The Belgian club president changing football on and off the pitch: “The game is losing in court - governance must change”
Off The Pitch
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By James Corbett , Senior Correspondent
From his living room in London, Alex Muzio, the president and majority shareholder of Royale Union Saint-Gilloise SCRL (RUSG), one of Belgium’s most storied clubs, is reflecting on the mind-boggling litany of litigation swamping football at the moment.
In the past year major rulings on who controls European club competition and player movement have come from Europe’s highest court; FIFA is facing a legal challenge on the club calendar from an array of stakeholders; meanwhile the stakes of disciplinary cases against clubs have never been higher.
“Football is constantly losing in court against everyone else so we can see that that's evidence that the governance is not right,” says Muzio.
"It should be 100 years ago"
He talks about how he is rewatching the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary on Al Davis, the NFL owner who in the early-1980s sued the organisation’s commissioner for the right to move the Raiders from Oakland to Los Angeles. Football, he says, is only just catching up.
“I could be wrong, but that mindset wasn't really in football,” he says, adding that it is “insane” how power was – and still is – unquestioningly misused for years.
“If you think that Bosman needed to go to court for something as disgraceful as he wasn't even offered a contract but was not allowed to move unless for an enormous transfer fee that made no sense, just because the owner of the team he was at didn't really like him and didn't want him to go anywhere.
“When you think of how insane that situation is, to think of what football is today, that was 30 years ago. It feels like it should be 100 years ago, it seems incredible that that would be the case.”
In Muzio’s dual role as president of the Union of European of Clubs (UEC), he has a particular interest in the game’s governance.
It is something he acknowledges that other club presidents and CEOs don’t always have – he makes no judgement on that, and says that it’s a reflection of a lack of bandwidth that comes from the intensity of their jobs – but, he adds, that the game is waking up to the fact that things need to change. Why is this?
“Just football constantly losing in court against everyone else,” he says. “So they can see that that's evidence that the governance is not right. That seems pretty clear and if that's true, then the people that are fighting for better governance, i.e. the UEC, have got to be happy with that outcome.”
Identifying a club
Muzio, a 40-year-old former employee of Star Lizard – the near mythical sports data company – and protégé of its founder Tony Bloom, has transformed the fortunes of RUSG, the historic club he first became involved with six years ago, when Bloom bought it out.
Muzio had initially identified RUSG for purchase by Bloom and took a 10 per cent stake himself but was given “all of the voting rights” and the freedom to make his ideas work on the club.
When he took it over, Union, who have 11 league titles, had been outside of Belgium’s top flight since the mid-1970s, and had ended the 2017/18 season in the First Division B relegation playoffs. The club was mostly manned by volunteers, run on a shoestring and considered also-rans.
So why RUSG, and was it a plan by Muzio, Bloom or Star Lizard?
Muzio had worked for Star Lizard straight out of university and had been head of its American sports desk.
The company supplies data for sports betting syndicates and also as a consultancy that serves the football industry, but, says Muzio, “There was always a feeling that you never know when something could happen in your core world” and so they began to explore other ways of utilising their knowledge.
One conversation was about starting a football agency, but it “was just not a business that we knew anything about.”
“And it seems like there's much more to being an agent than just knowing who's good at football,” he says.
“Whereas it felt like there was some experience of leading people in my history. There was experience of obviously loving football and just the idea of being involved in a club means that you have something to really build and grow, which wouldn't be the case with an agency, for example.”
Muzio started looking for a club to buy in 2016 and lays out the criteria. He wanted it close to London, so he could travel and see games, which ruled out Eastern Europe. He wanted to be in with a chance of winning things, which ruled out France where PSG dominate.
He wanted a business climate that was open to foreign investment – Belgium and Denmark were very pro-business, he says, Netherlands less so.
He also wanted a club that was small enough to change. He didn’t want to be the guy from “North London who frog marches a load of people out the club that they love.” But at the same time, he didn’t want to be pumping money into a village team that no one had heard of. And so, RUSG seemed the right fit.
Transformed fortunes
In the first season – 2018/19 – under the new owners, RUSG found themselves in the playoffs and in 2021, after three years of steady progress, they were promoted to the top-flight. Priced at 500-1 for the title, in their first season back in the top flight they finished league runners up, having led the league most of the campaign.
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They finished runners up again last season, but lifted the Belgian Cup for the first time in 110 years. They have also appeared in the Europa League and Europa Conference.
“I definitely didn't know we were going to succeed and it definitely wasn't an experiment,” says Muzio.
“I would say best-case scenario is not far off what it is now, and worst-case scenario was they would have owners that care about the club, that aren't going to leave it in the lurch and in a mess and bankrupt and relegated and would do their best.
“And it definitely wasn't an experiment because there's a lot more to a football club than just having good data.”
Hands-off
Like Brighton, the club has become renowned for its player scouting and trading. Victor Boniface, Dennis Undav, Teddy Teemu and Karou Mitoma have all served the club well and gone on to impress in Europe’s “Big Five” leagues.
