Player income from shirt sales, club compensation for Africa Cup of Nations players
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Hello and welcome to The Price of Football, the show that looks at the money behind a beautiful game with me, Kevin Day, and Liverpool University's Kieran McGuire. Kieran, how are you this evening?

I'm very good. We're recording this on Sunday night, so it's a bit like the night before you get your exam results, because we've got the FSA Awards tomorrow, or the Glenn Dennings, as I think Barry would prefer them to be known, because he was going on TalkSport today moaning about they've taken away the best radio show because he wins it so often.

Well, see, I was about to explain, Kieran, to our listeners that we are recording this the night before the Football Supporters Association Awards, so we don't know the actual results. But it's a disgrace that we didn't win.

Absolutely shameful. Once again, the little guys are just doing their best to stand up for the ordinary football fan trampled underfoot by capitalist leviathans who exist only to make money for themselves and not put it into the... They're like FIFA, these people, Kieran, as we'll discuss on Thursday. Just making money for themselves while we do our best. We're backed further and further into a corner like...

I can't, I can't, you know.

This is just an outrage, Kieran. Why did we... We can't predict that. I'm going to predict that I'll probably have a hangover by the time we find out where this goes out. Because I understand that win or lose, Kieran, the drinks are still free. Exactly. Yeah, so keep a look out for your newspaper pages to see whether there's a scuffle between two middle-aged presenters. Glenn Denning and Day taking half-hearted Irish swings at each other.

There probably isn't a little car park near Marylebone, but that's where we'd be going. You and me in a car park. Because I have a record, Kieran, for being impolitely furious when I don't win these things, Kieran. Oh, yeah.

I'd lost out the best writer, BAFTA. I'd lost out to freaking Sound of Music. Lots of two people who'd been dead for 50 years. That was an absolute outrage. It was the same day we beat Watford in the semi-final at Wembley. So I was quite drunk by the time I got there, let alone by the time I was beaten by...

Rodgers and Hammerstein. It's questions day, Keir, and we've got some cracking questions, as usual. I was a bit distracted there, Keir. You were stripping off your cardigan in a rather alluring way. LAUGHTER

I see what a Baroness sees in you now, Kieran. Our first question, Kieran, comes from a long-time listener, as I believe they say, long-time listener, first-time caller, Morgan Nock. Morgan says, when a club sells a shirt with a player's name and number on the back, one would expect the player to get a kickback filed under image rights. I'm not sure a kickback is the right term, Nick. Legitimate payment, I think, is the correct answer.

You've said on many occasions how most clubs only receive around 5% to 7% of the retail price of a shirt. Is that taking into account the cut the players might get, or does the player's slice come out of the club's already small percentage? Or my question, Kieran, does the player actually get any money at all when it's his name that's put on the back of his shirt? Well, there's only one person to talk to, or one of the few people to talk to here, and of course that involves a chat with one of our secret agents. And...

I think they've been talking to our friends in the legal profession because their answer was it depends. Ah, okay. And it really depends upon whether or not the player is deemed to be a brand in their own rights. So if we are talking about a Galactico, somebody such as Erling Haaland, for example, then embedded into his contract would be

image rights, which would include every time a number nine shirt is sold with the word Harland on it, then he would get a proportion of the additional money that he's paid across. So

For those people that do buy shirts, it's normally 80, 85 pounds if you're buying one of the big six club shirts, plus they will charge you another 10 to 15 pounds for name and number, plus they will charge you an extra five pounds if you want the arm badges as well.

So the player will get their share of the name and number element. Now, if we are dealing with a left back for Crawley Town or Morecambe, and I'm not denigrating these people because they're still professional footballers, and we are part footballers. Nobody has ever bought a shirt with our names on the back of them. They have bought them for these professional players.

then the chances are that the sums involved are so small that it's just a standard contract and nobody gets worked up by it. If you are talking about a club which is selling millions of units of merchandise, then...

We are talking millions of pounds. It's an extra £10 for a name and number, and the player's getting 20% of that, and you sell a million shirts, and that's 200 grand. So clearly there are significant sums. And if we go back to what happened when Cristiano Ronaldo signed for Manchester United for a second time, Cavani had already been allocated the number seven shirt that season, and

But from a marketing point of view, both Manchester United and Cristiano Ronaldo wanted the number seven shirt to go to that player. The Premier League, and here we praised the Premier League on a few occasions recently, and I'm going to praise them again.

They've always stipulated that once the name and number have been originally submitted to them, you cannot change during the season. And the rationale behind this is that if you were a Manchester United fan who had bought Cavani and Seven, you'd feel slightly cheesed off that effectively you would lose out. But I think, again, to be fair to the club, I think they did an amnesty and effectively a free swap over for anybody that bought the Cavani Seven. You could swap them for Ronaldo Seven and so on.

