Adam Crafton
Appearances
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
And that's a problem, right? If teams are being promoted, spending 100 million, but still really way off being able to properly compete, that creates an issue actually for the Premier League as well as the EFL.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
It's such an interesting question because then you get into the realm of actually who are the owners? What do the owners want? Why are the owners there? And there's so many different ownership models amongst 92 clubs, right?
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
There will be owners in, you know, an owner of a League 1, League 2 club who is kind of just the local businessman in his town who is actually really happy owning a club in League 1, League 2, being that community asset. who maybe thinks, you know, we'll have the old good year in a cup or something like that, but we're not going to get to the Premier League.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
But they probably still quite like the idea of having that far away distant dream of maybe we could, right? Who knows? Maybe we could. Then you have the other extreme, which is, I suppose, if we just take the block of American owners in the Premier League. I knew that was coming. Sorry, but, you know, because that's the interesting block because it's the growing block.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
And, you know, now with the Everton, the three-kin guys in Everton, we're getting pretty close to having kind of the, for any rule to pass in the Premier League, it's 14 or more clubs need to approve it. Now, would some of these owners like the Premier League to be a closed shot? Of course they would, because it protects their investment, it increases the value of their asset.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
You would then start to get Premier League clubs, I think, getting towards the valuations of some of the NBA teams and NFL teams, right? Because the Premier League basically is the Super League, right? Right. I think between us, we can probably say that. I know some people would argue La Liga, etc.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
But in terms of just viewing figures and global reach, the Premier League is kind of outstripping everything at the moment, probably other than the Champions League. So some of them, yes, I think would like it. But I think what's also true is the Super League had such a scarring effect
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
on particularly the owners of Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea weren't there at the time, but they know about it, Tottenham, Arsenal, that I don't think they would dare at the moment even try and go there. So I don't think it's a realistic conversation. And I also don't think it's...
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
realistic because something that's going on in the uk at the moment is this football governance bill that's going through parliament so i think you would actually see incredible political opposition i think it would simply be blocked by yeah by parliament and i know this is a kind of something that probably seems quite alien to americans like the idea that
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
The government's going to get involved in whether the league has promotion or relegation or whatever. And yes, they are, because it's a hugely popular issue. And there's probably, you know, you saw it when the Super League came along. The prime minister at the time, Boris Johnson, basically came along and said, I'm going to drop a legislation, I can't even say it,
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
legislative bomb to stop this from happening and that was one of the reasons why it didn't progress so as a result of that yes there are plenty of owners i suspect who would like this um to change but i don't see it as being realistic as a policy change anytime soon you know adam to that point it's interesting so um full disclosure i have a very very very very small um
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
We're not going to subsidize that, right? So could I ask you, Landon, as an owner, however small that stake may be, how would you feel if the promotion relegation was all of a sudden not a possibility?
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
I mean, there's players at the moment at Ipswich that were there in League One, right?
