[ad_1]
That first meeting told Alex Muzio everything he needed to know. Shortly after he and his business partner, gambling mogul Tony Bloom bought Belgian football team Royale Union Saint-Gilloise, Muzio met with the club’s coach. He wanted to discuss potential recruits.
Muzio has never been a football player. He was never a scout. He had spent his career working as a consultant to Bloom’s Starlizard, whom many consider to be the largest betting syndicate in England.
Starlizard’s business model uses data to find an edge. There is information about tens of thousands of players from around the world. Bespoke algorithms are designed to navigate through it and spot opportunities first, talent second. Starlizard’s team-owned plan was to do the same.
Bloom already has a team in England: Brighton, the club he has always supported, has become a Premier League mainstay with Bloom’s money and methods. But he and Muzio wanted to see what else their “IP” could achieve. “We wanted to win a championship,” Muzio said.
When Bloom bought Union in May 2018, Muzio was itching to get started. Having most recently celebrated a championship in the interwar years, the club was then stuck in the second tier of Belgian football. It was commissioned largely by volunteers. The training facility in the suburbs of Brussels had no showers. Muzio still can’t say with certainty that it’s a toilet.
He had no intention of staying that way. The first step was to be promoted to Belgium’s top league within three years, and to do so, Muzio knew the roster needed a refresh. He presented the club’s veteran manager, Marc Grosjean, with a list of potential signings, all selected and evaluated based on Starlizard’s data.
Grosjean was not impressed. He used a profanity to explain Muzio’s suggestions and then offered his own alternatives. “He told me he would prefer to sign with a number of Belgian players he knows,” Muzio said. Said. It didn’t take long to figure out what Starlizard’s measurements made of them. Grosjean is gone By the end of the month, his abrupt departure, if mutual, was declared as “a disagreement about the sporting development of the club”.
“We have ways we want to do things,” Muzio said. The resistance would only slow things down.
Three years later, his ideas were confirmed. The union reached its promotion goal last summer. Just over half this season will spend Christmas at the top of the Jupiler Pro League table, six points ahead of Club Brugge. The way Belgian football is structured, a traditional league schedule followed by the end-of-season playoff, means that for Union, the first domestic title since 1935 is just a distant possibility. But it’s still a possibility.
Of course this wouldn’t have been possible without the arrival of Muzio and Bloom, who serve as presidents of the League, but Bloom has no day-to-day involvement with the running of the club.
It’s not fair to describe their presence in Union as a fluke. The team was bought because it met the strict criteria set at the beginning of the search: the right type of club, the right price, the right place. The wider Brussels region, where the union has been based since 1897, is home to more than a million people and only one major team, its traditional rival, Anderlecht. It wasn’t just random chance.
Muzio, Bloom and Starlizard looked at teams from multiple leagues. Others may have different priorities, different needs, different ideas. It so happened that the League fit perfectly into their plan, and so it was the League whose existence was transformed, a club-shell suddenly revived.
It’s a version of a story played out with increasing regularity in Europe in recent years: teams that have either strayed into mediocrity or are having a hard time were raised, apparently overnight, by an outside force. On the surface, the clubs have little in common. Beneath they are tied with a single thread that can be traced back to England.
There is no doubt that European football has been shaped by the Premier League over the past decade. The wealth of Britain’s top flight has long had a gravitational effect on the rest of the continent. English clubs serve most reliable market for players, increase prices in the transfer market and send rising salaries. Players are bought across Europe with an eye towards future sales to the UK, and are often bought with money, the result of the Premier League’s seemingly epidemic-proof broadcast deals.
However, the nature of this effect has changed in recent years. No longer available in a single uninstall; instead, English clubs – or rather, the international ownership groups behind them – have invested directly in overseas teams, giving them an unfiltered influence on championships in Europe and worldwide.
The reasons for this vary. The league’s two rivals in the Jupiler Pro League are of British origin: OH Leuven is owned by King Power of Thailand, which controls Leicester City, and Ostend is part of a group of clubs owned by the Pacific Media Group. French side Nancy; FC Den Bosch in the Netherlands; and Barnsley, a second-tier English team.
While Leuven has at times served as something more like a farm team – a place to send young players to gain experience – Pacific Media Group believes its approach has helped improve performance and cut costs across its team network. “We don’t need to duplicate all staff in all markets,” said Paul Conway, the group’s founder. Informal Partner digital audio file.
Ostend, Nancy, Barnsley and others share not only employees but also knowledge. “We have more of a knowledge base than most,” Conway said of their club’s hiring departments. This helps prevent “leakage,” as he puts it. “You spend a lot of money on a player and at the end of the contract that player walks away,” he said. “We can spend our lives with these players because we have a uniform playing style as a group.” If a club doesn’t need a player, in other words, a slot for him can be found elsewhere.
A similar approach has helped Estoril, long a makeover in Portugal’s top division, compete for a spot in the Europa League after coming under the auspices of a group of teams backed by Blackstone manager David Blitzer, who is part of the consortium. He owns Premier League club Crystal Palace.
midtjyllandThe Danish champion shares a philosophy with one owner – another gambling magnate, Matthew Benham, a former colleague of Bloom – and Brentford FC, a data-driven organization that has just stepped into the Premier League.
And, of course, there are Manchester City-based clubs that form part of the City Football Group network. The group’s record is mixed at best: despite success in Major League Soccer and Australia – here New York FC and City of Melbourne reigning champions – European attempts were more complicated.
The group’s Belgian club Lommel remains on the wrong side of the second division despite a much larger budget than most of its peers, and Spanish outpost Girona was relegated from La Liga in 2019 and has not returned. French team Troyes, which City’s owners bought last year, promotion on first try, but currently struggling against it instant relegation.
Union’s relationship with Brighton is not that hierarchical. Starlizard’s depth of game knowledge means his methods are beyond the reach of most of their opponents – “It’s impossible for other teams to do,” Muzio said – but Muzio dismissed the notion that Union was any or all feeder. , sibling or partner club.
“We’re very independent,” he said, before citing Bloom.
Much of the methodology at Brighton and Union is inevitably the same, he said, due to the way Starlizard has always worked, but the clubs don’t share anything beyond that. So far, it has proven more than enough to get Union back to the pinnacle of Belgian football with an expertise crafted, honed and polished in England – for now.
[ad_2]
Source link