Who Really Controls Football? Money, Power & Premier League | Joey D’Urso

Jimmy's Jobs of the Future

Journalist Joey D'Urso joins Jimmy to discuss his book More Than a Shirt and his upcoming project Fields of Power, exploring how football is deeply intertwined with politics, economics, and

Key takeaways

• Joey D'Urso details China's top-down football strategy under Xi Jinping, which failed because it couldn't replicate grassroots culture despite massive investment in academies and European managers.
• Former Everton defender Li Tie is currently imprisoned in China amid opaque corruption allegations linked to the national team's failure to qualify for the World Cup.

Main topics

• Football and political power
• China's state-sponsored football development

Notable quotes

You cannot just make that culture overnight.

Conclusion

The episode offers a compelling look at how football operates as a mirror for global

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Welcome to this very special episode of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Now, I feel like we have been discussing the global economy lots in recent weeks. We had the episode with Ed Conway talking about trade, and also we had the episode with Dan Wang talking about China and Britain. Today, we're back to talking about the global economy with Joey Durso, but perhaps not in the way that you would think. He has written the book called More Than Just a Shirt, and it is all about... the commercial deals behind football shirts. It's fascinating listening to the modern 50 years of how it's evolved and how it has operated. It's really interesting how this part of the sports economy has evolved. Obviously sport and future of jobs in sport is one of the central themes that we come back to, but it is a brilliant read and it gave me lots more understanding about commercial sponsorship deals, including Derby County's with Loaded as well. And... the new pink shirts that Derby County have released that my daughters have been enjoying. And speaking of Derby County's pink kits... We're welcoming back another pink friend today, which is the plushie from Octopus Energy. Octopus Energy are going to be powering Jimmy's Jobs of the Future for the next six months, so we'll be hearing plenty more about them and how they're getting more into electric vehicles and solar panels, etc. And we're going to be doing some work with Greg Jackson, who was our 200th ever guest on Jimmy's Jobs of the Future, around the budget and the price cap in coming weeks as well. So keep your eyes and ears. period for that as well. Speaker 2 (1:57) attempt a few years ago by the signing of Oscar etc to kind of reinvigorate it but like Xi Jinping being at this match against Watford and like with Elton John Elton John and Bach as a young official but also how all the clubs a lot of the clubs were named after companies and so on it Speaker 1 (2:14) was just quite a different Speaker 2 (2:15) yeah Speaker 1 (2:16) so Guangzhou Evergrande and a couple of them I mean I had to write this in quite a careful way but I did some interviews with Chinese people who had been really involved in that world who were absolutely sworn to anonymity. But it was sort of, I interviewed them and who told me some stuff there, which I had to word pretty carefully. But really interesting insight to how football was used as a tool of the state in China. And there's now Li Taiyi, who played for Everton in the early 2000s. Defender, Premier League, very good player, who has managed the Chinese national team, sort of failed, failed to qualify for the World Cup, you know, and I don't think it was really his fault. The team was not very good, but is now in prison for corruption. um and corruption is like you know in a chinese is it's a police state that there's no open court you know here if you're accused of a crime the court and the evidence is open people can walk into it you know and there are that system is of course very imperfect um but broadly speaking if someone is in prison for corruption they will you'll know what the evidence is whereas for him it's a black box no one has any idea so was he did he actually commit corruption or was he an enemy of the state did he annoy someone senior to him and also in china there's his culture It's called Guanshi Gift Giving. So if you want to do business with anyone, you... buy them a car you know you give them you give them generous gifts and that and they're different that can be viewed as corruption so it's like it's constant thing this happens in Russia like important people if they are that are accused of corruption very often. And it's impossible to know from the outside whether that's real or not. Yeah. Speaker 1 (3:46) I mean, China's interesting because so much of the stuff we write about is about how football is growing, growing, growing. In the US, India, 20 years ago, no one liked it. Now it's really big. China is one that bucks the trend because it's kind of... It's gone back. