SCR - THE REAL IMPACT

Nobody Is Chasing Glory Any More

Why the quiet dismantling of Newcastle, Villa and Hearts should send fans looking down the pyramid

There is a moment in the most recent episode of *The Rest Is Entertainment* where Richard Osman lands on something that ought to unsettle anyone who cares about football.

Discussing why the biggest names in the entertainment industry are suddenly buying up sports teams, he arrives at the reason the smart money has stopped chasing film franchises and music catalogues: those things eventually run out of story. Sport never does. It writes itself, week after week, for nothing, forever — and no writers' room, no reboot and no streaming algorithm can replicate it.

If you want the argument made properly, [go and listen to the episode].

It is a genuinely clarifying half hour and it is better than any summary I can give you here.

The detail that makes it land is the Los Angeles Lakers.

Mark Walter bought the franchise for around $10bn and sold it roughly a year later at $12.5bn, clearing something in the region of $2.5bn for, as Osman puts it, doing very little at all.

The buyers are Bob Iger, the former chief executive of Disney, alongside the venture capitalist Josh Kushner, in a deal valuing the club at a record [$12.5bn].

Read that again. The man who ran the largest scripted-intellectual-property machine in human history looked at his options and concluded that the better asset was the unscripted one. He does not need to argue the case. His chequebook argues it for him.

And this is no longer a curiosity.

A JPMorgan study of more than a hundred billionaire clients found that 20% now hold controlling interests in sports teams, up from just 6% in 2022 — ahead of art and cars as the asset class of choice.

The American safety net

Here is what makes the American version of this trade so comfortable. In the NFL, there are thirty-two franchises and there will only ever be thirty-two franchises. Nobody is promoted into the party. Nobody is thrown out of it. Every owner receives their share of the media money whether they finish first or last, and the value of the asset climbs regardless of whether the team is any good.

Winning is pleasant.

It is not, financially speaking, necessary.

That is the whole appeal: an asset with a guaranteed floor, a fixed number of units, and no mechanism by which an ambitious outsider can turn up and take a seat at the table.

European football has never offered that protection on paper. Promotion and relegation are the closest thing our game has to a constitution.

Any club, in theory, can climb.

Which raises the obvious question. If you cannot legislate away the threat of a newcomer, how do you protect yourself from one?

You control what the newcomer can invest, and then when they begin to make progress, you buy the newcomer's best players.

This was never an American disease

It would be comforting to blame all of this on private equity and sovereign wealth. It would also be wrong.

Long before an American investor had ever considered the Premier League, European football had already organised itself into a series of near-permanent hierarchies — and it did so without any help from Wall Street.

Real Madrid and Barcelona in Spain. Bayern Munich in Germany. PSG in France. Benfica, Sporting and Porto in Portugal. Celtic and Rangers in Scotland. These clubs did not cheat their way to prominence.

Their histories are extraordinary, their supporter bases were built across generations by people who earned them, and nobody sensible begrudges them their status. The stature is thoroughly deserved.

What deserves scrutiny is what happens next — specifically, what happens whenever somebody threatens to challenge them consistently. This is where SCR - The real impact is felt.

Germany is the clearest textbook case. When Jürgen Klopp's Borussia Dortmund grew into a genuine rival, Bayern signed Mario Götze by triggering his release clause, then Robert Lewandowski, then Mats Hummels — three of the most important players in that side across three seasons.

When RB Leipzig finished second twice, Bayern took Dayot Upamecano and captain Marcel Sabitzer, and paid Leipzig for their manager too.

When Bayer Leverkusen won the title unbeaten, Bayern took Jonathan Tah.

Earlier generations delivered Ballack and Lucio from Leverkusen, Neuer and Goretzka from Schalke, Gomez from Stuttgart.

The pattern is not subtle: a club puts up a title fight, and within a season or two its best players are wearing Bayern's shirt.

Whether that is deliberate sabotage or simply what unmatched financial power looks like from the outside is almost beside the point. The effect on the league is identical either way.

Things have got so pointed that Dortmund reportedly wrote a clause into Nico Schlotterbeck's contract explicitly designed to stop Bayern triggering a move.

German clubs are now writing anti-Bayern provisions into paperwork. That is not a healthy competition. That is a hostage negotiation.

Scotland: the purest version of the theory in practise.

