Liverpool are assessing their options over their shirt sponsorship, but should they even be considering a cryptocurrency company?
If elite-level club football is effectively an arms race between an ever-diminishing number of superclubs, then some of those superclubs are at something of a disadvantage compared to the others. There are now two forms of superclub; one type is the ‘traditional’ huge club that has always won trophies (or at least set that as their minimum level of expectation). They used to have a huge advantage over everybody else through their enormous support, especially when the globalisation of the biggest national leagues started to accelerate during the 1990s.
The other type has long existed, but has flourished as the gap between the game’s haves and have-nots has grown: the club funded by the munificence of a wealthy owner. What has changed over time has been the amount of money required for any one individual to keep that challenge going. In the mid-1990s, being a multi-millionaire was enough to allow for spending that could challenge near the top. Jack Walker made a fortune from steel, and the money that he put into Blackburn Rovers was enough to snatch the Premier League title in 1995, even if the £25m spent on new players in the previous three years sounds almost laughably quaint a quarter of a century on.
Within a decade, the parameters had been reset. Football’s hyper-inflation had led to a situation in which the only realistic way to break the hegemony of that time – which was then held by Manchester United and Arsenal – was to be a billionaire, and preferably one of the wealthiest on the planet. Roman Abramovich’s arrival at Chelsea in the summer of 2003 priced the butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers out of the market forever. Only the sort of money that comes as a result of hoovering up a large proportion of a country’s natural resources provides the funding to allow a club to get close to the top of the table….
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