Blues chief financial officer Tom Ball has described the recent changes to the club’s ownership restructure as “a reshuffling of the pack”.

A fortnight ago, Town announced the formation of a new entity, Portman Holdings LLC, which is now the new majority shareholder in Gamechanger 20, which owns the club, with ORG, which manages funds on behalf of Arizona pension fund PSPRS, Clara Vista Investments and the Three Lions holding broadly equal stakes.

Portman Holdings has a 45 per cent stake in Gamechanger 20, Bright Path Partners investment maintains the 43 per cent it took last year with the rest smaller shareholdings such as Ed Sheeran’s and the Three Lions’ existing holdings both as a group and individually.

The restructure, which we understand values the club at around £400 million not the lower figure reported elsewhere, sees PSPRS, which has been the majority shareholder since the Gamechanger 20 takeover in 2021, diluting its investment and selling some of its shares to other existing shareholding groups.

Ball was asked about the ownership shift at Tuesday’s PLC AGM in the Sir Bobby Robson Suite at Portman Road.

“I think it’s best to refer to it as a reshuffling of the pack, that’s the way we like to look at it,” he said.

“The pension fund has gone from being a 90 per cent-plus holder directly four years ago and gradually over the last four years they have been dialling down and dialling down.

“Running a football club is an expensive business. They were always keen to bring in people alongside them, it was always part of the strategy from the start and having a really deep, diverse pool of capital is really important to us.

“The most important thing around this latest reshuffle is that the people who subscribed were all existing funders.

“Yes, the pension fund is dialling down, but who’s dialling in? Groups who have already invested. It’s a reshuffling, if you like.

“The way that they’re set up, these are all private equity-style funds bringing new people and it gives us greater and greater access to capital.”

Clara Vista, a new name to many fans when the ownership change was announced, has stated its intention to invest in clubs in other leagues and is understood to have been involved in discussions regarding a La Liga side.

Quizzed on this, chairman and CEO Mark Ashton added: “Clara Vista is an investment fund and one of the areas that they are looking at further down the line is whether they take stakes in overseas clubs. But right now they’re just focused on us.

“Where we’re really fortunate is that, not just Clara Vista but a number of our investors, have such good contacts, whether that’s data, whether that’s sports science, whether that’s medical, whether that’s commercial property, you name it, that we can tap into when we want.

“Clara Vista have been with us since the first recap [as part of Bright Path], so for a good 18 months. We know Bob Gold [senior partner at Clara Vista] and the team really well and I think they’ve fallen in love with Ipswich, if I’m honest with you.

“They come to a lot of the games, Bob might be here again on Saturday, he’s probably here more than any of the investors at the moment.

“They’re just really, really good people and allow us to tap into their networks. But they don’t get involved in the day-to-day running of the football department unless we ask them for anything specific advice. And that’s where we’re so fortunate, they’re such good, good people.”

Reflecting further on the ownership, Ashton said: “It’s one of the things which sets us apart from other football clubs where you see overseas investment come in and it go horribly wrong.

“We have an absolutely blue chip set of investors into this football club. From when we set this up on day one, management run the football club, management have to take a plan to the board, the board signs off the plan and then they hold the management, myself, Tom and the management team’s feet to the flames to deliver against that.

“But they give us the power to pivot really quickly. So if we have a transfer window and we need to make a decision, we know what the budget is, we know what we’ve got to spend, they trust us to pivot and do the deal.

“In essence, my challenge at some times with them is to say we can’t do as much as you want because we have Financial Fair Play rules.

“But we have a board, whether it’s Ed Schwarz [from ORG], Sam Simon, the Viola family [Bright Path], whether it’s Berke [Bakay of the Three Lions], whether it’s Brett [Johnson, Three Lions], who push us to be brave and bold every single day.

“And myself, Kieran and the team, when it goes right we get the plaudits and that’s really nice, but actually they deserve so much credit for how they allow us to operate this football club.

“It’s looked at by the football authorities as a blue chip investment when they’re giving examples to people who want to invest in football clubs on how to do it. They look towards Ipswich and I’m very proud of that.”

Meanwhile, Marc Lasry, whose Avenue Capital is one of the partners which makes up the Bright Path investment, has stepped down from the club board having joined in August 2024.

It’s understood Avenue are looking at investments in other clubs and are keen to avoid any potential conflicts of interest.

Photo: TWTD