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. What I think that is... They tried to sort of become a football country. They tried to chuck money at becoming a great... They thought, you know, we're becoming the richest country in the world, huge economy, superpower. If we chuck enough money at this thing, we can win the World Cup. And that's just not really how football works because you look at the World Cup quarterfinals, you had Switzerland there, you had Norway there, you know, Portugal, small countries in terms of population, but they are countries like this country where... pretty much every three four five year old will have kicked a ball at some point and if they're any good they'll be in a very an ecosystem of coaches and academies and whatever and the game is incredibly popular you cannot just make that culture overnight Speaker 2 (4:41) so Speaker 1 (4:42) in china they threw money at expensive academies and hired the best managers from europe but if the four-year-olds aren't playing football as they are here um kicking around in the playgrounds you'll never become a Speaker 2 (4:52) competition just isn't Speaker 1 (4:53) yeah and it's Speaker 2 (4:54) a Speaker 1 (4:54) very i think i mean i'm not an expert on Chinese education but I think it's a real culture of like hot housing like and the one child policy so yes you have one child and you want them to be very clever and good at school and whatever so it's um you know it's all about education and sport I think is and it's not you know historically like you know in Europe people have been playing football for 150 years now it's deeply rooted in culture whereas China they tried it as a sort of top-down overnight thing and it didn't really work although it's still really popular and people love watching it on TV and seeing pictures of people watching in bars all over China but becoming a good national team is really really hard to do Yeah, Speaker 2 (5:25) yeah. Speaker 1 (5:27) Which is kind of, in a way, like not a bad thing that you can't just sort of, you know, Speaker 2 (5:30) buy it, I guess. It is interesting, right? All the money that has come into football. And so it is interesting how long it still takes to achieve that. You know, it took Man City sort of 15 years to win the Champions League. There's a Speaker 1 (5:44) couple of Speaker 2 (5:44) football generations there. Speaker 1 (5:46) Yeah, and with the national team. I mean, the best teams are the same as they were 50 years ago. Speaker 2 (5:49) Yeah. Like literally, there's no... The World Cup. semi-finals doesn't change never changes i Speaker 1 (5:55) mean you can say like croatia's a country a little bit like portugal but they've never won it yeah still the same teams you know i think spain was the last new winner in 2010. france before that 98 it's just yeah it's the same countries because they're just the countries with the deepest football ecosystems yeah Speaker 2 (6:09) it's um Yeah, because actually you talk about Le Bleu in the book actually and it's interesting how football is not deep as Speaker 1 (6:19) culturally in France. No, but they're the best team and it's basically a sort of immigrant story. It's the children of immigrants from French colonies mainly in the suburbs of Paris where I've been, football and just generally quite a lot. And yeah, just the vast majority of that France team is children of first, second generation migrants from Africa mainly, North Africa. But yeah, if you go to smaller towns in France, they're not that bothered. If you go to virtually any English city, the football team is... It'll be the one thing that's in the park. It's Speaker 2 (6:49) the Speaker 1 (6:49) culture. It's the culture, yeah. Whereas I think also France has much more of Speaker 2 (6:52) a Speaker 1 (6:52) culture of literature, of food, of wine. These stereotypes are kind of true. Most British people are not that interested in gastronomy, whereas in France it's deeply rooted. And I think other things take precedence. Speaker 2 (7:03) Definitely, because that's one of the fascinating things about... So economics like you know one of the sort of great books but one of the things that I really remember from that the argument when I first read that kind of 10 years ago was about how no kind of capital city had won the Champions League Speaker 1 (7:17) for a long time I mean that's changed now but it's the Speaker 2 (7:20) same argument that basically there's culturally other stuff going on in the capital city which means that football is not as much because Speaker 1 (7:26) yeah because Arsenal against PSG that was a big I think that was the first capital on capital certainly for a very long time but now that's changing because Well, Paris was a classic example. PSG only became good in 2011. They were only founded in 1970. Until 1970, the city of Paris, which is the biggest city in Europe alongside London, didn't have a proper football team, which is crazy. And it's all industrial. So it's a fascinating historical, cultural story of football in France because it was way later than Germany, England, because it industrialised later. Speaker 2 (7:55) So Speaker 1 (7:55) the O'Pockets were very successful, were like Saint-Étienne. was the best team that's coal mining of some kind near Lyon. Lens in the north which is coal these little pockets and Marseille which is you know that came a bit later but it followed industrialization as it has the story of football is the story of