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THERE'S RICH.....AND THEN THERE'S RICH

5:00pm Thursday, 1st October 2009

Rich lists can be a bit confusing sometimes, and there's plenty of them about these days. In football, you get lists of the richest clubs - and lists of the richest owners - and of course the two don't necessarily tally. Anyway, what makes a football club really rich?

It depends where you start from. In the current Top Twenty Rich List of UK Club owners, at number one (and no surprise) is Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nayan at Man City; at number twenty it's Steve Morgan of Wolves. The Glazers at Man Utd only come in tenth, and Chelsea are pushed out of second place by the owners of QPR who not only come in second place (Lakshmi Mittal) but also in fifth (Bernie Ecclestone).

The wealth of individual owners of a club does not give any indication of how much of that money is spent at their club of course. Clearly, Abramovich has spent considerably more at Chelsea over the years than the twin billionaires at QPR.

When it comes to the 'rich list' of the world's clubs - based on 2007-8 turnovers - seven of the top twenty are English and were all in the Premier League. Man Utd split the two Spanish giants, with Real first and Barca third. But mirror, mirror on the wall, who is really the richest of all?

There is one way of defining a club's wealth which does not have a primary reference to money, either the owner's or even the club's takings (though it does have a direct bearing on how much money a club can make). It's quite a simple equation really but it is powerful in revealing the source of all the 'riches' in football.

Football clubs have 'value' because they are the focus of intense relationships experienced by those who support them, whether from near or far; that's why the sponsors, commercial partners and media are interested in them. But 'support' is too weak a word to express the real nature of these relationships. Given the time, energy, commitment, dedication and, yes, money, that fans spend in that 'support', to an outsider it looks more like 'love' than anything else, with a large dollop of 'dependency' thrown in.

So if you want to know how rich a club is, the equation looks like this:

How many fans love you + how much they love you + how (geographically) widespread they are + how much they're prepared to spend in pursuit of their affection = What your club is worth

In the final analysis, it isn't the stadium; the players or the clever guys who run the club (they can only work with what they have). It's about the sum total of intense affection you arouse.

And there are other factors too - just as in all 'love' relationships. In 1967, you could say Celtic were 'the richest club in the world'. Why? Because they had just won the European Cup for the first time, with the entire squad of players born within twenty miles or so of the stadium. That's 'richness' in terms of relationships.

Similarly today, surely the richest club in the world is currently Barcelona. They won this year's Champions League title with a squad largely drawn from their own academy. Don't you think there's a qualitative difference for the fans between that experience and winning it with a bunch of recently and expensively bought players from all over the place?

And what of Barca's 'owners'; all 158,000 of them? No doubt some of them are on the dole but they're the richest of all right now.

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