred around a raw, human and expressive hand-drawn technique on a simple piece of canvas. All intricate details are reimagined in paint format, from club crest to partner logos, to create a look unified by style. From there, Pharrell worked collaboratively with the adidas design team to create elite performance jerseys, featuring the very best in adidas technology.

Speaking about the collection, Pharrell Williams said; "History is what shapes the future, and sometimes in order to look forwards, first we need to look back. The most important part of the process with this collection was to learn of each club's legacies and how each defining moment of their histories were captured and preserved from a design perspective. Each of the new jerseys are symbols of the five club's legacies and a true celebration of the universality of sport."

Working closely with each of the five teams, Humanrace FC brings together the clubs for the first time in a shared celebration of the human spirit. Pharrell and the adidas design team's joint ambition was for this to demonstrate football is for everyone and the human race at its best - uniting together while celebrating our differences.

For the Juventus jersey, the Human Race FC team looked back into the adidas archive to discover its pink shirt from the 2015-16 season - the first season of the adidas and Juventus partnership. The bold and vivid colour blurred the lines between sport and style and became an instant icon of modern football culture. Further cementing its place in history, this was also the year the club took home the season's domestic treble.

The collection launches with a short film shining a light on the humans shaping creativity and football culture - today and in the future - as they share their own unique stories. This includes London grassroots team Romance FC, who have also had a bespoke shirt created for them to play in this season.

A reimagined Predator Mutator HU football boot headlines the footwear collection from a performance point of view, while Manchester United and Arsenal also receive bespoke Predator TR editions to match their Humanrace jerseys.

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adidas x Pharrell Launch Human Race Jersey Collection - SoccerBible

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If you thought kit culture had peaked, think again. Adidas and Humanrace unveil their collaborative football jerseys for Arsenal, Bayern Munich, Juventus, Man United & Real Madrid. Adidas collaborator and Humanrace Creative Director, Pharrell Williams, draws inspiration from the adidas archives to honour each football club's history with reimagined jersey designs, and you want them all.

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Charting the year-by-year changes to Sky Sports' broadcasts

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Since its first transmission 25 years ago, Sky Sports has changed the experience of watching sport on TV. In the month before Sky Sports began, there were just 27 hours of sport on TV.

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Paris Saint-Germain and GOAT have joined forces and inked a multi-year global partnership deal that allows the latter to become the club's newest official sleeve partner. With this new deal, you can expect the GOAT brand to be showcased on all of the club's performance kits such as the training, warm-up and match apparel.

"We are delighted to welcome GOAT into the Paris Saint-Germain family with this partnership that will see them join the exclusive roster of club partners present on our iconic jerseys" said Marc Armstrong, Chief Partnerships Officer of Paris Saint-Germain. "GOAT is a perfect fit for the club and further supports our position as a leading global sports and lifestyle icon for fans all over the world. Together we will develop exciting and creative experiences to connect with supporters everywhere."

In addition to the branded apparel, this partnership will also allow the stacked football team to launch exclusive merch, collaborations and vintage pieces through its own store in GOAT's marketplace. "Paris Saint-Germain is one of the most influential clubs in the world and we're excited to partner with them as we continue to build our global community," said Eddy Lu, Co-Founder and CEO of GOAT Group. "We're not only bringing together two leading lifestyle brands, but uniting a community of athletes, creatives and fans around the world. This partnership plays to each other's strengths, with innovative collaborations in the months and years to come."

In case you missed it, Paris Saint-Germain recently opened the doors to its newest flagship in NYC and you can shop the club's merch through GOAT.

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GOAT Announces Multi-Year Deal to Become Paris Saint-Germain's Offcial Sleeve Partner

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Paris Saint-Germain and GOAT have joined forces and inked a multi-year global partnership deal that allows the latter to become the club's newest official sleeve partner. With this new deal, you can expect the GOAT brand to be showcased on all of the club's performance kits such as the training, warm-up and match apparel.

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In the early 1990s, English First Division clubs believed that a radical restructuring of football was needed if they and the game in general were to develop and flourish.

So on 17 July 1991, they signed the Founder Members Agreement, establishing the basic principles for the setting up of the Premier League.

The League would have commercial independence from the Football League and The FA, leaving it free to organise its own broadcast and sponsorship agreement.

On 20 February 1992, the 22 First Division clubs resigned from the Football League en masse and three months later, on 27 May, the Premier League was established as a limited company.

The first television deal was struck with pay-TV broadcaster BSkyB, a radical move at the time, but Sky has been ever-present and has played a key role in developing the League to its present levels.

The inaugural Premier League campaign started on Saturday 15 August, 1992, with 22 clubs.

The 22 inaugural members of the new Premier League were Arsenal, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Chelsea, Coventry City, Crystal Palace, Everton, Ipswich Town, Leeds United, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Middlesbrough, Norwich City, Nottingham Forest, Oldham Athletic, Queens Park Rangers, Sheffield United, Sheffield Wednesday, Southampton, Tottenham Hotspur, and Wimbledon.

Of these, six clubs have been ever-present in the Premier League: Arsenal, Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur.

When the Premier League was formed, there was always the intention to reduce the number of clubs to 20 to promote development and excellence at club and international level. This was achieved at the end of the 1994/95 season when four clubs were relegated and just two promoted.

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Premier League Origins, Information & Background

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In the early 1990s, English First Division clubs believed that a radical restructuring of football was needed if they and the game in general were to develop and flourish. So on 17 July 1991, they signed the Founder Members Agreement, establishing the basic principles for the setting up of the Premier League.

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After a week of speculation, Neymar's 15-year relationship with Nike has officially come to an end, with the Brazilian superstar swapping the Swoosh for PUMA in one of the biggest brand switches of the modern era. Signing a baller of Neymar's status is a real statement of intent from PUMA, and most certainly a power shift in football's brand wars. And while many were confused as to why the PSG forward would switch sides after being a bonafide face of Nike, make no mistake, this is a win for Neymar too.

What made the news so shocking when it first circulated last weekend, is how central Neymar has been to Nike's marketing efforts over the last few years, with the Brazilian baller more or less teed up as the eventual heir to Cristiano Ronaldo's throne as football's Swoosh King. The player has had a string of signature boot releases, dropped apparel collections, and even became the first football player to receive a Jordan Brand boot. Major moves.

Welcome to the fam @neymarjr #KingIsBack pic.twitter.com/aMPnipZXj9

- PUMA (@PUMA) September 12, 2020

However, those with an eagle eye on the situation could have seen this coming. While CR7 remains one of the best players in the world at the age of 35 - and with no real decline yet in sight - players like Kylian Mbappé and Jadon Sancho have risen up to be very legitimate contenders as the next face of Nike. Just last month, Sancho became the youngest ever player to get a signature boot for the brand. It was a power move for JS7 and confirmation of how much stock the brand are putting in him.

Ultimately, it's meant Neymar has been left in the shadows. It's eerily similar to his situation at Barcelona, when he was always looked at as a backup dancer to Leo Messi.

