Financial Fair Play (FFP) was a phrase initially associated with former UEFA president Michel Platini. Its stated aim was to prevent clubs from spending more than they earned in the pursuit of success and in doing so getting into financial problems. A more cynical view might be that the established European superclubs were concerned about the rise of newly monied rivals, in the form of Manchester City and PSG, creating a threat to the effective cartel in terms of how football riches and trophies were spread amongst the elite. Distributions from UEFA for the European Champions League at the final stages had traditionally been shared between a small number of clubs, giving the recipients a further financial advantage over their less wealthy competitors. This effectively acted as a glass ceiling, which prevented smaller clubs from challenging the elite unless they had owners who were prepared to underwrite large losses in recruiting and paying for some of the best players.

FFP is an umbrella term which covers a variety of ways of gauging the finances of football clubs. The rules are set by UEFA for those clubs that qualify for European competitions and by national football associations for their domestic competitions. FFP rules are split into two broad camps, one of which is profit related, and puts a limit on the maximum losses that a club can make, and the other is linked to wage control. Both controls have some merits, but these approaches ignore a fundamental commercial rule. Businesses suffer financial difficulties because of an inability to pay their debts as they fall due, which is a cash flow issue and is not always connected to profit, which is an abstract accounting concept that can be manipulated.

In earlier chapters we established that profit and cash are not the same and so it seems baffling to have profit control methods if the sole aim is to minimize the chances of clubs entering formal insolvency/bankruptcy arrangements. The nature of these controls reinforces the view that some of them exist for reasons other than simply preventing clubs from going out of business.

Ratio analysis involves linking two or more figures from the accounts where they have a logical business relationship. The ratios are then used in comparative analysis on either an historic or peer group basis. When looking at ratios, one need not be concerned about the numbers themselves, they are merely tools and flags to help identify issues about the club's financial position. Instead, we need to ask:

• • What does the ratio mean?

• • What does a change in the ratio mean?

• • What are the causes of the change in the ratio?

• • And what are the consequences of the change in the ratio?

An analyst will focus on the “why” and the “so what” elements of a change in a ratio and identify the reasons behind the movement in the figures and their implications for the future, such as the ability to sign players, renew manager contracts, meet wage demands, and so on.

Performance ratios

Performance here means financial performance, not performance on the pitch, but some of the calculations can in fact be linked to on-field performance too. To measure how much profit is generated from each £1 of income we use the following:

There are other measures of profit too, all used by analysts to get an overall feel for the club's performance. We can have:

• • Gross profit margin (not really appropriate for a football club, but if looking at a business linked to the club, such as a sportswear manufacturer, this would be valid);

• • Operating profit margin;

• • EBIT margin;

• • EBITDA margin;

• • Profit before tax margin;

• • Net profit margin (and any other the analyst chooses to calculate).

When looking at profit margins it makes sense to distinguish between “dirty” profit measures such as operating and net profit ones, which include non-recurring items and “clean” measures such as EBIT and EBITDA where non-recurring items are removed. Table 10.1 shows the data an analyst might extract from the accounts and put into a spreadsheet, which is typically how an analyst would crunch the numbers.

The EBITDA margin for 2019 is calculated as EBITDA profit (£186 million) divided by total income (£627 million) and multiplied by 100 to arrive at a figure of 29.6 per cent. What does this mean?

I have shown how consumption reflects and makes meaning. Whether we intend it or not, whether we are conscious of it or not, what we know or are told of who consumes what serves to divide the people and things around us into different groups, which often carry evaluations and even moral loads. These groupings, meanings and associated evaluations are public, in the sense that they are what we see in movies and on television and what we read in the newspapers and on the web. They are, in a way, what everybody knows.

Of course, there is more to consumption than the expression and reproduction of public meanings. When we consume things, personal meanings and relationships also are important. They arise from our dealings with and use of different things in different contexts with different people. Economic anthropologists are some of those who have described these things and how they can be important for understanding consumption.