So that's the position. Yes, there is a financial settlement for players, but for players in the lower leagues where they are not selling many units and therefore the sums involved are so small, it just tends to go through on the nod that there won't be a share between club and player. I mean no disrespect to the player concerned, Kieran, but I suspect the Cavani 7 show up

will be as sought after as an unsigned copy of one of our books. There's a certain rarity value to both, I would guess, isn't there? I'm fairly certain of asking this question before, Kieran, and I really don't mean it to sound flippant, but we're not talking about players getting paid by the letter here, are they? Because if that were the case, Mateta's getting a lot more money selling shirts than Eze is.

That's right. No, no. I think the day, I mean, it used to be a bit of a standing joke, didn't it? Because we used to have that player at Nottingham Forest, Jan Venegor of Essendon. And clubs initially used to charge by the letter. I think there now is a flat fee charged for the name. So therefore, that becomes a non-discriminator.

Yeah, it's Venegor of Hesselink, wasn't it? Venegor of Hasselbank is completely different. Yes. That sounds like a minor complaint. I've just got a slight Venegor of the Hasselbank. Callum Hayward has our next question. Callum says, I'd like to ask a question about the transfers of players at the agreed future date. From the perspective of the buying club,

What are the differences in terms of financial commitments between a future transfer with an agreed date of transfer compared to purchasing a player immediately, but then loaning them straight out to another club? And in some circumstances, straight back to the selling club. If the buying club loans a player out, do they get any extra benefits in terms of access to the player, etc., as they have a contract of employment with them?

Well, I think this is an intriguing question because we are now in the position relating to Bosman transfers that a player in the final six months of a contract is now allowed permission to talk to other clubs, although those clubs cannot be in the same country.

So therefore, in theory, Kevin De Bruyne, Virgil van Dijk, Trent Alexander-Arnold, players of this ilk could start talking formally to other clubs from the 1st of January 2025, probably the most high profile of these, of course, and they could forward agree a deal. Now, the advantage to the buying club is that they can effectively lock in the

transfer arrangement. They can lock in the salary. That's going to help them in terms of budget. And also from the buying club's perspective, they can prevent others coming in and perhaps gazumping that particular deal. So those would all be the benefits for a player in the last six months of a contract.

In terms of a deal taking place where the player is sold normally partway through the season, or it can be at the start of the season, and we saw this example with Kamara, who went from Watford to Udinese and then was immediately loaned back. And I think both of our clubs have benefited in terms of

If you think about Wilfred Zaha, you sold him to Manchester United, immediately loaned back, and you wouldn't have been promoted.

Just be honest, had he not come back? So you can see the benefits to Palace from that point of view. The benefits to Manchester United was that they bought the player at an agreed fee. That meant that had he had another stellar second half of the season, and even as a Brighton fan, I've got to be grudgingly say that that was the case, it meant that nobody else could come in and take him away from Manchester United. And they also are able to charge a loan fee in respect of the player.

Looking at it from a Brighton point of view, when they signed Mitoma, the first thing they did was that they loaned him out to what was at the same time a club in which Tony Bloom had an interest in Uli and so on. And the player gets an opportunity to bed themselves in slowly and so on. I've had such a long weekend, Kieran. I'm quite tired. Remind me where it was at Zaha's called...

That goal? Two goals, I think you'll find. Yeah, two goals. The first one, the headed goal. Yeah, that's the one when Gordon Greer went missing. And the second one where Wayne Bridge went missing. I can't remember. Yeah, I'm sure we could have auctioned that shirt Wilford wore when he scored that goal. Like you did in Brighton when he flaunted a shirt when a bloke from Heidi High scored against Palace. I know we're not allowed to talk about football, Kieran, but that

That disallowed Southampton goal for VAR. I mean, I wanted Southampton to lose, obviously, but my, you got away with that one, didn't you? Jesus. Yes. Yeah. If it had been the other way around, bottom lips would have been hanging out. Yeah, of course they would have been. And I saw, I was talking to a Southampton fan after the match and he was aggrieved and I wasn't particularly, you know,

moaning that we got away with it but I wasn't kicking up a fuss about it and he was saying the only consolation was that at least it's not a long journey home and I'm going home to see my wife and sister and I said well that's two people that give you a nice happy face when you come back home and he said no no just the one Kieran Kieran that's very funny

Also, while we're talking about Brighton Southampton, Southampton's a way kit designer needs to have a long, hard look at themselves in the mirror. Chris Dyde has our next question. That was very good joke crowbarring in there, kid. Well done. Thank you. Chris Dyde says, I'm in the U.S.,

That's originally from England. And the football coverage is incredible. Pretty much all games from most of Europe's top leagues are on every week. If you have a few extra streaming services, that is, like Peacock and ESPN+. NBC and ESPN are apparently paying 10-figure sums for

to show the EPL and La Liga. But what's the payback for them on this investment? It seems like an astronomical sum for a pretty marginal sport here. Football is massively on the increase in the 18 years I've been here, and it's very popular amongst younger Americans. But surely this is crazy money for a sport that's arguably not even top five over here, if you consider NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, and NASCAR. It's a good question, Kieran. Why are they paying so much for a sport that...

possibly will be mainly watched by people from Spanish backgrounds and Europeans anyway. Yes, it's a six-year deal that the Premier League have signed. It's with the NBC subsidiary Peacock.