In this case, Nike equals Barca and PUMA equals PSG. Neymar just wants a chance to be the biggest star of his own show.

At PUMA, Neymar will be undisputed in his claim to be the face of the brand. Currently, the German giants are pushing Antoine Griezmann, Sergio Aguero and Luis Suarez as some of their biggest ambassadors. While Griezmann's star has fallen after a stop-start career at Barca, Aguero and Suarez are both approaching the end of their prime - and neither have the star power that Neymar does.

Jay Z after he helps deliver AC Milan their fifth consecutive UCL in 2026. pic.twitter.com/aZTvt6hz03

- VERSUS (@vsrsus) July 9, 2020

While currently behind adidas and Nike as the biggest brand in football right now - PUMA's stock is rising fast and they're on the brink of a breakthrough. Their close allegiance with Jay Z is helping to bring players like Romelu Lukaku to the family and giving their marketing a more cultured lens than ever before, while rumours are also strong that they've been lining up a deal to bring Raheem Sterling to the brand - with their very real heritage in identity politics and fighting for racial justice likely to be a big pull for the Brent baller.

Financially, PUMA also just recorded its best ever year in 2019 after posting sales of $6 billion. Neymar's arrival will carry that momentum even further forward.

This is a big move. Football's brand wars are about to be taken to the next level.

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Why You Shouldn't Be Surprised by Neymar's Move from Nike to PUMA

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After a week of speculation, Neymar's 15-year relationship with Nike has officially come to an end, with the Brazilian superstar swapping the Swoosh for PUMA in one of the biggest brand switches of the modern era. Signing a baller of Neymar's status is a real statement of intent from PUMA,...

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Paris Saint-Germain is delighted to announce the transfer of Achraf Hakimi. The 22-year-old Morocco right-back, who also has Spanish nationality, signed a five-year contract and is tied the club from the French capital until 30 June 2026.

Born in Madrid, Achraf Hakimi joined the Real Madrid youth academy at seven years of age in 2006. From 2015, he played for the club's U19 side in the UEFA Youth League (16 matches, 1 goal) before joining the Real Madrid Castilla squad in the Spanish third division for the 2016-17 campaign (28 matches, 1 goal).

The right-back made his first appearances for the first-team a year later, and was a member of the squad that won the UEFA Champions League and the FIFA Club World Cup.

Achraf Hakimi was then loaned for two seasons to Borussia Dortmund where he added a German Super Cup to his list of honours in 2019. In 2020, he joined Inter Milan, making 37 league appearances, scoring seven goals and providing ten assists as the Nerazzurri were crowned Serie A champions.

A Morocco international since 2016, Achraf Hakimi has earned 36 caps (4 goals, 6 assists) and took part in the 2018 World Cup with the Atlas Lions.

"I feel a great sense of pride today, said Achraf Hakimi after signing his contract. After Spain, Germany and Italy, Paris Saint-Germain offers me the chance to discover a new championship with one of the most prestigious clubs in the world. I can't wait to meet my new teammates, the fans and experience the incredible colour and passion inside the Parc des Princes. I share the same big ambitions as the coaching staff and my teammates and will do everything I can to deliver what is expected of me."

"We are delighted to welcome Achraf Hakimi to Paris Saint-Germain today, said Nasser Al-Khelaïfi, Chairman and CEO of Paris Saint-Germain. This calibre of signing shows the level of our ambitions - we continue to build something very special. Achraf may only be 22 years old and has already established himself as one of the most talended full-backs in world football - these are the standards we set at the club. I know Achraf will have a fantastic career with us and the whole club wishes him every success in our colours."

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Achraf Hakimi signs for Paris Saint-Germain

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Paris Saint-Germain is delighted to announce the transfer of Achraf Hakimi. The 22-year-old Morocco right-back, who also has Spanish nationality, signed a five-year contract and is tied the club from the French capital until 30 June 2026. Born in Madrid, Achraf Hakimi joined the Real Madrid youth academy at seven years of age in 2006.

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It's the early hours of Thursday, June 27, 1996 and England's Euro 96 is over. The street cleaners brush away the last of the debris, the plug has been pulled on Wembley's floodlights, and the Twin Towers are left alone to ruminate once more on a nation's heartache.

A group of young men huddle in a bar, not wanting to go to bed, not wanting to say goodbye, because that would confirm it really is all over. They sit, talking about the match and the six weeks before it. This is the England squad, freshly knocked out of their own European Championship by the old enemy, Germany - using their old weapon, penalties.

"After the semi-final, we'd been told we could drive home, but not one of us did," remembers Teddy Sheringham. "The atmosphere was dead... dead... dead. The bubbly nature of the squad had gone, but no one wanted to leave. Even in defeat there was a togetherness. So we all stayed there, had a few beers and reminisced."

It all ended in beers. To the press and the public, it had started the same way, with the squad vilified for its boozy antics on a pre-tournament tour to Hong Kong. Overpaid, overindulged and overly intoxicated off the pitch, this England team were stagnant and predictable on it. They were nobody's heroes.

Over the course of five encounters at Wembley, however, that slowly changed. With each scintillating performance, the Euro 96 vintage became England's last truly great football team. They may have lost a tournament, but they won a nation.

This is how they did it...

A new boss

(Image credit: PA Images)

As 1993 became the World Cup year of 1994, the country clamoured for one man. The Graham Taylor years had produced nothing of note, beside references to root vegetables. English football's allotment had become a quagmire, and it was the rich soil provided by Terry Venables that most people agreed was the antidote.

Unlike Taylor, Venables was seen as a forward-thinking coach: a man who had worked abroad, who could improve and motivate players - and serve drinks to the press at his Kensington nightclub.

His first game, in March 1994, was a 1-0 win over European champions Denmark, followed by a healthy 5-0 hammering of World Cup-bound Greece. That the latter was seen by just 23,000 fans at Wembley showed how the nation - despite the Venables factor - was yet to buy into the idea of a new dawn.

The friendlies were clunky, but to the players, there was an air of change. The approach was less rigid; the training and matches geared toward different tactics.

"England don't have friendly games," explains Alan Shearer. "If you play badly, you're still going to get hammered. We worked on different systems, though, and we were becoming a flexible squad."

That flexibility was clear in the inclusion of players such as Gareth Southgate, a ball-playing defender happy in midfield, while youth was represented in the forms of Robbie Fowler, Sol Campbell, Gary Neville and Phil Neville.

The nation was unconvinced. England went into the tournament ranked 14th in Europe. As ever, the left side was an issue: Graeme Le Saux had broken his leg, and neither Steve McManaman nor Darren Anderton felt natural there. Venables' Christmas Tree formation was ridiculed, and to sections of the press, the squad had a cliquey feel in which players were picked on reputation rather than merit.

"I'd played under Terry at Spurs and he got me involved straight away," continues Sheringham. "My association with him didn't go down well with the press, who said I was one of Terry's boys."

