10. Cristiano Ronaldo
After Ronaldo’s 47th career
hat-trick, against Atletico Madrid in the Champions League semi-finals, a
BBC Sport tweet pointed out that only one of those triples had come for
Manchester United. That’s testament to the way the
Portuguese attacker has continued to improve and re-invent himself, through sheer force of will and strength of character. With Lionel Messi – Ronaldo’s great rival – there’s the sense that his extreme talent has been bestowed upon him, but you don’t get quite the same feeling from the 32-year-old Madrid forward.
Portuguese attacker has continued to improve and re-invent himself, through sheer force of will and strength of character. With Lionel Messi – Ronaldo’s great rival – there’s the sense that his extreme talent has been bestowed upon him, but you don’t get quite the same feeling from the 32-year-old Madrid forward.
Everything Ronaldo has, he’s carved out for himself – and
there’s enough stuff he’s won to fill a museum on his home island of
Madeira. That self-obsessed streak is a stick that’s often used to beat
Ronaldo with – and it does sometimes seem like he takes more joy from
individual success than collective glory.
Perhaps that’s just indicative of modern football, though.
In an age when we’re told many fans follow individual players rather
than teams, and transfer value is as much about how many followers you
have as how many goals you’ve scored, Ronaldo is perhaps the ultimate
footballer.
In the last year, when you’d expect his powers to be
beginning to wane, the 32-year-old Ronaldo has managed to kick it up
another notch. He was instrumental as Portugal won Euro 2016, and has
scored 44 goals in 45 games for club and country this season. As Rio
Ferdinand said in commentary after the Champions League semi-final first
leg, it is literally Roy of the Rovers stuff – and Ronaldo seems to have been scoring for almost as long as Roy Race did. AK
9. Ed Woodward
Despite the mini-drought since Alex Ferguson’s departure,
Manchester United are still one of the biggest clubs in the world – they
knocked Real Madrid off the top of the Deloitte Money League (the only
league that matters, right?) this year, despite a season without the
Champions League.
Avram and Joel Glazer are at the top of United’s management
structure, but most of the day-to-day dealing falls to Ed Woodward,
executive vice-chairman and director of the club.
The 45-year-old was an investment banker, and started
working at United after advising the Glazers during their controversial
takeover. He became the leading man after David Gill’s departure, and
was heavily criticised by fans for failing to land any big-name transfer
targets during David Moyes’ time at the club. The arrival of Marouane
Fellaini, for a fee much higher than the buy-out clause which United
missed the deadline for, was underwhelming at best.
Things have picked up since then – particularly last summer
with the appointment of Jose Mourinho, and heavy financial backing from
the board. Woodward seems to have grown into his role, and is now
confident cutting deals with some of football’s major players. He also
helped the club land a lucrative new sponsorship deal with adidas worth
£750m over 10 years.
However, Woodward certainly seems to have signed more
sponsorship deals in foreign countries than he has players. United now
have an official noodles partner, an official mattress partner and an
official lubricant partner. Sounds like a fun night in. AK
8. Florentino Perez
At most football clubs, it’s the coach who is largely seen
to be in charge, while the executives take something of a back seat.
Real Madrid, however, is not most football clubs.
With the exception of a three-year hiatus in the
late-noughties, Florentino Perez has been president of Spain's
self-styled superclub since the turn of the millennium, and in that time
has ensured that the club has effectively redrawn the map in terms of
how a big club is expected to behave.
Perez's initial clamber to power sparked the club's
famous/infamous galacticos era, when the Real Madrid head honcho made it
an annual tradition to spend an eye-watering sum of money on whoever
happened to be the planet's most exciting, famous and handsome
footballer (they famously opted against signing the buck-toothed
Ronaldinho on aesthetic grounds). Was Perez cannily pre-empting today's
age of footballer-as-celebrity, or was he brashly laying the groundwork
for it?
In hindsight, probably a bit of both, with a large helping
of the latter. The galacticos era may now be consigned to history and be
remembered for hubris and shortsightedness rather than medals – but
broadly speaking it's a policy that has not only survived at the club
itself, but spread across Europe like wildfire.
Most basely, Perez's legacy can be counted in the many
trophies Real Madrid have hoovered up during his time as president. But
on a more pervasive level, his influence can be felt in the way
top-level football has become inextricable from ostentatious displays of
transfer market brawn, and how ability often plays second fiddle to
marketability when the juggernauts draw up their summer shortlists. AH
7. Jose Mourinho
It was a weary and somewhat bruised Mourinho who arrived at
Manchester United at the start of the season – very different from the
fresh-faced manager who’d taken the Premier League by storm in his first
spell at Chelsea. Fans were split on his arrival at Old Trafford, but
he’s certainly brought progress, although not the sweeping return to
glory that some perhaps expected.
