This is a transcript of the podcast Martin Calladine on crypto scandals and corruption in football between GRIP senior report Carmen Cracknell and football business journalist Martin Calladine.
[INTRO]
Carmen Cracknell: Welcome back to the GRIP Podcast, where today we focus on a new topic, football. I’m joined by Martin Calladine, a writer and commentator who has published a number of books about the crypto and corruption scandals that have plagued the beautiful game. We talked about regulatory failure in the industry and government attempts to set up a functioning regulator and what went wrong when vulnerable investors fell for club token scams.
Thank you for joining us on the GRIP Podcast, Martin. It’s great to have you here. Can you start by talking a bit about yourself and your background?
Martin Calladine: Sure. Well, first of all, let me thank you for inviting me. It’s lovely to be here. So I’m an author. I write about the business of sport, which I’ve done for about 10 years. I’ve published a number of books, looking at things like competitive balance and ethics. But increasingly, I’ve been looking at kind of the financialization of the game and particularly how clubs are owned, run and funded. And in the last three or four years, that’s inevitably involved writing about cryptocurrency.
Carmen Cracknell: Your latest book, No Questions Asked, How Football Joined the Crypto Con, has just gone to press. What prompted you to write this now?
Martin Calladine: Well, as football journalist, you’re a very skeptical person. And I think that carried over when I started to hear generally in the culture, all these stories about people making a fortune off crypto, you know, everybody knew a friend of a friend who’d made a few hundred thousand pounds. And that started to filter into football. And I’d start to see football clubs endorsing schemes that were in some cases, at least very confusing, but in many cases, obviously bogus, which just 15 minutes effort would show.
And, you know, so for example, I found a sponsor that Manchester City had signed, where there was no publicly verifiable information at all about that company, and not even that it existed. And so in defiance of anti money laundering regulations, seemingly, it had done this deal, which was bad enough. But it ended up in fact, as I was able to show involving itself in what was a new name from multi billion pound rolling crypto fraud.
I found a similar case with Fulham, where they’d endorsed a scheme that purported to be selling CFDs and investments offering up to 40% a year. But it was in fact, a pyramid scheme operating across West Africa and Southeast Asia. Everyone who worked for him was an actor, or someone who was operating in a false identity because of this negligence, Fulham partnered with someone who was stealing money from some of the poorest people in the whole world. And this happened again and again during crypto. And so it seemed to me that there was a story that needed to be told- that there was a vast amount of regulatory failure all across the whole industry and that these weren’t isolated cases.
This was a case of an industry that had been seen a huge influx of money and had made no effort at all to check where it was coming from within some cases, disastrous consequences.
Carmen Cracknell: Yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned Africa and Southeast Asia, is it kind of like the clubs are capitalizing on their names to make money from people really sort of vulnerable people in poorer countries? Because I would think more of people in the UK when I think of UK clubs.
Martin Calladine: Well, I think that that is what happened. And I think that was what was in the mind of many of these schemes. I don’t think clubs were at least at the beginning aware of that. So there are an enormous number, particularly the Premier League, but football in Europe generally is one of the world’s largest billboards, it’s an opportunity to, you know, to use them to reflect your message all across the world.
You know, the Premier League is seen in almost every country around the world. And so you had the ability sometimes with say almost no checking or due diligence to offer some of these clubs a reasonably large amount of money, and then immediately have your brand reflected out into parts of the world where people were desperately poor, where people, you know, the banking system wasn’t serving them, where maybe the economy was struggling.
And it was a pattern again and again, that places particularly like Turkey or Brazil, where there’s a huge kind of football culture, where people would come in, they’d sponsor British clubs, and then target their marketing efforts in those areas. And again, West Africa, Southeast Asia, where there’s a big footballing culture, and where people were looking for opportunity to, in some cases here, people might have spent five or £10 on some fan tokens, or some NFTs, lost that money, no harm is really done.
But the true harm was done abroad, where people might have spent a few thousand dollars, their life savings to try and earn a little bit of extra money, find that wiped out. And of course, you know, those victims were largely hidden, which is I think, you know, the story of football and crypto, you know, the money was with the deals were done in the UK, the victims were in the global south. And so football is able to wash its hands of it and pretend that nothing really happened.
