How the NFL and John Malkovich inspired UEFA's Champions ...

CBS Sports’ creative director Pete Radovich has won 45 Emmys and numerous other awards for documentaries, features and “teases”, those short films TV executives use to keep us watching something we are probably going to watch anyway (but we all like a good tease, so we don’t mind).

“I’m proud of the piece, that’s enough,” said Radovich, when this column asked him about his latest hit. “I don’t do these films to win prizes. I love it when they do but that’s not the intention at the start.”

Yeah, yeah, Pete, that’s easy for you to say when you’ve got an annexe full of them. When the Business of Football got a tip-off that UEFA’s latest short feature was a copy of a Radovich mini-masterpiece, we are not ashamed to admit that we started to practise our scoop-of-the-year acceptance speech.

UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and half a dozen other greats in a plagiarism scandal? Boom.

An hour of Googling later and the speech was in the bin. This is not that type of tale. Instead, it is that rarest of beasts on these pages: good news.

Let us rewind to the end of August when UEFA held its traditional season curtain-raiser in Monaco with the draws for the Champions League, Europa League and Conference League.

These are usually opportunities for TV presenters to show off new frocks, UEFA’s draw guru Giorgio Marchetti to shine and club execs to top up their tans. But this year was different. It had to be — UEFA was launching a new competition format that left many fans scratching their heads. It is so complicated that Marchetti was replaced by a computer. Frankly, UEFA had some explaining to do.

Now let’s scroll back to January 2018.

It is the AFC Championship game between reigning Super Bowl champions the New England Patriots and the surprise-package Jacksonville Jaguars. Radovich, as the senior producer of CBS’ coverage of the game, had to come up with a new way to say the Patriots should win this but please watch anyway.

What he wrote, produced and directed was… spectacular. Starring American actor John Malkovich and the New England Conservatory orchestra, “Teasing John Malkovich” is four minutes of angst, comedy, oratory and perfect story-telling. Its central idea was taking something that someone had complicated and making it simple, and it won lots of awards.

So, when UEFA’s marketing team started to think about its (don’t call it a) Swiss-model problem, a bright spark remembered something they had seen at the awards ceremonies a few years before.

“Someone at UEFA saw the Malkovich thing,” says Radovich, who also happens to produce CBS’s much-loved Champions League coverage.

“They had already been thinking about doing more of that type of thing and someone said, ‘We know this guy, he’s our lead producer in the U.S. — we deal with him all the time!’.

“It was complete luck, really, but I got a call out of the blue asking if I would like to help them with something. I didn’t have to think about it very long.”

He presented five ideas to UEFA and it picked the one he liked best, an homage to his most decorated work.

“I wanted something that had the same vibe but wasn’t just a copy-and-paste job,” he explains. “But I also thought if anyone is allowed to plagiarise my work, it’s me.”

We should not be too surprised that Ibrahimovic, a deadly marksman who was a prince in Paris and is famous for talking about himself, could reprise the role played by an actor whose most famous roles include being an assassin, a French aristocrat and himself in a film about being him, but who knew that Ceferin can take a joke and Gianluigi Buffon can act?

29.8.24

The dawn of a new era ✨ #UCLdraw | #UCL pic.twitter.com/CkAL4ZyoNm

— UEFA Champions League (@ChampionsLeague) August 28, 2024

“Right from the beginning, Zlatan was central to how I saw it working,” says Radovich. “He was the guy.”

For Radovich, the secret to the success of the shoot was “instant chemistry”.

“Because he grew up in Yugoslavia, Ceferin speaks fluent Croatian,” he explains. “My family are all Croatian, so I can speak Croatian. And Zlatan’s mother is Croatian, so he speaks it. The fact we are all guys from the Balkans really helped on a personal level. We spent about 80 per cent of the time talking Croatian.

“I remember when the three of us were going through the lines and we got to the one about Zlatan not winning the Champions League. Zlatan stops, gave me that look and says, ‘Did you write this?’. I said yes and he said, ‘You son of a bitch…’. and then cracked a big smile.”

The Business of Football is aware that this is the second week in a row it has praised UEFA. Normal service is bound to be resumed shortly.

Tingo, Sheffield United and potential proceeds of crime

Dozy Mmobuosi, remember him?

He was the London-based Nigerian “billionaire” who tried to buy Sheffield United only to skip town when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a civil suit against him, claiming he was responsible for a “massive multi-year scheme to defraud investors worldwide”.

Its 72-page complaint was damning. For four years, the SEC said, Mmobuosi had faked bank statements, invented revenues and cooked-up customers. At the same time he was trying to buy Sheffield United, he filed documents in the U.S. that said his firm Tingo Mobile had more than $460million (£350m at current rates) in the bank. In reality, it had less than $50.

In January, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation charged him with three counts of fraud that carry prison sentences between five and 20 years each.

Well, he’s back!

Two weeks ago, he addressed Tingo’s “dear shareholders” via his Instagram page, telling them he had “watched as my reputation and the reputation of the businesses I have built have been grotesquely caricatured across the media”.

The watching was over, though, as he had “voluntarily submitted (himself) to the rigours of a thorough police investigation in Nigeria”, which had cleared him of any wrongdoing. The police report, he added, had been sent to the SEC.

Two days later, however, news arrived from a federal court in New York, where Judge Jesse M Furman had ruled in favour of the SEC and fined Mmobuosi and three of his companies $250million. Furman also banned him from serving as an officer of a public company.

Clearly, the report had not arrived.

The question now is how the SEC intends to collect that fine, as Mmobuosi left nothing behind in the U.S. and UK. And his latest ventures, Tingo Cola and Tingo Electric Energy Drink, do not appear to flying off any shelves.

