Edens is not intimidated. One night at dinner he told me about a hotel he had recently built in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The project included a club where members could store their skis and valets parked their cars. Everyone, including the partners, told him it wouldn’t work. “A lot of locals said, ‘That’s not Jackson Hole, that’s not true to our heritage,'” Edens said. “’We’re not Vail. We carry our own things.’” He did not agree. “Who thinks carrying your three young children’s ski equipment across the parking lot is a good idea?”
Edens proceeded with the ski club. “And people love it,” he said. “He is completely exhausted. And that’s how I feel about some of the other things we’re doing now.” While he said he is respectful of the club’s long history, he added that “it’s okay to change things up a little bit. The Kiss Cam may not be the right way to do it. But there could be other ways.”
In the end In April, Chelsea played against Aston Villa in Birmingham. What was once a novelty, a match between American-owned teams, has become commonplace; This season there will be 72 games of this type. That number, the largest ever recorded, could increase significantly if certain results are achieved. Three teams advance to the Premier League from the lower tier each year: the top two teams and the winner of a tournament involving the next four teams. (To make room for them, three teams also withdraw.) Going into the last weekend of April, Leeds United, which is owned by San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York and his partners, was in second place. Ipswich Town, owned by an American investment company, came third. And Shilen Patel, a Tampa businessman, recently completed the purchase of fifth-place West Bromwich Albion.
If Everton’s proposed sale to a Miami-based firm is approved, up to 13 of the 20 clubs could be owned by Americans next season. That’s one short of the two-thirds supermajority that would have the power to remake the Premier League along the contours of, say, the NFL. A cap could be imposed on player salaries, which would greatly benefit the competitive prospects of mid-sized clubs such as Aston Villa. . Gate revenue and merchandise revenue such as T-shirt sales could be shared. Even the promotion and relegation system that has formed the basis of English football’s organizational system for more than a century could be scrapped. Gary Neville, former Manchester United player and now a commentator for Sky Sports, has branded American owners “a clear and present danger” to the “fabric” of the game.
And yet some degree of evolution toward the American model seems inevitable, whether Americans are involved or not. If clubs today are run less like a corner bar and more like complicated international businesses, it is because that is what they have become. When the Glazers recently agreed to sell 25 percent of Manchester United to Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a lifelong fan of the club and chairman of chemicals group INEOS, for $1.3 billion, he proposed replacing Old Trafford, the closest thing to a place sacred that exists. in English football, with a stadium with a capacity for 90,000 spectators. In doing so, Ratcliffe was acting like an American, as one commentator put it in response to a BBC article.