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Football ownership goes global

REUTERS, Milan
Within the next few days an established Serie A club will for the first time be owned by a non-Italian when Spaniard Lorenzo Sanz finally takes control of Parma.
There has been little concern about the former Real Madrid owner becoming the first foreigner to gain a foothold in Italian soccer -- Parma are in such desperate financial straits since the downfall of the Tanzi family and their Parmalat business that they would have probably accepted a takeover bid from a Mongolian milkman.
Until now Italian football has remained the exclusive preserve of Italian businessmen while elsewhere, especially in Britain, the game has become increasingly globalised.
It is remarkable how easily British football has accepted foreign ownership -- English champions Chelsea are run by a Russian while Scottish title challengers Hearts are effectively in the hands of a Lithuanian.
Manchester United fans objected to American Malcolm Glazer buying their club, but there was nothing they could do to stop the public company being subject to the very rules of the market that made it such a financial force in the first place.
Liverpool are reported to be in talks with Americans and there are foreigners in place at Queens Park Rangers and Portsmouth. In the current climate would anyone raise an objection if Arsenal's next chairman turned out to be Chinese?
The foreign domination of British football extends from the boardroom to the bench -- Arsenal are coached by a Frenchman, Arsene Wenger, Portuguese coach Jose Mourinho is in
charge of Chelsea and Spaniard Rafael Benitez guides Liverpool.
Compare that situation with Serie A where, at the moment, every club is Italian-owned and every coach is an Italian.
Juventus, Inter and AC Milan are world-famous clubs with as much, if not more, potential to become global brands as Manchester United or Chelsea, yet there has never been even a report of interest in those clubs from foreign businessmen.
Apart from desperate Parma the only other club to have been linked with a foreign takeover was AS Roma whose debts attracted the attention of a Russian consortium.
However, talks broke down and the Russians left without a word of explanation, leaving only rumours behind.
It is much harder to buy an Italian football club. Roma, Lazio and Juventus are traded on the Milan stock exchange but the rest are essentially limited companies wholly owned by one man.
If you want to buy AC Milan the only way to do it is to approach owner Silvio Berlusconi and make him an offer. The Glazer method of buying up shares and building up control isn't an option.
Clubs are still clubs and not fully fledged businesses and investing in Italian football holds out little hope of profit.
There is also the disincentive of the Italian 'sistema' -- the network of contacts and influence which a club president needs to have if he is to operate successfully in the transfer market and the Machiavellian world of Italian sport politics.
Those links take years to develop and rely on other economic and political relationships -- a foreign investor would risk being closed out.
In a curious way, so much of what is criticised about Italian football indirectly serves to protect it from outsiders whereas in England capitalism reigns -- show us the money is enough to get you a club in the oldest professional league in the world.
And so what? Few in Britain appear to care about the foreigners who are buying up their football clubs and the attitude seems to be the same one shown to overseas players and coaches: if they bring results, who cares?
The problem is that no one knows yet how men with no links at all to the communities in which their clubs are based will react if times get hard.
In the unlikely event that Berlusconi fell short of cash you could be fairly certain he would sell AC Milan to another Italian businessman.
The damage to his reputation and the threat of reprisals would be too great to risk any other route out.
Are British fans sure that their foreign owners will leave their club in safe hands if something should ever afflict their businesses?
Of course there are plenty of examples of home-grown businessmen who should never have been entrusted with the treasure of a town which is its football club. But there is surely a greater risk with foreign owners.
Only time will tell whether the Italian attitude of 'better the devil you know' proved to be a wiser approach than Britain's open door.