How to Take a Football Club Back to the Top without Buying It

Football fans are familiar with how money works in football. It’s what turned Chelsea around in the 00s, changed Manchester City’s fortunes both on and off the pitch, and the reason it’s so shocking that Paris Saint-Germain is still looking for a Champions League.

Money talks in football. You need it to run a club, invest in the best coaching staff and facilities, and attract the best players to your club. Usually, when a club comes into a lot of money, it’s following a takeover from a wealthy buyer who’s happy to front all the money to “buy” success knowing that in the financial arms race of football, they have enough of it and, eventually, other clubs simply being able to keep up will result in success.

Of course, there are Financial Fair Play rules that should exist to stop success from being bought, but these are fairly toothless and you can take almost any league and see that most of the success goes to the clubs with the biggest budget.

If you want a club to be successful, you need the right staff, the right players, and, most importantly, the budget to back all of this up.

What if there was another way?

lThe Fredrikstad Fotball Invest Model

Let’s take a trip down the road from Oslo to the city of Fredrikstad, Norway. The city is famous for its port, its industrial history, and, at one time, a fairly successful football club.

Fredrikstad FK, the city’s local team, is statistically Norway’s second most successful club, but outside of Norway, you’d be forgiven for not having heard of them. The club was impressively successful between the 1930s and the 1960s, but barring a couple of cup titles, has had little to shout about since then.

In the last decade, they were relegated out of Norway’s top flight and relegated again in 2017. In 2018, the club changed management and at the same time, Fredrikstad Fotball Invest (FFI) was born.

FFI is a limited company that issues shares. Local businessmen, like Tor Anders Petterøe, a member of FFI’s biggest shareholding group through the Golden Touch Media production company, provide money to the company when they buy these shares. FFI then uses this money in several financially savvy ways to help its beloved local club.

Instead, they have an agreement for a 30% stake in player logistics. They cough up 30% of the fees and also enjoy 30% of the money from the sale of players. They invest in professional contracts for young players, providing the money needed to reduce how much talent is lured away by richer clubs. And, when needed, they cough up cold, hard cash, like they’ve done this year, to help Fredrikstad FK make big moves in the transfer window.

The important thing to remember is that this company doesn’t own or run the club! FFI is a group of investors that loves their local football team and uses financial agreement to help the club. It doesn’t interfere with the running of the club but helps it financially, which arguably puts it on firmer ground than the wealthy owners that buy a club they have no interest in, pump money into the project, and abandon it at the first sign of it not going well.

Fredrikstad stadion in Fredrikstad – Photo by Pål Harald Lilleengen on Wikipedia