France Bleu Gironde: 26 million euros, or half of the debt owed to King Street and Fortress, would now be the responsibility of Gérard Lopez. Is this something that seems to you to be able to reassure the DNCG?
Loic Ravenel: I saw like you this article from Southwest without being a specialist in all these financial operations, we still realize that there are what we could call sleight of hand because we feel that the debt is still there and that we are going to try to manage by moving it to another company. Does it no longer enter the accounts? What will the DNCG say on this, will the DNCG say yes, the debt has disappeared or the debt is still there and despite everything it remains attached to the club? We see that we are in a system where you have increasingly complicated financial arrangements. Football today attracts players whose goal is to make investments, tax optimization to generate either profits or avoid generating too many losses.
The DNCG’s control perimeter is the real question!
You say the debt is still there. So what counts is the scope of control of the DNCG: will the DNCG stop just at the SASP, which is the professional sports limited company, or will it go back to the Jogo Bonito subsidiary?
It’s always a matter of defining where you look. Looks like we got some of the debt under another lamppost. Are we going to turn on this lamppost or not? This is the question because in itself I did not read that there was a cancellation of debt or that we said I will no longer look for my debts and we pass the towel. This is obviously not the case. We take it elsewhere, hoping perhaps that the sale of players and future financial transactions will make it possible to repay it later by putting it under the carpet in some way. That’s what it makes me think of.
The exercise of options to purchase Albert Elis by the Girondins de Bordeaux from Gérard Lopez, for 6 million euros at Boavista in Portugal, from Gérard Lopez from your observer position at the International Center for Sports Studies. Is this common practice?
It makes me think that we are faced with types of transfers today that are increasingly complex. We have tax optimization behind the transfers. There was at one point the fact of owning player shares which was banned by FIFA, we have more and more contracts with options or I raise the option one year, two years, three years depending a certain number of criteria, payments can be spread over several seasons, players are exchanged, players can even be sent through gateway clubs to pay less tax. You have some kind of optimization in this transfer market. And you have to understand one thing, the more you move a player, the more value you create and the more you can recover. So collect it in a legal or illegal way, as it can be done in some places.
Profiles like that of Claude Bez, the local entrepreneur at the head of the local club, seem to have disappeared, who are the investors in today’s football?
When we talk about investing in football, we have to be careful. What are we talking about ? You have the traditional investors, those who are effectively rooted in the local, regional or even national market, and who invest in a club for the long term. We can talk about Pinault in Rennes, Nicollin in Montpellier and we could even have also talked about Abramovitch in Chelsea, who have been investing for a relatively long time and for reasons that are not simply financial ones. I think that if Nicollin went to Montpellier for financial reasons, he would have filed for bankruptcy or quit a long time ago. These investors go there because it brings them notoriety, we must not remove the pleasure aspect either, be afraid, win and have emotions. And these investors are replaced by other types: on the one hand, we are talking about investment funds, sometimes called vulture funds, whose objective is to absolutely do business, no matter in which club we invest. The idea is to find a good deal, then go and resell this business, hoping to make a profit or to let go before losing too much and we must not forget another type of investment in football which are a bit like conglomerates.
What is the difference with the other two types?
These groups, these entities which will buy several teams which will put within their same group to realize then obviously can be profits in the sale of players but which will value their teams. We can think of Cyti Group which is in Manchester City but which also recently bought the Troyes club, which holds Gijon in Spain, Melbourne City in Australia. The goal of the game being here rather to have synergies between these teams to loan players, to transfer them, to bring in others, to create value in a certain way and to capitalize through these teams. the value of the group as such. And so these investors are also a bit of the new entrants that we can observe. You see, we have different strategies depending on your desires, what you are as an economic entity. And it’s true that it now applies more and more to French football, which for the past fifteen years has been relatively spared by these international investments.