Welcome to part three in our series this week on The Premier League Owners, the people behind English top-flight clubs. Here, we look at the last surviving homegrown owners and ask how long they can hold on.
You can read the other articles in the series here, and there are more to come this week:
If you search online for who was making global news in 1992, you will find familiar names, including Bill Clinton, Madonna and Mike Tyson.
You might come across stories that seem ancient, but there was plenty going on 32 years ago that could happen next week and nobody would think twice about it.
That is not something you could say about the comings and goings of English football’s owners. When the top 22 teams broke away from the Football League to form the Premier League, 21 were English-owned.
Wimbledon were the exception and their owner was Sam Hammam, a civil engineer from Lebanon who came to London in 1975 so that his wife could have their second child somewhere safe. He initially chose Wimbledon because he liked tennis but two years, later Hammam bought a £40,000 ($50,000 at current exchange rates) stake in the local football team, who had just reached the fourth tier.
Now, just over three decades later, there are only three Premier League clubs that are entirely English-owned, with one more that is majority English-owned, two run by Englishmen with minority stakes and one still owned, for a few weeks at least, by a Monaco-based, Anglo-Iranian whose eight-year spell as custodian was generously supported by his Russian-Uzbek patron.
That last one — Everton — should become the 10th American majority-owned club in the league by Christmas, while three of those other clubs are on the market, to one extent or another. It is entirely possible that if we were doing this series next November, the 1992 equation will have flipped, with just one English flagship in very international waters.
So, let us explore why the Premier League went the same way as Hammam’s favourite tennis tournament (a global competition, staged in England, with international stars on and off the pitch), who is still playing the plucky Brit role and how long they can hold on…
English football most certainly did not start in 1992 but it is a good before/after point in the game’s history.
Tottenham Hotspur were owned by Alan Sugar, who was born in a council house in east London, left school at 16 and sold car aerials out of a van. He called that business Amstrad, as in Alan Michael Sugar Trading. By the mid-1980s, Amstrad was listed on the London Stock Exchange and Sugar had moved on to a full range of consumer electronics. In 1991, he beat media baron and infamous fraudster Robert Maxwell in a takeover battle for Spurs.
Sugar’s time in charge is best remembered for his rows with managers, flashy signings and observation that money goes through clubs like prune juice, “in one end and out the other”. But he was instrumental in making sure Sky Sports got the media rights to the “new” league, which was handy as Amstrad made satellite dishes.
In 2001, he sold a chunk of Spurs to British investment firm ENIC (more on it to come), with the rest of his shares going in the same direction six years later.
Arsenal, Spurs’ great rival, had been owned for decades by Sir Samuel Hill-Wood and Sir Bracewell Smith, two businessmen who became politicians, and their descendants. The club exuded “old money” and Highbury, Arsenal’s art deco stadium, was famed for its marble halls and City of London links.
But, in 1983, a local entrepreneur called David Dein, who once sold fruit and veg at his mother’s market stall, paid Peter Hill-Wood, Sir Samuel’s grandson, £292,000 for 16 per cent of the club.
Dein and Peter Hill-Wood (Mike Egerton – PA Images via Getty Images)
Hill-Wood thought Dein was “crazy”, as investing in football was “dead money”. Allowing for inflation, that initial outlay would be worth just under £1million today — when a sixth of Arsenal will cost you circa £500million.
By 1991, Dein owned 42 per cent of the club and had become a leading figure in the game, one of several chairmen routinely described as “visionaries” for realising television was about to transform the value of their clubs.
But by the time the Premier League arrived, the sugar-trading business that had made him wealthy, London & Overseas, was in the final throes of bankruptcy. With legal bills to pay, Dein had started to sell his Arsenal shares to Danny Fiszman, a friend who made his money in diamonds. Over the next decade, Fiszman’s stake grew to almost 30 per cent and Dein’s shrunk to 14.58 per cent.
Those trades earned Dein £11million but he would bank a lot more when he controversially cashed out in 2007, selling the last of his shares to Russian-Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov and his Anglo-Iranian accountant Farhad Moshiri for £75million (or £123million in today’s money).
