The list of multi-club networks in football is ever-expanding. The most recognisable are City Football Group (CFG), with its 13 clubs spread across five continents, and the Red Bull stable, which spans Germany, Austria, Brazil and the United States.
Beneath that top tier is a web of connections with INEOS, Clearlake Capital, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), Global Football Holdings, Eagle Football, RedBird Capital, Pacific Media Group, King Power International and the recently collapsed 777 Partners all owning between two and eight teams.
Nottingham Forest’s Evangelos Marinakis also owns Olympiacos (Greece) and Rio Ave (Portugal) with plans to add Brazil’s Vasco da Gama, while an offshoot of Brighton & Hove Albion owner Tony Bloom’s Starlizard company, Jamestown Analytics, aids Royale Union Saint-Gilloise (Belgium) and Heart of Midlothian (Scotland).
Now, there is a new name in this particular arena: FMCF Investments, which has laid its first brick in the Slovenian second division with Tabor Sezana.
Situated half an hour’s drive from the Italian coastal city of Trieste, with a stadium capacity of just 1,300 and no major honours in the club’s 101-year history, Sezana may seem like an odd and obscure place to start. For the two men at the helm, however, it is the culmination of a dream they have shared for the best part of a decade — and one they believe fills a gap in the market.
Sporting director Lyndon Tomlinson was involved in the signings of Jadon Sancho at Manchester City, Alejandro Garnacho at Manchester United and Jude Bellingham at Birmingham City while working in senior academy recruitment positions, in addition to scouting for Leeds United, his boyhood club.
FMCF portfolio manager Michael Gorman is an American who was an attorney and player agent for over a decade, representing dozens of South American clients, including former Rangers and Colombia striker Alfredo Morelos.
Now they are seeking to merge those experiences and make Tabor the first staging post for South American and African players en route to the elite leagues of European football.
You may be wondering what brought together a lad from Yorkshire and an American who has spent much of his adult life in Colombia and California. It would be too simplistic to say ‘mutual frustration’, but it gets to the heart of why they both no longer wanted to be a cog in a machine they felt could be operated differently.
The duo were introduced to each other in 2018 by a mutual contact while Tomlinson was at Manchester United and Gorman was acting as a consultant, advising English clubs on the South American market as an intermediary.
For Gorman, the arduous experience of attempting to secure a teenage Morelos his first club in Europe was the genesis of his ambition to own and control a host club for South American players in Europe.
Morelos had five senior goals for Independiente Medellin in his homeland and seven for Colombia Under-20s, yet the offer of a free loan to over 100 clubs across the world saw only HJK, from Finland’s capital Helsinki, take the chance in 2017’s winter window before he was sold to Rangers 18 months later and went on to score 124 goals — 33 of them in European competitions — across six years in Glasgow.
“We saw the same barriers to bringing young South Americans to Europe, the main one being that every club in Europe wants to see the player in a league outside of their own country,” Gorman tells The Athletic.
“Most clubs don’t have the budget have the budget to scout live in South America and may not be willing to take a risk in a market with a different language and a contrasting negotiation style.
“They would prefer to wait for someone else to bring them (young players) to Europe, but the problem is that if they succeed, the value immediately becomes too high.
“We’ve seen that players from Colombia and Africa usually need a stepping-stone club to make the transition. Those who jump straight into the top five leagues have not performed as well.”
The true eureka moment came in 2021, when they witnessed first-hand Manchester United’s failure to sign now Chelsea midfielder Moises Caicedo and forward Jhon Duran, who is with Aston Villa these days, when they were playing in their homelands of Ecuador and Colombia respectively.
“It was (during) Covid, and I was in my apartment video scouting when Mike messaged me about this kid called Caicedo who has a cheap buyout clause,” says Tomlinson. “He sent me some video and I knew we had to track him straight away. After a few months, I had Michael pitch the details of the player to the club (United), but they pushed back and wanted us to do more scouting.”
At that point, Caicedo would have been available to buy from Ecuadorian club Independiente del Valle for between £2million ($2.5m) and £4m. Brighton did the deal instead and two years later completed a sale to Chelsea which made Caicedo the most expensive British transfer of all time (£115m).
“It was a case of, ‘What are we going to do with the kid?’. It was the same case with Duran,” says Tomlinson.
“I was banging my head against a wall. It was frustrating, as I had just come from Manchester City, where they’d signed Gabriel Jesus (from Palmeiras in Brazil at age 19) with the intention of placing him at another club.”
It served as the perfect microcosm of the rigidity of traditional one-club recruitment policy versus the fluidity of the multi-club model.
“CFG wanted any player from anywhere, as long as they could be flipped in the future for a transfer fee profit, whereas Manchester United and other standalone clubs were more focused on players who were ready to play for the first team immediately,” says Tomlinson.
“Most of us share a romanticised view of recruitment where you’re focusing on 25 players for the one season, but the reality is that the largest clubs hoover up talent to their portfolio and see which players work their way up the network to the flagship team.”
Caicedo went from Ecuadorian league player to breaking the British transfer record in two and a half years (Crystal Pix/MB Media/Getty Images)
They were convinced their track record of recommendations was strong and the pair started putting a plan into action.
In January this year FMCF purchased Tabor for a low seven-figure fee. They subsequently wiped out the club’s debts and committed five years’ worth of funding to bring the total package to a few million euros.
Neither had the means to do this alone. It was achieved with the backing of hedge funds who liked the potential returns of player trading, allied with former professional athletes from MLS, NHL, NFL, NWSL and boxing backgrounds, who see Sezana as stepping into a gap in the market for players from undertapped markets.
