As a result, it is quite complicated to understand and or to predict the commercial side of football for anyone concerned, including economists and sportswriters alike.
Perhaps the most notable transaction in the recent period is that of elite Bidvest Wits to Venda-based National First Division side Tshakhuma Tsha Madzivhandila. This led to former player Matthew Booth to urge the Premier Soccer League’s board of governors “to rethink the selling of clubs' status.” Like elsewhere in the world, these transactions defy rules of economics as they go against the tide where large businesses have either downscaled or closed shop due to the difficult economic environment. Football does not follow the traditional boom-bust cycles in the economy. It is also no longer about culture or tradition as streams of money flow into the game for good and bad reasons.
While the economics of football is a complex topic which includes foreign owners pumping billions into world’s top leagues and how they use their wealth to convert debt into equity to avoid stringent laws especially in Europe, this article does not go into the technicalities of the world of finance and its pros and cons.
UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin has no issue with sovereign wealth funds and state-linked money coming into football as long as the game's financial regulations are observed. Concerns about huge numbers in football compelled UEFA to impose Financial Fair Play rules on European clubs. Photo: Manu Fernandez/AP
With all the shenanigans, teams such as Liverpool and Bayern Munich somehow maintain their position as elite clubs without the injections of new money seen at Chelsea, Malaga, and Manchester City. The German Bundesliga, for example, has done a phenomenal job to protect clubs from takeover by shady, greedy investors. The league’s 50 plus one rule stipulates, “clubs – and, by extension, the fans - hold a majority of their own voting rights.
This implies that tender monies can be easily equated to the limitless wealth of the world’s narcos in terms of combining illegal funds and popularity of soccer in the ideal money-laundering scheme. Of course, those behind buying a PSL soccer team for the Northern Cape would cite frivolous things like tourism and entertainment for the people.
⦁Second, owners of professional soccer teams also become narcos. In January 2014, for example, Mexican authorities arrested the owner of the Queretaro professional soccer club, Tirso Martinez Sanchez, on grounds of dealing with drugs. Queretaro is the same team world superstar Ronaldinho Gaucho represented in a short stint in Mexico.
⦁Sixth, it is reported that Michoacan kingpin Wenceslao Alvarez may have purchased a B-list soccer team in eastern Mexico called The Mapaches de Nueva Italia. Alvarez was known to have close relations with one of the deadly cartels known as the Zetas, and drug cartels in Colombian fields and those in lucrative markets in Atlanta. Nonetheless, the team spoiled team members rotten with unusually high salaries drove luxury vehicles and received new uniforms for every game.
⦁Nine, officials and agents as emerge as global traffickers. For example, in what was termed ‘Operation Cyclone’ the Spanish police arrested eleven individuals “for allegedly using their ties to the sport as a cover for an international drug trafficking ring stretching from Argentina to Europe.” Spanish newspaper El Pais identified as a FIFA-licensed players’ agents such as Zoran Matijevic as the head of the ring and ex-player at Hercules Pedrag Stankovic as his associate.