Remember, Dein paid the equivalent of £1million for almost the same number of shares 24 years before. Are you starting to see why English football’s native owners sold up?
Usmanov and Moshiri, by the way, would later team up at Everton, having been introduced to their English owners by… Dein. And they only turned their attention to Everton because they were outmanoeuvred at Arsenal by American billionaire Stan Kroenke, the current custodian.
Chelsea, meanwhile, were owned in 1992 by Ken Bates, another self-made man who grew up in a council flat and made a fortune in haulage, dairy farms, concrete and quarries, before becoming the serial owner of football clubs.
Having owned Oldham Athletic in the 1960s, the Londoner bought Wigan Athletic in 1980 but ditched them in 1982 when Chelsea became available for £1. No, that is not a typo. They were languishing in Division Two, heavily in debt and tarnished by hooliganism.
Bates, now 92, spent 21 years at Chelsea, a period that would see him restore the club to the upper reaches of the English game, develop Stamford Bridge, sign dozens of foreign stars and fall out with lots of people. He eventually sold Chelsea to Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich in a deal that valued Chelsea at about £140million, worth nearly £250million today.
Because much of that value was comprised of debt, Bates only made £17million — but that was 30 million times what he paid for the club. He would go on to have spells in charge at Partick Thistle and Leeds United.
Bates paid £1 (yes, £1) for Chelsea in 1982 (Ian Kington/AFP via Getty Images)
In terms of the wider significance of the Abramovich deal, neither Chelsea nor the Premier League were the same again. Everyone in English football is living in a post-Roman world.
Queens Park Rangers, Chelsea’s neighbours, were owned by the Thompson family. A former trader at Smithfield meat market, David Thompson helped his father float the family meat wholesaling business before co-founding Hillsdown Holdings, the British food manufacturer that became Premier Foods and now owns the Mr Kipling, Oxo and Angel Delight brands.
David sold his stake in Hillsdown for £500million in 1989, just after he took control at QPR. His son, Richard, was already club chairman at the ripe old age of 24. They finished fifth in that first Premier League season and then ninth and 11th. But they went down in 1996 and the Thompsons sold the club to English music executive Chris Wright, who merged them with a rugby club, partially floated them and lost millions.
Crystal Palace were run by Ron Noades, who owned several run-of-the-mill golf courses in south-east England. Noades had owned Wimbledon (and considered moving them to Milton Keynes in the late 1970s), and went on to own Brentford. He would eventually sell Brentford to their supporters trust in 2006, who were backed by a “mystery investor” called Matthew Benham. More on him later.
In 1992, Southampton were owned by a group of local businessmen but were a few years out from inviting a financier called Rupert Lowe, a rugby fan with no connection to the city, to engineer a reverse takeover of the club via a company that owned nursing homes. This was so Southampton could go public, quickly and cheaply.
The following decade was eventful. Matthew Le Tissier scored some great goals, the club got a new ground but the parent company went into administration and Southampton were in the third tier by 2009, under foreign owners.
In East Anglia, Ipswich Town were still controlled by the Cobbold family, a local brewing dynasty, while Norwich City were owned by Robert Chase, who ran a family construction business. Both are now American-owned.
In the Midlands, the largest shareholder at Aston Villa was Doug Ellis, who made his fortune in package holidays to Spain and would later, once the English Football Association allowed it, become the first club director to pay himself a salary. He would also float Aston Villa and sell the rest of his shares to American billionaire Randy Lerner in 2006.
Coventry City’s majority owner was an ex-cricketer called Derrick Robins who founded a company that made pre-fabricated sheds. They returned to old-fashioned, local-boy-made-good ownership last year but that followed more than a decade under the control of a London-based hedge fund run by an American property investor.
Nottingham Forest, who finished last in 1993, were owned by 200 local shareholders, a structure that had not changed for more than a century and would not significantly alter until boyhood fan and private-equity firm boss Nigel Doughty rescued the club in 1999. His sudden death in 2012 was a huge loss to Forest, who then passed into the hands of Kuwaiti businessman Fawaz Al Hasawi before Greek billionaire Evangelos Marinakis took over in 2017.
