It’s guest blog time again and first through the door this week, offering a few thoughts on the latest Attanasio news, is regular commenter and friend of MyFootballWriter, Andrew Delf.
All yours, Delfie
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Following Monday’s announcement of a General Meeting for shareholders on October 2, 2023, to ratify the second phase of the Attanasios’ involvement in Norwich City, I’d like to offer a few thoughts of my own on what this means and where it leaves our club.
To start with, I should declare an interest. I own four ordinary shares, which I purchased for the princely sum of one hundred pounds and therefore I will have a vote.
At this point in time I haven’t yet seen the paperwork, so can only base my opinions on what I have seen and heard.
So… six points that I believe are worth making, in no particular order:
1) I firmly believe that Michael Wynn-Jones and Delia Smith have only ever wanted to do what they believe is best for our football club.
2) The world of football finance has changed beyond all recognition over the last decade and Michael and Delia have no need or desire to deal in these shark-infested waters.
3) As both are now octogenarians, they have recognised the need to try and leave the club in the most secure, safest and best hands that they possibly can.
4) It seems to be the case that they have foregone significant personal financial gain in order to try and benefit the club in the longer term.
5) The Attanasio group makes all the right noises, say the right things and, on the face of it, seem to be okay.
6) Plus, they are not human rights abusers, chancers from the Far East (or anywhere) or oligarchs who have recently, or in the recent past, been encouraged to take over other clubs in this country.
So, in conclusion, and based on all of the above, I will cast my vote in favour of the waiver.
Do I expect a different strategy to finance our club from the self-sustaining model? Yes, I do.
Do I expect things to change for the better or worse? I don’t have a crystal ball but, yes, I expect the club to progress.
Finally, what remains really important to me is that I can continue to watch football at Norwich City for as long as I wish to. I certainly cannot do that if the club is put at risk and then goes out of business.
Sensible, thoughtful to the point.
No if or buts , like the writer I wish to see City, prosper both on and off the pitch. As the EDP writer mentioned we need to be perennial not an annual yo – yo.
The Premier League is the dream , but that conversation is just around the corner.
As I a fellow shareholder (4) I feel much the same as you. Football today is a business and we need to move with the times and that involves change. Delia and Michael have done their bit – time to move on.
From what I have read, MA’s Norfolk group run a very tight financial ship at the Brewers baseball club. I too am a minority, tiny minority shareholder with 8. Still awaiting my package of papers in the post.
Going on the Brewers’ experience I expect little change in financial input. MA is richer than D&M, but against other EPL and even EFL owners he is just a better class of pauper.
Hi.
First of all, I’m not a share holder
In my view, Smith and Jones purchased the club knowing what they were going into and even back then they were out of their depth moneywise, and could see that the gap in finances were only going to get wider. Also, in their time of ownership and self-funding, the question comes… how many times has investment been turned away without due diligence being done on those prospective investors?
Something else… how many times has the club been near to bankruptcy and had to go cap in hand to the bank?
As for the Attanasio Norfolk Group making all the right sounds, sadly I’ve not heard one soundbite since the share issue was announced unless you count a senior employee and board member saying they are fully on board.
For me, it’s 26 years of wasted opportunities to take the club forward with, at the very least, ground improvements and all we heard is that it’s being looked at. Must be the same people who are looking at dualling the Acle straight since the 60s. All that money wasted and nothing to show for it.
Now the club are in a three-year holding zone with no real majority shareholders, except Smith and Jones have a nephew who could swing votes in their favour.
Too little too late (for me) but I did enjoy your six-point read.
Hi Alex.
Yes, things may have been better and certainly opportunities will have been missed. However in the 26 years I have seen promotions, relegations, trips to Wembley, some fabulous exciting football and also some pretty dire stuff, along with some ground improvements and supporter facilities improvements.
Would I swap that for the experience that the Ipswich supporters endured for billionaire Marcus Evans tenure? No, I wouldn’t.
You mention due diligence and I would suggest that is the reason we haven’t been taken over by Marcus Evans or owners like the Venkys at Blackburn.
Hi Andrew,
Yes, there have been some good memories and I go back to 1959 and the cup run (when I was 9-years-old).
