Why does private equity want to be a football agent?
That was a question posed by Daniel Geey on Other People's Money, our sports finance podcast series.
Jonathan Booker has written an interesting set of newsletters on this topic.
Good point here:
What is notable, and what warrants serious attention, is the scale at which this has now occurred in the world of football/soccer agency. For example, the mergers and/or acquisitions that saw American giant CAA bring together the UK behemoths Base and Stellar under the CAA ‘umbrella’, each of which were already individually amongst the most significant agency operations in European (if not world) football, represents arguably the biggest concentration of football agency influence seen in the sport to date. Others, including the likes of USG, Roc Nation and WMG, have pursued similar expansion through varying combinations of merger, acquisition and collaborations, each at their own scale and through their own commercial logic. The regulatory framework governing the football agency market has not so much failed to address this, but as with so many aspects associated with football agency, has struggled to keep pace with the speed and complexity of commercial developments it was not originally conceived to anticipate.
Such concerns regarding MAGs become considerably more acute when agency consolidation of this kind intersects with a separate but related development in the football ‘industry’: the existence of direct shared business interests, and in some reported cases interrelated shareholdings, between prominent agency operations and football club ownership groups.
Read the whole thing here:
Multi-Agency Groups in Football
When Consolidation Becomes a Conflict. (3/3)
Jonathan Booker