Business of Football: FIFA, Google and the Streisand effect – and searching for Man City legal fees

Singer, songwriter, actress, director, producer… Barbra Streisand has many strings to her bow but one that perhaps does not get enough attention is Streisand as a cautionary tale.

If that part of her remarkable life story was better known, people would stop making the same mistake she made in 2003 when she sued a photographer for taking a picture of her Malibu mansion in a series of snaps intended to draw attention to coastal erosion.

Claiming a violation of her privacy, the entertainer sued the guy for $50million (£37.9m at today’s exchange rate) and demanded the removal of ‘image 3,850’ from the California Coastal Records Project, a publicly available database of 12,000 pictures.

The judge threw out the complaint and made Streisand pay the snapper’s $177,000 legal bill. But the real cost of her clumsy attempt at censorship was that 420,000 people visited the project website the following month to look at her lovely house — a significant increase on the six people to have ever looked at the picture before the legal action… and two of those were her own lawyers.

Since then, there have been numerous examples of what has come to be known as ‘the Streisand effect’, such as Ryan Giggs’ attempt to sue Twitter because a user had revealed that the Manchester United great had taken out a super-injunction to prevent anyone reporting the details of an alleged affair with a reality TV star, or Beyonce trying to suppress unflattering pictures from her Super Bowl half-time show performance.

And now, it seems, we can add FIFA, world football’s governing body, to the list of those who have inadvertently drawn far more attention to something they do not want people to see but had previously been invisible to the vast majority of us.

The details of this own goal were revealed by Swiss media outlet SRF last week, when it published a story about Switzerland-based FIFA suing American technology giant Google in a commercial court in Zurich.

FIFA claims Google is responsible for aiding and abetting the spread of defamatory stories about the organisation because it will not remove an obscure African football website from the search results that come up when you use its search engine to look for FIFA news.

According to SRF, Google believes it is not its fault if someone is possibly libelling FIFA and it cannot be expected to police the whole internet. It also points out that you have to look very hard to find the articles concerned.

The SRF story does not reveal any details about the website or which stories have really upset FIFA but The Athletic knows, and can understand why FIFA is so angry, particularly as there are no bylines on any of the pieces, no sign of any attempt to give anyone a right of reply and no names or addresses on the website itself.

However, this column writes about FIFA for a living — of sorts — but had never heard of this website until last week. We are not going to help its climb up the search results by giving it a plug but we are fairly sure it will have already had a record week in terms of page impressions.

And the other unintended consequence of FIFA’s lawsuit is that many people will have read the SRF story, or a version of it, and assumed FIFA had something to hide or that this was another example of its president Gianni Infantino’s thin skin.

For what it is worth, the straw that broke this camel’s back was a piece about someone further down FIFA’s hierarchy.

The Athletic has contacted all concerned for comment but has either received nothing back or been told “no comment”.

Fair enough, but we cannot help thinking that ignoring a scarcely visited and rarely updated website — not us, the African one — would have been a more sensible approach than suing one of the largest companies in the world.

Streisand at an awards show in Los Angeles earlier this year (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)

The other thing about legal action, of course, is that it is expensive, as the Premier League is discovering. Its attempts to enforce its rulebook cost about £30million in lawyers’ fees last season.

The biggest bill, however, is yet to come, as the six-year cold war between the league and Manchester City over those hacked emails is about to get very hot indeed. But it takes two to tango, so City will have some hefty legal costs of their own… right?

Well, an initial search for the amount the serial champions have been spending on our “learned friends” in the club’s accounts did not provide any answers, as there are no references to legal fees in the “operating expenditure” sections of the annual financial reports of City or their parent company, the City Football Group (CFG), which is where most clubs would put them.

It is possible they are included in the £274.4million of “other external charges” that CFG shelled out in the 12 months to the end of June 2023, which was about £72m more than the corresponding number for the prior year, but there is a more likely figure for the legal bill buried in the “related party transaction” notes to CFG’s financial statement.

Under “other transactions”, at the bottom of page 70 of a 71-page document, is a note that says “the company has a receivable from Newton Investment & Development — Sole Proprietorship LLC, the immediate parent company of the group, of £19,905,000 (2022: £9,211,000)”. The note continues by explaining “this is due to expenses incurred by City Football Group on behalf of Newton Investment & Development”.

For those who do not speak accountantese, a receivable is an item on the balance sheet that denotes money the company is owed for products or services it has already provided. In other words, CFG is owed a little more than £29million by its owners for something it did on behalf of its owners between the summers of 2021 and 2023.

Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak at the team’s 4-1 win over Ipswich on Saturday (Matt McNulty/Getty Images)

It is hard to say for certain that this figure really is the club’s legal bill for the period in question, but The Athletic was not steered away from this theory when we ran it past a couple of experts, who asked to remain anonymous to protect business relationships.

It also makes sense when you remember that one of the hacked emails published by German outlet Der Spiegel in 2018 said City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak had once said “he would rather spend 30million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue (UEFA) for the next 10 years” than agree to a financial settlement with European football’s governing body when it was investigating the club for breaching its financial rules.

That estimate looks a little light now.

It is amazing what you can find while poking around at Companies House.

For example, it is astonishing how much money can be made from chuntering away into a fixed camera while watching Manchester United games on TV.

Brent Di Cesare, aka Mark Goldbridge, filed his accounts at the UK’s registrar of companies last week, and they revealed that the 45-year-old former Nottingham Forest fan is doing rather well.

The YouTuber is the sole director of five companies, the oldest being The United Stand Limited, which is also the name of his most popular YouTube channel.

