These Football Times
Deconstructing American Soccer (Part II)
Welcome to the Lab by These Football Times, the home of long-form storytelling online. Let us loop you through the ages of football, so sit back, learn and enjoy the podcast. Welcome to the Lab Podcast by These Football Times, I'm Jim Hart. This is part two of Deconstructing American Football, or soccer, as you will. We decided that this week we would talk about the economics of American football, and who better to do that with than Stephen Shinansky, who is the author of Soccer Nomics, and also his latest book is called Money and Soccer, a Soccer Nomics Guide, which I both recommend both highly. I just finished Money and Soccer over the weekend in preparation for this podcast, and I think it's brilliant. So welcome to the podcast, Stephen. How are you doing this morning? I'm very good, Jim, thanks a lot, and thanks for inviting me onto your show. You're more than welcome, and joining me is my longtime cohort, Mr. John Townsend of These Football Times. Hi, John. How are we doing? I'm well. I'm actually ecstatic to be able to talk to both you this morning, and I want to send my well wishes to Omar, as he's not able to join us today, but he would definitely add a lot to this conversation. But yeah, I'm very happy to be here this morning, and Stephen, thank you for joining us. So I guess we'll just kick right into it, then, Stephen, about, I suppose it was about a year or 18 months ago, and you found yourself in the middle of a controversy, and I think it started on Twitter, but I don't know how it really started. And a lot of people in MLS took exception to some things you had said. Why don't we talk about that a little bit? What started that little row that you were embroiled in? Well, I think the origin of this was that I was interested in making a... I decided to look at the comparison between how much players are paid in MLS, compare it to the other major soccer leagues in Europe, and I was actually quite surprised. I hadn't realized this, but actually there are about 15, 20 leagues in Europe that pay higher wages on average to their players than Major League Soccer. And some of these are very small leagues indeed, leagues like the League in Kazakhstan, the League in Romania, these are playing about the same amount. And the point about this is that in soccer, most of my research has been to show that you get pretty much what you pay for, but on average, over time, more spending leads to better results and involves a higher quality of play, largely because there's a highly competitive global market in soccer players, thousands of clubs, tens of thousands of players, ability is relatively easy to observe and measure, and therefore the market really, in a sense, works, you get paid what you're worth relative to other players, and therefore, as a result, if MLS has the 20th highest wage bill in global soccer, then that would make it there, roughly speaking, the 20th ranked league in global soccer, and it was really in that observation that things started to develop because having said that, then, you know, we could go on to argue about issues about what the real quality of the league is and making those kind of comparisons. But then I got into really thinking about the finances of Major League Soccer, and thinking really about how Major League Soccer could conceivably grow into something competitive with the big leagues in Europe. So when you started thinking about how it could grow into something, there are obviously obstacles to that, one being a single entity structure as it stands, the other, I assume, would be the player's CBA agreement as it stands. What other obstacles, or do you see those as obstacles, I guess, and are there other obstacles to growth under this current structure? Right, so I think the first thing to say is that it describes the scale of the challenge facing Major League Soccer, and I think people, again, often underestimate how big this challenge is. For example, Don Delve said last year, I think, that he wanted people to look at MLS in 10 years' time in much the same way as they look at La Liga or Serie R. And my view of that would be, well, okay, if you want to be compared with that, then you have to be a similar scale of operation, and the comparison is like being an owner of a mum and pop store saying that they want to be Wal-Mart in 10 years' time, and that's a huge challenge. You would have to have phenomenal growth. You would have to expand very dramatically. So, for example, I would reckon that the average club in Serie R or in La Liga generates a revenue which is something like half as big as the entire revenue of Major League Soccer. That's the scale of the challenge, and there are 20 clubs in each of those leagues. So, just the scale of the organisations is so much faster. And then the question is, well, how do you do that? How do you grow? If you could grow to that kind of scale, then what you could do is then you would hire very many of the best players. They would all play in Europe. They'd want to play in MLS. So the revenue growth is the key, and how are you going to generate revenue growth? They already get very good crowds, and that generates a certain amount of money, but here's the fundamental problem. All successful sports leagues in the modern world, and it's one of the talking stocks here, it's any sport. They all rely on television revenue as the basis of their success. It's really only TV penetration that generates the scale of revenue that enables you to hire the top talent. And this is ultimately the fundamental problem of MLS, is that it's not taking off on TV. They are getting audience sizes for each game on MLS game on television, they're getting