A champion sells into the drop | MJBurrows Sport - Issue No 7

Monday brought a study in comedowns and blind spots: a title-winning club now for sale at a third-tier price, and a race whose booming crowd its own sponsors keep walking past.

A decade ago Leicester City were the best story in English football. On Monday King Power hired a Wall Street bank to sell them, and the number on the deal will be set by League One, not by the trophy cabinet. £420m of family money and a Premier League title could not outrun the accounts; a points deduction finished the job and sent the club down. Relegation leaves the stadium, the academy and the training ground exactly as they were — top-flight, all of them — and slashes the one figure a buyer underwrites, the broadcast income. Whoever pays is buying the climb back, discounted by how long it takes and how bruised the books are.

Cycling has the problem other sports dream about: more audience than money chasing it. The Tour de France pulled 12m to the roadside this year and 41% more UK viewers, and its sponsors mostly still buy one thing — the front of a jersey. The prize they keep missing is the publicity caravan, the convoy of 170 vehicles and 36 brands that hurls 18m freebies into the fields and pulls nearly half the roadside crowd on its own. Skoda has driven the lead car for twenty years and everyone remembers the polka dots; the riders' own comebacks and the federations that grow them go almost unbacked. With sponsors funding nine-tenths of a team, demand is not the problem. The selling is.

One club selling into the drop, one race selling itself short — Monday's business, minus the trophies.

12m people line the roads of France every July. UK broadcast viewers jumped 41% this year. Yet Tour de France sponsorship still runs on the three routes it has leaned on for decades — put a name on a jersey, put a logo on a car, throw a hat into a crowd. The race has built a free audience most sports would kill for. The brands around it still treat it like a merchandise drop.

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£420m and a Premier League title bought Leicester City 16 years of the best story in English football. It ends in League One. King Power has hired a Wall Street bank to sound out buyers — and whatever the family thinks the club is worth, the third tier will do the pricing. A Leicester City sale was always going to happen eventually. Nobody planned for it to happen from here.

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Leicester spent a fortune and a decade proving a club is worth whatever league it sits in, and not a penny more — while the Tour de France pulls millions who mostly came for the free bucket hats. Sport saves its sharpest jokes for the accountants. — MJB