Bayern Munich Sporting Director Max Eberl has warned that the growth in football cannot last forever, and that the market crash is on the way, while declaring Kylian Mbappe’s move to Real Madrid plays a role in the death of the game.
Eberl, who was installed this year as Bayern’s Sporting Director, voiced his concern over the weekend that the emergence of Saudi Arabian football as a market force was bad news for the game as a whole.
“At some point the market will be oversaturated and Saudi Arabia will come. That doesn’t give me a good feeling. I have to say that to be fair, but that’s the market right now. No club benefits from this. The players, the families, the agents, Everyone benefits, but not the clubs. In the past, at least the clubs benefitted, the money stayed in the cycle and that will happen less and less,” Eberl explained to SDZ, as quoted by Cadena SER.
Meanwhile Mbappe has remained in Europe, leaving one of the state-backed giants for a club owned by its fans, just like Bayern. However Eberl was not convinced that was for the best either, considering his deal with Los Blancos to be problematic.
“You can always become more greedy with money, but everyone who is greedy with money will gradually become nother nail in the coffin for football. We are talking about hundreds of millions. It is too much and at some point you have the feeling that the bubble is going to burst.”
Certainly Eberl is not alone in having predicted football’s market bubble to burst. The growth of the sport continues to make it one of the wealthiest industries in the world, but as clubs price out local fans from the game, it the boom times could cause problems in the longer term. The largest clubs naturally will feel their pull will hold against market forces, but the infrastructure of the game below it could face damage.