industrialization all over the world you know Argentina and Brazil it's British posh schoolboys going on ships to get you know transport wool and beef and that they brought football with them and then quickly they became better at their own game yeah Speaker 2 (8:25) but it's also interesting like in northern England industrial heartlands where you know the people that won the European Cup Aston Villa Nottingham Forest Liverpool Manchester United like born out of industrial kind of heartlands and that was also the other thing that really struck me about One of the threads that I hadn't sort of spotted perhaps so much in kind of commerciality of football was how a lot of it is natural resources and it comes from soft power influence, right? So there's two things you say, two reasons often why people sponsor football shirts. Sell more products, classic crypto case, and then soft power and influence. Speaker 1 (9:01) Yeah, you just made me think something I never quite made the link of before, which is, yeah, I talk a lot about natural resource in terms of oil and gas from the Middle East, but also... you know, like Derby County, not something like Cole, right? So the original football hotbeds were... Natural resources of another kind. Yeah. Speaker 2 (9:16) Yeah. Manchester was Speaker 1 (9:17) textiles. Yeah. I mean was manufacturing. What's Speaker 2 (9:20) that Speaker 1 (9:20) classic map of like the Labour MP? I mean, it's probably a bit different now, but Labour MPs are where the mines were, right? Broadly. Natural, you know, that's where you get industrial communities. Speaker 2 (9:30) Interesting. So when did you first come up with the idea for a book? Speaker 1 (9:36) Well, it was sort of percolating in the back of my head for many, many years. So I spent, well, I probably brushed... corridors with you in a, shoulders with you in a corridor in Westminster sometime back in the 2010s because I, well I worked for the BBC in Westminster for pretty much four years. I was in BBC Politics in Millbank working with people like, you know, Chris Mason and Laura Koonsberg and I was a political researcher. I was the guy shouting when are you going to resign Prime Minister sometimes and doing all that. Did that until about 2020 and then I briefly worked for BuzzFeed when they were a very exciting media and then that COVID hit and it imploded and I got sacked by some American guy on Zoom and then... and then i was kind of floundering for a while i don't know what i was doing and then i got the blue i got a job at the athletic so covering football um but with an investigative journalist covering football so i was looking at kind of murky sponsors um shady gambling companies that sort of thing and i did that for three or four years and then moved to the times uh did that for two years and then i yeah i was a data journalist at the times and then but Speaker 2 (10:30) yeah throughout all that yeah going between football Speaker 1 (10:32) and politics the whole time and i i just i suppose like i was always always a huge die hard aston villa fan football fan politics person. I thought my life would be like in politics, you know, football is like a hobby, something to do at the weekend. But gradually the two felt like they were colliding and intermingling and you've had things like the Qatar World Cup with Manchester City being bought by Abu Dhabi, Newcastle being bought by Saudi Arabia, more recently Donald Trump and the World Cup. And it just felt increasingly like, you know, football and politics is something that is this huge global topic and could hopefully, you know, get a book deal out of it and sell a book. And I've had, yeah, lots of people. taken interest in it which is very exciting it feels like it's just getting bigger and bigger as a topic yeah Speaker 2 (11:10) you're yeah you're kind of skating to where the puck is going to use that uh horrible kind of american analogy but i suppose when you've done like the athletic buzzfeed the times and the bbc did you just think well i've done it all now or i've seen media from almost every kind of angle there from sort of old institution right through to the new and thought well Speaker 1 (11:32) Yeah, I mean, mainly the older. I suppose Athletic was new, bought by the New York Times, though, so very sort of establishment. Yeah, and I did it for 10 years. I guess there were two things. One, I sort of didn't really know what I wanted to... There wasn't, like... I loved my job at the Times. I really liked the people I worked with there, but there was no sort of... I wasn't, like, in five years' time, I'm trying to be this deputy editor or whatever. I just didn't have that kind of ambition in me. And secondly, as soon as I wrote the book, I was like, I absolutely love this. This is kind of what I feel like is my thing in life and I want to be for the rest of my working life. How do I do that? And that was sort of June. And in December, I left my job. Went travelling the world for three months, working on the second book. So I went to South America, Vietnam, Australia, Senegal, the Philippines, and then came back. And I'm trying to, you know, it's hard. It's hard work. I'm trying to sort of grind out this new life of writing books, social media. I do the