Instead, it’s been a gradual improvement. He’s built on the
solidity acquired under Louis van Gaal, and done a slightly better job
of scoring goals – although United are yet to regain that inevitably
about their attack that they enjoyed under Alex Ferguson.
However, with a League Cup already in the bag, a Europa
League win (and the Champions League qualification that it will ensure)
would make for a solidly successful first season.
It’s been well documented that Mourinho tends to be a
three-year man – that’s the doubt that hung over his appointment, and is
yet to be answered. Does he have the ability or the desire to bring
young talent through the academy and build a side that can challenge not
for just one title, but several?
That remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: if
Mourinho arrived at Old Trafford broken and humbled by his final season
at Chelsea, his reputation is somewhat rehabilitated. If he stays in
Manchester, he could build a dynasty. If not, he’s still one of the most
sought-after personalities in the game. AK
6. Roman Abramovich
When Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and final leader of the
Soviet Union, resigned and declared his office extinct in December 1991,
few minds were drawn to the transformative effect that event would have
on English football. Yet so it has proven: as Boris Yeltsin's Russia
renounced socialism in favour of crony capitalism and large-scale
privatisation, one of the lucky handful of oligarchs about to come into
unimaginable wealth and power just so happened to like football, too.
When Yeltsin ran for re-election five years later, Roman
Abramovich was among the wealthy few who pocketed billions of dollars in
state assets – in his case, oil – in return for pledging cash to the
campaign. The deal, according to Fow24news.com, was “the largest heist in corporate history and a lasting emblem of the corruption of modern Russia”.
Not that Abramovich was complaining: his man was indeed
re-elected, and he spent the ensuing decade edging ever closer to the
Kremlin's corridors of power (he personally interviewed all of Vladimir
Putin's would-be cabinet members when the president took office; Putin
owns a £25m yacht that was a gift from Abramovich).
In 2003, Abramovich went to watch Manchester United play
Real Madrid. It was a bona fide classic. Abramovich was smitten, and
decided he wanted a club for himself. Luckily for him, Chelsea – a team
based in a wealthy London district that plays second home to many a
Russian billionaire – were on the brink of financial oblivion.
Abramovich pounced. Fourteen years and 13 major trophies later, Chelsea
are a club transformed.
Abramovich's influence is there for all to see in the
shifting landscape of the Premier League over the last decade. But his
influence stretches some way beyond football, too, and is a reminder
that the sport does not take place in a bubble. Or to put it another
way: a butterfly flaps its wings in the Soviet Union, and two decades
later Jose Bosingwa is collecting a Champions League medal. AH
5. Lionel Messi
The icon. The greatest player to ever play the game.
Characterising the nature of Messi’s influence is difficult, because
it’s rather implied: like the value of Michael Jordan to the NBA in the
1990s, or Joe Namath to the post-merger NFL.
Defining his actual function is impossible because, really,
he’s been a symbol of his era rather than a creator of it. He’s
naturally ubiquitous, of course, throughout Barcelona’s successful La
Liga campaigns and their periodic surges through Europe. He’s also,
quite understandably, the most desirable marketing property in the game,
acting as the key piece within adidas’s brand activation strategy and
enjoying all manner of commercial deals across an ever-broadening range
of fields: from Dolce & Gabbana to India’s Tata Motors, to Turkish
Airlines and communications giant Huawei.
Messi is not only the world’s best player, but also the
game’s most bankable asset. While his influence doesn’t necessarily come
from any formalised power, his inarguable excellence (and brand
neutrality) helps to set the generational tone of the game itself.
For as long as football is player, the current era will be
adorned with his name; as a result, the range of his influence – in the
marketing, sporting and aspirational senses – is incalculable. What
Messi does at the Camp Nou one day will have rippled across the world by
the next morning, making him the purest kind of agenda-setter. SSB
4. Aleksander Ceferin
UEFA’s president since since September 2016, Ceferin is
that rare thing: a footballing bureaucrat with a sincere appetite for
change. To date, he is yet to really convince anyone that he isn’t under
the partial influence of his equivalent at FIFA, Gianni Infantino, but
he is evidently under no illusion about the nature of his mandate.
“It was an anti-establishment vote,” he told the New York Times
(of his election) earlier this year. “It is happening all around the
world. I met every association, and they all wanted something to
change.”
Over the course of his tenure, Ceferin will have to lead
the resistance against Champions League reform. The continent’s biggest
clubs (some of them in exile from the competition) have lobbied hard –
and got – historic privileges, and he has ascended to power at a time
when his organisation is locked in a pattern of appeasement. Troublingly
– perhaps oddly given his background as a fan of a club (Hajduk Split)
from a disenfranchised nation – a new range of reforms which nakedly
benefit the established leagues have already been waved through on his
watch. From 2018 onwards, the top-four countries will be guaranteed four
group stage participants a season, while – outrageously – historical
coefficient points will boost fallen clubs like Milan.
