English football has incidents of “corruption”, Barnsley co-chairman Paul Conway has told The Athletic.
Conway said that “there is a lot of incompetence and corruption in football”, adding there should be more stringent penalties for rule breaking in the English game.
Conway, who was speaking on The Business of Sport Podcast with Mark Chapman and Matt Slater, is part of the American investment group Pacific Media Group, who own significant stakes in the Belgium side KV Oostende, Swiss side FC Thun and were previously involved with OGC Nice in France.
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What did Conway say?
Speaking on the podcast, Conway said: “There’s corruption at the chairman level of clubs. From a league perspective, it’s one of the worst leagues to operate in because there’s rules. Nobody follows them and the league doesn’t enforce them.
“We’ll compete with any system. Just give us the rules and we’ll follow them.”
Conway added that “there should be penalties”.
Did he compare England to other countries?
Yes. Conway added: “France gets a bad reputation of doing business in France. We’ve never really had any issues there in three seasons and that’s why we want to get back into France.”
What did he say about multiple ownership?
In a wide-ranging interview, Conway also discussed the benefits of the multi-club ownership model.
“The biggest is obviously on the football side, where you can basically play the same style of play amongst the teams,” he said.
“And then when we’re recruiting, especially post Brexit, we have a lot of flexibility on where the players are signed, both based upon the location and also the level of quality of the player at that time.”
What else do I need to know?
Conway also discussed the models of City Football Group and Red Bull, plus why investing in MLS is not a good idea.
Professor Simon Chadwick, the director of Eurasian sport at the Emlyon Business School, also joined the podcast to speak about City Football Group, its CEO Ferran Soriano and the ‘Disneyfication’ of football.
Click Go Deeper below to listen to the podcast.
(Photo: Jon Hobley/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)