I don’t think we saw a case in the UK where many fans themselves lost a lot of money. But you know, the fans in the UK are only a very small proportion of the total global football watching audience.
Carmen Cracknell: Right. When it comes to kind of pushing these tokens on to vulnerable investors, is it the clubs touting them? Or is it these companies? I know you mentioned quite a bit in your book, a company called Socios, which describes itself as a blockchain based engagement platform that has been involved in creating a coin for Manchester City. Is it these companies that kind of use the club name to tout these coins? Or is it the clubs themselves?
Martin Calladine: It’s a mixture of both. So sometimes it will be ones like with the Fulham case where they they use the they pay for the Fulham brand and then you know, in church halls and and rented meeting rooms around the global south, you’ll then see pictures of Fulham players on the on the introductory slide as they ask for your money. But in some of them, for example, Socios, what they did was they created individual fan tokens, which are like a crypto asset.
And each of those is branded for the specific club and came with notionally some voting rights on the club’s actual business. And in those cases, the clubs didn’t just get a signing on fee for the endorsement, they would actually get a 50% take on each token that’s sold and would be actively involved in marketing those in providing prizes in providing things for fans to vote on. And as time would go on, they would then have a big store of those tokens, which they would then feed onto the market, which they take another 50% stake of over time.
So then it’s very much a business partnership where the clubs were strongly incentivized to promote these. And as you know, as the price of these things is able to float, if those went up, the clubs are then incentivized really to sell that for more tokens as the market and depress the price of their own fans investments. So in some cases, it’s not illegal, certainly, but I think a very murky and questionable way of constructing businesses, which clubs in many cases didn’t understand, and fans almost certainly didn’t.
Carmen Cracknell: Yeah, so you’ve you said earlier, the reason you wrote this book has kind of reached a sort of point where it’s become a big thing. How long has this been going on? And was there one particular club that kind of started this trend to begin with?
Martin Calladine: So the first time we really saw crypto emerging in football was about 2019, when Socios started to sign these deals with the Premier League. But there was a three year period from then onwards, where I think 19 of 20, maybe at one point, all 20 Premier League clubs, the vast majority of the professional clubs in the UK either had a crypto partnership, in many cases, multiple crypto partnerships. And if they didn’t, it was only because they chose not to sign them.
So there was this gold rush time, a time when clubs would be phoned up by people they had never spoken to before, who would say, we’ll offer you £100,000, maybe to put our branding on your billboard for the television game tomorrow. That’s it for a one off deal. The money could be double or triple what even bookmakers would pay them. And so this money just came flooding in. Clubs started selling NFTs, sometimes asking tens of thousands of pounds from fans of these, which are all now almost universally worthless.
They would encourage people to sign up for crypto trading kind of platforms, many of which have been involved in criminal kind of prosecutions, some of which perhaps completely like FTX. And then at the latter part of kind of 2022, there was this big downturn in the crypto market when a few of these things blew up. And it kind of seemed like for a lot of people, oh, it’s, you know, that was a crazy time. It’s gone away.
We don’t need to worry about that now. And there hasn’t been any kind of reflection on what happened there. But what has begun to happen now, of course, is your audience will be aware is that Bitcoin has started to pick back up again. And as that’s begun to pick back up again, money is available. And so more marketing is taking place.
So football clubs are now, I mean, so there’s a case in the Chelsea, in the height of the crypto boom, they signed a deal with a company called whale fin, who was going to be their shirt sponsor. That deal collapsed about six months later, apparently with no money having changed hands. Chelsea, I think had been offered £20 or 30 million for a deal. They got nothing. 18 months later, Chelsea, have just signed a new shirt sponsorship deal with a crypto company. I think it’s about £17m a year. And again, this company doesn’t do business in the UK, it doesn’t do business in the US, one of the few places it does do business is in Russia, which apparently isn’t problematic for anyone concerned. So there’s a concern that what people took as being the end of crypto was actually, you know, just a kind of a, it was a burnout, but it’s coming back and that we’re no better prepared for it. And certainly, in regulatory terms, no one’s really paying much attention. And we may be about to make the same mistakes again.
