Thank you very much for taking the time to read it though! It is really appreciated and I am glad it made sense for the most part.

Cheers,

Jonathan

Thank you very much for all of your help in giving me advice, opinions and bits of information to use in my piece on French football finances. The article was published today on In Bed With Maradona's website. You can find it here:  http://t.co/heF8Aub

I would love to know what you all think of it and thank you again for your help, it is much appreciated! A great start to the season for Rennes but as a PSG fan I cannot wish you too much good luck for this weekend. May the best team win!

Looking forward to posting on here again.

Cheers,

Jonathan

So to my mind you could develop as :

I. The financial fair play : a French ideology
a. Froggies are not great managers,
b. so they need to sell slaves every year or to cope with public funding for stadiums
II. To what extent is this sustainable in Europe
a. the end of debts if there is no balance and profit in long term, to be a rich owner is not enough
b. the necessity of an adequation between charges and turnover (salary cap)

sorry to sum up like this, but it's holiday time, and I can't stay with my computer in a sunny saturday afternoon.

To me, this looks like a solid, solid article on the situation of French football and its virtues that make him less competitive...

French football is like the girl cute but nothing special at college, who ends up being the beautiful, successful woman everybody admires 10 years later when all the teenage pin-ups have faded.

Give it five to ten years and the economical management of French football will be their strenght when Spain and England are hit by the proper collapse of their sides

Back to the point, I think this is a great article Jon. Maybe lauig and his sharper eye on football economics would have something to add, but to me it looks good

Thank you very much for all of your replies over the past few weeks. I have recently managed to compose a piece combining all the factors that I have found contribute to the poor financial state of some football clubs and the suggestions I received from here feature heavily. I have posted a rough version of the article on the link below and would really appreciate your opinions on it. It is important that I get as many facts right as possible and if you see something and believe that it is incorrect then please tell me. I want to avoid making any false claims here.

I am aware that the article is quite dry without any quotes but the piece is very long without them and I have struggled to find any suitable for this topic. The final version of this will be shorter but I just want to get some of your general thoughts.

Thanks,

Jonathan

http://painandtheglory.blogspot.com/201 … ticle.html

To illustrate the problem, an article about one of the biggest football club financial disaster of the last 10 years: RC Strasbourg.

-Here-

The team won the "Coupe de la Ligue" in 2005 with players as Mamadou Niang and Mickael Pagis, and was still playing in L1 level only 3 years ago...
Next year, it will be in amateur league, with an unknown guy as an owner, who bought the entire club for 1€!!!

I think among the problems as dic's suppression and french traditionnal way of management, club buyers are often incompetent and badly surrounded or  helped by sports managers.
Wrong choices in the short run causes bad results, more pressure, and starts a vicious circle. (FC Nantes is a good exemple for this point).

I think my team mates forgot a major key point...the social aspect of the French population. French people would not understand that a businessman like Pinault or Seydou could in one hand spend millions in a football club and in the other hand shut down a company or fire hundreds of people to please shareholders. In other countries in deep recession (Spain for example), it looks that football clubs are allowed to do so...

Thank you very much for your replies. Both answers are really useful and I hope that I will be able to put them into a clear, simplified yet easy to understand article in the next few days. The article on Rennes finances is very helpful as is lauig's multi-pointed answer. It is great that both of you got back to me so quickly. I really appreciate the help.

I knew lauig would come back with very good replies to your questions .

Another issue that  is less measurable but I believe a true cause of the issues, is the unequal ability of clubs to make the transition to modern football.

This is an issue we've seen a lot in Rugby when the switch to professionalism was made in the 90s. It didn;t happen as brutally in football, but the financial crisis may have just exposed many of the not so well structured club.

The difference between big clubs such as Lyon, Marseille or Rennes (Who all have in common a need to reduce their wage bill, as it shows since this summer for the Olympiques, since last year for Rennes) and smaller clubs of D2 or National is massive. Some clubs in D2 are not managed anywhere near as professionaly as clubs could be in the County Leagues in England, and many clubs in the National can't dream of attendances such as those of Conference clubs.

And this is a massive gap now between the old-school, local entrepreneur president liking a few bottles of red and a big meal with the staff and players after the game (this is a caricature but you see my point) and the Aulas-like, performance driven economists building near-rentable economic machines. The problem is that the old-school management, especially without a strong sponsor (Pinault, Seydoux, Louis Dreyfus, Tavernost) isn't viable anymore, and all clubs not able to achieve the transition is rather unlikely to do any better than survive (and this is enough of a struggle in many ways, especially if just one mistake can tip the boat over)

If you're interested, I'm not sure whether I gave you that link yet, but Sylvain wrote a very fine piece on the economical situation and model at the Stade Rennais, which you can read here on the website

This is a very interesting topic and it has several answers.
First, I would put the case of Grenoble aside from the others, having Japanese investors trying to build a top team in a quite small city (not too small but with a huge proportion of students coming from all over the country and who, for the most part, don't give a damn about the club), a city with no good football tradition (it's a hockey/winter sports town) and too close to the two giants that are Saint-Etienne and Lyon, with too few powerful firms to back up the main investors etc This project was very very risky.

For the others (and Grenobe too), one of the main reason is the strict ruling of the DNCG. French clubs cannot contract debts as large as what is possible in Engand or Spain and when their debt reach a critical point, the DNCG pronounce their "rétrogradation administrative" (how would you translate that ? ^_^).
But that's not the only explanation, the budgets of french clubs are way too dependant to the TV rights, stadiums do not bring enough income. They don't because very few clubs own their stadium, it belongs to the city which rent it out to the club. That's the case for Rennes and for most of the clubs.
They also don't bring enough income because they're rarely full, partly because french stadiums are a bit old and unconfortable, partly due to a lack of football cuture (Frenchs are not as passionate about our clubs as the guys in Dortmund, Manchester or Istanbul), partly because the buying power of the Frenchs has taken a toll (I know it may sound weird considering the prices of a tickets for an Arsenal or Chelski game but still...), partly because the quality of the football displayed in France is not very enthusiastic, partly because french companies are reluctant to invest in football. How come Toulouse is not massively sponsored by Airbus ? How come PSG has to reach out to Qatari investors and cannot benefit from the incredibly huge profits of Total ?

Thanks!

Hello
I don't speak english and i don't care

Je serais curieux de l'entendre ça!
^^