None of these companies is big enough to have to publish full, audited accounts but the abridged reports show they had £4,039,957 in the bank between them as of the end of 2023, an increase of almost £1.2million on the figure for 2022.

OK, that is about a month’s pay for Marcus Rashford, one of Goldbridge’s favourite topics, but Goldbridge looks like he is enjoying his work more than the United winger does these days.

Marcus Rashford endured a difficult afternoon at Brighton (Ash Donelon/Manchester United via Getty Images)

On to more weighty matters, and a status update on the whereabouts of English football’s first independent regulator.

As regular readers of the column will know, the creation of the game’s new good-governance czar was postponed when British prime minister Rishi Sunak decided to get it over and done with by calling a snap general election in July.

This brought an end to 14 years of rule by Sunak’s Conservative Party, but it also meant the Football Governance Bill his government had finally brought to parliament in March to start its passage into law ran out of time to complete the process.

This came as a real kick in the shins to supporters of the bill, of which there are many, particularly in the English Football League, and a glimmer of hope for its opponents, of which there are an uncertain amount as very few are willing to admit they do not like the idea of some light-touch regulation designed to stop clubs from going bankrupt.

Well, the good news for the first group is that Sir Keir Starmer’s new Labour government has delivered on its promise to crack on with the bill by reintroducing it last month. The bad news for the second group is they might dislike this version of it even more than the last one.

Sir Keir Starmer attends the Olympics’ opening ceremony in Paris (Karwai Tang/WireImage)

It is hoped that the bill should resume its passage through the houses of parliament in October but it will receive its first reading — the opening step in the process — in the House of Lords, the UK Parliament’s second chamber, as opposed to the more usual starting point, the House of Commons. The thinking is that this will make things move faster as there is unlikely to be any opposition to it in the now Labour-dominated Commons.

In terms of differences between the old and new bills, there are likely to be tighter regulations to ensure more diversity and equality in boardrooms, as well as more emphasis on “fan engagement”; in other words, greater consultation with supporters on issues such as ticket pricing and kick-off times.

But perhaps the most significant difference for the game’s finances will be fixing what many in the EFL (the governing body for the three divisions of 72 teams below the Premier League) — and the Labour Party — thought was a bizarre mistake in the first bill: the decision to leave the thorny question of parachute payments outside the regulator’s remit.

It is widely believed the Conservative government did this to placate the Premier League, which continues to believe that handing payments, which can total more than £110million over three years, to teams relegated from it to the EFL is necessary to encourage clubs on the way up the football ladder to “go for it”, thereby improving the quality of the Premier League as an entertainment product.

The fact that these payments also skew competition in the Championship and force teams without parachute payments to spend unsustainable amounts of money to compete with those who do get them is, in the Premier League’s view, somebody else’s problem.

Now, however, it is going to become another of the regulator’s problems, as the new bill is almost certainly going to say the regulator is able to look at what is an appropriate level for parachute payments — something closer to being a safety net for clubs that must quickly get used to a reduction in income, as opposed to a slush fund helping them to maintain Premier League-level wage bills post-relegation and bounce straight back up.

With the Labour government’s huge majority, there is no danger of the bill failing, so it really is just a matter of ticking the procedural boxes as quickly as possible, which means it could become law by the end of the year or certainly early in 2025, with the regulator being fully operational by the end of this season in May. Indeed, a small team are already operating as a shadow regulator.

Sunderland’s players celebrate going top of the Championship (Martin Swinney/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images)

For those still wondering why the government needs to stick its oar in, a recent report by Fair Game, a group of 34 men’s professional clubs in England and Wales, made for depressing reading.

Using publicly available data, the Fair Game Index looked at more than 200 “touchpoints” in four categories — finances, governance, equality and ethics, and fan engagement — to give every club in the top six tiers in England, and levels one through four in Scotland, a score out of 100.

The average score of the 206 clubs assessed was only 41, with particularly low scores given for financial transparency and equality and ethical standards. In regards to the latter, only 17 of the 206 even got half marks.

“The incoming independent regulator has a big job if it is to truly fix the problems that are endemic in the game,” the report concluded.

We always try to end these columns on a cheery note, so let’s finish this one with the cautiously optimistic prediction that Reading should have new owners by the end of the week.

For those who have not followed the catalogue of disasters that have befallen the former Premier League side, Reading were relegated to League One, the English game’s third tier, in 2023 and then given three separate points deductions last season for failing to pay their players and the taxman on time. Their best young players have been sold off so the club can keep the heating on, key staff have been let go and the women’s team lost their professional status, dropping from the second tier to the fifth this season.

All of this and more has happened under the disastrous ownership of Dai Yongge, but the Chinese businessman is on the verge of selling the club, the stadium and their training ground to Rob Couhig, former owner of nearby fellow EFL side Wycombe Wanderers, and his business partner Todd Trosclair.

Couhig at Reading’s EFL Trophy match against West Ham last week (Bradley Collyer/PA Images via Getty Images)

Both are from New Orleans. Couhig made his money in the legal business while Trosclair founded one of the largest electrical contractors in Louisiana, the state that U.S. city is in. Couhig also has several million burning a hole in his pocket from the sale of Wycombe to Georgian financial-technology billionaire Mikheil Lomtadze in May.

Couhig tried to buy some of what Yongge is selling when he agreed to purchase Reading’s training ground for Wycombe (the two towns are 35 minutes’ drive apart in London’s western commuter belt) last season, only for that deal to quickly collapse.

The 75-year-old clearly saw the potential for a Reading revival, though, and he has now back for them lock, stock and barrel.

We wish him, Trosclair and Reading all the best.

(Top photo: Reinaldo Coddou H/UEFA via Getty Images)