Carmen Cracknell: Is this kind of part of a broader problem in football in general with kind of corruption and money laundering and fraud? I know there’s there’s been talk in parliament, and there was a paper released on Tuesday, a research briefing that’s finally recommending an independent regulator for the industry. How does crypto fit into that? And is the regulation of the clubs going to happen, do you think? And how will it be implemented?
Martin Calladine: Well, at the high level, I think certainly something is going to happen. It seems that there is taken on a life of its own, that there is momentum behind this. And, you know, years of lobbying by the Premier League to try and undermine this seems to have failed, that there will be some regulation. But that regulation is fairly light touch. What’s being proposed really is what the league should have been doing themselves, which is looking at kind of revenue distribution to create a kind of a sustainable and fair kind of game, perhaps not even fair, but just sustainable and to ensure that there’s some basic measures applied to who can own and run football clubs.
Now, that doesn’t, for example, stop Mohammed Bin Salman, a person who’s been incredibly accused of murder and war crimes, owning a football club in Newcastle. And there’s no proposal to prevent him from doing so. There certainly wouldn’t be anything that goes down as far as giving the regulator control over what kinds of companies or products football clubs can endorse. So, for example, we see right now that many football clubs also endorse what’s called Asian facing bookmakers, which are companies that provide bookmaking services into countries where bookmaking is illegal. And there are numerous Premier League clubs right now and that, going back a number of years, have taken money to do that.
Even though there’s clear evidence that many of those companies are linked necessarily to organized crime because they’re operating and providing services in a legal way. But there’s no requirement for the regulator to look into that and none for the regulator to look into crypto or other kinds of sponsorship. Football generally, I don’t think in the UK has a massive problem with with fraud or money laundering, not on any huge scale, there is definitely a problem of governance and an inability to control costs and to kind of divide revenue in a way that makes it sustainable. But unfortunately, the problems of crypto and some of the others around sponsorship are not going to be touched by the regulator. And we have to wait either for further action from the leagues, which I don’t expect, or government to do something beyond that in terms of the way that it’s regulated as a product.
Carmen Cracknell: Do you think the government is now talking about this because the increased concerns because of the Ukraine-Russia war or sort of more a more general outcry about what’s going on?
Martin Calladine: No, I think it’s a strange confluence of factors. There have been a lot of people talking about the requirement for a long time and a number of football clubs continuing to go bust even as the amount of money in football is higher than it’s ever been. But what it all came down to was with the announcement of the the putative European Super League a couple of years ago, there was a huge backlash to that and to the Premier League clubs that had promised to join it. And so there were some backbenchers who had some ideas for an independent regulator and the government’s kind of what might be regarded perhaps as a knee-jerk response, not what you’d necessarily expect from a conservative government in terms of kind of regulating industry.
Their response was, we’re going to prevent this from happening ever again and we’re going to create a mechanism for doing that, which is to introduce this independent regulator. So the league’s biggest club shot themselves in the foot. They pushed their own control of the game too far to a point where the government felt obliged to step in. And after that it’s gone through the process of consultation and creating a white paper and green paper on this.
So I don’t think, I think it predates what’s happened in Ukraine. But then after that, obviously the removal of Roman Abramovich from Chelsea and the ongoing kind of ructions about how that money is managed, that played into again the perception that there were people running football clubs who shouldn’t be allowed to. There was another person who used to own arsenal who has subsequently been sanctioned as well, Alisher Usmanov. So there was definitely the government couldn’t any longer avoid the idea that football wasn’t necessarily in the right hands, but I don’t think we should expect necessarily that a regulator will transform all of this. What it may do is just force the Premier League to cut the pie a little bit more fairly. Even that would be very welcome though, I think.
Carmen Cracknell: Yeah, how in practice would a football regulator work? How would regulation work in the industry? There’s so many different clubs, such a massive sector. Can you talk a bit about that?
Martin Calladine: Yeah, absolutely. So they’ve recently appointed like a shadow regulator, so someone who’s who used to work in kind of ground, I think the ground management organisation, he was responsible ground safety in the UK. And they’ve now begun to set up that office so that when the regulator was brought in that it would be able to hit the ground running. But primarily, they’re looking at financial distribution.
So the key sticking point in the Premier League and the EFL for years has been the inability to agree how much the Premier League’s television income should be shared with the lower leagues. And the lower leagues have been saying for a long time, they’d like 25%. And the Premier League doesn’t want to give them anything like that amount of money. There’s also a question of what are called parachute payments, which the Premier League gives to clubs who are relegated. And those are so much money that they vastly out exceed the amount of money that the clubs in the division beneath get.
