Backpass: Owners are an unnecessary evil
Stan Kroenke and Roman Abramovich have more in common that simply owning football clubs.
For a lot of Americans, we grow up in a system in which capitalism is ultimately lionized as a structure that is a natural extension of good American values like competition and individualism and ingenuity. We are taught that if you work hard, and you invent something cool and bust your hump in your garage-workshop, you can eventually become the CEO of your own company and become wildly rich - and that your riches are entirely due to your own ‘up-by-your-bootstraps’ making.1
This is, of course, mostly ridiculous. Most billionaires today start with a massive head start on the rest of us. Elon Musk grew up among the wealthy elite in South Africa. Mark Zuckerberg’s parents could afford to send him to one of the top prep schools in New York before sending him on to Harvard. Roman Abramovich became chummy with Russian oligarchs and power brokers, including a fellow named Boris Berezovsky, who introduced him to Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle at precisely the moment the old Soviet Union was privatizing its oil industry. According to James Montague’s “The Billionaire Clubs”, Abramovich would ultimately parlay a small sum into $50 million, which he used to buy 50 percent of Sibneft, an oil company that was probably more accurately valued at $3 billion. And of course, there’s Stan Kroenke, son of a lumber company owner that married into the Walton family; heirs to the Walmart company fortune. Kroenke spun those billions into more billions, acquiring real estate and sports franchises like you or I might acquire another item of soccer apparel: a little too frequently, and because it suits us, but not because it is necessarily that practical an investment.
The two sports team owners I mentioned above are receiving scrutiny right now for very different reasons - but the ultimate result of that scrutiny leads me to wonder why the hell we even have ‘owners’ for sports teams in the first place. I’ll come back to that in a minute. First, the scrutiny.
Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club, is Russian. He is also Jewish, and as such, has dual citizenship to the state of Israel.2 But as a Russian with chummy relations to Vladimir Putin, the government of the United Kingdom is in the process of freezing his assets, including Chelsea. If Abramovich doesn’t unload his team, Chelsea likely won’t be able to touch their bank account, acquire new players, or really function as a profit-making football club at all.
While Abramovich is undoubtably *not* responsible for the invasion of Ukraine, his proximity to power makes him a useful lever upon which to exert pressure on Putin. But that power is the very thing that gives me pause. The individual owners of soccer teams are so unbelievably powerful that only a very small number of mechanisms - namely, FIFA, or a very powerful sovereign government - can wield any control over them. Sports team owners can do virtually whatever they want with impunity. They are gods.
The owners tested the very limits of this power just last year in their desire to revolt against FIFA and the Champions League in seeking ungodly and permanently guaranteed sums of money with their creation of ‘The Super League’. The Super League was a lot of things - mostly a terrible, ham-fisted effort to steal the very best teams and players and generate even more profit from their unbelievably profitable franchises. But one of the other things the Super League demonstrated was exactly how much power a very small group of very powerful owners might have over world football. The answer was - a lot. Sixteen to twenty men were very close to singlehandedly destroying FIFA, the top four leagues in Europe, and a 165 year history of promotion and relegation, and only terrible PR, poor planning, and the lack of a TV sponsor stopped them. Although in this case the barbarians were repulsed from the gate, their near-miss at remaking football in their own image proved the point - owners have way too much power.
For Stan Kroenke, this manifested itself most recently when he bought the NFL St. Louis Rams and then relocated them back to Los Angeles. As an owner, this is well within his right - its his thing to play with or profit from or move as he sees fit.
Of course, the problem is, a sports team is not a piece of furniture. It’s supposed to be some odd-hybrid animal of a thing that is a ‘civic asset’ and also a for-profit business. As such, throwball fans in St Louis were crestfallen and now hate Kroenke and the NFL. As a former LA Raiders fan, I can relate.
But your sports team isn’t really and truly a civic asset. If it was, there’d be rules on publicly broadcasting games for a reasonable fee, which is very clearly not what the Rapids are doing. If it were a civic asset, the MLS Earthquakes wouldn’t have moved to Houston in 2006; and Columbus wouldn’t have needed a ‘Save our team’ campaign in order get an expansion club to replace Andrew Precourt’s move to Austin. Owners have all the power.
In addition to screwing Rapids fans over on being able to watch the team in-market at a reasonable price, Kroenke’s power as owner has resulted, of course, in chronically underspending on the team. We consistently rank near the bottom in overall spending on player salaries. Or, in 2021, at the bottom.