They were also able to convince Manchester United’s scout in South America, Juan Mauricio Echeverria, to join them and head up talent identification and development in South America, which encompasses an academy in Cartagena, Colombia.
They viewed it as a positive sign that people were willing to leave successful positions at top clubs for a unique project.
Tabor’s mission is to ensure the players are given European coaching at a young age and play as soon as they arrive in Europe at 18 before being allowed to move on to a better league quickly, and for a reasonable transfer fee.
The rise of multi-club ownership groups has created tensions with some local fanbases who feel it strips away their identity. Sezana are a small club with an average attendance of between 300 and 400 but Tomlinson still experienced some pushback when results were not going their way after the takeover.
They found it challenging to attract some Slovenian players but he is confident that will change this winter given the team’s improvement and the realisation that, despite the club belonging to FMCF, for the model to thrive it requires them to be competing in Europe to increase the value of their players.
FMCF is seeking to pair the vertical integration of the Right to Dream-FC Nordsjaelland model with the fluidity of CFG’s multi-club umbrella. The former improves the chances of those playing regularly at a young age and transitioning to Europe seamlessly, the latter enables the group to manage the pathways of its players and to control their exits.
Between 2014 and 2016 at Manchester City, part of Tomlinson’s role was to coordinate the partnership with Right to Dream, the Ghanaian academy which bought Danish club Nordsjaelland in 2015 and has created a route for graduates to progress directly into first-team football in Denmark at age 18. It has spawned over £100million worth of African players, including West Ham’s Mohammed Kudus.
“We have to learn to walk before we can run and it has been a crazy first year, but that is what we’d like to replicate with our academies,” says Tomlinson.
“Right to Dream’s problem in the early days was that they would come to international tournaments and absolutely batter teams, but then the individual players would move to other clubs and not be a success. They realised they needed their own pathway to get the players, and that’s what we are trying to do with our academy in Cartagena. It is very competitive for players, but we have brought two boys over already.
“In the long term, we want to create academies in Colombia, Ecuador, Ghana and Gambia — teaching them the same way of playing and building a culture at Tabor Sezana that means they can transition smoothly into European football.”
In trying to find the right club to begin this project, the pair first had to find the right country. They looked at costs, geography, climate, language, work-permit frameworks and the football setup, also weighing up teams in Croatia, Greece, Denmark and Austria.
They found the price to buy a club in Slovenia was more accessible and that they do not have to overcome high minimum salary thresholds, as is the case in Switzerland and the Netherlands, and which is often an obstacle to taking a chance on a player from another continent.
The best four Slovenian teams each season, from a top division of just 10 sides, also qualify for European competition, while Slovenia ranks as the European league with the youngest average age.
Tabor signed Colombian striker Jhon Pajaro and Ghanaian midfielder Abdul Rashid Fuseini, and another two teenagers from the academy in Cartagena recently had a successful visit ahead of their planned moves at 18.
Tomlinson went to Ghana on a scouting mission last year and was recently on a similar trip to Nigeria, where he took in 18 different teams and has arranged for three players to come to Sezana on trial in the new year.
There is a big limitation on Tabor’s plans to fuse these two markets with a core of Slovenians — the rule which states that second-division clubs there can only name one non-EU player in a matchday squad. It means Pajaro and Fuseini have had to share the minutes but, while the rule relaxes to allow three non-EU players in the first division, it will remain a significant barrier.
It is why Sezana was always the first destination in a wider multi-club network plan.
“The next step will logically be a club in a country with a higher quota of non-EU players, as we need to control other clubs so we can loan the players who are adapting to European football,” says Tomlinson. “That will help with the flow, but until then it is about managing it sensibly. Logically, Spain or Portugal would be the next market to look at, given the language and culture. It would be the perfect bridge between South American and European football.”
The ultimate aim is to make Tabor a renowned platform for players from such countries and to transfer them on for profit.
It is that which seems to have captured the imagination of those outside traditional sporting circles, too. Gorman says so many people wanted to be part of the project who did not meet the U.S. requirements to be part of a capital raise platform, which grants them a vote on club decisions and a future right to dividends from club profits such as transfer fee income and UEFA prize money.
They view the structure as a way of democratising club ownership, allowing those who are not ultra-wealthy to have access to club ownership.
Tomlinson built an impressive CV in English football, so this move to a provincial club in Slovenia would have come as a surprise to many of his connections in the game.
“Maybe I took it for granted that this was that next natural step in my career, as I wanted to be a sporting director, but that’s probably because it had been so ingrained in my mind for five years,” Tomlinson says.
“As soon as I explain the project to people, they get it. It helps that the first time I went to Colombia, I fell in love with the place after 10 minutes. Now I get to spend three months there, during the league break in Slovenia, to help Juan find more players for our academy!”
Relegation in 2023, just before they started the process of buying the club, was followed by a narrow escape from going down again last season.
Tomlinson has had to rebuild the squad while getting to know the Slovenian market but he leveraged his years of scouting top youth talents to bring in former Borussia Dortmund midfielder Kamal Bafounta from French club Lorient and former Arsenal midfielder Mauro Bandeira. Tabor are now a point off top spot and in the last 16 of the Slovenian Cup — just four wins away from a Europa Conference League qualifying spot.
“We are accelerating the process before we’re even a year in and promotion is now the target,” says Tomlinson. “Our view has always been that we can develop and compete at the same time, but we thought it would be a longer timeline.”
(Top photos: Getty Images/Tabor Sezana; design: Eamonn Dalton)