And it's £2 billion over six years. Yeah, £450 million a year. That is sizable. When you take a look at the numbers, the average viewing figures for...

for a premier league match in the united states is 546 000 pounds if you take a look at the average viewing figures for a match on sky they're probably around about two two and a half million and make sure you go the efl matches unless it's leeds leeds leads by far the the biggest draw as far in respect of the efl um they they tend to be significantly smaller so

They're actually pretty decent viewing figures. How do they compare to the NFL? If we take a look at the NFL this season, it's averaging 17 to 18 million, so about 20 times as much in the NFL. But the NFL is on, I think it's something like $11 billion a year. So the NFL is getting 20 times the money. Also, from Peacock stroke NBC's point of view,

it's filling space. They've got to broadcast something. And if they were broadcasting, and you watch some of these sports channels, and some of the sports are quite tenuous, but badminton, think about racket sports, hockey, cricket, they don't generate significant numbers at all as far as the United States audiences are concerned. So if you're able to offer...

advertisers, an audience of 546,000. And then you look at the demographics of that audience and you say, yeah, there's a very large Hispanic following, especially for La Liga. The big clubs, you know, and

let's be honest, who are we talking about? We're talking the two Manchester teams, Liverpool, the three big London teams and so on. They have sizable followings. And that was very evident when I was in the States 18 months ago watching the Premier League soccer series or summer series, whatever they called it. So I think NBC think that they've got a good deal. They package the product very well. So, yeah,

a 90 minute football match, they will get three, three and a half hours of content from that in terms of,

pre-activity on Friday night, for example. I've already seen the rushes which have been shown from Brighton Southampton before the match. They were interviewing executives from the teams and so on. So they get a big package. And when you work it out on a week-by-week basis, it actually works out quite cheap for that level of audience. And all the time you're trying to say to advertisers,

we've got a live product and it, you know, 546,000 is, is pretty damn good because nobody's watching live TV with the exception of a sport and news channels. NBC's coverage hosted by a Palace fan, of course. And I'm sure she was as delighted as we were to see John Texter lifting a trophy over the weekend, except for one of his other clubs in the Copa delimitatories.

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Will NBC be sharing the World Cup? I just wonder whether this deal has anything to do with trying to keep interest in soccer. And if I ever say that again, Kieran, that word, you feel free to shout at me. But whether it's a way of keeping interest in soccer before the World Cup starts, so to speak, or would this deal have been as big if the World Cup wasn't taking place? No, no. I think the two things are independent and...

You've got to give American audiences huge amounts of credit. The American fan base takes pride in the US if anything is happening in the US, regardless of the nature of the sport. So all of the matches will sell out for the FIFA World Cup in 2026.

It's being hosted, of course, by the US, Canada and Mexico. And the viewing figures, especially for the United States, but also for the likes of Brazil, Argentina and some of the what's perceived to be some of the bigger European teams, they will get very big viewing figures as well. So you don't

Club football and international football are seen as being separate beasts and they actually attract a slightly different following. Ben Parks has our next question, Kieran.

And Ben says, do clubs get compensated for players that are playing in the African Cup of Nations like they do for the World Cup? For example, a set fee for the amount of days, weeks that they're away or if a player is injured. I'm interested in the answer to this, Kieran, because it is improving, but there are still managers within the Premier League who seem to resent their players being taken away for African Cup of Nations duty more than they do for the World Cup.

knowing, of course, that it tends to be during our season. But it still seems to be more of a nuisance than losing players to other tournaments. Yes, as far as I can make out, there's no formal compensation in terms of the daily fee. In the most recent FIFA World Cup, which took place in Qatar, clubs were being paid $11,000 a day

for their players being used by the international team. So this was a FIFA competition. And also the competition was deemed to start, I believe, two weeks before the first match took place. So lower league teams in England were absolutely delighted when, if they had a Georgian international playing for them, they were getting far more than they were actually paying the player.

as compensation. And then there was an additional fund set up by FIFA purely to compensate those clubs that lost players as a result of injury.

The same broad rules take place in relation to UEFA. So if you go to the World Club handbook and you go to the UEFA handbook, you can find these numbers. In UEFA, compensation is tiered, whereas in the FIFA World Cup, it's universal. In the FIFA World Cup, you'd say you get that $11,000 per day, whether you are Real Madrid or whether you are Accrington Stanley.

And I quite like the idea of that. That sort of definitely appeals to the old school romantic in me. In UEFA, it is split into three tiers and that determines the level of compensation you will get during the Cup of Nations and also during the Euros themselves.

When it comes to the African Cup of Nations, which is still lucrative for you in, it's a $7 million prize for the winning team. I've been through the constitution and I think it's a sign of my dedication or stupidity that I'm reading the constitution of the African Cup of Nations on a Sunday afternoon whilst Liverpool are...

