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JPMorgan Chase has apologized for backing the European Football Super League that fell this week after protests from fans, politicians, teams and players.
The US bank was instrumental in creating the Super League, pledging a £ 3.25m grant, which in turn provided funding for the rebel clubs to launch a breakaway competition.
The JPMorgan debt financing agreement would last for more than 23 years and would be guaranteed against future issuance rights for competition. FT revealed at the beginning of the week.
JPMorgan’s bank debts in London were key to Super League planning and they had been working on the project for several years, according to people with direct knowledge of the subject.
“We clearly judged how this agreement would be viewed by the wider football community and how it could affect it in the future,” the bank said in a statement on Friday. “We’ll learn from that.”
The new competition would overturn the hierarchy of European football and create a new league of 15 permanent members, including Manchester United of England, Real Madrid of Spain and Juventus of Italy.
The harsh reaction left the project behind almost all the original 12 founding clubs a few days from Sunday.
But the anger of UK football fans is widespread at a time when JPMorgan’s plans to enter the country’s retail banking market are coming to an end. The team has confirmed that it plans to open a digital bank in the UK only this year.
In the uproar over the Super League, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair He is Chairman of the International Board of JPMorganhe told the Telegraph, which is made up of company executives and former political leaders, that he did not support the project.
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Sajid Javid, another bank adviser and conservative chancellor, he has argued that governments should tax clubs which led to the cancellation of the plan.
Florentino Pérez, president of Real Madrid, one of the two biggest clubs in Spain, was the architect of the Super League, and since the last two seasons the team has put its hopes in the project to help recover the team from a budget of 400 million euros.
Both Pérez, a multimillion-dollar construction mogul, and the Spanish club have a close relationship with JPMorgan, which has supported the club’s efforts. To finance the renovation of the Santiago Bernabeu stadium. The importance of the agreement was that Jamie Dimon, the bank’s CEO, went to Madrid in July 2018 to meet Pérez on a trip to Europe.
JPMorgan also has close ties with other founding members of the Super League, Manchester United. The bank worked on the club’s controversial £ 790 million in the Glazer multimillion-dollar purchase of the club, and former JPMorgan banker Ed Woodward joined the club in 2005, the year the deal ended.
The club said this week that Woodward, who has been Manchester United’s executive vice-president since 2012, will step down and leave at the end of the year.
Manchester United’s participation in the Superliga has rekindled calls for the Glazer family to reduce their control over the club.
Jim O’Neill, former Goldman Sachs economist, and Paul Marshall hedge fund Marshall Wace, whose Red Knights team has failed before He wrote in an open letter to Joel Glaze on Friday to buy the family group in the U.S., asking the family to lower it to 49.9% of the majority.
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