Consuming for social relations

Consumption routinely occurs in social relations, and it should be no surprise that it can affect and reflect those relations. This is the point that Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood pursue in The World of Goods. There they do battle with economists about why people consume the things that they do. Is it price? If so, why does the demand for some goods go down when the price goes up, while for others the demand does not change much and for yet a few others the demand goes up? Alternatively, is it the utility of things: how their properties mesh with people's wants and needs? Perhaps – but which wants and needs? Douglas and Isherwood have an answer. For them (1978: 111), “there is only one type of physical property of consumption goods that need be considered: the capacity of goods to increase personal availability”.

By that they mean that goods are valued to the degree that they allow people to interact with others. Those others can be members of the household, friends or casual acquaintances. They even can be strangers, to whom one wants to appear a proper or even desirable fellow being, a suitable candidate for interaction. The importance of this interaction intrudes on us regularly.

This chapter examines the different approaches ‒ part art, part science ‒ used to value a club when it is sold. There's no “correct” price when buying a football club, just as there is no “correct” price for a football player, a house or a piece of art. This is due to the nature of what is being traded. There are some guidelines that help to narrow down prices to a realistic range and then it comes down to the negotiating skills of both parties, the extent of the need to sell and the ability of the buyer to finance the deal. Often buyers and sellers will use professional advisors to estimate a price for the club. Whilst a lot of time and effort can go into determining these values, they are potentially flawed for many clubs because of the elephant in the room that is the impact of relegation or promotion on a club's finances, especially in relation to the Premier League. Cynics might also suggest that some of the methods used by “professional” advisors are there to justify their exorbitant advisory fees, rather than to give an accurate measure of the true worth of a club.

Our case study will be Newcastle United, which, according to media reports, is up for sale, with owner Mike Ashley allegedly looking for a price of £300– 350 million.

Balance sheet value

The simplest way to value a club is to look at the net assets total in the balance sheet and use this as the figure. Newcastle's accounts at 30 June 2019 (see Table 11.1) show the club had net assets (assets less liabilities) of just over £43 million. The footnotes to the accounts also show that the club owed their owner Mike Ashley £111 million in loans on top of this sum, so a buyer would presumably have to repay him these loans too, which would take the net total to £154 million.

A balance sheet valuation method is a poor one to use. We’ve already established that the balance sheet tends to vastly undervalue players. This is because some players are not shown as assets in the accounts due to being recruited via the club academy system at a zero cost, or Bosman transfers with no purchase fee but a potential sale value if the player has joined and signed a long-term contract, or increasing in value due to market inflation.

Defining financial inclusion

Considering the diversity of actors and interventions that draw upon the term, as well as the range of spaces and contexts in which it is applied, it is not surprising that there are ongoing tensions over what financial inclusion actually means. The task of defining financial inclusion has been the subject of an ongoing project led by the Centre for Financial Inclusion (discussed further below), recognizing the agreement among key actors for a strategic need for an effective definition, in particular given the bold claims made in the Maya Declaration and elsewhere for its transformative effects.

With this in mind, it is useful to start with two canonical definitions.

There are clear resonances and similarities between these definitions. Both highlight access rather than use, foregrounding the importance of consumer choice; both are keen to make clear that financial inclusion includes a range of services and not simply the provision of credit. Yet there are subtle differences between them that highlight key questions for further exploration. The first concerns who the subject of financial inclusion is: is it individuals and businesses, or the unbanked? The former suggests that strengthening the private sector is a key aspect of financial inclusion: enabling people to invest and trade rather than simply manage their money.

A profit or loss account (also called an income statement, or statement of profit or losses, or statement of comprehensive income) summarizes the trading transactions of a business over a period of time. The profit or loss account deals with two main elements: income and costs. If total income exceeds total costs the difference is called a profit. If total income is less than total costs the difference is a loss. Most football clubs produce a profit or loss account covering a 12-month period, sometimes it might be slightly shorter or longer if they have altered their balance sheet date.