“In terms of Tony, I'm very fortunate that he put his faith in me to lead the project,” says Muzio.
“Tony's got a lot of business interests, not just football, and would never have had the time to run Union, so it was never his intention to ever do that. He has, as far as I'm aware, never done an interview, never given a directive to any member of staff at any time.
“He's really just completely hands-off in terms of any involvement in that stuff. He comes to games, because that was kind of the idea: that he's willing to invest and put money in, and he wants to be able to come and have fun and hopefully win stuff and share the enjoyment of that.”
Bloom gave up his majority stake in July last year after both Brighton and RUSG qualified for Europe, and although they were never part of any multiclub arrangement there was the obvious link with Star Lizard.
“How much is it a Star Lizard project? I would say it was never a Star Lizard project at all, because there's just never been any involvement from anyone at Star Lizard, apart from me, so that one's practically zero,” says Muzio.
Willie Wonka factory
Star Lizard reorganised in the summer, so that it could focus on its core business – providing data for bettors. Data supply for football now comes via Jamestown Analytics, run by Johan Moazed, another eminent sports bettor, who won the world backgammon championships in August. RUSG and Brighton are among its clients and Jamestown buys its data from Star Lizard.
Although its outcomes are well known – Star Lizard has made Bloom into one of Britain’s richest men, its data has helped transform the fortunes of Brighton and RUSG – what actually goes on inside its Camden HQ is little known or understood. To Muzio, who worked there for 16 years, I describe it as the Willie Wonka-factory of sports data analytics.
“In terms of the data, it is actually quite straightforward,” he says, and is surprisingly candid about its methods. “StarLizard and the data that it has, it's tailored to beat the betting markets. The betting markets are incredibly hard to beat. If you can beat the betting markets, then you're good at predicting how good teams are and how good players are.
“That's the difference between the data that Star Lizard has and the data that other people have, because you can buy a lot of third-party data from different people. But are they actually able to predict what happens in the future, or are they able to show you what's happened in the past? Almost exclusively, it's the latter. And that's the big thing, that if your data is not predictive, then you shouldn't use it to try and predict.”
Muzio gives me a lengthy description of one of its key metrics, which is evaluating the level of leagues in different countries. If you crack this metric, he says in a round about way, you can understand which leagues are undervalued for player talent, which leagues are more likely to produce players that will prosper in your own league, which leagues have ceased to be of enhanced value, and so on.
Changing landscape
For someone who follows the data, the decision to first join and then lead the UEC might appear surprising. It has pitted an upstart organisation largely run by volunteers against the well-established European Club Association (ECA), which is generously funded by UEFA.
Following the UEC’s formation last year, ECA went on a huge expansion drive and increased its overall membership by 300 per cent, to 700 member clubs – although those with actual full voting rights is still limited to around 140 members.
This is less than UEC’s membership base of 150, which is predicated on a one member one vote basis, and which accounts for around 10 per cent of the continent’s professional clubs.
The prevailing reality of football is that money generally wins. RUSG have challenged that idea, by showing that data and good management can overcome spending.
Is something similar going to happen to the hinterland of sports governance, where political institutions and the law has a say in where the balance of power rests, rather than the biggest club representative body holding authority because of its size?
So far, UEFA and FIFA have refused to recognise the UEC – despite other stakeholders within the game giving them a seat at the table. Europe’s lawmakers have also recognised the group. Are we going to have this broader recognition of organizations like the UEC or are FIFA and UEFA just going to keep the door closed until they're told to change by the European Commission or until there's a crisis point?
“I think it'll be a combination,” he says “I think that by the UEC existing, by the UEC calling for good governance, and, hopefully in the short to medium term, the UEC engaging with other stakeholders in a way that other people aren't, and being an example, showing governance in terms of the voting, statutes, all of that stuff that we do, I would hope that that would serve to show the EU, European Commission, etc., that there is someone trying to do this [and] they put pressure on and something happens.
“Realistically I think more likely is UEFA and FIFA realize these guys - the EU and the European Commission - are not going away [and that] if we don't change, if we don't reform, if we don't bring in better governance, then bad things are going to happen to us.
“That's how it's going to play out in my mind over the next years, that they will know, they will realize that if they don't do something, they're in trouble.”
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Regional IT Project Manager for Benelux & Germany @ AXA Partners Benelux
1mofify for the quoted part: Teddy Teuma, Deniz Ündav, Kaoru Mitoma "Like Brighton, the club has become renowned for its player scouting and trading. Victor Boniface, Dennis Undav, Teddy Teemu and Karou Mitoma have all served the club well and gone on to impress in Europe’s “Big Five” leagues."
Internationalt B2B Salg // Account Management // Relationssalg // E-commerce // Messeafvikling // Administration // Salgskoordinator
1moBrillant article 👍 Both the USG background story and the UEC position story, are very interesting. It will be interesting to see what the future brings for both.