audiences of roughly a quarter of a million viewers, which is really much too small to generate a significant revenue, and for below leader MX, or the Premier League, which are generating audiences two, three, four times as large as that, and not competitive with all the other major leagues sports in the United States. And then the question is what is going to change about this? What is going to change about the system in the next few years? They're tied into a broadcast contract that goes to 2022, which is delivering them, again, compared to other leagues around the world, tiny amounts of money. The earliest that this change would be 2022, and for it to change significantly in 2022, we'd have to see very rapid growth in TV audiences, and it's just not happening. So this is a kind of fundamental problem with the business model that mostly suffers. I see it, and somewhat provocatively, I concluded that they can stay as minor league soccer. They can be a feeder league for Europe, and do so very successfully, but they're never really going to arrive to compete with the top European league, unless there's some fundamental game-changing event, which I can't see on the horizon at the moment. So Stefan, what are the things that you mentioned in these fundamental changes that must take place? And I've always argued that people in MLS, supporting MLS, reviewing MLS, their biggest hurdle is actually the access to a better product overseas, both in terms of the breadth of the other leagues, and the quality on display, and the amount of media attention that American broadcast networks give the foreign gain. The other aspect of this is, I think a lot of people mistake growth in MLS for expansion. I think those are two different aspects. My question to you is, can MLS improve its product under the same model of growing, or I'm sorry, of expanding over, I would say, organic growth? And what does this organic growth entail? And this could be anything from player development to changing the system. What do you think? Well, I mean, one of the things that strikes me as being interesting, and I'm always at paying to draw this distinction, I'm very pessimistic about the future of major league soccer, but I'm very optimistic about the future of soccer in the United States. It seems to me that we're in the middle of an enormous boom of interest, and at so many different levels. So I was thinking a little bit about the success of some of the U.S.L. teams, which are doing really well in terms of generating attendances, you think of Cincinnati, S.C. Cincinnati, and some of the other U.S.L. teams, which are doing well. You think of the fact that there are able, the U.S. is able to have a couple of other leagues, which are generating some very interesting teams, both the N.A.S.L. and the N.P.S.L. And these are generating enormous amounts of local interest. So there's this upswell of fascination with the game, and of course, what's also particularly important in the United States is the growth of the women's game, and the level of interest that's generating, which I think is something that puts the United States ahead of many other parts of the world. So there are enormous number of reasons to be very optimistic about the future of soccer in the United States. The problem with majorly soccer is that somehow you have to draw people's attention to your particular version of the game. It's not enough that Americans are find soccer interested or are an increasing fraction of Americans find soccer interesting. You have to draw people's attention to your game, and the way that that happens conventionally is that the teams themselves compete in order to bring about that attention to their club. They hire big stars and try to win championships in a way which will draw in the fans and that competition creates an enormous amount of interest and generates new stories and the media buzz that you need, and that kind of drives you to become successful. And that's the bit that's missing with majorly soccer. There's no genuine competition between the teams, between the franchises, because of the single-end structure. They are essentially operating a cartel where they agree amongst themselves not to spend more than the salary cap, and in the hope that by doing so that they can attract lots of fans but not have to pay very high salaries and so that they can be highly profitable. And of course, this works phenomenally well as a business model in the NFL, in the NBA, in MLB, but only because in those sports, the U.S. leads are so far beyond anything else that goes on anywhere else in the world in those sports, and there is no competition for the NFL, in professional football. There are limited competition globally to major league baseball. The NBA is clearly the best part before the game in the world, and any player will want to play there. In those leads, you can have a salary cap and still attract the world's best players. The problem with major league soccer is you can't have a salary cap and attract any good players, not at the level of the salary cap that they're generating, and attracting lots of retiring soccer stars from Europe, in my view at least, is not going to be a successful model for attracting the interested fans on TV. It seems to me that the designated player or the retirement player coming over is actually counter to competitiveness in MLS. If we look at last year's final, it was Portland against Columbus, neither of which has big international stars that would go away on international duty, that were being taxed by flying around the world like Beckham did, things like that. It's counterintuitive for the clubs to go out, spend big on a star to win the league. In an economic sense, in