There is, though, the £8.85million he paid Sheffield United’s Saudi owner Prince Abdullah as a deposit. What the club describes as a “proportion” of that sum was then lent to Sheffield United’s parent company, Blades Leisure Limited. It was urgently needed, too, as United were pushing for promotion to the Premier League despite being under a transfer embargo for late payments.

As it was a non-refundable deposit on a deal he failed to complete, Mmobuosi has no right to that money — but the SEC might, as it was almost certainly the proceeds of crime and the U.S. authorities tend to go after those.

According to a note in the club’s most recent set of accounts, Sheffield United are aware that the £8.85million, plus interest, “could potentially be recovered from Blades Leisure Group and/or the club” but the club’s directors, based on legal advice, believe the possibility of this happening is “remote”.

When asked by The Athletic if the directors were still so confident of that, the club declined to comment. As did the SEC and Mmobuosi.

Textor’s Brazilian billions

Speaking of clubs with ‘For Sale’ signs up, there was better news for Everton this week, as John Textor provided more detail on his bid to buy the Premier League side.

The first hint of some much-needed progress in his talks with Everton’s owner, Farhad Moshiri, came last weekend when an investment prospectus reached the Business of Football from Miami-based investment firm Aliya Capital Partners.

The first thing that jumped out from the three-page document was the company’s address, 1450 Brickell Avenue. Hold on, we thought, isn’t that the same street as 777 Partners, the last Miami-based investment firm that tried to buy Everton?

A quick online search revealed that Brickell Avenue is a long road and the two offices are a mile apart. Phew, we thought. And after a little more research, we discovered that the firms are even further apart when it comes to financial muscle.

777 Partners, in case you have forgotten, is currently under the control of insolvency experts. Aliya, on the other hand, is the family office of one of the branches of the Safra dynasty.

When Lebanese-Brazilian banker Joseph Safra died in 2020, he was the richest banker in the world. His $15billion fortune was split between his wife and four children. It did not bring them much happiness, though, as they have been suing each other ever since. But they are still very rich.

Aliya Capital Partners looks after and invests some of that fortune but is very discreet about it, so you will not find any reference to the Safras on its website. However, you will see investments in Airbnb, Epic Games, Uber and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. It also backed Musk’s move for Twitter, which he subsequently rebranded X.

The Brazilian link is how Aliya met Textor, as he owns Rio de Janeiro’s Botafogo, as well as stakes in Lyon and RWD Molenbeek. Aliya has been looking to get back into football for some time, having previously been an investor in playing talent. That was when third parties, like family offices, were allowed to own stakes in players but world governing body FIFA banned this in 2014.

The investment prospectus was a confusing document, though, as it appeared to be an attempt to raise $25million for a co-investment with Textor’s Eagle Football Group in Everton, with the return on that investment coming from Eagle’s imminent flotation on the New York Stock Exchange.

Aliya did not reply to The Athletic’s request for comment but Textor told us the document was out of date and said the plan had changed.

That plan is for Textor and a “couple of friends with terrific resources” to buy Everton themselves, separately from Eagle Football, with the latter being floated later this year.

And on Friday we received confirmation that those friends are former FuboTV and Lyon director Alexander Bafer, who is rich but not Premier League rich, and Aliya, which is.

A new look for English football? Caps and collars

This column usually tries to finish on an upbeat note but this time we are going to end with an idea. And it comes from one of our readers, Gillingham owner Brad Galinson.

The Florida-based property investor bought a majority stake in the League Two club in December 2022. They were bottom of the table when he took over but pulled away from trouble, finished mid-table last season and are now second, having beaten Tranmere Rovers on Saturday.

Galinson has a suggestion to make.

“I love the thrill of promotion and relegation and, as an American, I feel that it’s something we miss out on with our closed leagues,” he explains. “But I do wonder if English football could take the best bits of the American system to create a UK/U.S. hybrid that solves English football’s biggest problems: not enough competitive balance at the top and poor financial sustainability.

“When you look at the Premier League, how many teams can win it this season? Two? Three? That’s not ideal. Compare that to the NFL, where half the league thinks it has a chance.

“And it’s because in English football there is a big correlation — 83 per cent (according to the 2009 bestseller, Soccernomics) — between wages and winning. Want to know who is most likely to win? Look at the wage bill. That’s why you have owners who are willing to gamble on their club’s futures by spending more than they can afford.

“One big difference between the countries is that nobody in the UK seems to think it is a good idea for team owners to make money or just break even. It’s the opposite in the U.S. and it is a good idea because the alternative is clubs going into administration and an endless cycle of forced sales. Making the game economically viable would be good for everyone.

“So, my idea is to take one of the tools that U.S. sport uses, the wage ceiling or cap, to control costs. But I would also bring in the flip side, the wage floor or collar. Maximum and minimum limits on what you can spend on talent.

“The NFL has been doing it for years and they share revenues and talent, too, so they can have every team in a really narrow range. But you could start wide in England and then narrow it over time.”

His suggested starting point is an annual cap on what you can spend on players’ wages and transfer fees, amortised (spread out) over a maximum of three years, of 75 per cent of each division’s annual football-related revenues. And the collar would be 50 per cent.

“The PFA (Professional Footballers’ Association, the players union) is going to hate the cap but that is why you start it wide, so it doesn’t bite too hard, and they should like the collar,” adds Galinson.

“You would also need to make relegation clauses mandatory in players’ contracts but most clubs do that anyway.

“At the moment, we have the ‘Salary Cost Management Protocol’ in League One and League Two, which works to a degree but owners can still just put in more equity to cover losses. Wrexham’s owners put in £9million last season.

“I have just put in more so we could sign (attacking midfielder) Bradley Dack, which is fine, but what if I get bored? How is it healthy that clubs owned by rich guys can just outspend Morecambe by five times?”

Food for thought.