🔴Forever a Red #NFFC
8 years on we will always remember you Nigel ❤️ pic.twitter.com/RgAStVzxtw
— Nottingham Forest (@NFFC) February 4, 2020
Further north, Sheffield United’s largest shareholder, and sponsor, was Arnold Laver, the owner of a timber firm, while Sheffield Wednesday’s main man was Dave Richards, a director of several underwhelming businesses but a consummate football politician. United are now owned by a Saudi prince, Wednesday by the son of a Thai tuna king.
Leeds United were controlled by Leslie Silver, another self-made millionaire from east London who moved to Leeds with his family when his father’s place of work was bombed in World War Two. Silver would later fly bombers in that conflict before returning to Leeds and founding Leyland Paints. He joined Leeds United’s board in 1981, spent millions on the stadium and team, saw them win the last pre-Premier League title and then sold up in 1996. Americans own the club now.
Everton and Liverpool were controlled by different branches of the Moores family, who owned the Littlewoods retail and football pools empire. ‘The pools’ was a hugely popular game that involved making a small, fixed-price bet on which games would finish as score draws. Everton are heading towards American ownership, Liverpool have been there for years.
Oldham, in their only season in the Premier League, were owned by caravan park proprietor Ian Stott, while Manchester City’s largest shareholder was Peter Swales, the owner of a string of hi-fi stores who had started his football ownership career at non-League Altrincham. Swales would lose control of the club in 1994 to Francis Lee, the club’s former star striker who had gone on to make serious money in toilet paper.
If that sounds a bit underwhelming, Manchester United’s chairman was Martin Edwards, whose family’s fortune came from the meat-processing industry.
Edwards was United chairman when they appointed Sir Alex Ferguson (SSPL/Getty Images)
For those keeping score, another wealthy local has recently rescued Oldham, while Manchester City are owned by the vice president of the United Arab Emirates. Manchester United became the first victim of a leveraged buyout in 2005, when American entrepreneur Malcolm Glazer took control. Two decades on, his kids are still reaping the benefits of that financial trick but their exit may be approaching.
That leaves just Blackburn Rovers and Middlesbrough from the Premier League’s first edition and, if you were to try to design what most fans would want in a patron, their owners would tick most boxes.
Having left school at 13, Jack Walker spent the next 40 years building up his family’s scrap metal business. In 1990, he sold it to British Steel for £360million, a record price for a private company. By then, he had already bought a tiny airline that would become Flybe, which, at one point, was Europe’s largest independent regional airline.
Walker’s pride and joy, though, were Blackburn. Having donated steel for a new stand in 1988, he took control in 1991. Promising to put the famous but faded club “back on top”, Walker also said he wanted to make Manchester United look “cheap”.
He was as good as his word. Walker died in 2000 but by the time his family trust sold the club to Indian chicken farmers Venky’s in 2010, the Walkers had poured at least £100million into Rovers.
Was the 1995 Premier League title, the 2002 League Cup and two decades of top-flight football worth it? Jack Walker would probably have said “absolutely” but his children clearly decided to bank the memories and get out of the business of subsidising millionaire footballers.
Walker celebrates Blackburn’s title success in 1995 with Alan Shearer (John Giles – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)
Remarkably, it is a business Middlesbrough owner Steve Gibson has not exited. Now 66, the entrepreneur still owns the club he has supported all his life. A director at 26, he formed a consortium to save the club two years later. In 1993, he bought the shares owned by brewing giant Scottish & Newcastle to take full control.
He is still there, having spent twice as much on Boro as Jack Walker spent on Blackburn, but, according to The Sunday Times Rich List, his fortune is £640milllion.
The Premier League, though, is now a club for multi-billionaires, American investment funds with tens of billions of dollars to deploy and sovereign wealth funds. He is rich but he is not a master of the universe or nation-state.
So, who is still flying the flag?
Brentford’s no-longer secret benefactor Matthew Benham is, in some ways, a throwback to the era described above. But in others — his profession, in particular — the 56-year-old embodies the modern owner.