In the past, Ceferin has also been an advocate of
cross-border league competition and seems determined to find a way of
increasing mobility within the game. Whether that proves realistic or
not, the Slovenian will drive European football’s agenda (sort of)
during his presidency, and be responsible for shaping it years after he
leaves office. SSB
3. Jorge Mendes
If you ask Cristiano Ronaldo about Jorge Mendes – his agent
and the man in charge of a portfolio of players worth more than £700m –
he’ll tell you about a kind, thoughtful man who also spends about 20
hours a day on the phone. Mendes has four of them, and he has used them
to become one of the most connected people in football – able to ring up
managers and club presidents in the middle of the night and harass them
to sign his clients.
But Mendes doesn’t just represent players. He’s the man you
call if you’re a billionaire who’s just bought a new club and you want
to make a splash. In fact, Mendes has even helped engineer those kinds
of takeovers – particularly with Peter Lim at Valencia, and Dmitry
Rybolovlev at Monaco. Atletico Madrid, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Deportivo
La Coruna, Monaco and Manchester United have all bought multiple Mendes
players when building their squads. Do you get the 10th player free,
perhaps?
His methods have ruffled feathers. A number of players,
including Ronaldo, Nani and Bebe were reportedly represented by other
agents before Mendes swooped in at just the right time. Bebe was only
signed to Mendes a couple of days before his shock move to Manchester
United.
You can question his methods, and his previous involvement
in third-party ownership schemes, but you can’t deny his influence. Mino
Raiola might have helped shape the bulk of the action in last summer’s
transfer window, but Mendes still has the ear of some of football’s
biggest spenders. AK
2. Gianni Infantino
The true impossible job. Before his migration to FIFA,
Infantino began his administrative career at UEFA where, among others,
he occupied the roles of Deputy Secretary General and, later, the senior
position itself. During that time, he was at the vanguard of a range of
UEFA reforms, including the Financial Fair Play initiative, the
expansion of the European Championship, and the conception of the
hostless 2020 competition.
His ascension to the FIFA presidency came, of course, as
the result of Sepp Blatter’s protracted demise. Having been elected to
the role with a promise to “bring football back”, Infantino faces the
unenviable task of sanitising what most assume to be a deeply toxic
organisation. Fluent in FIFAspeak ("We enter now a new era. We'll
restore the image of FIFA and make sure everybody will be happy with
what we do.") and just as practiced in the art of rhetoric as his
predecessor, his presidency has done little to assuage a suspicious
public.
It’s not been helped by May’s releasing of chief
investigator Cornel Borbely and lead judge Hans-Joachim Ecker, the two
men predominantly responsible for bringing down a host of corrupt
officials including Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini.
Infantino has been busy indeed: in January 2017, he led the
Executive Committee in a unanimous vote to expand the World Cup format
from 32 teams to an enormous 48 from the 2026 competition onwards.
Irrespective of how his organisation continues to be perceived,
Infantino has – and will continue to – shape global football. SSB
1. Richard Scudamore
The Premier League’s status as a relentless money-making
machine is largely thanks to its executive chairman Scudamore, the
57-year-old who joined the organisation in 1999 and has overseen a vast
expansion of its global reach and income. The latest television deal is
worth more than £5bn, and that’s just for the domestic market – the
global deals are becoming more and more valuable too.
The best players in the world might play in Spain, but it’s
still the Premier League that fans from London to Laos can’t seem to
take their eyes off.
Because of its position and spending power, any decision
made by the Premier League has far-reaching implications. Scudamore’s
critics say that the wealthy elites could be doing more to help clubs
lower down the league pyramid, as well as providing more money to fund
grassroots football and secure the future of the game. For all the cash
involved, there’s less and less live football available to watch for
free, and that’s bound to have implications further down the line.
Of course, Scudamore’s focus – and the reason he gets paid a
reported £2.5m a year – is to keep the Premier League at the top of
global football. This vastly experienced operator could be in for a
challenging few years on that front. The threat of China’s new spending
power seems to have been short-lived, but Brexit is the next potential
iceberg for Scudamore to navigate.
Already, the spending power of Premier League clubs has
been diminished by the collapsing pound, and it could mean a return to
restrictive work permit rules for EU transfers; it’s estimated that more
than 100 current Premier League players wouldn’t be eligible under
potential new rules.
Scudamore has said he wants to see a new Premier League
winner every six years, and has plans in place to try to encourage more
Leicester City stories. But if all the world’s best players are in other
countries, even British viewers might eventually switch over. AK
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