your opinion, does it make sense to put together a club of good players that becomes a unit to win the league, or does it make more economic sense to buy big-name players to try to fill the seats? I think one of the questions you have to go back to here is, when fans buy into watching a league or to watching sports competition, what are they really going for? I think MLS have just got this idea all wrong. They seem to be acting as if it's a circus, or it's a freak show. You can see the Gerald or David Beckham or Gerry Henri come and see these players who were once great. It's almost like the way that the Romans would bring parades captured chiefs from their enemies through the streets in celebration and triumph, and that somehow would excite the crowds and draw people out to watch. I don't think that's really what sporting competition is all about. I think sporting competition creates big stars, but what people go to watch is the content. It's actually the struggle between the two teams that people are interested in. As you point out, the two teams playing a high-quality game are likely to be much more interesting than just watching some star who once upon a time was recognized as one of the greatest players in the world. I think that kind of circus model has a limited appeal ultimately. They need to find a way to draw attention to the competition and make the contest interesting and people follow that. Again, when I grew up in England in the 60s and 70s, there was actually no soccer on TV. You couldn't watch league games. You saw people see edited highlights on Saturday evening, but because you couldn't actually watch the games on a Saturday, you actually sat around the radio listening to the results as they came in on a Saturday afternoon. That's what people were interested in. They wanted to know if they team won. They wanted to know what the score was. They wanted to know what had happened. I think that's the excitement of the game and I think that's what needs to be brought into top-level soccer in the United States. So much of the comparisons that people attribute to the structure in the United States, they point to other other leagues, like the NFL, the NBA, NHL, and Major League Baseball, and use that to strengthen the defense of why MLS is structured the way it is. I always am keen to point out that, well, I don't know that those sports, well, I do know that those sports aren't necessarily at the global level and global competition level and assess globally the way soccer is. I'm not saying they're not global sports, but I think that we can safely say that there are more powerful leagues around the world and soccer than any other sports. And I think one of the strangest phenomenon that I've seen is almost a replication of the first iteration in the NFL's model of bringing in stars that may be beyond their best and, as you said, parading them out. And I think that the shelf life of these players and what the expectation is coming here is misaligned with what they can actually deliver. Do you see that this model is actually just a rebrand or a retread of what has been done before in an attempt to generate attention to the sport, or is it actually geared to promote quality on the field? What do you think? I think the model was developed specifically because I think that the people who founded NLX were very much rooted in the American system. And they were, in many ways, I think completely unfamiliar with the notion of competition in soccer as it works in the rest of the world, or not very familiar with it. And I think that that persisted to today. And I think the objective, I think the reason they did this is because this is the way they believe that they would make money, and that this is the only way you can make money in professional sports. Now, I think a couple of things. One thing to bear in mind about an organization like the NFL is that it's not as if the NFL never faced any competition. There have been competitions with football leagues in the United States over many, many years. And indeed, in some cases, the rival leagues would fold. In some cases, the light rival league would be absorbed into the existing systems. The point was, though, that the NFL to succeed needed to become a monopoly. And when you are a monopoly, when, essentially, you have no genuine competition for your product, then you are in a very good position to make money, monopolies almost always make money. And the only real issue about monopoly is how to divide the soil. And that the whole American system is a evolved elite system, as evolved as one as way efficiently dividing the soil amongst the owners. But to apply that to the problem of major leagues of soccer in the United States, the organization of some United States is just a fundamental category error, because it's not a monopoly. There is no way that major league software is ever going to become close to a global monopoly of professional soccer, which means that the designing a system to divide the spoils is in this state, just because there are not going to be any spoils to divide. And this is where I really sort of go, I think I go, what I say, go down to the skin of major league soccer, and I think it was somewhat misunderstood. But here is what I would say, soccer leagues globally do not make money anywhere in the world. And that's part of the nature of being in a highly competitive environment. It's a fundamental proposition of economics, but businesses in highly competitive environments generate enough money to survive, but they don't make real progress. That's a fundamental proposition, so it's economic 101. And that's the world in which major league soccer is operating. And if major league soccer is, if