The profit or loss account in Table 3.1 covers the greatest year, to date, in the history of Leicester City Football Club. In 2015/16 Leicester won the English Premier League, despite having a fraction of the income of more established clubs. Whilst the fans of Leicester had perhaps some of the greatest days of their lives watching their team lift the Premier League trophy, the club also made a profit of over £20 million. This seems a lot of money, but the following year, when Leicester finished only twelfth in the Premier League, the club made a profit of over £80 million. This was mainly due to the club's participation in the UEFA Champions’ League. The club accountants, stoics that they are, may have been happier with the club's performance in 2016/17 and the record income and profits generated that year. Leicester's lower profits in 2015/16, despite the club's on-field success, suggests than an understanding of the profit or loss account, its components and how it is calculated, is a useful tool for anyone wanting to understand football finance.

It is important to be aware that clubs who have their shares listed on a stock exchange (like Manchester United, mentioned earlier), may have to produce more regular financial information to satisfy local legislation and stock exchange rules. These are called interim accounts and may cover a period of three, six or nine months.

The first step towards understanding football finances is being able to decipher a set of club accounts. This can be an overwhelming task as they may consist of many pages of technical jargon and so are best broken down into their key components. There are three main financial statements published by all businesses, including football clubs, typically contained in what is usually referred to as an annual report, and consist of:

• 1. The balance sheet, which shows the financial position of the club in terms of what it owns in the form of assets and what it owes to both outside parties (liabilities) and owners (equity, also referred to as capital);

• 2. The profit or loss account (sometimes called the income statement), which deals with revenues, costs and profit; and

• 3. The cash flow statement, which shows where cash has come from and how it has been spent. The most common mistake made by those unfamiliar with finance is to assume that cash and profit are the same, which is not the case in practice.

Most football clubs in the UK are limited liability companies, which are legally obliged to submit their financial statements to the government agency Companies House. The great thing for anyone interested in the finances of the club they support is that this information is freely available to access and download from the Companies House website. Rules vary in other countries as to the extent of financial information in the public domain according to local legislation. The amount of detail shown in the accounts sent to Companies House varies according to the size of the club. There are supporting footnotes that must be prepared as well as the main financial statements. The extent of these is again dependent upon the size of the club's finances. Manchester United plc's annual report for the year ended 30 June 2020 consisted of 782 pages when it filed its accounts with the US authorities, whereas those of Mansfield Town Football Club Limited, currently in League Two of the English Football League, were just four pages of financial information from start to finish.

Financial inclusion is an undeniably powerful and influential term, bringing together a diverse set of actors and shaping policy and practice across a broad array of settings. While its dominance is felt most keenly in develop-ment thinking, its roots lie in academic geography and social policy in the Global North, where issues of financial inclusion and exclusion are mapped over a longer duration of social change.

Rarely in this literature is financial inclusion challenged. Its assumptions about how societal change occurs, about how the lives of the poor can be improved and about where previous development policies and social policy have gone wrong retain an unquestioned status, not only among the key players in the financial inclusion assemblage, but also among governments, international institutions and major financial corporations. Following Raymond Williams’ exploration of keywords, its positive emotional force and semantic flexibility give it a similar socio-cultural role to the term “community”: the “warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships” (Williams 1983: 76). The power of financial inclusion lies less in any specific societal changes it names (indeed, it can refer to a variety of opposing and contradictory policies and transformations). Rather, the influence of the term lies in its conveying of a fuzzy and happy feeling, promising positivity and inclusive change and a progressive project that everyone can agree on. It would seem immoral to argue against financial inclusion; as Philip Mader (2018: 464) asks, who would argue for financial exclusion?

In seeking to pin down the meaning of financial inclusion, I noted in Chapter 2 that the financial inclusion literature can be characterized by a set of key assumptions. The chapters of this book have surveyed the different modalities of financial inclusion: as a tool of poverty eradication; as a market-driven process of creating new markets from formerly excluded groups; as a form of intervention into the financial subjectivity of the poor; as a long-term political project seeking societal transformation; and as the everyday effects of user-generated financial creativity. Another way of stating this is that the book has surveyed a range of contexts in which financial inclusion is at stake. Having explored this diverse terrain, I can now consider and assess these assumptions in a new light.