An Oxford physics graduate, Benham spent a decade working for banks before he was hired by Tony Bloom (more on him very soon) in 2001 to work at Premier Bet, a firm set up to take advantage of flaws that Bloom and others had spotted in the odds Asian bookmakers were offering on football results.
But three years later, Benham and Bloom spectacularly fell out, with the former leaving to set up a rival business, Smartodds, and taking some key staff with him.
Benham, left, with Brentford manager Thomas Frank (Mike Hewitt via Getty Images)
A year after that split, Benham read a newspaper article that said Brentford’s supporters trust was “desperately seeking” support and duly provided it, under the radar.
In 2007, the trust, known as Bees United, was struggling with the debts it had inherited from Noades, so Benham paid them off and gave the trust five years to pay him back, interest-free. By 2009, he was investing £1million a season in exchange for preference shares. By 2012, after a Bees United vote, he took full control.
He was now the proud owner of a third-tier club with a dilapidated ground. Twelve years, two promotions, a stadium move and £100million of Benham’s cash later, Brentford are solid members of the Premier League’s middle class.
But Benham, a private man whose wealth is estimated to be £200million, knows the numbers better than most and has realised Brentford need someone with deeper pockets. So, he has asked Rothschild, a merchant bank, to look for a new mystery investor. Nobody has bitten yet.
The only other Premier League club owned by a single Englishman is Brighton and their owner is… Bloom.
The 54-year-old professional gambler and entrepreneur bought his boyhood club in 2009, when they, too, were a third-tier club in financial difficulty. Fifteen years, two promotions, a stadium move and almost £500million of Bloom’s cash later, Brighton are bidding for a seat at the Premier League’s top table.
Unlike Benham, Bloom does feature in The Sunday Times 2024 Rich List. He is the 233rd richest person in the UK, apparently, worth £716million, while his gift for numbers has helped Brighton gain an advantage in player recruitment. The market usually catches up, but, for the time being, Bloom seems happy to keep spinning the wheel at Brighton.
Bloom bought Brighton in 2009 (Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
Tottenham, the first club to test their worth on the stock market, are also still owned by English investors but their ownership structure is complicated.
British investment firm ENIC owns almost 87 per cent, with the rest shared between 30,000 fans, most of whom will have had the shares in their families for decades.
ENIC’s stake is split 70/30 between the family trust of Joe Lewis, another self-made man from east London, and his protege Daniel Levy. Lewis — 87 and worth more than £5billion, according to The Sunday Times — used to own the stake himself but a combination of his age and recent legal difficulties appear to have persuaded him and his family to conduct some sensible estate management. Meanwhile, Lewis’ children seem to have come to the same conclusion as so many other club chairmen’s children: maybe it is time to do something else with the family fortune.
Whether the 62-year-old Levy, one of the best-paid executives in football, feels the same is a topic of much debate in merger and acquisition circles. Rothschild is testing the market on ENIC’s behalf, so we shall see, but even Levy knows Spurs need a leg up if they are to retain their invites to the big events.
Rothschild is pretty busy, as it is also trying to sell the 25 per cent of West Ham United controlled by a family trust of David Gold, who died in 2023.
Gold, you guessed it, was a self-made man from east London who made a fortune in pornography and sex shops with his brother, Ralph, and their business partner, David Sullivan.
Davids Gold and Sullivan teamed up to buy Birmingham City, who they sold in 2009, and then bought 50 per cent of West Ham in January 2010, with an option to buy more. The deal valued the club at £105million but most of that was comprised of debt run by the previous regime, bankers from Iceland.
Gold and Sullivan did pay £8million to increase their stakes to 30 per cent each four months later but then largely limited their investments in the club to interest-bearing loans, although Sullivan increased his stake to 55 per cent in 2013 via some debt restructuring.
Under their watch, West Ham established themselves in the Premier League and secured a bargain rental agreement when they moved to London’s Olympic Stadium in 2016. In 2017, they sold a 10 per cent stake to American investor J Albert ‘Tripp’ Smith and then, in 2021, they all diluted their stakes by selling 27 per cent of the club to Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky. That last deal valued the club at more than £600million, which shows the value of a good rental agreement for prestige London real estate.