That's got to be the most routine win I've seen for a long, long time. First 15 minutes of Liverpool were outstanding, weren't they? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But I can see no reference

to compensation. There's lots of reference to the number of tickets that executives get and the standard of hotel to which they are entitled during the course of the competition and also the standard of flights. None of this economy nonsense. It's business class and if you are

the overall president of the ACF, it's got to be first class as you go from match to match. And it's good to see that some things never change when it comes to execs, whether it's domestic clubs or international issues. And remember, wasn't it Roy Keane who used to, one of the reasons he kicked off in the World Cup was that the executives of the FAI were in business class and the players were having to go and travel economy.

So that's where we are. There's no formal compensation from what I can see. So you can understand a certain element of managers having a moan when they lose players to the African Cup of Nations. But here's a suggestion. If you sign a player from Africa and he's decent, the chances are he's going to be playing in the African Cup of Nations. So don't act surprised when he goes to said tournament. Yeah.

I think one of the other reasons Rory Keane kicked off was because it was a Tuesday. Talking of FIFA, we're discussing a story on our next pod on Thursday, which I think, even by FIFA standards, is one of the shabbiest decisions they've ever made. You'll need to listen to our pod to hear it discussed. You won't be getting it from Glenn Denning or Mika Richards.

They'll be too busy laughing about wacky own goals to discuss the sort of in-depth financial that fails to win us. This is an interesting question, Kieran, from Neil Cottrell. I mean, this is a very interesting question, I think. Neil Cottrell says, many clubs in the Premier League and Championship, as we know, will be trying to manage their finances just within the profitability and sustainability limits to maximise competitiveness.

If a club sacks its manager, presumably the compensation costs contribute to the overall P&S limits this year. If that is the case, could this inhibit clubs really close to the limit from sacking managers or from spending as much as they might otherwise do in the transfer window in January to give themselves some leeway in case they do have to make a managerial change between now and the end of the season? It's an interesting concept here that clubs might be keeping some money back

You know, look at what Leicester had. It was a bit of a shock for Leicester to replace their manager this early. But will the money that they're paying him in compensation, which I presume will be substantial, count towards P&S?

Well, it certainly will. So redundancy costs are deemed to be a regular expense and therefore they do go into the PSR calculations. Does that mean a club might delay sacking a player until after the 30th of June? Yes, it might.

Does it have an overall impact? Actually, we're going to be covering on Thursday's show the total cost to Manchester United for

of hiring and firing managers and executives since Sir Alex Ferguson retired and try to contextualise that. The club which has paid out the most in these fees, I don't think it would come as any surprise, will be Chelsea under Roman Abramovich because when you treat a football club as an executive toy, then you get bored easily and you effectively trade it in for a slightly different model. So, yes, I'm also aware of...

at least one

well-known Premier League club who was desperate to sack its manager and also recruit another high-profile manager. And they couldn't do that for exactly this reason. And then all of a sudden, a very, very generous sponsorship deal was arranged by a company which may or may not be connected to a mate of the club's owner,

And all of a sudden, manager A shown the door, marked goodbye, and a new, very high-profile, fantastic manager came. Oh, well, okay. I'm looking forward to the awards now because I'm going to get drunkenly shout out the name of that manager. That's an interesting one. I suppose the difficulty is, especially in the Premier League now, Kieran, when it comes to compensation,

is that increasingly you're not just paying off a manager, you're paying off the five or six people that he brought with him because I think more in the past couple of years, more so than ever before, they're coming as a team, aren't they, rather than as an individual? Yes, the word entourage is frequently used when it comes to managerial change.

You can understand it from the coach's point of view. You want to be able to rely on people and reliance comes from building up a relationship and that takes time. Trust is something which doesn't exist in football. So having people around you is what... And also from the point of view of the club recruiting the manager...

And again, this tends to be most of the case at the upper levels because they can afford to do so. You want ultimately to be successful. And as we've said on more than one occasion, the difference between finishing 14th and 13th in the Premier League is around about £3.4 million. Well, that could be the cost of...

getting rid of the entourage of the managers who's leaving and effectively signing up the new one. And yet the difference between finishing fifth and fourth in the Premier League, which is

probably now becoming as valuable as winning the championship playoffs, is potentially worth up to £100 million a season. So it's huge getting into the Champions League. So when you are recruiting, you do a cost-benefit analysis. And if you have to recruit the...

goalkeeping coach, the coach as opposed to the manager and the physio who he likes and so on and so forth, then that's just seen as a cost of doing business. Our next question comes from Harry Handley. That's a good name, isn't it? Harry Handley. You can imagine him

Port Vale's centre-back and captain in 1955, shaking hands with someone called Tommy as a Christmas Day game kicks off. Harry's got the sort of question I like as well, which is asking for a friend getting around FFP. This scenario could happen, just a little bit of advice. Harry says, if someone were to win the lottery and wanted to give some of their winnings to their favourite club,

