David Owen Archives - Inside World Football

David Owen: City Football Group – Can Snow White and the seven dwarfs become a football fairy story?

City Football Group (CFG)’s business strategy always seemed rather baffling. Yes, OK, assemble a collection of similar businesses – in this case football clubs – inside the same tent and you can shave back-office costs. You might be able to engineer a less wasteful talent development pipeline than one-legged rivals. And if the real aim is soft power, well, the Abu Dhabi flag has been well and truly planted in outposts of the beautiful game from Melbourne to Mumbai.

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Women’s World Cup viewing: chronicle of the long, lingering death of TV foretold?

By David Owen

October 21 – Women’s football is on a roll – and more power to its elbow for that. Nonetheless, the viewing figures for this summer’s Women’s World Cup, released at the end of last week to some fanfare, deserve to be treated with a certain amount of caution.

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David Owen: Don’t bury Bury

Alistair Burt, a former Minister of the Crown, is one of those increasingly rare Conservative MPs who don’t make you feel like you have been transported to the Planet Zog when you talk or, more recently, listen to them.

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FIFA cashed-in on its problem-plagued cycle, but missed the big money opportunity

So, how were the last four years for the FIFA business? With the governing body’s 2018 financial report finally published in the wake of the Miami Council meeting, a proper analysis can now be attempted.

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The true story of World Cup viewing

By David Owen

If there is one message to FIFA from the TV viewing figures for Russia 2018, it is that, if it wants to attract even bigger audiences, it must hope for, or somehow engineer, greater diversity in its crown jewel’s final stages.

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David Owen: Premier League club boards should enjoy the good times while they can

The good news for Premier League club owners: top-tier English football has never been more profitable. The bad news: this is probably as good as it is going to get for at least the next five years – an age in terms of media technology.

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David Owen – The 50+1 debate and why it may hold the key to the Bundesliga’s future

The Bundesliga is the top football league in Western Europe’s most populous country. Based purely on these two facts, you might expect it to generate more revenue than any other rival league worldwide.

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David Owen: European football – a cash magnet, but is the pyramid’s base starting to erode?

How many 19th century industries can say they have more than tripled revenues over the first 16 years of this millennium? My hunch would be only one: European club football which, according to the latest UEFA Club Licensing Benchmarking Report, generated revenues of €18.5 billion in 2016, up from €6 billion in 2000.

David Owen

How Catalonian independence might hit Barça in the pocket

It was interesting to read my colleague Andrew Warshaw’s piece this week recounting Catalán sports minister Gerard Figueras’s thoughts on where the region’s top football clubs might play should the region achieve independence.

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David Owen: Transformed bidding climate gives Garcia report the air of a relic

From the vantage-point of today, the Garcia report has something of the air of the Dead Sea Scrolls – an important relic offering vital clues about how life was lived in a bygone era.

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David Owen: It’s a fascinating time for the concept of a British World Cup

Politics and sport make uneasy, if unavoidable, bedfellows. This has been underlined plenty of times in just the past few months and is now being highlighted once again by tensions in the Gulf centred on Qatar, host of the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

David Owen

Celtic’s Lisbon Lions and why we will probably never see their like again

As the biographer of Foinavon, it should come as no surprise that I think the late-1960s was the greatest period in the history of sport. And on Thursday, another landmark 50th anniversary falls – that of the 1967 European Cup final, the night of the Lisbon Lions, the match that made household names of Jock Stein and Billy McNeill.

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David Owen – Why McLaren poses no threat to Russia’s World Cup

Let’s be clear: the McLaren Investigation Report, the second part of which was unveiled in London last week, poses no threat to Russia’s World Cup.

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David Owen: Super-sized Club World Cup, or FIFA’s quest for a second leg to its stool

I know what you’re all thinking: it’s hard to imagine anything the world needs more right now than a new 32-team international club football competition. Believe it or not, however, there are two entities that need this innovation even more than you do: one is FIFA, the world football body; the other is Gianni Infantino, its bashful new President.