".....
Referring to Spain as a country, they do not encourage foreign investment in the same way as we do in the UK. For instance Spanish banks may buy up utility (water electric etc.) companies from other countries but they have fought long and hard in the European courts to prevent a German institution from buying some of their utilities. It is just a different mindset, Britain is much more open for this kind of thing and it obviously leads to more direct investment. On a football front, the big clubs (Real Barca) are owned by their members and the members can vote out the president.
When Abramovich came to Europe he considered buying a club in either Italy, Spain or England. Italy he saw as too tactical and thus boring, Spain because of the terms of ownership he saw as a bad investment, thus he ended up at Chelsea.
UK clubs have shares you can buy and thus are able to go public and be available on the stock market. I do not know of a Spanish club where this is the case. Thus English clubs attract enormous foreign investment which has led to the enormous influx of cash we are now seeing. where the money comes from, well in the case of the Real Galactico saga it came from their having sold the "Ciudad Deportivo" for 600 million Euros. This was a training ground in the centre of the business district, a fantastic facility from when Madrid was much smaller. They spent that on the whole Galactico thing and also bought some land near the airport where they have the stadium for their B team and about 14 pitches plus modern state of the art facilities. It only opened up about a year ago, while the old training ground is now home to four enormous tower block office building s which are still under construction.
Also, clubs tend to have presidents who are wealthy businessmen and the expansion of the Spanish economy has meant there are plenty of those.
They may own the club and put in large sums simply for their own glorification and to gain publicity and favour which helps them in other areas. On a local level there is investment from town halls. My local club Calpe is a town hall club and probably receives about 100K a year to spend on
it's facilities. The stadium is the municipal stadium and the land etc. are owned by the town hall.
There is big local pride in Spain so investing in this way is common.
On the plus side this means excellent local facilities. On the minus side it means the president will be a mate of the mayor and everyone including management and coaches will support a particular political party which is in power. It is really very political.
Our local council recently changed from PP (Tory) to a coalition between PSOE (labour) and Bloc (Green) as a result there will be a complete change in the clubs management
....."