From the club's perspective, what would be the best way to do it from an FFP and tax perspective? Would it be a donation, an interest-free loan with the understanding that it would never need to be paid back, an equity investment in the club, or another way? And would the best way vary depending on whether the club were in the Premier League, Football League or non-league, given the various different financial rules? Yes, this is an intriguing question, Harry. And I suspect...

it's either been discussed in many a pub or thought of late at night by by many a person uh who's going well yeah okay it was two pounds 60 this week but but it could have been um and you go okay i'll know i'll definitely get you know i'll get the new house i'll get the new car you were going three or four holidays sack the job but with the rest of it i'm gonna spy you know invest in a football team um

The best way to use this money, Harry, would be, yes, you could make a donation. And the benefit of a donation, it's a one-off commitment.

we did see, I think it was a guy called Colin Weir, who was a Partick Thistle fan. And he had a spectacular, he had a nine-figure win on the lottery. And he put a substantial amount of money into the club. Sadly, he passed away relatively soon afterwards. We didn't get to see the fruits of his labours and Partick Thistle's

I've had complications there. So a lot would depend upon what you want with it. So if you just want to go and give 10 million pounds to your local club, give them a 10 million pound donation, walk away. It's up to them what they do with it. Now, again, I've just been talking about trust, just been talking about relationships.

Well, what happens if six months later they release your favourite player? You're going to have a bit of a bottom lip. You'll be a bit narked about that. So it depends whether or not you're willing to trust the club to make the right decisions in both the short and long-term interests.

If you gave the money in the form of a loan, and by definition of a loan is money which has to be repaid at a later date, what's going to happen to the interest? Well, now if it's a Premier League club, even if you don't charge any interest for PSR purposes, they're going to impute a level of interest. And...

That could be substantial. So I wouldn't recommend that. And my view would be if you can afford to give a club £5 million –

then don't ever expect to get it back. So a loan would not work if you lent the club money in the EFL Championship or League One or League Two. Again, there will be no PSR benefit as far as the National League is concerned, where to say that the cost control rules are loose is putting it very mildly.

There's nothing that you have to satisfy in the first place, provided you're paying your bills on time. That's as far as it really goes. So the third alternative would be to put money into the club in the form of equity, in the form of shares.

The trouble is, if you do that, you might end up owning 10 or 20% of the club. That might dilute the existing balance between current owners. So they might resent you for that. You could do it via non-voting shares, and that's one way to get around it. As far as the Premier League is concerned,

The first £90 million that you donated to the club via a new share issue, they would count towards PSR. In the EFL Championship, the first £24 million would count over a three-year period. And in League One or League Two, it would be deemed to be what we refer to as football fortune.

And Football Fortune effectively says, for every million pounds you put into the club, you can spend a million pounds more on wages. So you get 100% relief if it's done in the form of shares. So those are the options. We're not encouraging people to buy lottery tickets because it is a form of gambling. And we've always said we don't encourage people to gamble, but

I got £2.60 on Tuesday and I got quite excited about it. Did you? Well, they do say money comes to money, Kieran, don't they?

We won 11 quid on the postcode lottery, which is... Did you? It sounds nice, but it represents a considerable loss in the amount of money that Ali actually pays on the postcode lottery. We were discussing this situation yesterday before the Newcastle game. You've changed, Kevin. You've changed.

I say we were discussing, I was listening to people around me, unfortunately, talking. Come on, lads, this is my job. I've got enough of this. I've come to the pub to get away from work. But obviously, I've often dreamt of winning enough money to be able to invest a substantial sum in the club on the basis that they change the kit back to claret and blue. That's not going to happen. But yesterday I was saying, well, if I get just enough money to have a lounge named after me,

That would be odd. But a lounge that only me and my mates can go into. And then somebody said, well, you're in that now. You're in the Portsons Arms, which is pretty much. Yes, that's true. Pretty much. Congratulations to Bevan Graham, by the way, who owned the Portsons Arms, whose dog won the Greyhound Derby in Ireland last week. Oh, really? Yes. Oh, superb. Fantastic. We saw some of the pictures yesterday. Apparently it's a tradition that the winners drink champagne out of a very large bottle.

vase and they they weren't doing it reluctantly they took this as a challenge but no it's great that we're all highly delighted in the forces I was just saying and they got the Christmas decorations up they do the best Christmas decorations in the world

David Gorton has a very interesting question. David Gorton's question is becoming more and more pertinent now, Kieran, as well. He says,

are there different packages that allow different clubs based on their financial affordability and also is there a metric to show how successful teams are based on data systems used or money spent on data to improve decision making we've discussed several times recently Kieran that probably Tony Bloom's data his little package on his little laptop

It's probably the sort of package that most clubs wouldn't be able to afford. But it's an interesting one. Are there off-the-shelf packages that clubs can buy, depending on how much money they've got?