Sheringham wasn't the only one dealing with flak. Since scoring a brace against the USA in September 1994, Shearer had failed to score in any of his previous dozen international appearances leading up to Euro 96 - and the knives were out.

"My confidence wasn't great," recalls the former striker. "There were question marks everywhere against my ability at this level. But you have to keep belief; I was still scoring for fun at Blackburn. The best thing Terry did for me, about a month before the tournament, was to take me aside and say, 'You'll be starting - you're my centre-forward'. I thought, 'Wow, what a boost'."

"There was no doubt that he would play," Venables later told FourFourTwo. "He was, quite simply, a goalscorer. You can never leave a player like that out."

Venables always remained bullish, even saying, "I won't be satisfied unless we get to the final". Few, however, were buying it.

"The friendlies hadn't gone too well," journalist Brian Woolnough, then of The Sun, commented in 2012. "Terry and the team were taking a lot of stick - mostly from me and my paper - but he was adamant. 'Judge me when it matters,' he'd say. He must have said it 50 times."

Venables saw things that perhaps others didn't

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England at Euro 96: The untold story of the summer football almost came home

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It's the early hours of Thursday, June 27, 1996 and England's Euro 96 is over. The street cleaners brush away the last of the debris, the plug has been pulled on Wembley's floodlights, and the Twin Towers are left alone to ruminate once more on a nation's heartache.

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The Argentine's move to Parc des Princes was the biggest story of the summer, but what impact has he had on the club's revenue stream?

PSG snapped Messi up on a free transfer following his departure from Barcelona in the summer, tying the Argentine down to a two-season deal with the option of an extra year.

The capture of the seven-time Ballon d'Or winner was perceived by many to be the biggest coup of the last transfer window, but what effect has he had on PSG's revenue stream so far?

GOAL is here with everything you need to know.

How many Messi shirts have PSG sold?

PSG have sold almost one million Messi-printed jerseys to date in 2022-21, GOAL can confirm.

The club's sponsorship director Marc Armstrong says the 34-year-old's arrival led to record-breaking overall shirt sales for the year and believes they would have been even higher had it not been for the manufacturing delays caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

"He's a great asset. From a commercial point of view, the impact is incredible,"Armstrong told GOAL.

"We believe that last year we sold more shirts than any other club, and this year will be even better. It's definitely the best jersey launch in terms of sales with at least a 30-40% increase in demand.

"The demand has been enormous. If we could produce more, we would sell even more."

Have PSG attracted more sponsors?

Armstrong also revealed sponsorship offers began flooding in for PSG as soon as Messi's departure from Barca was confirmed.

The French giants moved quickly to win the race for the Argentine international's signature and are now reaping the rewards as external companies also seek to profit on his popularity.

Partnerships have been agreed with brands such as Autohero, Crypto.com, Smart Good Things and Gorillas as PSG have been able to rake in millions in additional revenue.

"There has been an impact and the partners are committed to our price. Previously, demand was already strong, but now it is greater than ever," Armstrong added.

"We immediately had a significant increase in offers and even before he officially signed in Paris, there were a lot of requests.

"We have really felt an impact in all of our business areas: from sponsorship and merchandising to hospitality and ticketing."
Has PSG's social media following increased?
PSG's online presence has grown exponentially with Messi on their books, with 20 million subscribers gained across all of their social media platforms in the first week after his signing alone.

GOAL understands that number has increased by one million every month since, and Armstrong says another club record fell on the day he was officially confirmed as a PSG player.

"Our community is at an all-time high, with 150 million social media fans," he said. "We had the highest engagement rate in the history of player announcements, all club and player accounts combined."

What about ticket sales?

Messi, who has recorded six goals and five assists in his first 15 appearances for PSG, has also had a positive effect on the club's ticket sales.

Armstrong admits that the club are struggling to keep up with demand as they continue to sell out every fixture well in advance, with price hikes now inevitable in the hospitality sector.

However, PSG's sponsorship chief has promised that normal tickets will remain affordable for the general public regardless of how much registration levels increase.

"There is a huge demand that we, unfortunately, cannot fully meet at the moment, so interest in the secondary market is growing as you would expect," said Armstrong.

"This is one of the many elements that we will be considering in the pricing strategy and in all of our ongoing renewal discussions. It would not be surprising if prices go up.

"This is a point on which we are working. In the general public areas of the stadium, we are nevertheless committed to keeping prices affordable to allow all our fans to enjoy the Paris Saint-Germain experience."

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Messi financial boost to PSG revealed: Shirt sales, sponsorship and social media breakdown | Goal.com UK

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The Argentine's move to Parc des Princes was the biggest story of the summer, but what impact has he had on the club's revenue stream? PSG snapped Messi up on a free transfer following his departure from Barcelona in the summer, tying the Argentine down to a two-season deal with the option of an extra year.

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Last year, Everton signed a sleeve sponsorship deal with popular mobile game Angry Birds.

Sleeve sponsorships are still relatively new ground for Premier League clubs and whilst partnerships are nothing new for anyone involved in football, any sponsor who takes pride of place on the shirt should surely be one a club should work with to mutual benefit. The Toffees were one of the first to jump on the sleeve partnership, though it did seem slightly odd at the time... the natural link between football club and mobile app where birds fly into things being less obvious than usual.

But it's always interesting to see how such partnerships are activated. Especially this one!

???? | Introducing the first footballers to feature in @AngryBirds ...

Gylfi Sigurdsson, @CenkTosun_ and @TheoWalcott!

Download Angry Birds Evolution now to play ➡️ https://t.co/XbbnFhdjMG pic.twitter.com/3JcJjF5BM7

- Everton (@Everton) August 22, 2018

Today, Everton and Angry Birds partnered to bring three Toffees players, Theo Walcott, Cenk Tosun and Gylfi Sigurdsson into the game itself.

When you think about it, short of building some sort of football game into the app itself, the only way the two could partner in a meaningful way was probably to turn some Everton players into playable Angry Birds. Which is exactly what they've done.

It's something which will probably see a lot of press and social media chatter over the next few days. Mostly because it's likely to seem strange, jarring or even cringeworthy for some fans at first. And yet, this is the sort of strategic partnership that clubs should have in mind when they partner with another brand. Especially when it's a brand which will adorn the club's kit for a season or more. Wouldn't it have been worse to see Everton simply throw out a few Angry Tweets here and there saying 'download now' instead of actually partnering in a meaningful way?

It's also great to see sponsors actually put time and effort into creating something to bring that partnership to life. Just spending money to attach a name to a football club's brand and get in front of their fans with a few social media posts feels a bit meaningless. And even if Angry Birds have had to spend even more extra money just to enhance their partnership, you get the feeling it'll be more impactful because of it.

In any case, Theo Walcott seems pleased:

Excited to have a character within @AngryBirds Evolution! DOWNLOAD NOW to play as me, @CenkTosun_ and Gylfi https://t.co/0JjcPhX976 " pic.twitter.com/nzZ3c96F0R

- Theo Walcott (@theowalcott) August 22, 2018

So maybe that means it's mission accomplished!