they continue to insist that they must make money, like the monopoly leagues in America make, then they will fail, they will fall, they will collapse. Now, that doesn't mean say I'm predicting their collapse, what I am saying is I just don't believe that this money making, if they insist on making money, then they will have to give up. I think they'll end up doing what leagues in the rest of the world do, which is living in a world where they can never make any money. And just trying to build up the league as part of an entertaining system. But the problem is until they recognize the real constraints they face, they're going to struggle to make headway with the league, I think. With regards to American soccer, I think there's also a proclivity to assume that the status quo must maintain balance, and I think one aspect that American soccer should implement from the maybe the federation level is creating industries that people can recognize as industries to generate money. And I think some of those could be scouting and player development. And I don't know if you're familiar with Major League Soccer's stance on training compensation and solidarity payments to youth clubs. But I think we are at a point where without incentivizing development and rewarding development over years in this model, we are continually seeing the same type of product year after year in Major League Soccer. And in many cases, or in all cases, American club soccer at all levels at the professional level. Do you find that that's possible to create such industries like scouting, player development, analytics as a service with regards to how it's used in baseball and how it could be used in soccer? To actually improve what's happening on the pitch? Yeah, so I mean one thing is that there must be some normal amounts of talent in the United States. And the United States is obviously, I mean, the combination of being a very large nation and being a very rich nation is a powerful motor for the development of sporting talent. And we see this across all the sports where, generally, where Americans take the sport seriously, they dominate the sport. And I don't see any reason why that wouldn't be true in the world of soccer. But obviously, as you say, you have to put resources into that development and you have to encourage it. You have to nurture it. And I think it's happening anyway, but it's being slowed down by, as you say, the kind of action, the kind of behavior of majorly soccer, which, again, if you go back to why are they -- so I am familiar with the stories about, for example, refusing to distribute solidarity payments under the FIFA transfer system, which teaches youth development clubs, which it seems an incredibly short-sighted thing to do, and which is actually getting them into legal fights and antitrust actions. But that's exactly what you would expect to happen in -- and what does happen in the world of monopoly American sports needs, then, again, the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NBA, these organizations are in the antitrust courts all the time. And Major League Soccer is just acting as if they are one of those organizations and fighting as they do over getting the share of the money. But, of course -- so, in a sense, you know, what really is going on with Major League Soccer is they're fighting over their share of the take, whilst doing nothing to make the cake in bigger. I mean, it's such a small cake that this tiny shit there is not really worth very much. So, again, it comes back to the point that there's huge development potential in the United States, but the way that Major League Soccer has structured itself is actually, in my view, restraining that role. I agree. Major League Soccer right now is saying they're putting money into development, I think only because, you know, so that they can say that they are doing something to earn the payments when players do go overseas. But at what point in this process are they going to have to prove that that money belongs to them? At what point do the courts -- does it have to go to the court of sport arbitration? Does FIFA get involved? You know, what is the next step here? Do you have any insight into this? Well, when it comes to the transfer payments, MLS have brought up a number of different reasons why they can't or redistribute solidarity payments to the courts that train the players. And their current position, as I understand it, is that this would violate the agreement that they made with the Department of Justice on the creation of the single entity model. So, you may be aware that several years ago there was actually a challenge from the players for the single entity arrangement, and that as a result of that, the MLS made a number of commitments about -- made a number of undertakings about how it would conduct its business. And it claimed that to hand out these solidarity payments would actually be in violation of those undertakings. Now, to be honest, I think that's something else -- I don't find that convincing at all, but then, of course, I'm just an economist and I'm not a lawyer, so that one will have to actually be sorted out in court. But certainly, what we're seeing is, again, an attempt to crawl all the revenues that come from software and make sure they all go to the owners of the major league plan sizes. And, I mean, you know, Don Garver actually has a fundamental problem, which is his owners want money. They want to make money out of their investment, and they're not making any money out of it right now. They admit to losing $100 million a year, collectively. And so, something has to give here, and I think fighting over these small sums of money is not actually going to help them in the