The Football Association unveiled its plans last month for a menu of multimillion-pound investment into grassroots facilities and projects, and wiping out the debt on Wembley, largely from the sale of greatly increased TV deals for FA Cup and England matches. Announcing the international sales last year, the FA’s chief executive, Martin Glenn, said the money would have “a transformational impact” on football across the country.
One of the major buyers in those international deals, reported to have paid £210m from next season to 2023-24 for the exclusive rights to broadcast in the Middle East, North Africa and western Europe, is an agency based in London, Pitch International. Pitch has also bought the English Football League’s international media rights, reported to be £120m over five seasons until 2021-22.
Formed in 2004 with two principal directors and a chairman, Trevor East, who is a former BSkyB executive – then taken over in 2009 by an investor who has never been publicly identified – Pitch has rapidly risen to become a significant agency in English football TV rights.
Pitch sells the rights around the world. For the Middle East and North Africa region, where the Gulf is the richest territory, it has consistently sold its English football rights to beIN Sports, the Qatari broadcaster. Formerly the sports arm of Al Jazeera, beIN has become the dominant broadcaster in the region having had huge, sustained investment from Qatar state funds. In the new “transformational” deal for FA rights, Pitch is understood to have again sold on the rights for the Middle East and North Africa to beIN.
A spokesman for Pitch told the Guardian it has an “arm’s length” commercial relationship and not an exclusive arrangement with beIN or any other broadcaster. “Many rights holders and agencies across numerous sports deal with beIN, which is a major broadcaster in the Middle East and elsewhere,” he said.
Famously beIN’s most prominent move in Europe has been the huge money paid to broadcast Ligue 1 in France jointly with Canal+, a deal first done after the state fund, Qatar Sports Investments, bought Paris Saint‑Germain in 2011.
Less well-known has been the huge money the Qatari broadcaster is paying into English football, both directly and by buying the rights to FA and EFL matches from Pitch. In the current 2016-19 round of Premier League deals, beIN is paying a reported £429m to broadcast matches in the Middle East and North Africa, following £315m paid over the previous three years. beIN also bought the Premier League TV rights for Thailand, paying £187m for three years, according to industry reports, and holds the rights for Indonesia and New Zealand.
This huge money has been pouring into English football from Qatar throughout the period in which the integrity of the country’s bid to host the 2022 World Cup has been repeatedly attacked, particularly by the former FA chairman Greg Dyke. He told the Guardian he did not see any contradiction between his publicly stated suspicions over Qatar’s bid and cashing in the millions from beIN: “The TV rights just tend to get sold to the highest bidder,” he said.
In a climate of increasing demands for transparency in financial flows and in football club ownership Pitch has never, through its rapid rise, said who its ultimate owner is, although East is a well-known, gregarious character, and Paul McGrath, one of the company’s founders, has been involved in media rights for years. Public documents filed in the UK at Companies House state that in December 2009, 75% of Pitch was bought for £52m. Yet nobody involved has ever explained who bought this stake. East repeatedly declined to answer the Guardian’s questions about Pitch’s ownership or the 2009 takeover, citing confidentiality.
The immediate owner which took over the 75% stake in Pitch was a London-based company formed that year, Homer Newco Limited. In turn its owner, the controlling shareholder of Pitch until December 2015, was a company registered in Amsterdam, Homere Holding BV. Dutch companies are not required to have the same level of transparency as in England where shareholders are identified; in Holland only a 100% owner must be disclosed. The ownership of Homere Holding is declared in Dutch company filings to be 97.34% held by a party recorded only as “Shareholder 1”.
The Pitch accounts, which show rising income every year, most recently £28m from the Middle East and Africa, £33m from America and £60m from the UK and Europe, have stated since 2010: “The members consider Homer Newco Limited to be the controlling party. The ultimate controlling party is considered to be Homere Holding BV, a company incorporated in the Netherlands.”
The founding documents of Homer Newco, which state the Dutch entity as the sole owner, record that an original director was Hervé de Kervasdoué, who had an address in the Paris suburb of Bougival. De Kervasdoué is a French lawyer, who acted for Qatar Sports Investments on the acquisition of PSG in 2011.
That deal was listed on the website of his firm, RedLink, as one of its notable achievements. Also listed was: “Acquisition of a prominent English company in the sports rights industry.”
Contacted by the Guardian, De Kervasdoué said he had a lawyer’s duty of client confidentiality and declined to say which English sports rights company had been acquired, or why he was an original director of Homer Newco, which took over Pitch in 2009.
beIN Sports also declined to answer questions about the relationship with Pitch or the anonymity of its ownership.
Pitch’s chairman, East, declined to answer questions about the Dutch company which was the agency’s controlling party, the 2009 takeover, why De Kervasdoué, QSI’s lawyer, was an original director of Pitch’s new owner, and why anonymity and confidentiality are drawn over it all. He said that Pitch’s majority owners now are the two main directors, McGrath and Jon Owen, who from 2015 have been noted on Companies House documents as owning 75% of Homer Newco, with Homere Holding reduced to owning 25 shares. East said the statement in Pitch’s 2015‑16 accounts, that Homere Holding remains the ultimate controlling party, is “incorrect” and will be corrected in this year’s accounts.
The spokesman for Pitch said of its ownership arrangements: “Due to confidentiality Pitch is unable to comment on ownership or contract valuation questions beyond the information previously provided.”
The EFL has strong regulations on transparency for its own clubs, requiring them to state and publish who owns them and that the individuals are “fit and proper” people to be owners but the league does not have similar requirements for its commercial partners and did not register any concerns about Pitch’s anonymous ownership:
“As our chosen sales partner, Pitch International negotiate the sale of the broadcasting rights of all five EFL competitions, internationally, with local broadcasters to secure maximum value for the EFL on behalf of our 72 Clubs,” the league said in a statement.
“The EFL has a growing global appeal and is currently broadcast in over 190 territories worldwide. Each individual proposal brought forward by Pitch is separately considered and where appropriate, approved by the EFL.”
The FA, asked about the anonymity of ownership at one of the companies paying hundreds of millions of pounds in the “transformational” deal for English football, and the amount of money coming into the game from Qatar, with whose association the English FA signed a cooperation agreement last week, declined to comment.