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Why Angry Birds' partnership with Everton is actually great

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Last year, Everton signed a sleeve sponsorship deal with popular mobile game Angry Birds. Sleeve sponsorships are still relatively new ground for Premier League clubs and whilst partnerships are nothing new for anyone involved in football, any sponsor who takes pride of place on the shirt should surely be one a club should work with to mutual benefit.

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The relationship between fashion and football is nothing new. First it was the fans, the so-called casuals who became style pioneers in the 1970s and '80s, importing European luxury brands like Stone Island and Fila before anyone else, and inventing terrace fashion in the process. Then there's fashion itself - which seems to find an evergreen source of inspiration in the game, as Martine Rose, Liam Hodges and just about every other designer with half an eye on the wider world has shown us.

Even footballers themselves, so long anti-Midases of fashion - prone to trucker hats, bootcut jeans and anything else from the bad taste section in the Trafford Centre - have gotten in on the act. Post- Beckham, it's Arsenal's some-time full-back Hector Bellerin leading the charge, perhaps spending as much time on the front row of Fashion Week as he does in the Emirates dugout.

However, when it comes to the clubs, the kits, the official end of football fashion... the results have traditionally been lacking at best, downright upsetting at worst. Football gear is easily recontextualised by Dover Street lads, high-end designers and streetwear brands - but as clubs are largely run by normie marketing execs and ex-players, we've rarely seen kits and training wear that match the stylistic pull of the game itself.

Football's changing style icons: George Best, David Beckham, Andrea Pirlo, Hector Bellerin

For every Fiorucci-sponsored Milan kit, every Balenciaga-esque David James jersey or Wavey Garms-friendly retro football shirt - there has been many a dud, deadlock or disaster. People have started entire blogs about terrible football kits, where they can lament the infamous Hull City 'tiger' kit, Coventry's dirt brown number from '78 and Chelsea's 'broken TV grey and Tango orange' away offering from the '94/95 season.

There is still an ongoing disconnect between what fans think looks good and what clubs do. Despite the hugely hyped social media announcements, the massive sponsorship deals, the staged drops, a lot of modern football kits are still major disappointments - victims of both over- and underthinking. Arsenal's '19/20 'bruised banana' away kit being just one of the most recent examples.

But there are real signs of change out there. Sportswear dominates men's fashion, and football culture is fashionable again. Magazines like Mundial are dedicated to it. Loyle Carner wears football shirts on stage. Drake wears them all the time. All of which means the shiny suit brigade who tend to run things have started to hand over some aesthetic power to a younger generation, who in turn look high fashion and streetwear for inspiration.

Football fans, 1985

One of the great kit successes of recent years, one that you'll probably find in almost any conurbation larger than 500 people on earth, is the home kit of Paris Saint-Germain - the gold-standard bearer for trendy football tops. This shirt, from a little-loved team, in a little-watched league has become something of an iconic garment in recent years. It isn't the most beautiful or flashy number, but something about its simplicity, and its prominence in music videos by rappers like PNL and MHD has cemented it as a must-have piece. Most recently it was seen on 'Alex from Glasto' - who, being from Somerset probably doesn't follow Thomas Tuchel's boys home and away, but finds something in the connotations it provides.

It might be hard to define why that shirt has become so popular (and it definitely isn't the team itself), but it's a standard that many clubs and even national sides are clearly trying to emulate: an instantly recognisable, collectable kit that goes beyond traditional local allegiances, in a way that American basketball vests often do.

Jordan x Paris Saint Germain

Following on from the accidental success of its home kit, PSG has now created something of a diffusion line, its very own 'X' collaboration with Nike Jordan - who interestingly, are very much pioneers in the field of sportswear as streetwear. Looking at the pieces, it's not too hard to imagine that they might become the official PSG kit one day.

Also looking for credibility (not to mention a Champions League) is Juventus - which has formed an unlikely allegiance with Palace Skateboards. At first, there was a rumour Palace was actually going to be doing the official kit, but Adidas quickly quelled that by releasing probably the worst Juve kit in years. Cristiano Ronaldo might not be wearing Palace just yet, but the collaboration shows the ambition of both Palace and Juventus, both in their own sectors and in the global market of cool where a football team can now be as hip as a brand or rapper if they want to be.

Palace x Juventus

There are other examples of a kind of growing ambition in this field keep coming: Chelsea's latest away shirt pays homage to the club's association with the Kings Road, paying tribute to its mod/ska history with a Fred Perry-esque collar. Reactions are mixed, but it certainly beats some of the recent offerings which seem to have been aimed at 14-year-old chat stream nerds in Atlanta and Kuala Lumpur. It's a shame that the home kit, with its borderline deep-V neck and lame pattern effect doesn't look half as good.

Then there's the 2018 Nigeria World Cup kit - which became a real hot piece for even the casual fan, far more so than any of the more established team's efforts - most likely because it wasn't scared to be bold, on-trend, and understanding of the culture of the team it was worn by. Resellers went crazy for it and it's already been re-released a number of times, like the best Air Jordan shoes.

Nigerian 2018 World Cup Kit

And don't forget the tracksuits and training wear - once upon a time only worn by club physios - but in the age of athleisure, deeply fashionable. Naturally, PSG seems to lead the charge in this.

Football is starting to broaden its aesthetic horizons. We might be a long way off seeing the Virgil Abloh X Stoke City home kit we all really want to see, but clubs are certainly looking towards the streets and the catwalks for inspiration, and that can only be a good thing. As long as it stays interesting and collaborative, rather than hackneyed and cynical, we might just be looking at a new golden era of football kits. Or those 'worst kits ever' blogs might have a few more entries yet.

The Champions League Of Fashionable Football Shirts

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How Football Went Fashion | FashionBeans

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The relationship between fashion and football is nothing new. First it was the fans, the so-called casuals who became style pioneers in the 1970s and '80s, importing European luxury brands like Stone Island and Fila before anyone else, and inventing terrace fashion in the process.

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ick Parry is showing me the most important document in the recent history of British sport. He has a photo of it on his phone. "Here it is in my handwriting," he says. "Graham was upstairs, waiting for me to tell him, and I'd forgotten to put FA. So that's Graham's writing on the top going 'by the way, that's the FA Premier League'."

"Graham" is Graham Kelly, the former chief executive of the Football Association. In 1991 he hired Parry to help him with a problem. Out of that problem was born a football competition that has become a global brand, a sporting hegemon and a form of soft power for the United Kingdom in the 21st century. But visible even in its totemic "founders' agreement", the document on Parry's phone, were the tensions that would make the Premier League sometimes as reviled as it was beloved.

The Premier League turns 25 this summer and there is much to celebrate. It is by far the most popular national football competition in the world, watched avidly on television by fans in 210 countries. At home, capacity crowds attend fiercely competitive matches in brand new stadiums, largely free from disorder or disruption. The competition has dozens of star players, almost all the most famous managers, and creates enough drama to feed a relentless media appetite. It is also, again by far, football's richest competition, generating £4.865bn in revenue during the 2015-16 season, according to the financial analysts Deloitte.

