The sporting future of Lionel Messi was not the only summer soap opera of the Spanish football. The agreement between La Liga, the body that manages professional football in the country, and CVC Capital Partners, one of the largest investment funds in the world, is shaking the Iberian peninsula. It was ratified on August 12 by 38 of the 42 clubs making up the Spanish first and second divisions, but the two heavyweights, Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, are opposed to it.
This protocol grants the London-based investment fund a share of around 11% of audiovisual and non-audiovisual championship revenues for fifty years, as well as a 10% stake in the capital of a new commercial entity, LaLiga Impulso, against a payment of 2.1 billion euros. Since then, fans and clubs have been tearing each other apart. Florentino Pérez, the president of Real Madrid and backer of a European Super League, threatens to attack the promoters of the transaction, including Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga.
On the other side of the world, it is the New Zealand rugby players who have been fighting for months to prevent the investment fund Silver Lake from taking 15% of the company managing the commercial rights of the All Blacks. An operation, blessed at the beginning of 2021 by the New Zealand rugby federation, which values this franchise at 2.2 billion dollars (1.8 billion euros).
For the stars in the black jersey, Sam Cane and others Aaron Smith, the “Special connection and the nature of what rugby represents in New Zealand” could be called into question by this transaction, they wrote in a letter unveiled in March by the New Zealand Herald. And point “An inherent risk of cultural appropriation, real or felt, knowing that Silver Lake is an American investment fund”. “In public performances: the team is a national asset”, summarizes the sociologist Michel Raspaud, professor at the University of Grenoble-Alpes.
Faustian pact
In France, a controversy has also arisen in rugby, on the occasion of CVC’s entry into the capital of the Six Nations Tournament. “An investment fund is not the devil”, concedes Florian Grill, member of the management committee of the French Rugby Federation (FFR). He was however opposed to such an agreement, which, to hear it, is part of a Faustian pact: “We sell family jewels to finance our operating losses; the financial bubble of rugby is inflated to the detriment of amateur clubs; we give to a financial actor, not sporting and who comes to make a capital gain, rights which should not be conceded. ” CVC has in this case a right of veto on the entry or exit of nations in the tournament.
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