long term, but that's why this is happening. I think it's happening because they're trying to do anything they can to generate some revenues for what to get to generate a return for the owners. When I read that they lose $100 million a year, my years perk up for a couple of reasons. One, they want to act like the big boys. $100 million is one bad transfer to a big club. That's like Fernando Torres gone bad for Chelsea, and having to dump him, or something, you know, akin to that, right? Somebody buys Paul Pogba, and he breaks his leg, and you've lost $100 million. Two is that I don't believe that they lose $100 million when you factor in some into the equation. And I don't know the exact relationship between some and MLS, and I don't know that anyone does. Do you understand the financial relationship between the two entities? No, I mean, obviously, we don't have any, we don't have all the formal documentation that allow us to understand. I mean, I think it's fairly clear that some operators, the marketing arm of the US Soccer Federation and the MLS has a controlling voice in the organization of the US Soccer Federation. So it's not hard to, and essentially what the way the system is worth is to me that some tries to control all of the marketing rights to soccer in the United States, and then distribute that money to interested parties of which some are the owners of the MLS franchisees. And I think the overwhelming question that we all get is that the US Soccer Federation is trying to cross-subsidize MLS franchisees out of revenues generated from other activities. And that's why we see these issues going to court. So the suspicion that these four subs are there really drives the challenge to the payment of the solidarity payments for the transfer fees to the youth development cross, the challenge of the women's soccer players to the wage payments to the, for compared to the men's international team, that's in part, I think, driven by the fact that this money is going through some and it's in some sense an arbitrary decision within US Soccer as to how much women should be paid. So I think you see, I mean, again, it's part of this whole approach to treating soccer is if it were a monopoly product in the United States, which can be controlled centrally, and just managing the flow of rents to the investors, which is, A, it's going to create a lot of litigation, and B, I think ultimately just won't work. So much of US Soccer as both the federation and then with regards to just the sport in the States is defined by what many call collusion between Major League Soccer and the federation. And my question to you is I once wrote a radical article about what if there was a team that was unaffiliated with a league that was given the same amount of money that would equate to a franchise fee. So in excess of a hundred million dollars, and they decided to play 38 friendlies, whereby they could invest that money however they wanted to, whether it was they wanted to travel the world and play friendlies with that budget, they wanted to create their own academy and create a superstar team for a year. Do you find that, and the idea was what could you do with a hundred million dollars instead of paying a franchise fee into this cartel, as you say, which I agree with. Do you find that there is a possibility for alternative ways to circumvent some of the mechanisms in place for a professional team that didn't want to maybe buy into MLS because of the continual loss, and could a team make money doing it this maverick way where they took a hundred million plus and put it into just the operational budget for a team of assembling and playing for, you know, nine to ten months? Well, I think the real issue there is you need a competitive structure within which you're going to operate. So it's leagues that really work and it's competitive league. So I think an all-star team playing friendlies is not going to do it. I mean, I think the big question to the US really is whether it's possible to create leagues like outside of the MLS structure, and these might be NASL and MPSL, which can then be competitive and growth, or are these leagues also going to be suffocated by the MLS system. So, and I think that's an open question. I mean, I guess we see, you know, certainly my own local team, Detroit City SC, is, you know, is a wonderful story of creating a new team out of nothing and creating a following and a boat in a city, but then, you know, within a year or two of that happening, then the MLS role in town starts talking about creating an MLS franchise, which would put the Detroit City SC in a somewhat difficult position. So I mean, I think the danger is that the opportunity to create rival leagues is being strangled by MLS, and that in itself might limit the development of the sport in the country. Do you see a time when a system separate from Major League Soccer could operate and coexist in this country, where you have Major League Soccer operating without a Division I sanction from FIFA, and you have an alternative, I would say pyramid, where you could have two models coexist, where you have MLS as a close shop, and people who want to invest into that can do it through the mechanisms in place, and you could also have an NASL and PSL model. I can't include USL, because I think there is too much of a match in collusion with MLS at this point with the affiliations. However, would you see that as a possibility, and if that were a possibility with this alternative open system, could there, would that invite investment for at the lower levels? Would you see that? I think it's very hard to imagine two high-quality leagues operating in the same country at the same time. I think it's a natural