For the cleanest illustration of what this does to a football culture, though, you do not need to leave Scotland. And you do not need to go back a decade — this summer will do.

Hearts spent almost the entirety of the 2025-26 season top of the Scottish Premiership. They lost the title to Celtic on the final day. It was the most compelling domestic season in years, driven by a manager who had rebuilt the club's identity and a captain who scored twenty goals.

Rangers responded by taking both of them.

Lawrence Shankland went first, announced in May, before he had even flown out to the World Cup with Scotland.

He had signed a new three-year Hearts deal only twelve months earlier — a deal Rangers had passed on at the time — and left for nothing, because Rangers activated a break clause buried in that contract. Hearts' sporting director was reduced to publicly defending the decision to have granted the clause at all, on the grounds it was the only way they could keep him for the season in the first place.

Three weeks later, Derek McInnes left Tynecastle to become Rangers manager, with Rangers meeting Hearts' compensation terms. By the end of July, McInnes had named Shankland his captain at Ibrox — the same manager, the same captain, the same partnership, relocated forty miles west.

Hearts did nothing wrong.

They built the best thing they had built in a generation, came within ninety minutes of the title, and had the two people most responsible for it removed inside a month. Ask Aberdeen, Hibs or Motherwell how familiar that feels. Whenever a club outside Glasgow produces something genuinely good, the two clubs it threatens are usually first in the queue for it.

England, summer 2026 - SCR - The Real Impact

Which brings us to the EPL, and to the most expensive version of this yet.

In May, Aston Villa beat Freiburg 3-0 in Istanbul to win the Europa League — their first major trophy in thirty years — and finished fourth in the Premier League to reach the Champions League.

Newcastle had been in the Champions League proper, going out to Barcelona. Two clubs outside the traditional elite doing precisely what the sport claims to reward: sound recruitment, excellent coaching, patient building, actual silverware.

The year before had broken their own trophy drought with a team of well found and well bought players who had been improved by the coaching team and seen their profiles raised. It is true to say that the league performance of Newcastle last season was below what was expected, no small part down to the squad being stretched by European football, and the loss the previous summer of squad players (Elliot Anderson and Yanuba Minteh) both sold to keep Newcastle on the right side of the financial restrictions.

Then the window opened.

Newcastle sold Sandro Tonali to Tottenham for £100m. They sold their captain, Bruno Guimarães, to Arsenal for £75m, after a pursuit conducted for weeks through intermediaries while the club stated repeatedly and publicly that he was not for sale at any price.

They had already sold Alexander Isak to Liverpool the previous September for a British record £125m, after the striker effectively withdrew from the club to force the move.

Anthony Gordon went too. Eddie Howe, the manager who built all of it, was reported to have become exasperated by the sales, and has since departed.

Bruno, Isak and Tonali had their transfers agreed before an approach was even made to Newcastle with "super agents" acting in the shadows on behalf of the top six clubs. Tonali has even openly admitted this with revelations about his discussions with fellow countryman and Spurs manager Robert De Zerbi some weeks before the deal was done. Clear violation of EPL transfer rules, but seemingly transfer rules that do not apply in some selected cases.

Villa fared no better. Morgan Rogers joined Chelsea for £117m, making him the most expensive British footballer in history — a record set only weeks earlier when Manchester City paid Nottingham Forest £116m for Elliot Anderson (yes the same one Newcastle had been forced to sell the year before). Youri Tielemans, the Belgium captain and a central figure in the European run, went to Manchester United for around £35m because a release clause was triggered. Villa had offered him new terms months earlier and had no wish to sell. They had no say in it. ( and on the day of writing this, Arsenal have come in strong for Villa defender Konsa).

Roughly £452m of playing talent moved from Newcastle and Aston Villa into Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham and Manchester United inside a single year. Every transfer went upwards. Not one went the other way.

We understand the argument that nobody makes the players move, but the ability the top 6 clubs have to virtually double the wages of the player is a massive incentive, and do not under estimate the influence of agents who benefit to an extraordinary extent to make sure these deals happen.

This is defence, not ambition

Here is the part worth sitting with, because it reframes everything.

Arsenal did not need Bruno Guimarães to win the league. They had just won it. Chelsea did not need Morgan Rogers to thrive — and they were not even in Europe to offer Rogers a higher grade of football.

These were not the desperate lunges of clubs chasing a trophy they could not otherwise reach.

