Who will be the next football club chairman to be arrested on charges of money-laundering, do you suppose? Sadly, my idea of opening a book on the potential runners and riders proved to be a step too far for our lawyers, so you’ll have to speculate between yourselves.
Forgive the cynicism for a moment, but one does have to ask the question: why would anyone buy a middle-ranking football club unless it is out of a wish to gratify the ego, or maybe it is a club you supported as a kid and to which you therefore feel a sentimental allegiance, or, finally, as a useful conduit to launder the proceeds of multi-million-pound skag deals and the like? One of the three, then. The one thing you wouldn’t do, if you were a rich businessman, is buy a football club to make more money.
I assume that rich businessmen know this, because as a general rule they are not stupid. And, as befits the berserk economics of professional football, the more successful a club are on the pitch, the bigger their losses in the boardroom. So, Manchester United cap a spectacularly successful season with losses of £83.6m, up by four million quid on their less successful season before. That year, the Double winners Chelsea made a record loss of £40m.
None of the top seven from last season made a profit, not even the spendthrift and intelligently administered Arsenal; below the top seven only four scraped a profit and in each case the profit was, effectively, peanuts. So you are entering a business where success tends to mean you end up really, really in debt, failure means you end up utterly broke and even pootling along somewhere in between means you are more likely than not to end up with crippling losses.
Advertisement
Success means you end up really in debt, failure means you end up utterly broke and pootling along means you end up with crippling losses So if you are a very wealthy foreigner with no great interest in football and no allegiance to any football club, why would you invest in one? What’s in it for you? This was rather my worry when the entertaining Thai politician and crook Thaksin Shinawatra bought Manchester City a few years ago.
I wondered: why’s he done that, then? Perhaps out of philanthropy, because he wishes to bring succour to the good, honest people of Manchester, having admired them from afar for so long, and possessed of fond, if misted, memories of Neil Young, Colin Bell and Mike Summerbee?
This must be what the Premier League reckoned because they deemed him a “fit and proper” person to run a club.
I know that their definition of “fit and proper” differs from yours and mine — they mean simply that the bloke’s got lots of money and hasn’t been in prison for murder recently; it is, I think, a fairly broad definition of the term, one so broad that even Ken Bates can be happily embraced by it.
As it turned out, old Thaksin — now a citizen of Montenegro, incidentally, for reasons that probably have a lot to do with money — was about as fit and proper a person to run a football club as El-Hadji Diouf would be a fit and proper person to run the United Nations.
Advertisement
So, then, Birmingham City: facing a season of struggle in the Championship with enormous debts and a foreign owner who will be appearing in court on, er, money-laundering charges just as they kick off their campaign. Carson Yeung Ka Sing has been charged on five counts of dealing with property “known or believed to represent proceeds of an indictable offence”. The police investigating the case are from the Hong Kong narcotics bureau.
A former hairdresser from Kowloon and casino owner whose associates had run into trouble with the law, and indeed with the Triads, and who is himself up to his neck in debts, was nonetheless also deemed fit and proper to run Birmingham City.
His actual relationship with the Blues is, in any case, shrouded in mystery. The acting chairman is Yeung’s old associate Peter Pannu, a former Hong Kong cop whose job it was to keep an eye on the Triads, and he has said Birmingham City’s finances are “safe” and that there is “nothing for the fans to worry about” and he doesn’t think the charges against his boss are too much of a problem. So, that should put everyone’s mind at rest, then.
Pannu has previously blamed rumours of money problems at St Andrews on media mischief, at the same time as distancing the club from Yeung himself who, Pannu argues, is simply a “bank” from which Birmingham can withdraw lots of money.
Indeed, Yeung has put lots of money into the club — something like £83m over four years. And perhaps there are some who will argue that being a nice man, he will be delighted that he should be regarded simply as a “bank”, and are saddened that he will miss the opening-day fixture at Derby.
Advertisement
And there will be others of us who simply wonder a little at the magnanimity of it all, at the motive. And wonder still further if it is time for the football authorities to be ever so slightly more inquiring about businessmen registered in the Cayman Islands buying football clubs, and perhaps a little more rigorous about what constitutes the term “fit and proper”.