So if you get relegated, you have, you’re able to immediately outspend the clubs that you’re now competing against. And so clubs tend to come straight back up again. So that has had real competitive problems for a while, anti competitive problems. And the financial gap between the Premier League and the championship is such that it’s encouraged clubs in the championship, so which is the second tier of English football, to spend vastly more money than they have in the hope of being able to get into the Premier League and access all of those. Well, so those are the key things that the independent regulators are supposed to do is to look at a way of smoothing out those problems between those two divisions, so that money flows down better, to oversee slightly better how cost controls take place, to oversee how club ownership and licensing takes place.
So the idea would be hopefully that rather than you pass what’s called the owners and directors test once, and then you let go, that there’d be some more real time monitoring of how clubs are run on the suitability of those owners to try and head off clubs for getting into problems before it really happens. These are all relatively minor things and things that you would expect that the proper self regulation should be able to manage, but football regulation is so fractured.
You know, you have FIFA providing global regulation, UEFA providing European regulation, you have UK and European law, and then you have the FA, which is the notional kind of national body, you have the Premier League, and then you have the EFL, which governs the three divisions beneath the Premier League. So you have all of these competing parties, and there’s just been a standoff for years where effectively most owners are left to just get on with things, except at the top of the Premier League, where five or six clubs have been able to use their power to reinforce their dominance and turn their financial power into on the field power, and then create a feedback loop that allows them to pull away from the rest. So what’s being talked about is not especially radical. And I don’t think is if you look at the problems that regulators, for example, might have in say, you know, setting prices in like gas or water, which just, you know, and managing the kind of the growth and investment over time, those are complex things and creating, you know, kind of effectively a quasi marketplace. It’s nothing like that at all. It really is to effectively force the children to play nicely and to make the Premier League behave a little bit more responsibly. And as such, I can’t see how it couldn’t be a success, to be honest.
Carmen Cracknell: Good. Yeah, that’s good to hear, because regulation is not always successful. So it’d be interesting to see what do you think for the timeline of this? When do you think a regulator will be formed?
Martin Calladine: That’s the difficulty. I mean, the..it has been ready to go and has been thoroughly consulted on for at least the last 18 months. And now it is just a case of waiting for a bill to be put before Parliament. And as recently as a couple of weeks ago, a question was asked in Parliament and the sports minister said, you know, imminently, imminently, and they have been saying imminently for a while. So it has become a concern for those like myself who who support regulation, that a general election might arrive before the legislation can go through Parliament.
The legislation itself, as I understand it, should be relatively simple. As I say, the government has taken steps to create an organisation already to step into that role immediately to happen. So in theory, it could happen the moment the government wants to bring its bill before Parliament, and the bill itself will receive almost universal support. It goes further than the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats had proposed going, and they now both support it completely. So it’s just waiting for it to happen. And the longer it goes on and doesn’t happen, the more nervous it makes people like me. But in theory, you know, a couple of months is the answer.
Carmen Cracknell: So I wanted to talk also a bit about how English football compares to US soccer, but also the NFL, and how the NFL is regulated, because I know there’s been a lot of issues there with kind of celebrities pumping tokens and endorsing fake crypto companies. Is the regulation a lot more advanced in the US?
Martin Calladine: It is advanced, I think is may not be the right way. From what I understand it, there’s this kind of a two pronged thing here, which is one in the US, there’s just a general tradition of people seeking kind of civil redress through the courts. And you know, very often in lieu of actual kind of criminal action is you sue people. And so we’ve seen celebrities who’ve endorsed things, which UK celebrities have done and have not faced any action for here, slapped with with multi-billion pound lawsuits, people like Tom Brady, Shaquille O’Neal, other film stars as well.
