Premier League wealth is affecting overseas title races

That first meeting told Alex Muzio all he needed to know. Not long after he and his business partner, gambling magnate Tony Bloom, bought Royale Union Saint-Gilloise, a Belgian football team, Muzio sat down with the club’s coach. He wants to discuss potential rookies.

Muzio was never a football player. He was never a scout. He has spent his career working for Bloom’s consulting firm Starlizard, which provides data and analytics for Bloom’s betting organization, considered by many to be the largest in the UK.

Starlizard’s business model is using data to its advantage. It has information on tens of thousands of players from all over the world. Its own algorithms are designed to skim it and spot opportunities first, then talent. Muzio’s plan for team mastery does the same.

Bloom already owns a team in England: The club he has always supported, Brighton, has become a mainstay of the Premier League with Bloom’s money and methods. But he and Muzio wanted to see what else their “IP” could achieve. “We want,” said Muzio, “to win a title.”

By May 2018, when Bloom had completed the purchase of Union, Muzio was keen to get started. The club, which last celebrated a title in the interwar years, was at the time mired in the second tier of Belgian football. It is staffed largely by volunteers. Its training base on the outskirts of Brussels has had no showers. Muzio still can’t say for sure that there are toilets.

He had no intention of letting it continue like this. The first step was being promoted to the Belgian first division within three years, and to do that, Muzio knew, the squad needed to be revamped. He presented to the club’s experienced manager, Marc Grosjean, a list of potential signings, all of which were selected and evaluated by Starlizard’s data.

Grosjean was unimpressed. He used an explicit to describe Muzio’s proposals, and then offered his own alternatives. “He told me he wanted to sign a group of Belgian players, players that he knew,” Muzio said. It didn’t take long to figure out the Starlizard stats that made them up. Muzio hardly liked it, but Grosjean is gone at the end of the month, his sudden departure, if any, was announced as a “difference of opinion on the sporting development of the club.”

“We have ways that we want to do things,” says Muzio. Resistance will only slow things down.

Three years later, his idea was vindicated. Union hit its target of being promoted last summer. More than half way through this season, it will spend Christmas atop the Jupiler Pro League table, six points ahead of Club Brugge. The way Belgian football is structured, with the traditional league schedule followed by the end-of-season playoffs, means that a first domestic title for Union since 1935 remains a distant possibility. But it’s a possibility anyway.

Of course, that wouldn’t have been possible without the arrival of Muzio, who holds the position of president of the Alliance, and Bloom, although the latter has no day-to-day involvement in running the club. the set.

It wouldn’t be entirely fair to describe their presence at Union as a fluke. The team was acquired for meeting the strict criteria established at the start of the search: the right type of club at the right price in the right location. The larger Brussels area, where Union has been based since 1897, is home to more than a million people and has only one large team, traditional rival Anderlecht. It’s not just a random chance.

Muzio, Bloom and Starlizard looked at teams in a variety of tournaments. Others may have different priorities, different requirements, different ideas. It happens that Union fits their bill exactly, and so Union has a transformed existence, a shell of a club suddenly revived.

This is a version of a story that has played out across Europe with increasing regularity in recent years: teams have either flourished in mediocrity or have fallen on hard times to flourish, seemingly overnight, by some external influence. On the surface, the clubs have very little in common. Beneath, they are bound by a single thread, one that can be traced back to England.

European football has, over the past decade or so, been shaped by the Premier League without a doubt. Britain’s wealth of top flights has long exerted a pull on the rest of the continent. English Club acts as The most reliable market for players, price increase on the transfer and deposit market salary hike. Players are acquired across Europe with the aim of being sold to England in the future, and are often bought for money, a consequence of the Premier League’s apparently anti-pandemic broadcast contracts.

In recent years, however, the nature of that impact has changed. It no longer exists at once removed; instead, English clubs – or rather the international ownership groups behind them – have invested directly in overseas teams, giving them no small influence on the championships. enemies throughout Europe, and around the world.

The reasons for that vary. Two of Union’s competitors in the Jupiler Pro League have British ownership: OH Leuven is owned by King Power, the Thai company that controls Leicester City, and Ostend is part of the Pacific group of clubs. Media Group, among them is Nancy from France; FC Den Bosch in the Netherlands; and a British second tier team, Barnsley.

While Leuven is, at times, like a farm team – sending young players to gain experience – Pacific Media Group believes their approach improves performance and reduces costs across the entire network. grid your teams. Paul Conway, founder of the group, told Unofficial partner audio file.

Ostend, Nancy, Barnsley and the rest not only shared about employees, but also shared knowledge. “We have a bigger knowledge base than most people,” Conway said of its clubs’ recruitment department. That helps prevent “leakage”, as he put it. “You spend a lot of money on a player and then, at the end of the contract, the player leaves,” he said. “Because we have an even playing style as a group, we can spend our whole lives with these players.” In other words, if a club doesn’t require a player, you can find a spot for him elsewhere.

A similar approach has helped Estoril, long a strong contender in Portugal’s top flight, to compete for a Europa League spot after arriving under the auspices of a group of teams. is supported by David Blitzer, chief executive officer of Blackstone, a member of the consortium. owns Premier League club Crystal Palace.

Midtjylland, the Danish champion, shares owners – another gambling magnate, Matthew Benham, a former colleague of Bloom – and a philosophy with Brentford FC, a newly promoted data-driven organization. Premier League.

And then, of course, there are clubs that form some sort of City Football Group network, centered on Manchester City. The group’s record, at best, is mixed: Though it has enjoyed success in Major League Soccer and Australia – where New York City FC and City of Melbourne are the defending champions – its European ventures are more complicated.

The group’s Belgian club, Lommel, remained bogged down at the bottom of the second division despite a much larger budget than their peers, and Girona, their Spanish outpost, was demoted from La Liga in 2019 and has not returned. Troyes, the French team that the owner of Man City bought last year, is promote at first try, but now struggling against immediate relegation.

Union’s relationship with Brighton is not too hierarchical. Starlizard’s extensive knowledge of the game means that its methods are beyond the reach of most of its rivals — “They can’t be left to other teams,” says Muzio — but Muzio dismisses the idea. the idea that Union is any or all of the feeder, sister club or partner.

“We are very independent,” he said, before mentioning Bloom: “Tony is the majority owner, but he has no involvement in Union. He did not interfere. The club has the freedom to do it the way we want to do it. ”

Much of the methodology at Brighton and Union is certainly the same, he said, stemming from the way Starlizard has always worked, but the clubs don’t share anything beyond that. So far, that has proven to be more than enough for Union to recover – for the time being – to the pinnacle of Belgian football, with an expertise crafted and honed and polished in England.