Thus far in this book I have examined how, under the banner of financial inclusion, new services, interventions and programmes have been created to enable previously excluded groups to enjoy and profit from unfettered access to financial services. In these examples we saw how states, financial institutions, NGOs and the other actors labelled by Schwittay (2011) as “the financial inclusion assemblage” have sought to remove the barriers of geography, discrimination and a lack of financial knowledge that are seen to inhibit people from living a rich and fulfilling financial life. We have explored also the diverse and conflicting ways in which these interventions transformed the lives of their intended targets.

Yet it is important to note that a distinct and important strand of financial inclusion policy involves not the provision of new services or forms of intervention, but rather the use of existing infrastructures and relationships to achieve financial inclusion ends. Of particular importance in this respect is the provision of financial support through welfare payments. While in the previous chapter I addressed welfare reform in the UK as a key con-textual factor in shaping the direction of financial inclusion, in this chapter I address a different way in which these fields intertwine: in the use of welfare provision as a tool of financial inclusion.

An important reason for addressing this relationship is that, following the fall from grace of microcredit as the primary site of financial inclusion in the Global South, many key players in the financial inclusion assemblage turned to a particular form of large-scale welfare provision as an alternative future for financial inclusion policy (World Bank 2018: 7; Lomelí 2008: 478; Kidd 2019). These were conditional cash transfer (CCT) systems: welfare payments made to low-income families where the financial support is conditional upon the family meeting particular conditions. The potential for financial inclusion through CCT was clear. Rather than seeking to create new programmes and systems for identifying and reaching the unbanked, with all the planning and investment this would involve, these would use the existing need for financial support, and the conditionality mechanisms that were central to the provision of this support, to transform their financial practices.

I’m not sure the movie-world is ready for another superhero, but if Disney ever do buy my idea of “Accountoman” – the caped crusader of footballing justice – then only Kieran Maguire would be suitable for the role. Bam! Another club owner is whacked in the intangible assets. Pow! No one truncates accounts on my watch! The irony being, of course, that Disney would run a mile from the actual Kieran Maguire because they are definitely not ready for their first R18-rated film.

Late in 2019, producer Guy Kilty contacted me about a podcast he was planning, to cover the murky world of football finance. I wished him well and said it sounded fascinating (as well as a comedian, writer and author, I am also quite a good liar). It turns out that Guy, knowing that I was a hopeless romantic about football and a total idiot about finances, thought I would be the ideal person to host the podcast alongside football finance expert Kieran Maguire. I would become the slightly dim sidekick accompanying our hero as we took on the villains of the beautiful game, a sort of Batman and Robin against Vatman and Robbing.

And so began my relationship with the author of this book. A relationship that has turned into a close friendship, with a podcast that is already well on the way to its twomillionth download. The close friendship bit is all the more remarkable considering that much of our work has been conducted remotely because of the Covid-19 pandemic and considering which bloody football team the rascal supports.

Kieran and Guy took the sensible decision not to tell me he was a Brighton fan until after we had recorded four episodes, by which time I was obviously hurt and disappointed but had already sussed that Kieran was on the side of the angels and knew, that as a Crystal Palace fan, I held the moral high ground. I decided I would rise above the issue, and, at the same time, mention Kieran's betrayal at every opportunity on the pod. He's from South London, for God's sake! It would have been better if he supported Millwall – at least they’re his local team!

I have described some of the important analytical models that economic anthropologists use when they approach production and circulation, as well as historical changes in these two realms of economic life, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. Now I want to show the kinds of insights that the models and histories can provide by using them to address something that those who read this book are likely to see as familiar: Christmas.

In the United States and the United Kingdom, Christmas is a holiday. The 25th of December is a holy day marked on the church calendar of western Christian denominations, and many believers observe it with special services and ceremonies. But Christmas is also a civic holiday, one that those of any or no religion are likely to observe as well, but in a different sense. They are likely to observe it in the shops as the Christmas displays go up and seasonal items appear on the shelves. They observe it in the office parties and family gatherings that litter December. They observe it on radio and television, as Christmas music and movies appear. Even the online solitaire that I play has a special design for playing cards at Christmas. It is this that makes Christmas a ubiquitous set of activities and experiences in these countries, and it is this civic event that concerns me in this chapter. I want to make that familiar event seem strange by making use of those analytical models and historical changes.

