Mark Steed, the chief investment officer of PSPRS, the pension fund which was the driving force behind the 2021 Gamechanger 20 takeover of the club, has thanked fans for their continued support and expressed his hope that Town can continue progressing to the next level and that he will see the Blues competing in Europe.
PSPRS, Arizona’s police and fire service pension fund, owned 90 per cent of the club when the takeover took place, but since then has divested its share in the club.
Through ORG, an investment fund, PSPRS is now one of three parties that owns Portman Holdings LLP, which has a 45 per cent stake in Gamechanger 20. Bright Path Partners, which first invested in March 2024, has 43 per cent with the rest smaller shareholdings such as Ed Sheeran’s.
Steed made a visit to the club earlier in the month, along with Jason Schechterle, the former Arizona police officer who suffered serious burns in a road accident and is now a motivational speaker, and who has spoken to Town players and staff on a number of occasions over the last five years.
"There’s been a lot of changes at Ipswich since our initial investment, which was us and then we appointed ORG and brought in the Three Lions,” Steed told TownTV. "I think that was a relatively simple story and we were effectively the principal shareholder.
"And then there’s been a lot of machinations since, so we just wanted to come out and talk to the supporters and let them know that we’re now down at 10 per cent, but we’re not going away, we have a lot of confidence in what’s going on.
"But also mostly just to say thank you for the continued support, they’ve always been excellent, always been very supportive of the club’s initiatives.
"And I think, too, Jason Schechterle’s out here, speaking with some of the players and some of the staff, and I’ve actually never got to see him in action either.
"So this was a good chance to kill two birds with one stone — see Jason and say thanks to the fans and also just give them a little intel on our involvement since we were there at the beginning.”
A very visible sign of PSPRS’s influence at the club is the ‘running towards adversity’ motto which appears on the inside collars of Town shirts as well as on the wall outside the home dressing room.
"I represent people who put themselves in harm’s way, the police officers and the firefighters,” Steed explained. "And they’re always running towards the dangerous moment that everybody’s running away from. So this ‘running towards adversity’ just became something that we wanted to make Ipswich about.
"And what we meant by that was when things go poorly you don’t blame somebody else, you don’t change expectations, you just meet the problem head on.
"So what we’re really trying to do was change the culture from an expectation that there would be a failure to an expectation that there would be success.
"And we wanted to create an organisation that got more purposeful when things got difficult and not more fearful, and that’s been very important from day one. And I’m really happy to see that that’s sort of taken root here.”
Steed admits it’s caught on to a greater extent than he anticipated, largely due to Schechterle’s involvement.
"It’s really surprised me,” he added. "I think a lot of people tend to try to address culture with language, which is important, you do have to change the way that you speak and I had to make that very deliberate.
"But he went a step further because ultimately your words can only go so far. You’ve got to show people through actions and I also think with a football club, there’s so much turnover.
"Your squad turns over, staff turns over and so it’s important to repeat that message. But it has to be so constant that it remains even when players are in or out or staff are in or out.
"So I’ve been very surprised and I love seeing the writing around the dressing room and on the door. That’s pretty satisfying.”
Although knowing he had family in England at the time of the takeover, Steed has more recently discovered he has a close connection with Ipswich.
"This I wasn’t expecting,” he continued. "I like doing a lot of family research and genealogy and about a year and a half after we made the acquisition, I found out that my great-grandparents were from Ipswich and their parents were from Ipswich after they came over from France.
"I think by that point in the transaction, I understood that football clubs are about generation upon generation, participating and supporting a club. It was really strange to see that my own ancestors had a connection to the club.
"I’m not so mystical to think that there was some sort of ancestral motivation that put Ipswich Town through my investment committee, but it did make the experience a lot more meaningful.
"As best I could tell, my great grandfather was a music teacher. That’s about all I’ve been able to figure out. This would have been mid-19th century.”
Steed says he’s learnt from the investment in Town, almost certainly one of the most successful of his career, the club which Marcus Evans sold to Gamechanger for £40 million having been valued at around £400 million when the restructuring took place at the end of last year.
"I think there’s two lessons,” he said. "One of them is a very classic investment lesson, which is that sometimes your good processes can have bad outcomes and bad processes can have good outcomes - you can have a very sensible signing, but then that player can get injured, you can control the match for 75 per cent of the time, you can have 20 shots on goal and you can lose 1-0. We’ve all we’ve all seen that.
"And so I think it’s really important to step back and visit the process, and what the circumstances were under which you made the decision. And football is very good at reminding you about the presence of randomness.
"But I think the other one is that I learned is the power of doing nothing sometimes. I think investors or owners of clubs have a bit of an inflated sense of themselves just generally, I’m convinced that that’s even more true in the world of football.
"And so it’s really easy for boards and owners to ask for meeting after meeting reports, phone calls because sometimes activity looks like leadership.
"But if you hire the right people and the standards are clear, you don’t have to do that.
"So I think once you’re clear about the goals of the organisation and you see people that are truly exceptional that are executing, you have to resist the urge to just grab the steering column from them every 20 minutes. And that was another lesson. Sometimes it’s just best to let things just keep going.”
Reflecting further, he added: "And there’s a lot of luck, too. We were fortunate to convince [chairman and CEO] Mark [Ashton] to come here from Bristol City.
"And when he had to change managers, I think we were extremely fortunate again to have Kieran McKenna come in and to do as well as he did. I don’t think a lot of people would have thought that.
"We wanted to make sure that it had as much attention as possible from us. When we purchased Ipswich, our [PSPRS’s] portfolio was about $10 billion, it’s now $27 billion, so trying to solve that, giving the club proper attention, but also acknowledging that I’ve got other investments to worry about, that was important.
"So we we appointed Ed Schwartz [from ORG] to represent us on the board, who’s done an excellent job, and the Three Lions [Brett Johnson, Berke Bakay and Mark Detmer], of course, originally, who brought us effectively the transaction, have been excellent, and now you’ve got other other investors that have also contributed.
"So you really do need partners that see things the same way you do. And it’s great when you can get aligned and the club’s in a better place, and that equates to increased valuation.
"But at the end of the day, if you want to create something enduring, you need that alignment of interest from the very, very top all the way down.”
Quizzed on what he’s most proud of, Steed said: "I think the promotions are the easy answer, but I would probably say just that the club found its ambition again.
"I think it’s one thing to just have success on some metrics, but to be able to try to convince people that from hoping something good can happen to believing that you actually can produce something good and find its ambition, I think that’s what I’m most proud of.
"When I walk around, I have conversations with staff or players and you feel that ambition. And I think that’s the thing I’m most proud of, because that represents more of a mental shift and that’s ultimately harder.
"I see a club that’s much stronger than it was when we invested. But hopefully, for me, it’s a club where the story is not finished. If people are talking about our time here 20 years from now as the golden years, I would be disappointed.
"The point of us allowing other investors to increase their stake is to take the club to the next level and to extend that success. So I’m looking forward to watching Ipswich compete in Europe.
"But ultimately, what I see is an organisation that’s strong, that finally has belief in itself. And I think that’s great.”