The story of how the Premier League came into being is one of determination and deceit, of clubbable bureaucracy coming face to face with free-wheeling entrepreneurialism. In effect it is a story of its age, the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Thatcherism had smashed post-war orthodoxies but created little in its place. Football, the national game, was on its knees: stigmatised as a crucible for hooliganism, grieving after the tragedy of Hillsborough. The sport was loathed by government and struggling to make ends meet. Yet a great opportunity was approaching and a small number of ambitious men were ready to seize it.

First among those men were Greg Dyke and David Dein. Dein was then deputy chairman of Arsenal, one of the Big Five, the clubs with the most storied heritage and the greatest crowds in English football (the other four were Manchester United, Liverpool, Everton and Tottenham Hotspur). Dein was fascinated by the high-rolling razzmatazz of American sport and frustrated by the endless sub-committees of the Football League, the competition to which his club then belonged. Dyke, meanwhile, was at that time both chief executive of London Weekend Television and the chairman of ITV Sport and liked watching football almost as much as he liked doing deals.

The two men, who remain good friends, had first met in 1988 at a fashionable Japanese restaurant called Suntory. Dyke wanted to show the Big Five's matches on ITV and offered to buy their rights separately from the rest of the 22 clubs who formed the League's elite First Division. If such a plan were to have come to pass it would in effect have amounted to a breakaway competition.

The Football League found out about the discussion and went into conniptions; so desperate were they to prevent such a deal they sold TV rights to the entire First Division for four years on terms that suited both broadcaster and clubs. ITV could show matches at a new time of 5pm on Sunday and the clubs got to keep 75% of the money, rather than sharing 50% with lower league clubs as had previously been the case.

"That year I bought the whole of the Football League for the cost of one match now. And I got shit for it at ITV for paying too much," says Dyke, now in a fashionable "kitchen" in Soho. When the deal began to approach its end the Big Five were keen to make more money still but Dyke did not believe it was possible. "I had a dinner at LWT with the Big Five and I said: 'We're not going to get this deal again. The League are better organised. We're not going to get the same deal, so what are we going to do?'

"David Dein said: 'It's time to break away.' They were going to break away and had worked out that the absolutely crucial element of this was the FA. If they could get the governing body on side, then they could do it."

In most of the conversations that helped inform this article, the word most commonly used in relation to the Football Association was "tragedy". The Premier League could not exist without the FA, it is registered at companies house as the Football Association Premier League, and yet the parent exerts almost no control over the child.

As evinced by Graham Kelly's amendment to the founders' agreement, the parentage was uncertain even at its conception. In 2017, many of the problems afflicting the English game, from the lack of young English players in the top flight to the feeling of disenchantment some have with the cost of watching the game, would seem soluble if the interests of the game's governing body were aligned with that of its most valuable asset.

In 1991, however, the FA was not looking over the horizon. It was worried about a newly aggressive Football League. Spurred by the threat of the 1988 breakaway, the League had produced a manifesto, One Game, One Team, One Voice, which mooted a holistic approach to the development of all levels of football, with the League at its centre, of course. This was particularly galling for Kelly, who had left the League for the FA just months previously. When the Big Five, through their ambassadors Dein and Liverpool's Noel White, approached him with the intention to secede once again, they found a receptive audience.

After meeting the pair, Kelly got straight to work. The FA commissioned an executive from Saatchi & Saatchi, Alex Fynn, to imagine how a new league might be organised and the revenues it might generate. Kelly also hired Parry, then a management consultant at Ernst & Young, to act as emissary to the Big Five.

"The first few weeks I was doing the running around and there were regular meetings of the five clubs," says Parry. These meetings were conducted in secret, though perhaps they could have been more discreet; one with Manchester United's Martin Edwards was held at a Manchester hotel under the name "Martin and co". "Against all expectations, the First Division had just gone back from 20 to 22 clubs, which was hardly helpful to the England team. We envisaged a reduction to 18 clubs. David was very keen on it, others much less so, they were conscious of loss of revenue."

A reduction to 18 clubs was also part of Fynn's plan. He had calculated the substantial revenues available from increased TV exposure. Off the back of them he envisaged a restructuring of the entire league system, with an elite division resting on a pyramid of regional competitions. There would be more "event" matches, the England team would benefit and, crucially, the FA would take a significant percentage of any broadcast revenue (up to 40%) to reinvest in the national and grassroots game. In effect, England would become more like Germany. Fynn presented his plan to the FA's board full of optimism.

By the time the FA announced plans for a breakaway league on 5 April 1991, only a desire to reduce the division to 18 clubs remained. The new league had become simply a transfer of power, from the Football League to the FA. The League immediately began legal proceedings. It also observed that all clubs registered in the League needed to serve a notice period of three years before quitting; a potentially fatal clause because clubs would have to resign not knowing if, by the time the breakaway eventually arrived, they would even be in it or not.

Still, plans for the competition, now known as the Premier League (the title having been adjudged less confrontational than the original "Super League") pushed relentlessly onwards. With more and more clubs interested, a meeting was convened with the FA to discuss the fine print. It was to be a fateful meeting.

Dein describes the encounter as "probably a missed opportunity". Held at the FA's Lancaster Gate offices, it was conducted by the FA's chairman, Sir Bert Millichip, later to be dubbed by Brian Glanville as Bert the Inert. His counterparts were a gaggle of football chairmen desperate to take control of their own destiny. The agenda soon turned to the reduction to 18 clubs. Some of the smaller teams, worried about being excluded, wanted to know if this was mandatory. Sir Bert shrugged his shoulders and said: "It's your league, you decide."

"I was looking at Graham and thinking: 'Hang on, isn't that pretty fundamental?'," says Parry of the moment the FA ceded control of the direction of English football. "It took me by surprise, I think it took everybody by surprise. He was referring to the 18 clubs, but the message people heard was 'it's our league, we'll make the big decisions'."

Fynn is more scathing of the way the FA let go of the reins. "They were a poorly run organisation," he says. "They felt their way of doing things was threatened by the Football League and their first priority was to head that off. In backing breakaway clubs they saw a way to destroy the power of the Football League. All I can say is that they were incompetent and that they had no vision; how could a 42-game league help the England team?"

We knew we had an airplane on the runway ready to take off, but we didn't know how high it was going to fly

It was an historic moment, the blazers hustled by the suits. For those who have since watched the England team struggle or seen their club fall ever further behind the zenith of the domestic game, with the chance of winning the Premier League not even a dream, it is indeed a sporting tragedy. But at that very moment something miraculous also happened, a piece of administrative genius that would capture another, vastly greater audience. Within minutes of Millichip's fateful words, the clubs had heard enough. They announced they would design the league among themselves. Millichip, in a further act of anachronistic gentlemanliness, offered them a conference room next door. The clubs took it and appointed Parry, who had been working in a second role for Kelly as ambassador on behalf of the breakaway, to a third job: that of chairman of the putative league.