Yes. If you take a look at Statsbomb, for example, and I know the guys from Statsbomb listen to the show, so we'd love to have you come on the show and sort of talk us through it in more detail. They offer a free package to not just clubs, but to anybody. Oh, okay. But...

you've got to know what you're dealing with. If somebody gives me a piano, it doesn't make me a piano player, does it? Yeah, sure. So therefore, unless you are familiar with programming languages such as Python or R, then I think you're going to struggle to interpret the data. And

I give my spreadsheet away to anybody that asks for it. And I get contacted by, I'm currently doing some training work for the professional footballers associations. I've got players and former players contact me, say, can I have such and such a club? And say, yeah, yeah, fine. And people say, well, why do you not charge for it? So I go,

Unless you understand how to use the data, it's useless. And it's one of those things, it makes sense to me. Just like if you were writing notes for a show, you might write them in your own form of shorthand. If I tried to read, I'd go, what's he doing there? But you know exactly how it's going to flow. And you turn two or three words into a five-minute routine. And that's what I always say to people. Data in itself...

doesn't necessarily have value. What you need are people smart enough to put groups of data together to get meaningful outputs. So yes, there is a free package from Statsbomb, but if you want more, then you perhaps got to interact with them and set up a relationship on a consultancy basis.

And they have, I think, slightly more detailed packages in terms of live data analysis. So you can access certain data during the match. And I think it was Statsbomb that sort of, you know, one of the people who were behind the legendary XG, which is now sort of entered the modern lexicon of Statsbomb.

football observation and so on. And you've got to pay for that, and rightly so, because they put an awful lot of their background and their reputation into this, and they will offer consultancy packages on the back of that. As for who's got

the best tomato sauce. I've got lots of Italian friends and they all claim that their own mother has got the best Italian sauce. My auntie Marie, by the way, who lived in Milan for 15 years, her tomato sauce is just off the scale. And there's always something which that mama will use that somebody else's won't. They'll all claim that theirs is the best. And the thing about data, the thing about statistics is

is that to a large extent, we can make them what we want to make them. So we've seen that historically from economic analysis, political analysis, as well as football analysis. So I don't think it's possible to say that data analytics team X is better than data analytics teams Y. There tends to be a flavor of the month. Yeah, nobody's denying that Tony Bloom's

Jamestown and his other companies that he's got

are held in high regard but ultimately they they are still linked to individuals um but yes they've got they they've got a good reputation and that works for brighton but they don't sell their package to anybody else in the premier league the other and when ipswich got promoted to the premier league they were originally a customer and jamestown says sorry we can't have two teams from the same division utilizing our data so i think that jamestown are now giving it to to grimsby town

as well as the relationship they're starting up with Hearts in Scotland as well. So that's where we stand. I would imagine the likes of Statsbomb would probably have a more broad approach because they've not got a vested interest in an individual club, unlike Bloomin', Jamestown and so on.

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I think we've discussed this before, Kieran, but I remember a very uncomfortable afternoon in hospital when my dad, God rest his soul, told two Italian nurses that he guaranteed my risotto was better than anything their mums had ever cooked.

I know. I know. It was just, and obviously they took Umbridge at this. Yeah, yes, I can understand that. If you prefer, Umbridge. And they just really, they got really hum to me. I've just about got my head around XG here and I'm not the massive fan. It doesn't exist. So I'm suspicious of it.

which is odd because I read fiction and like plays, but expected saves is the one that's doing my head. Let's not talk about expected saves. And what I don't understand about data care, obviously I'm the last person on God's earth who would understand how data works, but how does it predict the future? I mean, I can understand how you can tell what happened in the past using data and what might happen now, but the way you can use data

It's still guesswork, isn't it? Essentially educated guesswork, isn't it?

It is. What it is assuming is that history will repeat itself. Yes, right. So therefore, if you have a fullback who historically has won 70% of tackles when facing a winger, then you would expect that to continue going forwards. What that doesn't necessarily do is recognise that, as we are seeing in football,

in the form of Manchester City, is that things can fall off a cliff very, very quickly. And I think it was Gary Neville who said when he decided to give up football, Manchester United were playing Stoke, and he always had backed himself. He said, I'm not the fastest person at the club, but I'm fast enough. And he said, I got skinned four or five times, and I just knew I have to give up now. So things can change.

fall very quickly. At the same time, if you are looking to recruit a player and you go to the likes of Statsbomb and you're saying, this is the type of football we are playing, could you advise what type of right back would fit in most efficiently with this system, assuming we are going to repeat that system? Now, if you move away, if Manchester City...

sack Pep Guardiola and replace him with Sam Allardyce doesn't matter all that historic data goes to waste because the two play a slightly different type of football yes that example of the fullback and the winger is what not doesn't bother me about data of course I fully accept it's a very useful tool but

But if you've got a club that have a fullback who they now know can tackle 70% of the time against a right-footed left winger who comes inside, the club with the right-footed left winger now have that data as well, which would then enable them to play a left-footed right winger or vice versa. So it's a kind of constant seesawing going on, isn't it, there, basically? And that's part of the wonderful thing about football. You are...

you are playing chess. And anybody that's played chess to a different level, say somebody plays a move that you weren't expecting and you have to have a complete rethink. Yeah, that's if you've seen the move rather than reading a spreadsheet, rather than watching the game like normal people should do. Our penultimate question comes from Chris Boddy.