consequence that one dominantly will ultimately prevail, and the history in the US has been ultimately been either one league defeats the other or absorbs the other one through a merger of some sort. I don't see the coexistence rate, but I think the MLS model will have to change, I think, because I think the owners who are hoping for large profits from it are going to be disappointed, and I think we'll see those investors are trying to find alternatives, or trying to pull out and sell their interests elsewhere, and I think that then raises the question about whether, in a bid to keep MLS going, that we might not see some from Netflix. One of the things I think, I want to see all these things would happen with the, I'm sure there are a number of owners who would be perfectly happy to have the salary cap and the player allocation system abolished and introduce the kind of player-later market that we see in global software in the rest of the world, so, for example, I'm sure the New York City FC that this world would be completely happy with that process and would welcome it, and I think a number of big clubs in Europe might be interested in taking it at stake in some of the, in MLS franchises, if they could then use those franchises to as development clubs and as clubs which were where they could place players who'd lost form or who were coming back from injury and so forth, and that would be the very attractive thing to do. In that world, I think there would be more genuine interest in competition in MLS, I think eventually, MLS would grow into something which would be highly competitive. Now, whether that would also involve bringing in a pyramid to the system and allowing some promotion validation, I think, again, that would start to become entirely feasible in the world where the existing owners in MLS would be coming to solutions and would be demanding some kind of fundamental change or even just trying to get out and be replaced by a different breed of owners, but I think, I think the crunch time will come really in about three or four years is when we start to get close to the renegotiations with broadcast contracts, and it becomes clear that as it looks like the development that they will not see a large jump in revenues. I'm sure the next contract will be worth more than the current one, but I don't think it's going to be a fundamental game changer. I think that's when a lot of the investors in MLS will start to ask some fundamental questions and say, "Well, we need to consider an alternative model." My question is, when I was a kid, you always knew that the Yankees were going to win the pennant, the Canadians were going to win the Stanley Cup. You always knew that there was a big club out there that was going to attract all the big name players. The same goes for European football, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus, Man United, Chelsea. In American sports today, we don't have that. We have parity, and that's brought on through the draft, through other mechanisms, that they've created this idea that any team can win the championship in a year. I think that takes a lot of the real drama away from the league, and I just wanted to discuss that a little bit. One thing I think we all need to observe is that the European system of soccer organization has been phenomenally successful and creates what is clearly the world's most popular sport. At the same time, we also should acknowledge that the American system has generated three or four stupendously successful leagues, which are attract, in some cases, global interest, in some cases, unbelievable national interest. In some sense, the American model and the European models both have worked, both work well. As you point out, they both have fundamentally different principles. The way I characterize this is that what the American system offers really is equality of outcome, and so it's a system based on that the results at the end of the day should be roughly equal, and the European system is based on equality of opportunity. Everybody has a chance, but actually the outcomes are highly unequal. In some ways, it's paradoxical that Europeans would like the equality of opportunity system and Americans would like the equality of outcomes. Normally, in terms of economics, we think of being the two populations that are actually having up to the opposite preferences. We think of Americans liking equality of opportunity, but being happy with unequal outcomes, and we think of Europeans being social democrats who want anything to be roughly equal at the end of the day. I always find it so paradoxical that we seem to see this distinction. What I think is important is, clearly, the development of these leagues is part of an intensely, or is it a process which is a cultural process which evolves over many decades, which is reflective of, or if you want, national personality, if you want to call it that. It's a reflection of social values, a perception of the way society works, a perception about what's good and what's bad and how things should operate. One thing, it's very hard to transfer one system from one culture to another. It seems to me what's going on is that the problem, part of the problem, so again, this is perhaps a little bit less of an economic algorithm and a bit more of a psychological or sociological argument, but it seems to me what's happening in major league soccer is an attempt to transfer what is perceived as an originally European game and put it in an American context, and in some ways it falls flat on both counts. It falls flat because to many Americans, obviously not you guys and not your listeners, but to many Americans, soccer is an alien force and to be resisted as an