In that meeting, which lasted less than two hours, the clubs and Parry created the founders' agreement. It is not legally binding but it has acquired a kind of sanctity, close to that of a religious text. Inside were two simple changes that were to prove incredibly profound. The first was that, within the Premier League, everything would be voted on by the clubs, every club would have one vote, and every vote would require a two-thirds majority to pass. There would be no committees or sub-committees. Secondly, at the behest of the smaller clubs, all TV revenue would be split in a new way. The Premier League would no longer share its money with the lower divisions. But neither would the Big Five take a share commensurate to their size. All money would be divided 50-25-25. 50% was to be split equally between the clubs, 25% according to the league position achieved in the previous season and only 25% dependent on the number of times a club appeared on TV. (A footnote: any international TV revenues, which then were nigh-on zero, were to be divided equally.)

Soon The Premier League announced itself as a legal entity separate from the FA. It may have ditched first the Football League, then the FA before it had even come into existence, but it had also created a framework that would not have been possible under either. By streamlining its governance, the Premier League was more agile than its predecessors. By altering the TV formula, each club had a stake in making it work. This would not have been possible under either. It was one ideally suited to a new era, in which television would become the most important way to consume the sport, and where that sport would be less a competition between domestic tribes and more an internationalised branch of the entertainment industry.

According to Dein: "To make an omelette you need to break some eggs and we broke a lot of eggs at the time. We were forming a new legal entity, rebranding ourselves with a far improved voting structure where we could be master of our own destiny. We had the opportunity to drive the game forward for the benefit of all stakeholders. We knew we had an airplane on the runway ready to take off, but we didn't know how high it was going to fly."

The Football League went on to lose its case in the High Court. The clubs tendered their resignation and Parry physically handed 22 letters to the League at its base in Lytham St Annes. "They invited me in and gave me a cup of tea," he says. "They were nice people." The clubs were bought out of their notice period, with the FA bizarrely offering to foot the bill. A deal brokering relegation and promotion with the League was also agreed. The Premier League, ultimately to be comprised of 20 teams, was set to launch in August 1992. Now all this broadcast-friendly creation needed was to make sure it got on to TV.

Waiting, ready to return to the centre of the story, was Greg Dyke. The idea conceived in Suntory had come to fruition; the Big Five could now sign a new, lucrative deal with ITV without having to pass a share of the money down the leagues. But there were two complications: first, under the new League's constitution, Crystal Palace and Chelsea had as much clout as Spurs or Everton and they resented Dyke for the way the previous deal had been arranged; second, and the significance of this change should hardly need stating, Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB was now an interested party. While Dyke re-established contact with the Big Five, Murdoch went to work on Parry.

While others would later be flown to private islands, Parry had to make do with a trip to Sky's payments processing centre in Livingston. The company at that time was mired in debts of more than £2bn but, flattered as he may have been, Parry saw the potential to build a partnership that ran deeper than one game a week on a Sunday afternoon.

"The relationship with Sky is one of the key reasons for the success of the Premier League," Parry says. "Look at the energy they've put into growing the game and promoting it. [Former Sky chief executive] Sam Chisholm memorably said it was the greatest corporate romance of all time."

Get your arse here and blow them out of the water

ITV thought they were in the driving seat. Trevor East, then Dyke's deputy and later to become head of Sky Sports, believed he and Parry had come to an understanding while watching Nigel Benn fight Hector Abel Lescano in December 1991. But Parry denied this had happened. By 18 May 1992, however, at the meeting where the Premier League were to select a TV partner, only one bid was up for voting on and that was Sky's. What happened that day slipped into Premier League folklore almost immediately. East had arrived early at the Royal Lancaster Hotel with envelopes under his arm. A deadline for bids had been set for the previous midnight, but East chose to ignore it. He presented the clubs with a proposal that would yield £262m over five years for 30 live games a season. When Parry found out he immediately called Chisholm, who woke up Murdoch in New York, who authorised another bid.

Less effective, but certainly as dramatic, was the performance of Alan Sugar. Along with Terry Venables, Sugar had recently acquired control of Spurs. He also had a deal to manufacture Sky's satellite dishes. With Venables suddenly called from the meeting, Sugar held Spurs' once solid ITV vote in his hands. After seeing East's revised bid he tore into the lobby of the hotel, got Chisholm on the phone and demanded he "get your fucking arse round here and blow them out of the water". Dyke says: "We said: 'Who are you speaking to?' and he said: 'I'm talking to my girlfriend!'" Parry recalls: "Sam was saying to him: 'Get off the bloody phone, I'm trying to get this thing sorted!'"

Sky came back with a vastly improved deal worth £42m more over the five years than ITV were willing to pay. They would show 60 games a season and promised a return for Match of the Day, with the BBC paying for highlights. This was the deal that was put to Premier League clubs. It was passed 14 to 6.

Dyke is now phlegmatic about the decision. "I was a bit naive, because it was always going to end up on pay TV at some stage," he says. "If we'd have won you'd just have had a single Sunday afternoon game like we'd done the previous four years. We might have won it that time but in the end pay TV would have won out."

Such were Sky's debts that, had they lost, they might not even have been in business by the time the next negotiation came along. But they won. On
16 August 1992 Richard Keys presented the first Super Sunday, Nottingham Forest versus Liverpool. The Premier League era had begun.

This article was amended on 24 July 2017 to remove a quote from Greg Dyke that said Rick Parry had been flown up to meet Rupert Murdoch in person.

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Deceit, determination and Murdoch's millions: how Premier League was born

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ick Parry is showing me the most important document in the recent history of British sport. He has a photo of it on his phone. "Here it is in my handwriting," he says. "Graham was upstairs, waiting for me to tell him, and I'd forgotten to put FA.

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Qatar is set to host the world's largest football spectacle, but the country's ambitions have been mired in controversy from the start.

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'We lack personality, it's one of our flaws': Kylian Mbappe delivers damning verdict on PSG after 5-1 humiliation at the hands of Lille

PSG suffered a shocking and humiliating 5-1 loss to Lille in Ligue 1 on Sunday

Despite the loss, PSG can be crowned champions by beating Nantes in midweek

But Kylian Mbappe sounded very concerned when he spoke to Canal Plus

Mbappe said: 'We lack personality, it's one of our flaws, we have to correct this'

Paris St Germain must show more character, striker Kylian Mbappe said on Sunday after his team suffered a 5-1 humiliation at Lille which delayed their Ligue 1 title celebrations.

The French champions were reduced to 10 men after Juan Bernat had cancelled out Thomas Meunier's early own goal. They went on to concede four times in the second half for their heaviest league defeat under their Qatari owners.

Qatar Sports Investment have invested more than €1billion (£860million) on players since they took control in 2011.