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
A lot of players. Bournemouth, you know, when they went up with Eddie Howe, it was like League Two to the Premier League, some of these players. So, yeah, I've never considered it really, yeah, from a player's perspective in terms of it possibly being their only way to get there as well.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
Thank you. You wanted someone at the top of the game and you got me instead.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
No, I think the points you make are valid. I think if I was looking at soccer in the United States and I was looking at the MLS, there's kind of two ways you look at it. One is... you have to adapt to what the audience here is about and what the audience here is about as, as Tim says is we don't support second division teams.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
And my really simple sociological take on that is just Americans love watching the best.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
Yeah, and I think it's why the Premier League and Champions League is really popular here. A bit in the way that you guys call baseball the World Series, right? Because you expect the sport you watch to be the best, right? So that's why people are watching Champions League.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
um now the flip way that soccer could look at it and is set is to basically still say you guys might push back on this a little bit but they could say we're still a challenger sport to you know nfl to college football to baseball to basketball we can argue about that when we look at participation figures and um and i suspect but they could say well actually because we're challenging
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
Maybe we actually do do things differently to the way that American sport tends to see itself, right? And say, we do bring in this jeopardy that you don't get in other sports in the US and say, we're going to do this differently and see whether the audience comes with us on it. Now, whether there is the evidence there that people would go with that is another story, but that's what they could do.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
But I really do think MLS, it's the easiest thing to say ever, has to do something. Because as an example, I was actually in Vegas last week, and I was talking to one of the sports books in Vegas. And I said to them, out of the soccer leagues... Where does MLS rank in terms of the most betted on soccer leagues? Not all sports leagues, just soccer leagues.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
It's the ninth most bet on soccer league, right? So that's a domestic market, right? I know Vegas doesn't obviously have an MLS team, but you're talking about within the United States, the ninth most betted on soccer league. That to me is a problem, right? Because people bet on what they're watching on TV.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
And that tells me, you know, I know we don't get the figures around what, you know, what people are watching on Apple at the moment, but it tells me not enough people are watching, you know, Liga MX was second, right? So we know Liga MX is very popular within the United States. But that's an issue because that tells you that people aren't tuning in.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
Because they've already- And why would they, right?
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
This is like the great, you know, sorry to everyone listening, not happening.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
Yeah, well, I suppose the major difference is the rest of the world kind of has this idea of a pyramid, right? This idea of teams that have always existed, that have been around for decades, centuries, and this idea that there is a top division where you may have maybe 12, 16, 18, 20 teams, but you don't have a fixed place in that division.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
I totally agree with you on that. And also, rationally, if you're looking at it purely from the business case, why would you look at what's happening in the Premier League and the Championship and say, I want to take that risk with my business.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
Why would I want to take the risk of having an end of year situation where I may have to let people go because revenue streams are unpredictable, where my valuation may change because we've I don't know, our star striker got injured and therefore we've not played well for 10 games. The beauty of European football is the irrationality. And that's maybe the motivation.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
The bit I always find strange is coming from the UK into America is in so many industries,
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
Americans kind of shun the idea of protectionism and regulation and then when it comes to sport it's like this kind of right protectionist cartel to be honest right looking after a very very small amount of you know very very wealthy people um what and I don't know maybe you could actually argue that's exactly what what goes on in other industries but but So it's interesting.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
It's like in so many other spheres, it's like trust the market, trust the market, it'll be fine. Whereas here it's like, no, don't trust the market. We have to make sure we are completely protected and everything's relatively predictable. Of course, you then have wildcard factors like drafts that make things more egalitarian and things like that. I just wonder whether there's other things that
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
MLS could change first in terms of making itself more attractive, more appealing, more jeopardy without promotion and relegation. Whether it is increasing spending limits, whether it is creating greater visibility outside of paywalls. I think there's a lot of things that MLS can do and also US soccer can do as well.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
