Raphael Stevens

The glowing testimonies to the Manchester City playmaker as he departs the Premier League have focused on his play, not his personality. That was by design. More

LONDON — It took the San Francisco 49ers seven years to turn their interest in owning a piece of an English soccer team into reality. Now, two years after buying a 10 percent stake in Leeds United, the 49ers’ owners are looking to increase their investment, and their involvement, in the storied club that two weeks ago won promotion to the Premier League.Executives representing the 49ers and Leeds United’s majority owner, Andrea Radrizzani, are in talks about increasing the N.F.L. team’s share, according to Paraag Marathe, the 49ers executive who has sat on the soccer team’s board since San Francisco’s initial investment in 2018.“It’s something that we are absolutely hoping to do,” Marathe said in a telephone interview.A tip of the cap to our friends at @LUFC! 👏 https://t.co/GTxTWF1Z1a— San Francisco 49ers (@49ers) July 17, 2020
Any new investment, though, would only further entrench American football team owners in the board rooms of England’s Premier League, the world’s most popular and lucrative domestic soccer competition. The Glazer family, which owns the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, has controlled Manchester United since 2005; Arsenal is backed by the Los Angeles Rams owner E. Stanley Kroenke; and Fulham, which is one win away from clinching a return to the Premier League, is owned by Shahid Khan, who also owns the Jacksonville Jaguars.Under Radrizzani, an Italian sports media tycoon, Leeds United has long searched for new investment. Radrizzani has been in talks with Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, which already owns the French superclub Paris St.-Germain, but those discussions — despite reaching an advanced stage last year — have so far failed to produce a sale.While the 49ers only hold a minority share, they have hardly been passive investors in Leeds. Top executives, including Marathe and Jed York, the 49ers’ chief executive, had been regular visitors to Leeds’ Elland Road stadium until the coronavirus pandemic shut down global travel. Marathe said he and York had traveled to Leeds, a city in northern England, once every five to six weeks.“It obviously had fallen on hard times under multiple ownership groups,” Marathe said of Leeds, a storied club that has been troubled by financial problems and on-field struggles since tumbling out of the Premier League in 2004. “But the brand equity is still there, the fans, and the amount of people that care about that club,” he said. “We just knew that not only do they belong in the Premier League, but if they got to the Premier League, that the sky’s the limit.”“The journey isn’t concluded,” he said of the team’s return to England’s top tier. “It’s just beginning.”The 49ers first took an interest in Leeds United in 2011 when Marathe, the president of 49ers Enterprises, the team’s venture capital division, was scouring the world for sports brands in which the team could invest. In Leeds, he found a team with a long history — a three-time English champion with a passionate fan base in a large city that had no other professional club — and started talks about a relationship. The 49ers did not invest then, but did sign a strategic partnership agreement that largely failed to yield any positive results, according to Marathe.But the team’s interest in a more direct stake in Leeds remained. By 2015, Marathe had developed a friendship with Radrizzani, who two years later bought Leeds himself. “I said, ‘Wow,’” Marathe recalled saying to Radrizzani shortly after the Italian’s purchase was complete. “‘It’s such a coincidence because I actually love this club and I spent some time around this club.’”Marathe and Radrizzani speak at least twice a week. And in addition to the regular trips to Leeds, the 49ers regularly share information about their business and processes; when Leeds was beginning the search for its current coach, the 49ers passed on a guide the team used to recruit its current general manager and head coach. Leeds eventually picked Marcelo Bielsa, the charismatic and quirky Argentine who led Leeds back to the Premier League.The gap in quality — and resources — between the Premier League and the second-tier Championship that Leeds United just won can be significant. Last season’s Championship winner, Norwich City, will return there next season after finishing last in the Premier League this year. Some teams spend heavily to try to become competitive immediately. Others, like Sheffield United, which finished in the top half of the table in its first season back in the top flight, have prospered by relying on the fundamentals that took them there.Marathe pointed to Sheffield United’s debut season as an example of an approach Leeds might be looking to follow.“You don’t want to just rush and go high — ‘Every player out now; we’re a Premier League club’ — and buy this and this and this player,” Marathe said. “Sometimes you want to build it organically and thoughtfully.”Marathe said that, for now, the 49ers remained focused on being patient with their investment — which became far more valuable on July 17, the day Leeds United’s top-flight return was confirmed — rather than on cashing in.“This is more about continuing the journey than it is about what the multiple on our investment is,” Marathe said.Ken Belson contributed reporting from New York. More

