Premier League influence extends to title matches in other countries

The first meeting showed Alex Muzio everything he needed to know. Not long after he and his business partner, gambling magnate Tony Bloom, acquired the Royale Union Saint-Gilloise, a Belgian football club, Muzio met with the team’s coach for a chat. He wanted to discuss potential hires.

Muzio was never a football player. He was never a scout. He spent his youth working for Bloom’s Starlizard consultancy, a company that many people regard as the UK’s leading betting company.

Starlizard’s business model is to use dice to find betting odds. The system has information from tens of thousands of players around the world. The bespoke algorithms he uses are designed to sift through this data and distinguish opportunities first and talents second. Starlizard’s plan as a club owner was to do the same thing.

Bloom already owned a club in England: the team he had always supported, Brighton, transformed in part by Bloom’s money and methods. But he and Muzio wanted to see what else their “intellectual property” could do. Muzio said that what he wanted “was to win a title”.

In May 2018, when Bloom completed the Union takeover, Muzio was eager to get started. The club, which held a title for the last time in the years between World War I and World War II, was at that time sunk in the second division of Belgian football. Its staff consisted largely of volunteers. The training center in the suburb of Brussels did not have showers in the changing rooms. Muzio wasn’t even sure the center had restrooms.

But his intention was not for things to continue like this. The first step would be to gain access to the Belgian first division in three years and, for that, Muzio knew that the team needed to be reformulated. He presented seasoned Union coach Marc Grosjean with a list of potential signings, all selected and evaluated based on Starlizard data.

Grosjean was not impressed. He used a curse word to describe Muzio’s suggestions, then presented his alternatives. “He told me that he would prefer to sign a group of Belgian players, players he knew,” said Muzio. It didn’t take long for Starlizard’s system to evaluate the trainer’s suggestions. Before the end of the month, Grosjean was out of Union, and his abrupt but mutually agreed departure was described as “a disagreement over the club’s sporting development”.

“There are ways to do the things that interest us,” said Muzio. And any resistance would only serve to slow down the process.

Three years later, his ideas were proven. Union reached its goal of accessing the first division in the middle of this year. And now, more or less halfway through the current season, the club occupies the first position in the Jupiter Pro League, with a six-point advantage over Club Brugge. Given the structure of Belgian football, whose regular season is followed by playoffs to decide the champion, the possibility of a Union title, their first since 1935, remains remote. But it’s a possibility nonetheless.

And that, of course, would not have been possible without the arrival of Muzio, who serves as president of the Union, and Bloom, although the latter has no involvement in the club’s day-to-day administration.

It’s not completely accurate to describe their presence at Union as a fluke. The team was acquired because it met the strict criteria established at the beginning of the search: it was the right kind of club, at the right price, and located in the right place. The metropolitan area of ​​Brussels, where Union has been headquartered since 1897, is home to more than a million residents and only one other big club, Anderlecht, Union’s most traditional rival. The purchase of the club did not happen by chance.

Muzio, Bloom and Starlizard studied clubs in a number of leagues. Others might have had different priorities, different requirements, different ideas. But Union, specifically, fit exactly what they were looking for, and so was transformed by their arrival, a club hitherto reduced to a shadow of itself but eventually revitalized.

This is a version of a story that has been repeating itself in many parts of Europe with increasing regularity in recent years: teams sunk into mediocrity or facing financial difficulties and ended up rescued, in some cases overnight, by a force external. On the surface, these clubs all have very little in common. But beneath the surface there is a streak of union between them, and that streak leads to England.

That European football has had its shape dictated by the Premier League, for the past 10 years or so, is undoubted. The wealth of the English First Division exerts a strong gravitational pull on the rest of the continent. English clubs serve as the most reliable market for players, push up transfer prices and drive up wages. Players are acquired across Europe with the aim of later transfer to England, and often purchases are backed by cash that comes as a result of Premier League television contracts, apparently immune to the pandemic.

In recent years, however, the nature of that impact has changed. It stopped happening at a scale away; instead, English clubs – or rather, the international groups that control them – began to invest directly in international teams, which gives them immediate influence over championships across Europe and across the planet.

The reasons for this vary. Two of Union’s rivals at Jupiter Pro Legue have owners with English connections: OH Leuven is controlled by King Power, the Thai company that owns Leicester City, and Ostend is part of a group of clubs belonging to the Pacific Media Group, among which Nancy, from France; FC Den Bosch, from the Netherlands; and an English second division team, Barnsley.

While Leuven has served at times as little more than a development team – a place where young players are sent to gain experience – Pacific Media Group believes its approach helps improve performance and reduce costs in your entire network of teams. “We don’t need to have full staffs in every market,” Paul Conway, the group’s founder, told the Unofficial Partner podcast.

Ostend, Nancy, Barnsley and the other clubs in the group share not only personnel but also knowledge. “We have a superior knowledge base than most teams,” Conway said of his club’s recruiting departments. This helps prevent “leakage”, in his words. “You spend loads of money on a player and then, at the end of the contract, he leaves,” he said. “Because we have a uniform style of play within the group, we can keep these players for life.” If a club no longer needs a certain player, in other words, a spot can be found for him in another team in the group.

A similar approach helped Estoril, long a simple extra in the Portuguese first division, win a place in the Europa League, after taking control of a group of clubs linked to David Blitzer, executive of the Blackstone financial group that is part of the consortium that controls Crystal Palace, of the English Premier League.

Danish champions Midtjylland has among his owners Matthew Benham, another betting magnate and former colleague of Bloom, who is one of the owners of Brentford, a club recently promoted to the Premier League with which the Danish team share a philosophies of play and football. disciplined use of data systems.

And there are, let’s not forget, the clubs that make up the City Football Group, a network centered on Manchester City. The group’s history doesn’t just include successes. Although he did well in Major League Soccer, USA, and Australia – leagues whose current champions are, respectively, New York City FC and Melbourne City–, his endeavors in Europe seem more complicated.

Lommel, the group’s club in Belgium, remain sunk at the bottom of the second division table despite having a higher budget than many of their peers, and Girona, their Spanish club, were relegated from La Liga in 2019 and still hasn’t come back. Troyes, the French club acquired by the group last year, gained access to Ligue 1 in their first attempt but for now are battling relegation.

The relationship between Union and Brighton is less hierarchical. The depth of Starlizard’s knowledge of the game means its methods are beyond the reach of most of its rivals — “it’s impossible for other clubs to use them,” Muzio said — but he has rejected the idea that Union is just one. barn of players to feed the brother team.

“We are very independent,” he said, before referring to Boom. “Tony is the majority owner, but he has no involvement with Union. He doesn’t interfere. We have the freedom to do things however we want.”

Much of the methodology of Brighton and Union is the same, inevitably, he said, because it’s based on the way Starlizard has always worked, but the clubs don’t share anything else but that. So far, it has been enough to restore – at least for now – Union’s position at the top of Belgian football, based on expertise developed and honed in England.