American, and then on the other hand, to many, to you guys, to Americans who really got into soccer, they understand they get the European system, they see why it's attractive, and then they look at what's going on anyway, and they say, "Well, we don't want to store this just a retread of an American system." We actually like the diversity that the European system is. So it seems to me that MLS sort of falls between two schools here, and my personal view is that the soccer would do better in the United States if it were to try and, if it were to be, to provide that alternative European style system as an alternative, not instead of American sports, but something alongside and complementary to the existing American sports landscape. Again, we come back to the reason that they don't want to do it, I think if I sat down with most of the owners in MLS for a few hours, I could persuade them that this is the right way to think about the problem, but then bottom line would still come, I'd say, "Well, yes, 7, but if we did it, your way, we wouldn't make any money." And that's the obstacle, I think, is the desire to make a profit out of this is getting in the way of developing the sport in the United States. I agree 100%, and you eloquently argue in your book that anyone who gets into the business of football does so for reasons other than making a profit in most cases, Roman Abramovitz, for example, perfect example, the guy, I don't know how much more money he's spent than he's taken in, but it's probably over a billion dollars, wouldn't you say? I think both for Chelsea, yes, Abramovitz has put in about $2 billion of his own money, and Sheikh Mansour, it meant the city, and has done more or less the same, about $2 billion. Of course, PSG is another example where upwards of a billion dollars has been put in over a very short period of time, so yeah, and we're used to that in Europe on both a small scale and a large scale. It's always been part of a part of the people putting their own money in, and frankly, you know, either rich people doing this because they've got the money and it's fun, or rich people doing this because they have to see other benefits, they have to see the benefit of being a benefactor, the community that they like, the prestige, it maybe helps them even helps them in the other business adventures. Sure. So, I mean, the idea that people won't do this is something that I often hear Americans tell me, "Oh, well, that would never work over here," but it seems to me that the motivation would work just as effectively in an American context. No, I agree, and this is where it seems to me that – and you're the economist here, but it seems to me that this is very much a structure of corporate socialism, and it's not uncommon in the United States, it seems to me these days, to see this kind of structure, that this kind of shared risk pool, the fact that these guys who are already rich, they'll put in a little money, but they're not really risking their money. Right. I mean, again, I think it comes back to some of the mental principles. The capitalist system only really works, if it works at all, when you have competition, when you have firms really going against each other, trying to attract customers and trying to provide, you know, to build a better mousetrap, as it were. And I think it's – I think that the sports in the sports world, the league has got away with persuading – particularly persuading the antitrust courts that they're different, that that really doesn't apply to them, that actually, it's not competition that works, it's collusion that works, and I mean, and in fairness, it has worked for the major leagues in terms of making money, and of course they do control sports which are attracted to millions of firms. I think it's not adapting that model in the U.S. is not going to work largely because there's so much international competition, and that comes back to the fundamental point that you can't treat soccer in the United States as if it were football or baseball. It's a very different proposition. Well, Stefan, we're rapidly approaching the hour mark, and I want to give John an opportunity to ask any follow-up questions he may have before we sign off. No, I just want to thank you, Stefan, for coming on. I know that we could probably talk all day about the economics of American soccer, and I'm sure we will probably ask you to come on in the future. But where can people find your work, and if you're on social media, which I know you are, where can they find you, and should take a opportunity to say thank you? Well, thanks a lot, John. It's been a real pleasure. So my Twitter handle is @SSZY, and there's also a Soconomics blog that I try to write on fairly regularly. It's just typed in Soconomics, actually, the blog will, in Google, the blog will come up. But if you want to read sort of my ultimate statement on how I think soccer works as a business in the rest of the world, you should take a look at my book, Money and Soccer, but I do think in next year or two I'm going to write a book about in the list, because I think the economics of it, because I think it's just such an interesting subject, and it seems that so many people over here are interested in that question, so I think I'm going to write about that. Well, I look forward to reading that, Stefan, because I find all of your work brilliant. I read Money and Soccer, and I thought it was brilliant, and I'm so happy that you agreed to come on the show. I think you'll find that we are a London-based podcast, so many of our listeners will be from Europe, so we hope that we penetrate the US market with this podcast, and for these football times, this is Jim Hart signing off. Thanks for listening.