And Chris's question is very timely, Kieran. Again, I'm a bit worried about missing the third round draw for the FA Cup tomorrow night. I'm going to have to, Glenn Denning and I are going to have to have a truce. You can't be rolling around a car park in Merriman while the third round draw for the FA Cup is going on. The Cushbody's question is about hospitality tickets and gate receipts.

Chris says, I'm aware that the rules and tradition is for each club to receive 40% of the gate receipts, brackets, I think. That's a man after my own heart. But are hospitality tickets included in that total for an FA Cup game or just the standard price tickets?

Fair question, Chris. The way that the monies are allocated when it comes to FA Cup games is that the home club, first of all, deducts the costs of hosting the game. Now, to stop clubs from taking the Michael with this, the Football Association do vet and they do have what they consider to be appropriate levels of expenses.

then the remaining money is split 45, 45, 10. And that is in respect of all the tickets sold, including hospitality packages. Now, it would be the case is that if you have boxes, then you're going to be incurring expenses in running those boxes. So those would be taken off the very top. And it would be effectively the net profit from each individual box.

which would be split between the two clubs. And it could be, of course, that, you know, let's say that Palace end up hosting Accrington Stanley, because Stanley are through, in the third round. Well, it could be that some people from Accrington want a box at Palace, you know, because it'll be, you know, it'll be an amazing match from their perspective. So therefore they're contributing, not just for the away fans attending, but they're

Could also be for the higher-priced tickets. So, yes, they are taken into consideration, and it's all tickets sold for the games. Where's the 10 going in that 45-45-10 split? The 10 goes into the FA pool.

which then contributes, A, for the broad running, the administrative costs of running the Football Association Cup, and also the money that gets redistributed in terms of how clubs are proceeding through the tournament. And again, I'm being very positive towards our administrative bodies today.

Let's give the FA more credit for the way that it's giving more money to the clubs lower down the leagues in terms of the earlier rounds. I think that is the appropriate approach to take. The bigger teams will sell out Wembley. They'll make money from the final rounds and also from their home matches.

and also as we've seen with Manchester United winning the FA Cup was the difference between appearing in Europe and not appearing in Europe and on the back of that you've got a minimum of four home games in the Europa League bringing in probably three to four million pounds a time so winning the FA Cup where the prize money is two million pounds actually is neither here nor there so it makes sense that more goes to the smaller clubs.

Our last question comes from another Kieran, although spelt very differently to yours. It's Kieran W. I know you're physically able to answer this question, Kieran, but I don't know whether this is case-sensitive information, so to speak. But Kieran asks, which five clubs in the Premier League are closest to breaking FFP limits and which five clubs have the most financial wriggle room to spend money?

Yeah, I suspect that when Kieran sent in this question, we could be talking about the Wanderers and Royal Engineers in terms of who was closest and further, given the somewhat long waiting list that we have. I'm used to a variety of spelling of the word Kieran, but this is the first time I've seen it K-E-A-R-O-N. Yeah, Kieron. Yeah, very strange. And...

me being born caused not, not certainly not the first and certainly not the last, uh, ruction between my mum and my dad. Um, they decided to, to call me Kieran, which at the time was, was not a, uh, a name that was common, uh, in England, uh, as was the case back in those days. So I was born, um, in, in, in the elephant castle at the local hospital. Um, and,

The mother was normally kept in hospital for two or three days. My old man went to celebrate my birth down the Two Eagles, which was the pub at the bottom of Brook Drive in those days. And in true Irish style, got I think what's technically known as shit-faced, decided it was going to be a good idea to go to the registry office and

And having been told by my mother that they're going to spell the name the Gaelic way, which there's no K, of course, in the Gaelic language. So that would have been C-I-A-R-O-N. Came up with the he said, yeah, it's Ciaran. So he couldn't remember how to spell it. So the registrar says, I think it's spelt this way, beginning with a K-I-E-A-R-A-N.

And that did not go down well with my mum when she finally got the birth certificate. All of which is very funny and very interesting, Kieran, but leads me to believe you don't want to answer this question. Oh, yes. I'd have forgotten something. Also, if you get this, I believe it's in one of Neil Ruddock's books, but he tells a story very well about how one of his daughters is called Pebbles.

which his wife just assumed that they started calling them Pebbles because it's a nice nickname and when eventually she said well we need to get them both properly registered and call her Juliet or whatever and

Shane Face Neil Ruddock had to admit that he'd already got drunk and registered her name as Pebbles. Yes, I wouldn't be surprised, Kieran, because this is quite sensitive information, so the clubs themselves might not be too pleased with you.

