Book Review 2023.04: The Billionaires Club: The unstoppable rise of the football’s super-rich owners, 2017, 316 pages, Paperback, ₹399
This book is the worthy winner of the 2018 Sports Book Award, Football Book of the Year. A must read for every lover of this captivating game who wishes football a glorious future for it to be enjoyed by not just the current and also the future generations.
With no single hero or villain, it is a fascinating commentary of how the ownership in the elite world of club football is changing in the 21st century. While its impact for the grassroot football is not expressly spelt out, it is not tough to see its consequences on community football clubs that need to thrive to identify and promote young talent. What makes this book distinct is the socio-economic lens used to analyze changes in the elite football club ownership which offers the readers not only a brief glimpse of the political and economic drivers for change but also the personal motive for buying clubs like Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester City and Leicester City among others.
Moving from the wealthy Russians who insure their survival by building a public profile to insulate themselves from the whims of their totalitarian rulers to American sports businessmen thriving on public funded stadiums for their private profits the book captures the wide range of incentive or compulsions driving the Russians, Americans, Chinese, Arabs and the Thais owners.
The last part of the book detailing how Bangladeshi labor is exploited in the middle-east, by providing specific case studies from construction of stadiums for Qatar FIFA 2022 World Cup is vivid and engaging while at the same time depressing. Painting in detail the efforts made by the Qatar royalty to whitewash the negative images of their slave labor camps with the spectacle of the World Cup tests our love for the beautiful game of football to its breaking point.
I recommend this book to all readers interested in sports management and financing of sports. A by-product of reading this book is the triggers it sets off in all sensitive human beings to re-examine the way market economics is manipulated for the benefit of the super-rich by taxing the poor, and how neighborhood clubs that nourish grassroot talent are being taken away from the local community sponsors by the sporting plutocrats.
Happy reading or should I say necessary critical reading.