So you’ve very, very famous people, whether any of those will come to anything, you know, remains to be seen, because as we know that not all of these see the light of day, and sometimes they’re settled. And it is just on the celebrity note worth noting that in discovery for the Tom Brady lawsuit, it came out that one very famous celebrity had declined an opportunity to endorse the scheme he had. And that was Taylor Swift. And as I understand, she had been offered several as much as $100 million to endorse it. And her response had been, can you tell me that these are not unregulated securities? So seemingly, at least one celebrity can do some research in ways that we don’t always expect of other celebrities. And she declined to put her name to it. And but beyond that, there’s also the US SEC, so the financial regulator there that seems to have much wider latitude in terms of crypto has effectively become the global regulator, because any time there’s a crypto problem or a crypto scandal, usually a US investor has somehow even if they weren’t supposed to be has been invested in it.
And so they’ve had oversight. So if you look at FTX, which was a Bahamas based company, the Binance multi billion dollar fine of a few months ago, I think Binance until recently had no…claimed to have no global headquarters anywhere. The Terra Luna collapse, which set off the whole crypto when I think was originally South Korea based or might have been Singapore, but none of those were US based. And the US has still taken criminal action against all of those and demanded greater oversight and has taken that role.
I mean, there’s, there’s a case of the of MTI, which was, I think, four billion dollar fraud, which was mostly in southern Africa. And even that’s seen US courtrooms, because again, some US investors were caught up. So that seemed to have been almost the only way that any justice can be served to people who’ve lost money in crypto, whether through, you know, malfeasance or fraud. But they just seem to have that kind of willingness to get involved. The US, the UK by contrast, contrast has been, it’s been almost laughable, you know, the until the end of last year, the ASA, the Advertising Standards Authority was the only party with any regulatory authority, which, as you can tell by their name, meant that they could regulate and prevent you from putting out misleading advertising. And they were the ones that mandated a requirement for crypto products here to come with a risk warning, which is quite serious. But until October last year, the FCA had no authority over crypto products, and even now only lightly so.
So people are now supposed to register with them for their promotion. And I think they’re called high risk mass market investments. Anyway, the outcome of that is that largely, you can now invest in them. And if you lose, if they go under, you will still lose everything. So there’s no, it’s not a, it’s not a kind of a reputable financial product in the way that, you know, a kind of an investment with a regulated or a regulated body is so really British consumers are marginally better protected than they were, but not significantly so. They’re still really wide open to fraud. And if they are a subject of fraud or business failure, their chance of getting any restitution here is almost zero as compared with the US where we’ve said that there’s much more likelihood of there being some kind of criminal or civil action.
Carmen Cracknell: Right. So it’s like a combination of the power and reach of the SEC and the kind of litigious, more litigious culture there, I guess, than here.
Martin Calladine: Absolutely. It just doesn’t seem to be, and I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know if this is a legal issue, but also I think culturally, we seem to have a strange reluctance to hold famous people, famous football clubs to account for the things that they did wrong. You know, I’ve, in my book, I’ve, I’ve recounted a number of examples that I know the ones where clubs through what at best could be described as grotesque negligence. And in some cases, provably, they knew who they were doing business with were not sound businesses, and they continued to do so.
Whether they have any legal responsibility for that, I don’t know. But it seems obvious to me that they have moral responsibility. But equally obvious that they’ve no intention of taking any.
Martin Calladine: There are many cases, they don’t have control of their own social media, and the deals are done on their behalf. And that’s broadly the way many of them like it. So clubs won’t have much direct oversight over the endorsements that players sign unless there’s a direct conflict. And clubs wouldn’t really care anyway, they don’t, and it would be hard to imagine a player doing anything that’s an illegal endorsement that the club would deem to be damaging their own brand.
And many of the clubs, their definition of what damages their brand, it really doesn’t extend to commercial endorsements, very few clubs refuse almost any commercial endorsements on any basis, with the exception of alcohol, they that’s the only one they tend to think harms their brand, everything else, as long as it’s a commercial endorsement, they’re fine, they’re much more concerned about how players might behave in public, how they might conduct themselves, if they’re seen drunk coming out of a nightclub, that kind of thing. But they don’t care, what suitcase a player endorses or whether they’ve got a crypto deal.
Carmen Cracknell: What’s your view on blockchain in general, kind of separately from crypto? I know it’s, maybe it’s come back more recently with the rise in the crypto markets again, but it was the buzz word, wasn’t it? Sort of two or three years ago, every company, every industry was talking about how blockchain was going to revolutionise everything. Does it have a place in football in your view?