'It was a box-to-box game, some moments we were in control, some moments we were not,' France forward Mbappe, who had two goals disallowed before Bernat was sent off in the 36th minute, told Canal Plus.

PSG will be crowned champions on Wednesday if they win at Nantes. They have 81 points after 31 games to second-placed Lille's 64 after 32 matches.

'We're going to be champions but we cannot lose like this,' the 20-year-old Mbappe added.

'It's not normal. We lack personality, it's one of our flaws, we have to correct this. We played like debutants.'

Coach Thomas Tuchel did not share the player's point of view, pointing out that PSG only had 15 players available for the match.

'It's not possible, even Thilo Kehrer who came on for Thiago Silva was ill today,' the German said.

'I don't even know how many players I can take to Nantes.

'We don't have enough players. Nobody talks about it because we win but today was just too much.'

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'We lack personality, it's one of our flaws': Kylian Mbappe on PSG

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PSG suffered a shocking and humiliating 5-1 loss to Lille in Ligue 1 on Sunday Despite the loss, PSG can be crowned champions by beating Nantes in midweek But Kylian Mbappe sounded very concerned when he spoke to Canal Plus Mbappe said: 'We lack personality, it's one of our flaws, we have to correct this' Paris St Germain must show more character, striker Kylian Mbappe said on Sunday after his team suffered a 5-1 humiliation at Lille which delayed their Ligue 1 title celebrations.

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A smashed window, SAS & kung-fu kick - how Blackburn won the Premier League

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Twenty-five years on from Blackburn’s dramatic title win, those involved tell how they conquered the Premier League.

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Fifa has confirmed alcohol will be banned for World Cup fans at grounds in a major and unprecedented volte-face just two days before the tournament will kick off in Qatar. The news that it will not be sold inside or around the perimeter of stadiums was confirmed by Fifa in a terse statement on Friday afternoon.

It said: "Following discussions between host country authorities and Fifa, a decision has been made to focus the sale of alcoholic beverages on the Fifa Fan Festival, other fan destinations and licensed venues, removing sales points of beer from Qatar's World Cup 2022 stadium perimeters.

"There is no impact to the sale of Bud Zero, which will remain available at all Qatar's World Cup stadiums."

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The statement added: "Host country authorities and Fifa will continue to ensure that the stadiums and surrounding areas provide an enjoyable, respectful and pleasant experience for all fans. The tournament organisers appreciate AB InBev's [the brewer of Budweiser, Anheuser-Busch InBev] understanding and continuous support to our joint commitment to cater for everyone during the Fifa World Cup Qatar 2022."

However football's governing body will now be looking nervously over its shoulders at the prospect of legal action from Budweiser, which has a $75m (£63m) sponsorship agreement with Fifa, and is likely to regard this as a major breach of contract.

In a tweet - since deleted - moments just before the news became official the US beer brand said: "Well, this is awkward..."

The sale of alcohol is strictly controlled in Qatar, a conservative Muslim nation, but organisers had promised it would be available in match venues and in fan zones - and that it would also be reasonable priced.

However it has now decided that alcohol will be available at matches only in hospitality boxes, where the cheapest suites are nearly £20,000 a match, and some fan zones after 7pm, where it will cost nearly £12 for 500ml of Budweiser.

The Guardian understands the decision was taken after the Qataris, as the host nation, decided that everyone inside World Cup stadiums had to feel comfortable - and that this would not be the case if fans were seen drinking alcohol or turned up drunk.

In their view, this is a tournament where there will be a large number of supporters from Gulf and Asian countries, where drinking alcohol is not part of the culture. And whereas there are some alcohol-free fan zones in Doha, in a stadium it is hard to escape people who have been drinking.

However it is unclear why they have taken the decision now and not in the 12 years since winning the right to host the tournament. Until recently organisers had always said that they would find a way to find a middle ground between western fans' tastes and Qatar's conservative culture.

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That message was reiterated most recently by Fatma al-Nuaimi, head of communications for the Supreme Committee, who said: "When it comes to alcohol, hospitality is part of our culture, even if alcohol is not. There will be designated areas where drinks will be served, especially the fan zones. So it will be in the places where the fans will gather, but not openly on the streets."

The organisation's official fan guide also states that "ticket holders will have access to Budweiser, Budweiser Zero, and Coca-Cola products within the stadium perimeter" for at least three hours before games, and for one hour afterwards.

The news was greeted with frustration by the Football Supporters' Association, which questioned whether the Qataris could now be trusted on their other promises. "Some fans like a beer at a match and some don't, but the real issue is the last minute U-turn which speaks to a wider problem - the total lack of communication and clarity from the organising committee towards supporters," a spokesperson said.

"If they can change their minds on this at a moment's notice, with no explanation, supporters will have understandable concerns about whether they will fulfil other promises relating to accommodation, transport or cultural issues."

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Qatar bans beer from World Cup stadiums after 11th-hour U-turn

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Fifa has confirmed alcohol will be banned for World Cup fans at grounds in a major and unprecedented volte-face two days before the tournament kicks off

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Manchester United trophies prove that it is one of the greatest clubs in the world. Its fanbase keeps growing despite the experienced turbulent times the club has suffered, including a trophy drought period of more than five years. This article highlights the number of trophies the Red Devils have won so far and other details.

With a rich history that began 144 years ago, Manchester United has become a dominant figure in English football and the world. It is among the world's leading English clubs on the men's side and holds top positions on lists of international teams with the highest number of competitive honours. Read on to know all Manchester United trophies and the years won.

Manchester United's profile summary

Manchester United trophies list

Manchester United has a net worth of around $4.2 billion and its current mrket value is about $2.10 billion. Since its inception in 1878, the club as won 66 trophies. Here is a complete breakdown of all the trophies they won year by year.

Exciting feature: Check out news exactly for YOU ➡️ find "Recommended for you" block and enjoy!

How many trophies do Manchester United have?

MFUC has won 66 titles from 1908 to 2022.

How many trophies have Manchester United won in 2022?

Manchester United has not bagged a title this year.

Manchester United European trophies

Regarding European trophies, the Red Devils are one of the most successful clubs from the English side, with a total of 6 trophies from all of its tours. Below is a complete breakdown of Manchester United's European trophies:

UEFA Champions League

Man United became the first English club to win a European title in 1968 by beating Benfica 4-1 in the final. It was under manager Matt Busby. This was a decade after eight iconic players died in the Munich air disaster.

In 1999 the club defeated Bayern Munich 2-1 to win the title under the management of Alex Ferguson. The club saw triumph by beating their English counterparts Chelsea in the penalties to lift the trophy for the third time in 2008.

UEFA Cup Winners' Cup

Coming from the 1985 ban imposed on them, Manchester United defeated Barcelona in the Final to lift a European title for the first time in 23 years.

UEFA Super Cup

Under the Stewardship of Alex Ferguson, the Red Devils defeated the Serbian side Red Star Belgrade to lift their first and only European Super Cup title.