They were something colder. If Newcastle keep Isak, Tonali and Bruno for three more seasons, they stop being a good team having a good spell and start becoming a permanent fixture — Champions League revenue, a settled spine, and a reason for the next Isak to sign.

If Hearts keep McInnes and Shankland after coming within a day of the title, the same thing starts happening at Tynecastle. Success, left alone, compounds.

Buying those players does not merely improve the buyer. It resets the seller. It converts a rival's decade of careful work back into cash and restarts the clock. And because the money at the top is structurally larger — the traditional big six were reported to be up to £75m better off than the league's bottom sides under the overseas broadcast formula, with a further £30m to £90m advantage flowing from Champions League rights they qualify for far more reliably.

That is not glory-hunting. It is estate management.

The bar is no longer "win the title", it is "make sure nobody new can". And the tell is that the money keeps arriving either way.

At least at ownership level. Nobody doubts the hunger or ambition of the managers and coaches and players of these teams, but money is a massive influence, and the only influence for the owners.

Football is a business. The business needs to be fairer.

Let us not be naive about this.

Football has been a business since long before any of us started watching, and pretending otherwise gets nobody anywhere. Clubs are employers. They carry debt, meet payrolls, maintain stadiums and answer to people who have put money in. Players have short careers and are entitled to maximise them.

A well-run club that develops talent and sells it well is not betraying anybody; it is doing the job.

The objection is not that money exists in football. It is that the money has been arranged so that the same names win most of the arguments before a ball is kicked. A structure where broadcast income is skewed towards the clubs that already have the most of it, where European qualification hands a further advantage to the clubs most likely to qualify, and where release clauses can be activated against the wishes of a selling club that has done everything right, is not a market. It is a ratchet.

None of that requires demolishing the game.

It requires distribution that treats the pyramid as a pyramid, and contractual protection that gives a well-run club a genuine chance of keeping what it has built for longer than a single season.

Football's business model does not need to be dismantled. It needs to be fairer.

What is still beautiful, and where to find it

Now the good part, because this is not a counsel of despair.

Go down a level or three and the entire emotional architecture of the game changes. Nobody at that level knows what is going to happen in May, and that is the point.

There is no financial moat, no coefficient, no guaranteed floor — which means there is no script. Every August genuinely resets.

A promotion push, a cup run, a smart appointment, six players clicking at once: any of it can happen, and none of it can be bought in advance.

You get to watch ambition operate in real time.

A manager arrives with an idea and you can see whether the idea works. A striker signs from a division below, on wages the club can actually afford, and by Christmas the away end is singing his name — and in a decade's time there will be grown adults who name their sons after him.

That is how legends are still made. Not bought at £117m and unveiled on a branded video, but discovered, adopted and earned.

Best of all, you get the academy.

A local sixteen-year-old comes through, gets minutes he would never see at an elite club, becomes properly good, and eventually moves on for a fee that keeps his boyhood club solvent and ambitious for five years.

Motherwell sold Elijah Just to Swansea this summer for a reported club-record fee. That is not a defeat. That is the model working — a club producing something valuable, being paid properly for it, and reinvesting.

The stakes are real down there. The joy is un-purchased. When something extraordinary happens, nobody's balance sheet made it happen, and everyone in the ground knows it. You are not consuming a brand. You are part of the reason the thing exists at all.

Newcastle, Villa and Hearts proved in one summer that you can do everything right in modern football and still be quietly taken apart by clubs with deeper pockets and longer memories. It was a brutal lesson, delivered to three of the best-run operations in Britain.

The rest of us should take the hint. The elite end of the game is becoming an asset class, priced and hedged and defended by people who have correctly worked out that they no longer need to win in order to profit. The authentic version of the thing they are monetising is still there. It is just further down the pyramid than most of us have been looking.

*Next time: the European Super League project formally collapsed in February 2026, after Barcelona and then Real Madrid withdrew and UEFA reached an agreement with the remaining rebels ([The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/feb/11/european-super-league-project-over-real-madrid-uefa-deal)). Everyone declared it a victory for the fans. But if the elite clubs are already taking whatever they want from everybody else while remaining inside the existing structure — would a breakaway that finally separated them from the rest have actually freed the other ninety clubs to compete, and given ordinary supporters a better Saturday? We picked the right villain. We may have won the wrong war.*