Sullivan remains the biggest shareholder at just under 39 per cent but Kretinsky is waiting in the wings for the Golds to realise they probably are not going to get a better price than whatever he has offered. If that happens, West Ham would move into the Czech-controlled column.
Whether we consider the Moshiri tenure at Everton as English, Iranian, Monegasque or Russian seems moot, as it was an expensive failure and is almost over. Texas-based family firm The Friedkin Group is poised to complete a takeover.
That leaves two other clubs not majority-owned by Englishmen or women but run by English minority shareholders.
The first is Crystal Palace, who, if you were just looking at the register of shareholders, you might think is as American as NASCAR and bad beer. But the agreement between the main shareholders has left chairman Steve Parish, a lifelong fan who helped save the club from bankruptcy in 2010, in charge.
By most standards, Parish made a lot of money when he sold his marketing design and production company in 2011 but, with a net worth estimated at around £50million, the 59-year-old is not even Championship rich these days, which is where his American co-owners David Blitzer, Josh Harris and John Textor come in. Blitzer and Harris are Premier League rich but they seem quite happy to let Parish run the shop.
Parish is a lifelong Palace fan (Alex Davidson/Getty Images)
It is harder to get a handle on Textor’s wealth and he is trying to sell his 45 per cent stake in the club. Despite his best efforts to drum up interest in this business opportunity, Blitzer and Harris remain his most likely buyers. Parish would love that, as it would leave him at the wheel.
There is a similar setup at Manchester United, with Sir Jim Ratcliffe making all the big decisions despite owning only 27.7 per cent of the club, while the ever-popular Glazers own over 40 per cent of the stock between them but still have a clear voting majority thanks to their control of most of the Class A shares that have super-voting powers.
But there are important differences between Parish’s situation at Palace and Ratcliffe’s at United.
One, Ratcliffe was Britain’s richest man last year, when he offered the Glazers £1.3billion for an initial 26 per cent stake in the club he supported as a boy. His wealth fluctuates with the cyclical fortunes of INEOS, the petrochemicals firm he co-owns, but The Sunday Times still have him fourth in this year’s Rich List, worth £23.5billon.
Two, full control over all sporting matters was a condition of the 72-year-old’s investment and the events of this year suggest the Glazers have been happy to let Ratcliffe take the lead on non-sporting matters, too.
And three, most close observers of Ratcliffe’s business career think he is not stopping at the 29 per cent of the club he contractually will reach in January. His deal with the Glazers is complicated, with protections for both parties, but it does map out a road to full control for the Englishman. Which would buck the trend, wouldn’t it?
As for why English owners have become such a protected species, there are dozens of different numbers we could point to but they all add up to the same thing: our rich are no longer wealthy enough to own our country’s most popular trophy assets.
Football finance experts Kieran Maguire and Christina Philippou put it nicely in a piece they co-authored for The Conversation last month when they wrote: “From 1993 to 2018, when the UK economy more than doubled, the total value of Premier League clubs grew 30 times larger.”
The United States economy, particularly the top end of it, did a much better job of keeping pace with football’s voodoo economics.
“At the start of the 2024-25 season, investment groups, consortia or financial speculators of some kind either wholly owned or had significant stakes in 12 of the 20 clubs in the Premier League,” is how The Athletic’s Nick Miller describes it in Who Owns Football?
“Fifteen were owned by people who also held significant stakes in other sports teams. At a push, three — four if you want to throw Ratcliffe in — were owned by people who either supported the clubs or had some form of previous connection with them.
“The most frequent industry from which these owners came was finance, be that investment banking, asset management or hedge funds — things that, if you were to ask the average person on the street to explain the difference between, they might struggle. Other sources of money include real estate, oil, shipping and cars.
“As of early 2024, there were no butchers or paint dealers in charge of a Premier League football club.”
(Top photos: Robin Jones/Getty Images, Joe Giddens/PA Images via Getty Images, Plumb Images/Leicester City FC via Getty Images: design: Eamonn Dalton)