The thing that shocks me most is when I look at soccer all around the world, it is so accessible for people to play regardless of background, ethnicity. It is the greatest sporting vehicle of social mobility. You look at where a Messi or Ronaldo came from, a Luis Suarez to where to where they went and in the United States, you know, it is incredibly expensive. Yes.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
Certainly, if we just take the example of England, you have 20 clubs in the top division, then there's 24 in the second tier, 24 in the third tier, 24 in the fourth tier. That's just the professional game. And The idea is it's fluid. So three teams will go down from the Premier League, three teams will come up from the Championship.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
And the stories I hear of like what people have to pay for their kids to be able to, to play soccer.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
But I think it's a really important debate for, uh, for for for us soccer to have because although again it may be rational it may be logical it is not what happens elsewhere in the world right right and it's a big it's a big differentiator yeah could um tim just thinking about this um andrew our producer put in our chat here could would mls argue that the way they keep the
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
And I suppose the advantage of it is this concept of being able to dream, of being able to take a place in the top flight, but also this idea of sporting jeopardy so that bad performances have consequences.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
As in to decide the championship winner? Yeah. Yeah. I think people like it with people who are into NFL in the UK, which is growing, to be honest. It's now shown on Sky or BBC. There's highlight shows. I think people like it. I think it appeals. Could you do it with the Premier League? There'd be resistance because there's resistance to everything.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
You know, I mean, you could go out and say, you know, we're going to give everyone, I don't know, $100 and there'll be resistance because it's changed, right? So true. So there is a bit of that. I have been thinking it in the last few years. You know, there are those years, right, where, and it may be one this year, where Liverpool actually ended up winning the league by 15 points.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
and you're in April and it's a bit like, yeah. Right. That's not that exciting. Right. Whisper that quietly. You know, a team, you know, when city, when to be fair with city, it's tended to be pretty close, even though it's felt inevitable. Yeah. They're going to win. Right. It's tended to be a couple of points here or there. I think
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
what you could do is a playoff for the fourth place yeah the final champions league place yeah oh that's interesting so particularly now that you've got this kind of clutch of clubs who are all pretty competent you know between kind of third and uh i don't know seventh or eighth in the table maybe you take the teams that are third fourth fifth sixth seventh or something like that
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
And good performances are rewarded, but also from a spectator sport perspective, it doesn't just mean you're looking at the top of the table as to who's going to win the championship or who's going to win the playoffs, or who's going to qualify for European competition. But you also have this other layer of television jeopardy, which is who's going to stay in the division.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
and put them into a playoffs. Because, I don't know, I think it's lame that you can finish fourth and you get into the Champions League. And I quite like the idea of actually maybe you should have to do a bit more to do that. And it could also increase the teams that actually make it through.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
The flip side is you could get a team like Forest that finish fourth and everyone says, well, they absolutely deserve to make it because they've overperformed so much. And then you put them into a playoffs and then it gives, I don't know, a a man silly a second chance yeah and obviously they then take it so that would be the counter argument i also don't dislike the idea of a kind of 17th place
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
So possibly you relegate four clubs instead of three, or you do a playoff between the fourth bottom team and the fourth team in the championship or something like that. I think Germany does something like that.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
Yeah, so Tim, you're 100% right on that. They will want more. And the question is, what is it they're going to get, right? Is it, you know, so one thing that is constantly spoken about is do you end up with a regular season game?
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
uh, being taken around the world. Sure. I would say most likely to the States. I don't think the premier league will be the first to do it, but we know La Liga are desperate to do it. We know Serie A would do it. We know UEFA would do it with the champions league. Um, it could be something like that. It could be, how do you bring the viewer closer to the action?
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
Is it miking up the coaches on the touchline? Is it giving access to locker room, uh, half-time team talks. Tim, I don't want to put you out of a job at half-time analysis.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
And we'll go probably even deeper into this, but with the Premier League, that's become even greater jeopardy because of the cost of relegation and the jeopardy of the trapdoor, which there is a kind of...