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Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund on Thursday withdrew its bid to become the latest foreign owner in England’s Premier League, pulling out of an agreement to buy Newcastle United after a tumultuous takeover process and significant pressure on the league to block the sale.Without criticizing the Premier League directly, the group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund attributed the collapse of the deal in part to “an unforeseen prolonged process.”The Premier League, which had been vetting the proposed sale since April, made no comment on the withdrawal.The Saudi-led consortium, which included the British businesswoman Amanda Staveley and a British-based property company in addition to the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, was set to pay about $400 million for the team and its stadium, which has been owned by the sportswear magnate Mike Ashley since 2007.While the Premier League’s glamour and global reach have long made it a magnet for the world’s super rich — its team owners currently include American billionaires, a Russian oligarch, a Chinese holding company and the brother of the ruler of the United Arab Emirates — Saudi Arabia’s bid for a team led to a level of discord rarely seen.Human rights groups and even the widow of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi wrote to the Premier League’s chief executive, Richard Masters, to urge him to block the sale because of the involvement of the Public Investment Fund, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund led by Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.A more important challenge to the takeover, at least for top Premier League officials, had come from beIN Media Group, the Qatar-owned television network. The network, one of the Premier League’s biggest broadcaster partners, has for three years has accused Saudi Arabia of being behind industrial-scale piracy of its programming.Only weeks before it began considering the Saudi takeover bid, the Premier League had written to the United States government to urge it to keep the kingdom on a watch list of countries that breach intellectual property rules.Once the Saudi bid became public, senior beIN officials lobbied the league and even the British government not to allow a Saudi state vehicle to join the ranks of club owners, and the Premier League spent months deliberating the so-called “fit and proper test” that is applied to all new owners.The Premier League was not known to have ever previously blocked a sale, and with the Saudi group’s withdrawal, it did not have to do so in this case.“Unfortunately, the prolonged process under the current circumstances coupled with global uncertainty has rendered the potential investment no longer commercially viable,” the investment group said in a joint statement. It said its agreement with Newcastle’s owners to buy the team had expired and appeared to blame uncertain economic conditions as the reason to walk away. Ashley had collected more than $25 million as a nonrefundable deposit.Premier League matches have a reach that surpasses any other similar global sports competitions, with its teams counting millions of passionate fans on continents thousands of miles away from the stadiums where games take place. That reach has attracted perhaps the most diverse ownership group in sports: Over the last two decades, British businessmen who once dominated the league’s ownership ranks have been edged out by billionaires from the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa — a membership that currently boasts a Russian-Israeli oligarch (Chelsea’s Roman Abramovich), one of Africa’s richest men (Aston Villa’s Nassef Sawiris) and the heirs to a Thai duty-free shopping empire (Leicester’s Srivaddhanaprabha family).The Saudi-led investors had proposed spending as much as $320 million over five years to turn Newcastle into a competitive force in the league and to invest in infrastructure around its stadium.The Saudi fund would not have been the league’s first Gulf-state owner: Manchester City, who won the league in two of the last three seasons, is controlled by the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates.While the league spent weeks in an uncomfortable spotlight created by the Saudi bid, Newcastle fans had largely rejoiced at the prospect of the unpopular Ashley’s being replaced by deep-pocketed owners.Since the first details of the proposed takeover emerged earlier this year, many Newcastle promoted it on social media, with some even changing their profile pictures to incorporate images of the Saudi flag or Salman, the kingdom’s crown prince.Most seemed to hope that the Saudis’ wealth would allow the team, whose raucous home support endures despite a middling on-field record, to compete for titles again. Newcastle narrowly missed missing winning the Premier League title twice in the mid-1990s but has not won a major domestic trophy since the 1955 F.A. Cup. The last of the club’s four English titles came in 1927. More