UEFA Europa League

The UEFA Europa League is one of the Red Devils' most recent cups. They defeated their Dutch counterparts Ajax 2-0 to win the trophy under Jose Mourinho's management.

What are Manchester United trophies in the last 10 years?

Man United has undergone a huge transformational change in the last ten years. They have had seven coaches after Alex Ferguson's departure. The change has impacted the club's performance. The number of Man U's trophies has reduced significantly in the last ten years compared to previous decades. Below are the trophies won by the Red Devils from 2012 to 2022:

1 Premier League (2012-13)

1 FA Cup (2015-16)

1 UEFA Europa League (2016-17)

1 EFL/ Carabao Cup (2016-17)

1 Community Shield (2016-17)

What are Manchester United's trophies in the last 5 years?

The Red Devils have experienced a trophy drought for the past five years. They bagged the FA Community Shield, Europa League, and League Cup in the 2016/17 season. The team has not won the Premier League title since Sir Alex Ferguson left in 2013.

How many trophies did Alex win with the Red Devils?

Alex Ferguson is Man Utd's most successful and longest-serving manager (close to three decades). During his time, the club won 38 trophies, including 2 UEFA Champions League titles, 5 FA Cups, and 13 league titles between 1986 and 2013. Below is a detailed breakdown of all the trophies Manchester United won before, during, and after coach Alex Ferguson's time.

When did Man Utd last win a trophy?

Man United's last major trophy was the 2017 Europa League title under Jose Mourinho. They also won the Community Shield and Carabao Cup in the season.

Who has more trophies, Man U or Liverpool?

Liverpool has 67 trophies, while Manchester United has 66 as of 2022.

How many trophies did Ronaldo win at Manchester United?

Cristiano Ronaldo scored 118 goals from 292 appearances during his first stint with the Red Devils. He won over 300 trophies and medals by January 2021, with some dating back to his childhood.

How many trophies does Manchester Utd have?

The club has won 66 major trophies from 1878 to 2022.

Manchester United trophies confirm that this club is a force to reckon with in football. The club has millions of loyal fans worldwide. They believe the team will soon start winning major trophies as it used to in the 20th century.

READ ALSO: How many trophies have AC Milan won to date?

Sportbrief.com also listed all of AC Milan's trophies. Associazione Calcio Milan's history dates back over 100 years ago. The club has had many legendary players, including strikers, goalkeepers, and defenders.

AC Milan is one of the dominant forces in the Italian (Serie A league) and European football scene, except in the 1980-81 and 1982-83 seasons.
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Source: SportsBrief.com

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Here is a list of all Manchester United trophies since 1878

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Manchester United trophies prove that it is one of the greatest clubs in the world. Its fanbase keeps growing despite the experienced turbulent times the club has suffered, including a trophy drought period of more than five years. This article highlights the number of trophies the Red Devils have won so far and other details.

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Qatar is a minefield for World Cup advertisers. One team has already lost a sponsor | CNN Business

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Billions of people watch FIFA's World Cup every four years, a tantalizing opportunity for advertisers who want to capitalize on the feel-good fervor of the world's biggest sporting event. But this year, it's a reputational minefield for some of the world's biggest brands.

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Introduction

Back in 2019, our blog discussed the findings by the disciplinary commission that Birmingham City FC had breached the English Football League's ( EFL) FFP rules around profitability and sustainability. Since then, major changes have been introduced in Europe around FFP regulations, including the newly launched UEFA financial sustainability rules. Many are now asking whether these new rules will be a game changer for the sport.

The new rules

The new UEFA financial sustainability rules came into force in June 2022. They are based on three pillars: solvency, stability and cost control.

As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the new rules allow clubs to incur losses of €60m over three years, compared to the previous allowance of €30m. However, the new rules also introduce a spending cap (the so-called ' squad cost ratio') on wages, transfers and agents' fees to 70 per cent of a club's total revenue by 2025-2026. Clubs are also required to settle overdue payables in specified timeframes.

In addition, the new rules require all transactions to be at a fair value. Previously, this requirement only applied to transactions with related parties.

There are also new sanctions for non-compliance. For example, failure to comply with the squad cost requirement may lead to a proportional financial penalty and breach of the solvency requirement on payables may result in clubs being excluded from future competitions.

A game changer?

The question now is whether the new financial sustainability rules will be effective.

It is becoming common to read headlines reporting that certain clubs are continuing to spend staggering amounts of money to secure players. Others have found creative ways to secure deals they would not otherwise be able to afford. Just recently, it was announced by FC Barcelona that the club had struck a deal with investment firm Sixth Street over its broadcasting rights for the next 25 years. Despite reportedly being in over €1.3 billion in debt, FC Barcelona have been able to make a number of marquee signings.

It is expected that the new spending cap - which, notably, not only applies to wages but also to transfers and agency fees - as well as stricter enforcement of the rules will influence clubs' spending attitudes. However, many have already voiced concerns that clubs will continue to devise ways to overcome the rules, despite the fair value requirement which now applies to all transactions. Others are worried that the rules will fail to encourage competition between rich and poor clubs.

It is perhaps too early to assess the impact the new financial sustainability rules will have. However, there is no doubt that clubs will need to look very closely at the new rules and understand the impact on their financial strategies and any potential sanctions.

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New Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules: A game changer?

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Back in 2019, our blog discussed the findings by the disciplinary commission that Birmingham City FC had breached the English Football League's ( EFL) FFP rules around profitability and sustainability. Since then, major changes have been introduced in Europe around FFP regulations, including the newly launched UEFA financial sustainability rules.

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However, that's not to say Bureau Borsche hasn't taken dynamic steps forward. The historic lion emblem has been integrated into a minimal "V" crest. Its abstract new form, the release adds, produces "a fresh lion that feels more sleek, fierce, and stylish than the one it replaces".

Capped by the club's classic orange and green, the letterform on the logo has been split to resemble two flags. Meanwhile, in a significant move for the club, the lion itself has returned to its original gold, after previous introductions of a white logo throughout its 114-year history (from 1997-2005, in 2013, and in 2015, remaining though last season). The gold iteration, Bureau Borsches reason, is "the most authentic and refers to the old heritage".

A new set of 22/23 pre-match shirts also launch with the new identity. Having released its shirts to much fanfare in the past, Venezia FC rings in this season with "a streetwear sensibility", says the release. The Bureau Borsche shirts feature an orange, black, and green checker design and the new crest in total gold. The accompanying campaign for the 22/23 pre-match shirts is shot by Alessandro Simonetti.

Venezia FC pre-match shirts are available for pre-order here; the rest of the 22/23 Venezia FC kit collection includes three kits to be released on 7 July, 14 July, and 21 July.

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How to rebrand Venezia FC, the "world's most fashionable club"? Call in Bureau Borsche

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However, that's not to say Bureau Borsche hasn't taken dynamic steps forward. The historic lion emblem has been integrated into a minimal "V" crest. Its abstract new form, the release adds, produces "a fresh lion that feels more sleek, fierce, and stylish than the one it replaces".