Richard Scudamore, the former Premier League boss, has teamed up with one of the world’s leading private equity investors in elite sport as pandemic pressures mount on the finances of team owners and governing bodies around the world.
Sky News has learned that Mr. Scudamore has begun working with CVC Capital Partners, the former Formula 1 motorsport owner and new sponsor of the Rugby Union Six Nations Championship.
City sources said Mr. Scudamore signed a contract with CVC earlier this year to begin his work as a senior advisor.
His appointment has not been made public, although it was confirmed by insiders on Tuesday.
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Players from Ireland and England will compete against each other during the Six Nations Game in Dublin in March. Image: AP
Mr. Scudamore’s new role expands him into a team at CVC that includes Simon Denyer, the founder and former head of DAZN, the sports streaming service.
It takes place amid a barrage of deals involving some of the most lucrative and well-known sports franchises in the world, including Six Nations rugby, the Italian Serie A, the New Zealand All Blacks and the McLaren F1 team, all of them aim to inject new capital to support them through the COVID-19 crisis and its aftermath.
Private equity firms have identified the pandemic as an opportunity to capitalize on enduring sports brands at potentially attractive valuations, leveraging their expertise in areas such as media and broadcasting rights.
Mr Scudamore signed a three-year non-compete agreement with the Premier League when he stepped down as its chairman in late 2018, preventing him from working with a competing competition or bidder for its media rights until the end of that year.
His role at CVC, which has spent more than £ 500 million on senior national and international rights from rugby unions over the past two years, is considered global and intended to cover the sporting landscape.
CVC, the Luxembourg-based private equity firm, made £ 1 billion in profits on a decade-long investment in Formula 1, having previously also owned the MotoGP series.
Since then, the company has turned its attention to off-track sports with large investments in a number of rugby assets and a $ 300 million partnership with the International Volleyball Federation announced in February.
The investment firm has also been battling a deal to acquire a stake in a new company that owns the commercial rights to the Italian Serie A football league – the English Premier League equivalent.
This deal has stalled in recent months due to political battles within Serie A, which also included Juventus President Andrea Agnelli.
Mr. Agnelli was one of the main architects of the European Super League Project that spectacularly collapsed last month within hours of its launch being announced.
The six English clubs that signed up for the UEFA runaway – Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur – are now facing a football association investigation and a significant financial gap.
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Mr Scudamore criticized the owners of the six clubs, accusing them of “changing the dynamic” [of English football] forever.
“I can’t explain why either of them thought it was a good idea,” he reportedly said last month.
“I’m the person who told you for years that it was a crazy idea and it couldn’t happen.”
Mr. Scudamore has been a member of the Ryder Cup Committee of the European Golf Tour since he left the Premier League, where he was the linchpin of a staggering increase in media rights both domestically and internationally to the competition.
He also became an adviser to the top division of Australian football and major league baseball on their commercial strategy, although those roles are believed to have come to an end by now.
Last fall, he joined the board of directors of RedBall Acquisition Corp, a new blank check company formed to acquire an asset in the sports, media, or entertainment industries.
RedBall was pursuing a merger that would have made Fenway Sports Group, the owners of Premier League champions Liverpool and the Boston Red Sox, a New York-listed company.
Those talks were broken off, but RedBird Capital Partners, the sponsor of RedBall, instead agreed to privately buy a $ 735 million stake in FSG.
CVC declined to comment on Tuesday.
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