This week saw one of the footballing sensations of the past couple of decades as Athletic Club (‘Athletic’) – generally known internationally by their name incorporating the industrial port city where they play their football, Athletic Bilbao – put on a display of stunning virtuosity and courage at Old Trafford, taking a 3-2 lead into the home leg of their last 16 UEFA Europa League tie with Manchester United. One of two really substantial clubs in Spain’s picturesque and sporadically unstable País Vasco, Athletic’s performance attracted critical and popular acclaim throughout Europe, with their voluminously passionate following providing a pulsating soundtrack to a genuinely memorable encounter.
Yet we at Mediolana believe that Athletic’s recent success – the 2010-2011 season saw a sixth place finish in La Liga, with the club clearly capitalising on the consequent Europa League entry – is much more significant than the footballing public have thus far recognised. This is because Athletic are demonstrating a model – based on the intensive development of youth remunerated on relatively modest salaries, rather than expensive acquisitions compensated with multi-million euro contracts – that is likely to become increasingly salient as implementation of the UEFA Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play Regulations begins to bite. These rules stipulate radical debt restrictions that must be followed by all clubs wishing to take part in UEFA club competitions, including the requirement that operating deficits for individual clubs be restricted to an absolute maximum of €45m for the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 seasons, a figure that shrinks to €30m per season for the three years to the summer of 2018 (Article 61 – Notion of Acceptable Deviation).
Given the reality of UEFA’s new financial regime, European football is facing a transformative period where – outside of the carefully-regulated leagues of France and Germany, whose members have long been subject to fiscal rules not dissimilar to those now being introduced continent-wide – many of its most famous club brands are being forced to confront the fact that they are insolvent. This can produce cognitive and practical dissonance of dizzying proportions: current European champions FC Barcelona, who as of Q3 2011 had liabilities on their balance sheet to the tune of around half a billion euros despite a lucrative sponsorship arrangement with the Qatar Foundation, responded to this state of affairs by banning colour photocopying; their opponents in last spring’s UEFA Champions League Final, Manchester United, are the posterboys for Biblical invocations against usury.
The splendid Manchester victory for Athletic’s all-Basque selection was not, despite the approval of some of the more insular elements of the media, primarily a victory for localism; rather, it was a triumph for financial humility and investment in education, as well as sumptuous technique and the admirable tactics of Marcelo Bielsa.
Mediolana 