Jake Zahnow, co-founder of Bright Path Sports, says he sees his organisation’s involvement in Town as a long-term investment.
Bright Path Sports, the first private equity and advisory firm purely dedicated to raising and deploying Native American capital into professional sport, made a £120 million investment in the club in March, taking a stake of around 40 per cent.
Zahnow spoke at Soccerex Miami last month alongside Blues chairman and CEO Mark Ashton, Ed Schwartz from ORG, the US investment firm which manages funds on behalf of the Arizona Public Safety Personnel Retirement System (PSPRS), the club’s majority owner, and Berke Bakay, one of the Three Lions investors, and was interviewed by James Pearce, who has been working as a media consultant to the ownership since the 2021 takeover.
"We learned about the investment through our friend Ed Schwartz of ORG, who represents PSPRS, which is a pension fund out of Arizona, and they were looking to raise capital,” he said.
"This team was in League One and we had the incredible opportunity to go over and attend the promotion game from League One into the Championship. For anyone who loves soccer, it doesn’t matter what level, when you get promoted to the next level, it was truly exciting.
"The weekend of that game, we became hooked. We got to know management and over the following summer, really had an opportunity to meet Mark Ashton and his entire team, and that’s really where we fell in love with the investment.
"He put together an incredible team to run the club and as many people know, Ipswich Town had been suffering in the lower levels for many years. Mark really had a vision to take the team forward.
"We invested in that vision, invested in Mark and we’re proud to say now we’re partners with PSPRS and Mark in this team and during that Mark got the team promoted.”
While it wasn’t difficult to get interest from American potential investors in English football, Town itself didn’t have the profile of some other clubs.
"The English football pyramid is at the top of the world and it was really, frankly, easy to get interest in investing in English football,” he said.
"But Ipswich Town did not have the brand that some other football clubs have in the US. But once we educated our investors on the club, the history, its catchment area, its supporters, its relative lack of competition for support from other types of sports in Suffolk county, it not only turned them on from a financial perspective but also from a fan perspective.
"And, by the way, the performance on the field during the Championship helped enormously. Knock on wood, it was easier than we expected.”
Zahnow admits that promotion to the top flight came sooner than he had anticipated: "Moving the club into the Premier League was always in our plan but it was never in our first year plan, so we had tempered the expectations of all of our investors that this is a long-term investment, we’re in this for the long haul, it’s going to be bumpy, up and down.
"So we set the expectations fairly conservatively and might I say low. Yet we had our fingers crossed the entire time and when we closed in March, we certainly knew there was an opportunity to get promoted, but there was certainly not a guarantee and we had a lot of great competition that we had to face along the way.”
He was at Portman Road for the 2-0 victory over Huddersfield in May which secured Town’s promotion to the Premier League.
"We had to chew our fingernails off but it was absolutely amazing,” he recalled. "I was there with a bunch of our investors. I was honoured and fortunate to take my son with me. Frankly, it was one of the best days of my life. It was amazing.
"And for the fans of Ipswich and certainly Mark and his team, who saw this opportunity three years ago when the team was in League One, it was incredible.”
Zahnow says relegation, an unfamiliar concept to those more familiar with American sport, wouldn’t impact the investment.
"That’s a really interesting question,” he said. "We’ve looked at this as a long-term investment. We are way ahead of plan right now.
"If, God forbid, we get relegated at some point in the future, our commitment to the team will be the same as when we closed in March.
"We believe that Mark and his team are building a foundation that’s not going to keep us up for one year, it’s going to keep us for the long term and we understand that in the short term there are going to be some bumps. That does not dissuade or discourage myself, my partners or our investors.
"We’re in this for the long haul and we every reason to believe that this management team is going to build a long-term success in Suffolk county for Ipswich Town Football Club.”