For Kieran Maguire, midweek mornings were always the challenge. Bleary-eyed students would file into a lecture theatre the morning after the night before and show more interest in the fortunes of Liverpool or Manchester United than they ever did in the nuts and bolts of accountancy and finance.
“All of my teaching life has been in Manchester and Liverpool, which are two huge football cities,” the Columbo of football finance tells The Fixture. “So, if I’ve got 200 or 300 kids to teach in a university class on a Thursday morning for three hours, I’m thinking, ‘How do I keep them awake?’
“I learned that if I went in and asked, ‘Why can’t United sign any players in this window?’ they would perk up and say, ‘The board are twats, the manager is a clown’.
“Then I would say, ‘Okay, take a look at this number’. If we were supposed to be looking at debts that morning, I would show them that Manchester United or someone owed £400 million in unpaid transfer fees.
“They would say, ‘I never knew that’, and the debate would begin.”
Where his fellow lecturers used Vodafone or Apple or Marks and Spencer as practical case studies, Maguire dug deep into British football clubs. He would use Sir Alex Ferguson’s management techniques or Liverpool’s new American owners to bring dreary subjects to life and the students responded to what he had to say.
He won the Most Loved Lecturer award for the Manchester Metropolitan University business school in 2008 before adding the Best Overall Lecturer two years later. Teaching what he describes as a “dry and tedious” subject, Maguire turned the business of football into an academic discipline, as fascinating to supporters these days as tactics or team selections or the allegiances of referees.
From broadcast deals, to Super League plots, to Infantino’s scheme to flog the World Cup, to iffy owners and squad ratio costs, he made football finance part of the 24-hour rolling news cycle and, when United were purchased by the Glazer family in 2005, he was invited on to BBC Breakfast to address the nation for the first time.
Currently a Professor of Football Finance at the University of Liverpool Management School, journalists from across the UK call the lifelong Brighton fan on a daily basis to seek his expertise on how football clubs spend their money.
Since 2019, he has also been co-host of the highly successful Price of Football podcast with comedian, broadcaster and partner-in-crime Kevin Day.
Forensic on the finances of British football – Scotland included – SPFL chief Neil Doncaster is a regular guest on the show and football’s Odd Couple travelled to Edinburgh in midweek for a festival grilling from Iain Dale. Where the LBC broadcaster’s fringe interrogations usually feature the likes of former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, MSP Stephen Flynn and former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, Day and Maguire were the first subjects to appear with no political background.
“They were worried we are such a niche market, that people wouldn’t buy tickets,” says Day over a pint in a local hostelry. “But increasingly as the pod goes on, it’s not a niche market any more. And it’s not just lawyers and accountants that are interested, it’s all football fans.”
An Edinburgh veteran from his decades on the comedy circuit, Day describes Maguire – only half in jest – as “the Romesh Ranganathan of football finance”.
“No one has a bigger ego than a live comedian,” says the Londoner, a committed Crystal Palace fan. “So it took me a couple of live shows with Price of Football to realise, ‘They are not here for you’.
“If I taught him to introduce himself, they’d just turn up to hear Kieran. But it’s amazing the fan mail he gets from mainly a demographic of middle-aged men.”
During a 90-minute chat with Dale, Maguire confessed to rampant “imposter syndrome”. A reluctant celebrity, he spends much of his time on stage with his head looking downwards, his wife Gail making a mental note to tick him off later.
When the show ends, it takes half- an-hour to negotiate an exit from the foyer of the EICC because he is besieged by middle-aged men keen to share worries and concerns over the finances of their local club.
A contributor to Match of the Day 2 and Five Live, Day is more comfortable in the spotlight, his son Ed Knight, now following in his comedy footsteps at the festival.
“Kevin makes me look 10 times better than I am because he knows when to ask the right questions,” Maguire insists. “He knows when to rein me in and when to take the piss.”
Neither man expected the podcast to catch fire. When an email arrived out of the blue in 2019, they had never met and gave the idea four weeks tops. While their shared Irish roots saw them hit it off, they always felt that football finance would be too geeky, too niche, to hold mainstream appeal.
“I thought it was a terrible idea,” Day admits. “And both of us were too polite to tell the producer to clear off, essentially.
“I don’t want to use the word luck, but the fact is we started doing the pod when Bury were going under.
“The press had no interest in this story whatsoever. So we were the only people talking about it publicly.