Well, it's opinion. Ultimately, I don't have access to the Premier League's records. And also, there is an element, there's a huge amount of supposition because we've only got the financial statements up to the end of 22, 23. We're starting to see a trickle of clubs published now for 23, 24. So in my opinion,

The clubs that were closest to breaking the PSR rules, as far as the Premier League was concerned, for 23-24 were, and this is in no particular order, were Leicester, Chelsea, Forest, Everton and Newcastle.

I suspect, however, that they all will be on the right side of PSR because if you recall, Leicester sold Dewsbury Hall to Chelsea last

Chelsea sold Ian Mattson or somebody else to Leicester. Forest sold their goalkeeper to Newcastle. Newcastle clearly didn't want this. It made a lot of money. Newcastle sold Anderson to Forest. And Everton did similar in terms of some deals with Aston Villa. So...

That's five years. I would have added Villa Inn as club number six in relation to that. So those, I think, were the clubs that were closest to breaking, but they used and kept within the PSR limits in all probability, unless the Premier League deems that selling two hotels, a car park and the women's team to yourself is outside of the rules or the prices charged by Chelsea were not at market rates.

So that's where we are in terms of the clubs closest to breaking. In terms of maximum wiggle room, the clubs that I've got down are Spurs, Liverpool, Manchester City. Manchester City are very good at selling players. Again, we've got to take their figures at face value. They've been audited. They've been signed off. Brentford and Brighton. Interesting. I was going to suggest Brentford, but...

Of course Brighton are in there, obviously. Can you tell which clubs have the most wriggle room, shall we say? I would say Brighton probably are there as far as up to the end of 23-24, simply because they sold Caicedo, Cucurea, Potter, Ben White, McAllister and so on. Because they sold so many players, their

their profit sales or their player sales will have contributed the most. In terms of the club that is most sustainable on a PSR perspective, I would say Spurs because they constantly come in with a wage to revenue percentage in the low 40s. But yeah,

percentage-wise. They have future-proofed the stadium, so I think they are the best business if you're viewing football clubs purely on a business perspective. It's interesting the way the mind of the football fan works, Kieran, and the mind of the football journalist, because suddenly this weekend...

There's at least, I would say, 12 people in the Portsons' arms, and I've read at least three articles today suggesting that it's obvious why Man City is struggling for form. It's because their players know they're going to be found guilty on all 115 of the charges. And then you go, might be a little loss of confidence, a couple of injuries maybe, players coming back from injury. No, no, no, they know for a fact they want out before. Oh, okay, right, all right, all right.

And suddenly it becomes a fact. Just no one mentioned it. And suddenly I said, no, it's definitely a fact. My mate told me and he's a taxi driver who had...

Pep Guardiola's barber in his car. Pep Guardiola's what? Yeah, Pep Guardiola's barber. Flies him over from Barcelona to give him a number two, does he? And he told you that in Spanish, did he? Thank you to everyone who's donated to the pod via our Patreon page. If you'd like to make a small monthly contribution, that'd be very kind of you. It'll get you access to our chat community and our regular quizzes. And you can do that by going to patreon.com slash priceoffootball. I think the date of our Christmas quiz has gone out to our

but I better not. I think it's about the 16th of December. I was going to say, let's not mention it in case we get it wrong, Kieran, but we've indulged in idle speculation now. If you've got a question you'd like answered on the show, email us at questions at priceoffootball.com. Don't forget, you can follow us on Twitter X and find us on our YouTube channel. And if you'd like to buy our book, you can find details on our website, priceoffootball.com. We'll be back on Thursday. In the meantime, I shall hand over to Kieran Maguire for his customary farewell.

Well, thank you to everybody that's been in contact. We've had some more FA Cup questions

trophy contact from listeners, which is fascinating, as well as people in other realms of the game. So we genuinely appreciate you making the effort, and we always try to reply, and we are fascinated by your contributions. Patreon supporters, thank you so, so much. It allows you to watch the club, to listen to the podcast regularly.

without adverts, which can go on a bit, but yeah, we equally thank you for the advertisers. We will be announcing some change in relation to that soon. Another way you can support the show is to give us a review.

And it helps in the charts. It helps with algorithms for both Spotify and Apple Podcasts, the apps. By all accounts, it doesn't matter what you say as far as your review is concerned. So you could even say you would rather have the show presented by Kendo Nagasaki and Giant Haystacks. Ha, ha, ha.

And that could be the warm-up act to Dave versus Glenn Denning. And I'd certainly pay to watch that show. Well, we know one particular listener who's an expert in wrestling over there in the States will be highly delighted about that. My dad loved Kendo Nagasaki. I believe he was from Wealdstone.

He used to dress as the world's worst samurai, basically, samurai stroke ninja, and come into the ring in his bizarre mystical. And then he had a ceremony where when he retired, he ritually burnt his face mask. But it turns out that the rumor is that he was a franchise, that there were several. How was he? Well, you know, because Dave from Wheelstone obviously had to have the odd day off, so somebody else put the mask on him.

Giant Haystack. I didn't like Big Daddy. I was the only one on Giant Haystack's side, basically. Bye, everybody. Bye.

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