In the U.S., professional sports are big business and teams are owned by rich guys, who often butt heads with city governments over stadium construction, etc., and sometimes the owners decide to just pull up stakes and move to a different city that will treat them better’ and on top of that they’re always having to deal with players’ unions in an adversarial, management v. labor manner.
Is it the same with soccer teams in the UK, etc., or are they more like genuine local clubs.
Sorry, I meant “Association-football,” of course. (Why can’t we edit thread titles?!)
The big clubs are generally owned by wealthy men, some of them American. Stan Kroenke is the majority owner of Arsenal, and also owns the St. Louis Rams, the Colorado Avalanche, Colorado Rapids, and Denver Nuggets.
Likewise Liverpool are currently owned by the same group behind the Red Sox.
It’s pretty much the same deal in England, with a few caveats; the further down the league structure you go, the more likely you are to find a wealthy owner/owners with some genuine tie to the locality of the club. Moving a club franchise happened historically when there was less regulation and professionalism; it’s happened once in the “modern era”, and there was an enormous stink kicked up about it, the end result being that the moved team does not get to claim any of its prior history or trophies as its own. The other issue is that, football being very old, played at all levels across the country, and England being much more packed in than the US, there really aren’t many places a team could move to that don’t already have one. Suffice it to say that it really isn’t something that’s going to happen again without an enormous kerfuffle.
Ownership also commonly works differently in Europe. I know the German leagues, for example, have rules in place that mandate a majority is owned by the club members, aka paying fans. But those are better explained by someone more familiar with those countries.
What about owner-player relations? Is there such thing as a soccer strike?
I can only really speak for England, and there’s been no player strikes in modern times. I’ve been going through some American strike action information to try and find similar details, but it looks like a lot of the reasons for them aren’t applicable to soccer - salary caps, for example. The one thing I can think of is with free agency. The Bosman ruling, a few decades ago now, was an EU court case which set out that players out of contract can move between clubs without a transfer fee, a victory for players over owners/clubs.
In case anyone is wondering, Revenant Threshold is here referring to the relocation of Wimbledon F.C. from London to the town of Milton Keynes in 2003, and the renaming of the team to Milton Keynes Dons.
The Wimbledon supporters, who strongly opposed the move, reacted by founding their own club, AFC Wimbledon, who currently play in League Two.