Blog written by tractorboykent
Published: 8th April 2021 14:09
For a club recently described as Britain’s unhappiest, it may seem odd that Town fans are suddenly awash with optimism now that the deal is done.
Stars and stripes have started to appear in posts and tweets. At times there’s even a sense of inevitability that the rise back to the top starts here.
It’s maybe notable that the more restrained responses have come from the new faces themselves â€" Mike O’Leary emphasising several times that there is an awful lot of work to do.
He’s certainly right. The arrival of a new owner with cash doesn’t automatically mean success; a lot of the same optimism that we are hearing today was expressed 13 years ago when Marcus Evans arrived.
There is no shortage of reasons to be cautious about the principle and practice of foreign ownership. Finding successful examples is much tougher than finding horror stories - the soap opera of Sisu Capital at Coventry, Carsen Yeung at Birmingham, the Venky family at Blackburn, Portmsouth’s parade of incompetence from Gaydamak through Al Fahim to Antonov, Cellino at Leeds, Al Hasawi at Forest, Alkhadi at Macclesfield, Becchertti at Leyton Orient and Duchatelet at Charlton.
None will be welcomed back by the club’s fans and their legacy is a mess that others have had to sort. That’s without mentioning Wigan and Bury.
Americans have certainly taken their place in this too â€" Lerner at Villa, Short at Sunderland and even Liverpool succumbed to Hicks and Gillet Junior who managed to take out loans for which the club was paying £100,000 interest PER DAY (the High Court dubbed them ‘untrustworthy owners’).
Town’s new owners do however look different. For a start there is no opaqueness about their identity or their resources. The status of Game Changer 20 and ORG is open and public. With the source of money being a pension fund we also know that this is a commercial investment requiring a sizeable return that realistically can only come from being in the Premier League. Their investment portfolio is balanced by risk so the fact that ITFC is certainly at the speculative end doesn’t mean that they are not committed â€" they know what they’re getting.
Beyond the money are people who have football experience. Mike O’Leary has been very open that a new CEO will be the day-to-day public face but that he will be very involved too and his experience at West Brom amongst others will be very valuable.
The US contingent have made a success of their football investments over there and Brett Johnson in particular has tasted English football in the five years that he lived here so â€" even from the vantage of Los Angeles â€" he clearly has more than an investors’ eye view of the future.
Both Johnson and O’Leary however have made clear their expectation isn’t promotion this season â€" they have seen as well as we have what’s been happening on the field with this squad. Johnson’s description of their attitude as "a healthy impatience" for success is realistic â€" we all get that, I’m sure.
This deal was no on-the-fly decision either and that’s healthy. O’Leary describes it as ‘the most intricate and complex Mergers and Acquisition deal†that he has ever done in a long career in and out of football. He talked about them taking a year looking at investment options before deciding on Town and then a further 14 months (including a four-month pause for Covid interruptions) concluding the deal. It is fair to say that all parties thought long and hard.
The nature of the deal is also out in the open. £21 million of debt is repaid and the vast majority of the balance waived by Marcus Evans means that the new owners have a pretty good clean slate.
Given the bile and vilification that has been thrown at Marcus Evans, he is owed some significant recognition in my opinion. He has consistently said that he would sell if a buyer was found that would commit long term and fund at a level higher than he could.
This reflects a commitment to avoiding the risk of dodgy owners (like those above) deemed ‘fit and proper to run a club’ before they proved otherwise.
As O’Leary has said, Evans "didn’t need to sell and it would have been easy for a man of his wealth to walk away". We can all bemoan the decline of the last 13 years but we ought to also reflect the genuine effort made by Evans and his role in saving us at the beginning â€" at least as much as in passing on the baton at the end.
It was great to hear (as had been rumoured) that the choice of Paul Cook as manager was shared by the new and the old owners. That’s one area in which we don’t need change â€" let’s let him get stuck in, starting with the overdue clear out of this failed squad.
There will be those who are unhappy that a club once run by the Cobbolds - in their famously inimitable style - is now in the hands of US investors. They might have preferred an alternative such as community ownership. There are some admirable examples of this - Exeter, Newport and Wycombe amongst them â€" but their modest approach likely rules out any realistic ambitions of getting back to the Premier League? If we want that then we need deep pockets.
We also need to be realistic. We aren’t going to go straight from struggling against Rochdale to taking on Liverpool. There are steps. Likely many of them. One of the first will be the appointment of a CEO and O’Leary says we must "make sure that we get the right candidate" â€" how many times has that phrase been used (for managers, player and off-field staff) in the last 13 years. It’s easier said than done.
Whatever happens next, we need unity. The fall and rise of both Sheffield United and Brighton have included spells in the League One wilderness and their renaissance has been driven by togetherness.
When Brighton were playing at a tiny amateur athletics stadium with temporary stands after their crooked owners sold their ground from under them, the fans stayed loyal and together. Sadly at Town we seem to have had more division than unity. Hopefully that will now end.
We have all known times when the people we voted in turned out to be no better than the ones we voted out. Right now that looks very unlikely so we can raise a cautious glass and hopefully focus on what happens on the pitch.