A NEW football season approaches, and with it new players, overpriced replica kits and unsavoury club owners. If you are one of them, most observers will wrongly assume that you are laundering only your reputation, and that you are willing to lose millions on a philanthropic sporting folly to do so. That is too kind. Your new asset will not just help you wash your dirty money. It will make more of it too.

It is a good time to enter the football racket. Banks are less generous and sentimental about loans. Tax officials are less lenient, too, as Rangers, a big Glasgow club, discovered: it was forced into liquidation by tax arrears, afterwards being reconstituted under new ownership. But hard times mean clubs are desperate and going cheap. Set up a holding company (or a nest of them) in a discreet jurisdiction, as many owners do, and you have a money-laundering and embezzlement machine at your disposal. The authorities are unlikely to bother you (see article).

Start with ticket revenues. Exaggerating the attendance at matches lets you run some of the dirty takings from your previous career through the turnstiles, turning them into legitimate income (this particular ruse works best if you buy a middling club, where games are not routinely sold out). Conversely, if you need some petty cash you can siphon off the gate receipts—a tactic that some of Brazil’s football kingpins, the cartolas (“top hats”), are rumoured to have employed in the past.

The market in players, between clubs and across national borders, is another golden opportunity. Time was when the scams were simple: bent coaches would take “bungs” (backhanders) to buy a player with the chairman’s wallet. Now the tricks are more complex—and some owners are in on them. One aim is money-laundering. Transfers involve huge and largely subjective sums (since a player is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for him). With agents or other intermediaries involved, payments pass through multiple hands and jurisdictions: perfect for concealing the origin and direction of the cash. Sell a player to a friendly club that publicly overstates the true price, and you can supplement the real fee with a couple of million ill-gotten euros of your own: that money is now clean and in your club’s accounts. Pull the trick in reverse—inflating the value of a player you are buying—and you gain a usefully overvalued asset on your balance-sheet, which will help your club to borrow.

Transfers can also help you privatise club revenues and defraud minority shareholders. With the help of a co-operative agent, the fees, commissions and even parts of players’ salaries can find their way back to you (and away from the taxman). Agents who are personal friends may be safest. The regulations which govern transfer deals are easy to circumvent.

Another wheeze—annoyingly banned by some national football associations—is third-party ownership, where the rights in a player are owned (or part-owned) not by his club but by an outside consortium. So you can secretly invest in players whom you then rent to your club, trousering the proceeds. Or sell your club’s star man to your front company for a depressed fee, then sell him on at full price. Naturally you will award the club’s construction and catering contracts to your own firms.

Matches made in heaven