[ad_1]
JPMorgan Chase has apologized for supporting the European Superliga football that collapsed this week after a clamor from fans, politicians, teams and players.
The American bank was instrumental in creating the Super League by pledging a € 3.25 million grant that in effect provided initial funding to the rebel clubs to launch the pro-independence contest.
JPMorgan’s debt financing agreement would have lasted 23 years and would have been secured against future competition rights, revealed the FT earlier this week.
London-based debt bankers JPMorgan were instrumental in planning the Superliga and had been working on the project for several years, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
“We clearly misjudged how this deal would be seen by the football community at large and how it could affect them in the future,” the bank said in a statement on Friday. “We’ll learn from that.”
The new competition would have toppled European football, creating a new league of 15 permanent members, including English Manchester United, Spanish Real Madrid and Italian Juventus.
The fierce reaction left almost all of the original 12 founding clubs to abandon the project within days of its launch on Sunday.
But widespread anger from football fans across the UK comes just as JPMorgan is finalizing plans to enter the country’s retail banking market. The group has confirmed this this year it intends to open a digital-only bank in the UK.
During the uproar over the Superliga, former British Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair, who chairs the JPMorgan International Board, which is made up of business executives and former political leaders, told the Telegraph that it did not support the project.
Weekly newsletter
Marker is the Financial Times ’must-see new weekly report on the sports business, where you’ll find the best analysis of financial issues affecting clubs, franchises, owners, investors and global industry media groups. Sign up here.
Sajid Javid, another bank adviser and former Conservative chancellor, argued that governments should tax clubs who refused to abandon the plan.
Florentino Pérez, president of Real Madrid, one of the two largest clubs in Spain, was the architect of the Superliga and pointed out his hopes for the project to help the team recover from its lack of budget. 400 million euros in the last two seasons.
Both Pérez, a billionaire construction mogul, and the Spanish club have close relations with JPMorgan, which has supported the club’s efforts. to finance the renovation of the Santiago Bernabéu stadium. The importance of the agreement was such that Jamie Dimon, CEO of the bank, went to Madrid to meet with Pérez in July 2018 during a European trip.
JPMorgan also maintains close ties with other founding members of the Super League, including Manchester United. The bank worked on the controversial takeover of the club by the multimillion-dollar Glazer family, which raised £ 790 million, and former JPMorgan banker Ed Woodward joined the club in 2005, the year in what the agreement was completed.
The club said this week that Woodward, who has held the position of executive vice-president of Manchester United since 2012, will leave the post and leave at the end of this year.
Manchester United’s participation in the Super League has once again boosted calls for the Glazer family to reduce their control over the club.
Jim O’Neill, a former Goldman Sachs economist, and Paul Marshall, of the Marshall Wace hedge fund, whose group is Red Knights previously failed to buy the American family’s equipment, he wrote Friday in an open letter to Joel Glazer, urging the family to reduce their majority stake to a maximum of 49.9%.
[ad_2]
Source link