If you think about it, Christmas is full of contradictions for those who experience it. People tell each other that it is a festive season of good cheer, but, equally, they say that the fun is going out of it, swamped by materialism and commerce. Christmas goods seem to appear in the stores earlier every year, as do the advertisements on television telling us to buy more and more things for more and more people. This slights the religious beliefs that many see as an important part of Christmas and conflicts with religious reservations about wealth and its display. In spite of people's concern with the garish commercialization, the stores get more crowded and the websites get slower.

Why would anyone choose to analyse a football club's finances? There must surely be more important and interesting things in life that warrant consideration, and this is the approach taken by most football fans. However, some fans want to know as much as possible about all aspects of the team they support. Alternatively, you may be a supplier to a club and are wondering whether to extend its credit terms. You may even be involved in the world of corporate finance and are seeking a “bargain basement” club for a client to invest in, or indeed many other reasons.

If you do want to analyse finances, then you don't need to be mathematically gifted, most calculations are built around no more than adding, subtracting and calculating percentages. When looking at a football club, the first challenge can often be identifying exactly which company to investigate. This is because there can be a Russian doll-style group set up with a holding company perhaps owning another club (referred to as a subsidiary), which owns the football part of the business. The parent company may also own another company that owns the stadium and training grounds, yet another running the commercial arm. Ideally you should look at the company within the group that ultimately controls all elements of the club, which is usually the holding company.

Table 9.1 lists the various companies controlled by Manchester United Plc, whose shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange. It would seem logical for a fan to look at the accounts of Manchester United Football Club Limited in order to analyse the Red Devils, but doing that would exclude most of the commercial dealings of the club. Manchester United Football Club Limited made an operating profit of £57 million in 2018/19, whereas Manchester United Limited made an operating loss of £17 million. Manchester United Plc combines the activities of all group companies into a consolidated set of financial statements. This would be the company that makes most sense to analyse, as it acts as the umbrella for all United's activities. Anyone thinking of buying the club would almost certainly be wanting to buy everything to do with United, so this is an additional reason for reviewing the parent company.

Once you’ve decided on the right company, you can then start on the analytics.

Throughout this book I explore interventions, projects and initiatives that identify an excluded group – whether by geography, gender, knowledge or other factors – and propose and implement ways in which they can be included. In this chapter I turn to the practices of redlining and reverse redlining to display the danger of approaching this inclusion/ exclusion binary as nothing more than a problem to be solved or threshold to be crossed. The chapter describes how the previous exclusion of vulnerable consumers, coupled to their continuing socio-economic marginalization, can itself become factored into calculations of profit and risk, leading to new forms of exploitation and inequality.

The chapter thus adds a vital note of caution to the concept of financial inclusion, urging attention to how structural inequality continues to shape the terms on which groups are included in financial markets. In this spe-cific case, it explores how the opening of mortgage finance opportunities to non-normative consumers, principally African-American, Latino and single-female households, allowed lenders, investors and others to justify amassing considerable profits through the burdening of vulnerable consumers with considerable costs and risks.

The chapter also considers, through the concept of the feminization of finance, what the history of reverse redlining tells us about the specific dynamics of the financial inclusion of women. It notes the forms of financial subjectivity that women are expected to embody, and the considerable burdens single mothers in particular are expected to carry in an era of stagnating wages and the retreat of the welfare state. The chapter notes also, through this focus upon the female financial subject, the specific nature of financial inclusion in mortgage finance. At the heart of the sub-prime crisis was the changing nature of the family home; no longer valued as a space to be lived in, the home became a commodity whose rising value could be drawn upon in a speculative manner.

Redlining

Few histories of financial exclusion are as stark and unambiguous as the systematic withholding of mortgage finance opportunities to non-normative households in the United States. This form of exclusion, running across the middle decades of the twentieth century, is generally brought together under the term redlining: the practice through which geographically demarcated areas, typically inner-city areas with large African-American populations, were defined as being of poor credit risk and unworthy of mortgage-financed owner-occupation.