“We lost that one because Bury still went out of business but Kieran has the instincts of a journalist. He knows where the real fault lies.
"He knows who the people to blame for these situations are and he phones them up.”
When Maguire’s name shows up on a football club owner’s mobile phone screen, it is rarely the sign of a job well done.
Watford took exception to a story regarding unpaid wages. The podcast production company have also received cease and desist emails from the English Premier League.
“We take it as a sign we are doing the right things if we’re upsetting people,” says Day proudly.
“I think most people realise we’re coming from a good place. Most people realise we’re not trying to stir trouble up, that we are genuine.
"Most of the time we report in terms of, ‘What the f*** is going on there?’
“I have nothing against Nottingham Forest, Brian Clough is one of my footballing idols. But I despise Evangelos Marinakis – the man who currently runs the club. Despise him.
“We are not having a go at Forest or Chelsea or whoever, we are having a go at the people who are clearly getting it wrong.”
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Supporters do not always see the distinction. Least of all in Glasgow, where any attack on a football club is – by extension – an attack on them and any positive coverage of the biggest rivals feels like a personal affront.
When Maguire turned his attention to the chances of the Rangers figures breaking even three years ago he was taken to task by supporters of Celtic, many of whom scrutinise the accounts of their bitter arch rivals with the forensic zeal of Hercule Poirot investigating a homicide on the Orient Express.
“I put out a tweet which went a bit viral,” he recalls now. “It basically showed a map of the UK’s football finance experts. Sheffield had two, Portsmouth one, Liverpool two and 60,000 in the east end of Glasgow.
“It was picked up by newspapers north of the Border before Celtic fans took it badly. It was a gag. A dad joke. No more than that.
“I was invited to the 150th anniversary Rangers dinner and that was very kind of them, with a name like mine.
“They said, ‘We might not agree with you, but you are the only person out there not taking a partial view of things’.
“But the reality of football fans is that they want to hear bad things about their rivals. That’s just the way it is.”
While the mutual antipathy of Celtic and Rangers shows no sign of abating, last season threw up a new protagonist.
“We find now on the podcast that the only thing that unites fans of Celtic and Rangers is Hearts,” observes Day.
“What you had in Scotland last season was something we haven’t had in England for 15 years – a three-horse race. There’s just two clubs – Arsenal and Man City – fighting each other now.
“I think Hearts will win the Scottish league within the next three seasons and that will be good for Scottish football because the broadcasting deal will be better.”
It is a contentious view. After a summer of supporter unrest, Celtic have started spending substantial sums on players. The loss of manager Derek McInnes, captain Lawrence Shankland and midfielder Cammy Devlin to Rangers, meanwhile, saw Hearts dismissed in some quarters as a one-season wonder. Despite a difficult start to the new season at Tynecastle, Maguire warns against anyone writing off Hearts investor and fellow Brighton man Tony Bloom just yet.
“We’ve met him on a couple of occasions. And I think both him and Matthew Benham [owner of Brentford] have taken football recruitment to a different level.”
While Day is bullish in his prediction of a Hearts title by 2029, it is not necessarily the outcome he craves. While Maguire chose Kilmarnock as his “Scottish team”, his podcasting sidekick reserves his affections for the team at the foot of Leith Walk.
“I come from a big Irish Catholic family and I have a lot of relatives in Glasgow who support Celtic, but I didn’t want to be a Celtic fan and I couldn’t really choose Rangers or Hearts for various cultural reasons. So I chose Hibs. But from the point of view of Scotland’s broadcast deal, yes, I would love Hearts to win the league.”
Oddly, for a man who speaks with some passion about nothing but money, Maguire appears to neither care for nor covet the stuff. A must-have contact for every journalist in Britain these days, he estimates that he takes 800 media calls a year, but rarely charges a fee for his expertise.
“I have a hobby which is my job,” he explains. “Therefore, I am not especially interested in money.”
Day takes the view that a podcast committed to transparency and the equal distribution of football finance gives up credibility and authenticity if the hosts use the platform to enrich themselves first and foremost.
“We’re all about putting a fan’s perspective, we’re all about transparency,” he says. “We’re all about how money should be shared equally. That’s one of the reasons why Kieran doesn’t want to charge
“He is now the world’s first ever professor of football finance. And you don’t get to be a professor without the subject being important or really, really knowing his stuff. Me? I’m just the warm-up man for an accountant…”