We currently have zero Designated Players. All of this is clearly due to some mandate from ownership against spending more than the club can bring in in profit. And with a small, suburban stadium, an underfunded marketing and advertising budget, no big stars to attract fans, no easy public transit to matches, and all of the public visibility in Denver of a speakeasy off an alley in LoDo, the Rapids do not make much profit. So for Uncle Stan, they keep their expenditures low.3
I will say, because you are probably thinking it, that yes, the Rapids are doing quite well right now despite the lack of spending. And yes, they are! We won the Western Conference in 2021 despite having that tiny payroll. David defeats Goliath! Except, that analogy sucks, because Stan Kroenke is worth more than $8 billion - He’s. Not David. And also - imagine what Rapids GM Pádraig Smith could do if he actually could spend freely.
Being beholden to these skinflint owners; who might move the team if the wind blows in the wrong direction; who lock up TV rights behind terrible cable deals only accessible to folks with oodles of extra spending money; who hobnob with tyrants; who rarely, if ever, actually watch the very teams that they own in person; it feels weird.4
The public owns the libraries; the buses; the police and fire department; and the roads. Collectives own publicly-traded companies on the NYSE and can vote to steer those companies in the direction they desire. But sports teams in America are owned by feudal lords, granted their power by being in the right place at the right time. Our sports-owners were not handed a sword by a watery tart in a farcical aquatic ceremony - but pretty close. Abramovich got Chelsea because he rubbed the right elbows at a post-Communism cocktail party. Kroenke merits Arsenal, the Rams, and the Rapids because the girl he shared a chair lift with was one of the wealthiest heiresses on the planet.5 Their lordships are no less random than meriting a sports team because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at them.
But as much as I and many other football fans around the world will complain about it, there are painfully few anarcho-syndicalist communes presiding over football teams via bi-weekly meetings6 proliferating around the world.
AFC Wimbledon is one. They were founded after their owner took their team, Wimbledon, and buggered off to another town called Milton Keynes. They are fan-owned, and they seem to be doing pretty well because of it. In Israel, the owner of Hapoel Jerusalem mismanaged the team so badly that the fans revolted and founded their own club. Starting in the bottom tier of Israeli football, the fan-owned version, temporarily named Hapoel Katamon Jerusalem FC, rose through the ranks through winning and promotion, gaining access to the top flight just this season.7 Along the way, the old Hapoel folded, and the new, fan-owned Hapoel assumed their old name. In America, there are no fan-owned soccer clubs, but the Green Bay Packers offer an NFL version of the same idea. By all this I mean - there are alternative methods of organizing teams. We just haven’t quite embraced it in MLS or USL, yet.
Owners have ungodly amounts of power, conferred upon them by provenance of having a lot of money. And for fans, that turns sport - which we long to be a pure meritocracy - into something like just one more arena in which the nasty class struggle of capitalism manifests in ways that are definitely not ideal. In the worst case scenarios - like Chelsea, and the Qatari-backed juggernaut PSG - our favorite teams owners are complicit in some of the very worst evils in society, like war and human trafficking and labor exploitation.
We think owners are a necessary evil to enjoying sports. And for now, they are. But we sports fans may just lack imagination in the ways in which we might construct a sporting system that is not dependent on the unnecessary evil of billionaire owners. That also may just be for now.
Fun fact: the phrase ‘up by your bootstraps’ was originally coined as something absurd and illogical - that a person literally pulling themselves upwards by their shoes would in fact not elevate about the floorboards. Somehow, the words have lost all meaning and it is now actually taken as a thing that a person ca really do. Perfect analogy to 21st century capitalism really.
Israel’s basic law includes the ‘Law of Return’, which allows anyone with one Jewish grandparent the right to immediate citizenship. The law was passed in 1950. The basis for the idea of the one Jewish grandparent threshold was practical in its awfulness: if Hitler would have exterminated you for being a Jew, the logic goes, then Israel was going to allow you citizenship as one. Abramovich recently fled the UK to Israel.
Sam Stejskal once quipped in a brilliant article “As long as Stan Kroenke owns the team, it’s hard to imagine it getting much better.” It actually did get better, though, but in spite of Kroenke, for sure.
I mean, this owner-worship out of ATL (that’s United owner Arthur Blank) was pretty damn weird too:
‘shared a chairlift’ is not meant to be taken literally. Kroeke met Ann Walton while skiing in Aspen, though, and I rather like my ‘meet-cute’ version of their story.
This scene, from ‘Monty Pythons and the Holy Grail’, is recited nearly daily in our home. Because we are lunatics.