Martin Calladine: Well, it doesn’t in my view, and that’s not the view of everyone I spoke to when I was researching this book, you know, it’s not necessarily that blockchain is useless, I think, although, you know, I think it has to be acknowledged that people have been talking about the potential of blockchain to revolutionise everything from logistics and supply chains to finance for at least 10 years now you had big consultancies going in and trying to sell that into global organisations. And thus far, all they’ve really managed to produce with blockchain is fraud, money laundering and speculation. You know, those are the only really three strong use cases.
Many people I spoke to still feel that blockchain could be useful technology, perhaps for integrating into fan relationships and data collection. But for the most part, crypto where it interacted with football wasn’t looking to apply it to unsolved problems in the game. It was looking to use football’s global appeal to recruit investors for, you know, unregulated, sometimes fraudulent enterprises. And I think that football and blockchain, blockchain tech generally, it wants to be that to be otherwise, it needs to, there needs to be a reset, you know, a recognition that most of what went before was junk investments and scams.
I mean, there’s talk at the moment now coming back again about the metaverse and people talking about football metaverse products. So, you know, like interactive 3D stadiums and watching games and interacting with the fans there and buying merch and stuff. But all those again, whenever you see them, whenever you talk about the blockchain, they never ever talk about it separately from crypto when it comes to specifying the product, the product at the end always includes cryptocurrency of some kind, and almost always a marketplace opportunity for speculating on it.
And if crypto, if blockchain is a transformative technology, one, why hasn’t it transformed anything yet? Two, why does it always have to include crypto and a speculative opportunity? Why can’t that be put to one side and we can use the fundamental kind of sound record keeping element of that separate from the financial speculation?
But until there’s a good answer for that, I think people are going to continue to be pretty skeptical about it, especially since so often you speak to people and they say, well, yes, it can do all of these things in theory, but in practice, it doesn’t tend to do any of these especially well, and often not better than existing technologies, not to not cheaper than existing technologies. So, you know, I don’t know that we’re much further down the road towards that that kind of panacea, the thing that we’ve been promised, and most of the kind of the companies that crashed and burned along the way, we look back at them, I’m not sure that there was much usefully built in that regard either. So I’m a skeptical possibly more so than I ever was about blockchain, I have to say, but you know, other people will have their own views on that.
Carmen Cracknell: And the other big buzz word or buzz term is AI. How is that impacting the game?
Martin Calladine: That’s a really good question. And not one I think I can actually usefully answer at this stage. We saw, I mean, all I can say is that last year we did see what I was able to show, I think was the first ever AI generated statement from a football club chairman. The Wigan chairman was under a great deal of pressure at the time. And English was his second language. And he put out a noticeably well written apology for the current state of the club with an exhortation for everybody to remain positive.
And when we ran that through AI checkers, they all seem to suggest that it was AI generated, how it may affect, you know, other stuff like data collection or assessment of player and player performance and scouting and stuff like that. I’m sure people are working on that right now. I’m not aware of what’s going on in that regard or anything already is being used in that way.
Carmen Cracknell: So are you going to carry on with the crypto beat and continue with that? Or what’s the next topic you’ll be tackling? Or do you think this story is going to go on for quite a few more years?
Martin Calladine: Regrettably, I kind of hoped that the book would be the end of it. But crypto is like it’s just the beginning. Yeah, it never fully dies away. I expect Bitcoin to rise and fall and take a long time to fully peter out. I don’t think the long term that was in 10 years we’ll still be talking about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. I could be wrong. So I think I will still be writing about this. But the joy and or a tragedy of writing about football and business of it is that there are always more corrupt or dubious people involving themselves in always more corrupt and dubious schemes.
So there’s plenty for me to be getting on with outside of this. But I’ll still be doing a bit of it for the near future.
Carmen Cracknell: Yeah, great. Well, those were all my questions. If people want to read your book and find out more about you, how can they get in touch or where should they go online?
Martin Calladine: Well, if you want to read my book, that is available now on Amazon. And that’s no questions asked how football fell for the crypto con. And I tweet at ugly game. And you can find my daily thoughts about what’s going wrong in the world there.
Carmen Cracknell: Lovely. Thank you so much, Martin, for joining.
Martin Calladine: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to be on. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.
Carmen Cracknell: Thank you. Take care.