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
It's also interesting, guys, in terms of how does MLS actually continue to expand? They're now up to 30. I think, as you say, you'd expect maybe Phoenix, Vegas. But the challenge is, you're talking about a $500 million expansion fee. Then you're also expected to build a soccer-specific stadium. In a market like Vegas, for example, you'd have to... have a retractable roof because of the heat.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
perverse jeopardy to it in many ways right because often it leads to fire sales and redundancies and fears over the future of the club I mean Tim will know better probably than well Landon as well you were at Everton as well so you know how for Everton over the past few years there has just been this real kind of existential fear of what might happen with relegation.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
You know, you're talking about really, you're talking about people who have a billion to drop.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
Before you've even started. Many billions.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
So before you've even started, right? And I know this is a place with a lot of billionaires, but are there that many more people that want to be spending that on a new MLS team? I'm not sure.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
Pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
The reality, of course, is that there is a secret rule in English football, which means Everton can never be relegated. However badly they play, they never actually go down. But that's kind of the premise of it. This idea, you can go up, you can go down. And it means that, you know, the makeup of the Premier League today compared to 10, 15 years ago is very, very different. And it means we have
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
some incredible stories like Brentford and Bournemouth and Brighton and Ipswich at the moment. But then there's also teams like Nottingham Forest, who in the 1980s were winning European Cups, but it's only been the last couple of years that they've managed to get themselves back into the Premier League.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
So when you're in the Premier League, there's a guaranteed revenue that you get through the television money. I think the domestic money is split equally. And then the international TV rights, one of the things that the bigger clubs or the clubs that consider themselves bigger managed to negotiate was a larger portion of that international TV rights going in their direction.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
So that's kind of what we kind of describe as the big six clubs, a couple of which are kind of currently about 14th and 15th in the table, right? Clubs like Man United and Tottenham. But then there is a difference, as you say, based on performance related prize money. So where you finish in the table. Then if you are relegated, you still get that automatic TV money for that season.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
That money still goes to you. But because the difference between the TV money is so big between the Premier League and the Championship, You're still being relegated often with a wage bill, with a salary bill that is so disproportionate to what you're going to receive TV revenue-wise in the championship that they were fearing that clubs would just go out of business.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
And we saw maybe 15, 20 years ago clubs like Portsmouth and Leeds come incredibly close, incredibly close to going out of business when they were relegated. So one of the things that were brought in was these parachute payments. And they last three years. I can't remember the exact figures, but it's a sliding scale. So the first year, you get a big sum. Second year, slightly less.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
Third year, slightly less. And the idea is to cushion that landing. And it's quite a vivid word, right? It's like you're literally jumping out of the plane, right? And this parachute is holding you up. Sure. Now, this has been successful in protecting those clubs that do go down.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
What you do tend to see is some clubs will spend that parachute money very, very quickly to try and come straight back up. And I think it is becoming an issue, actually, in terms of the competitive balance of the championship itself, because what you tend to see is clubs that go down, even if they've been pretty poor in the Premier League, are still so much better than the rest of the champions.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
Yeah, that's right. And there's certain requirements that you need in the Premier League, and it's largely to do with the global broadcast requirements. So it's, you know, because so much of the international TV revenue is contributing to Premier League clubs and funds transfers and all the product.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
So a lot of it is just about actually giving the broadcasters everything they need to be able to show the games.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
I don't have that much of an issue with that side of it in terms of, you know, if a club such as Luton is getting to the Premier League, I think they'd almost rather than be spending it on enhancing the infrastructure of the club, getting the training ground right, getting the stadium into a better place that enables them then to actually be more successful longer term rather than spending it on, I don't know, another £8 million left back that probably won't do that much.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
You know, So I don't have that much of an issue with that. I think just to go back to the point you were mentioning around the yo-yo clubs, there's a real issue in the championship at the moment for those clubs who received the parachute payments but didn't come up. So a club like Stoke, who we saw in the Premier League for quite a long time, then got relegated, or Middlesbrough, went down.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
But now they're kind of in this, or Birmingham, you know, now in League One, they're kind of stuck because they're not able to organically drive the kind of revenue they need to be able to hit the top of the championship. And then you have these three clubs coming down every season who are disproportionately financially boosted.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
So yes, you do get these freak instances of teams that just hit runs of forms on Ipswich, back-to-back promotions, or Luton. But it's really tough, I think, for those clubs that are kind of just living at the moment between, I don't know, 8th and 20th in the championship. Swansea, another example, right? You saw the owners of DC United, Levine, kind of just give up on Swansea by the end.
Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard
Promotion and Relegation with Adam Crafton
And there is this ongoing debate within English football around how the Premier League should redistribute to the EFL to try and, I suppose, just even it out a little bit more because I think even the Premier League is starting to see an impact of this because of what you describe as these yo-yo clubs that get to the Premier League and actually just can't compete anymore.