In terms of praising what has been achieved in 26 years, yes, I do agree there have been things to cheer about in that time but it’s the wasted opportunities to get to the next step that upsets me.
Twenty million pounds was quoted about 15 years ago to increase the City Stand, well Liverpool have just extended over their Anfield Road End at a cost of £80m.
So a redevelopment of the City Stand with all new changing rooms and everything else will be £100m and similar for the South Stand.
I just think that all the missed opportunities makes City the poor relation in this league.
Ipswich had Evans. When he sold the club he is supposed to have written off every penny he lent the club and he invested his own cash but realised he tried his best and got out.
Smith and Jones sadly have hung on far too long (in my opinion) and I’ll probably get some criticism of having that opinion, but waiting another three years just seems to defy logic and leaves the club in no-man’s land again.
Be careful what you wish for. As the writer points out football finances are shark infested waters. Many clubs are sailing very close to the wind, & I fear if one goes under others will follow. There may come a time when Global Media Moguls tire of the PL in favour of European & possibly a Saudi football circus . If that happens we may well be thanking our lucky stars that NCFC didn’t sell its soul & that Delia ‘s reign was a blessing. Foootball Clubs (at any level) are an integral part of community life, but sadly is being hijacked by egocentric & often dubious £ billionaires for a personal game of Monopoly, accumulating celebrity players, media coverage & the spotlight at a huge cost to OUR game
It’s probably a good deal based on the fact it’s difficult to see where football is going to end up at the moment.
I suspect the Premier League will soon become a closed shop based on the US models, so MA might prove to be an ideal owner.
I certainly agree with AlexB that by and large, 26 years have been wasted.
I completely agree with the content of the article but not with @AlexB who seems to be one of those who forget the mess that the club was in 26 years ago and what has been achieved in the interim. I well recall the European season but that was never going to be sustainable with City’s demographic.
The main criticism of D&M seems to be that they were and are not rich enough and did not then have the benefit of 20-20 hindsight that is now used to so roundly criticise them.
My criticism is that for 26 years she has said no-one wanted to invest yet her Financial Director stated that numerous offers had been put forward to the club and the owners had turned them down.
We are told City has a large waiting list for season tickets, so why hasn’t the club built on the capacity to increase revenue?
As I say, opinions are just that and we all have them.
No one suitable wanted to invest. Due diligence was applied and the potential investors failed the test, as was also suggested above by the author of the article.
As for £20M 20-odd years ago, if we take the usual rule of thumb that the value of money halves every seven years an £80M to £100M starts to look like pretty good value, add in the current inflated construction costs and it looks better yet. However, what this misses is that the club simply did not have the money to invest at that time and added ST revenue would take a considerable period of time to recoup the investment.
Clearly, we continue to diverge (disagree) in our opinions.
You may disagree, but you both do so with civility and grace … just how we like on on MFW.
Thank you.
Hard at times, Gary 😁😁😁
Hard indeed and not only for one side!!!
The known potential investors were Fernandez, who has achieved nothing at QPR, and di Stefano, a convicted fraudster, so I’m glad the due diligence weeded those two out, and who knows how many of a similar ilke went by the wayside too?
I wouldn’t trade our last 26 years with our neighbours down the A140.
Like Andrew, I have four shares, and my vote will go to supporting the waiver. I didn’t get the shares to make a profit, or to benefit in any other way, unlike a gentleman from Essex (for the benefit of those that also read the Pink’un forum). Anybody who buys shares in any company should be aware that it’s a risk, with no guarantees.
i’ve shouldered my arms on this particular topic for the next two and a half years so I’ll just make a couple of observations:
Firstly I only had two or four [?] shares, but decided that for all the good they were to me personally I would give them to the Canaries Trust who would know better than I what to do with them!
Secondly, a nice short and to the point article Andy – I enjoyed reading it.
I am not a share holder and my understanding of this may be incorrect, but here’s my view based on my limited understanding.
The rumbling we’ve heard out of the club (and others ‘in the know’) here is this has taken so long because ‘we’re a PLC and the deal needs scrutiny’. That appears baloney. As it has been presented, they’ve been negotiating an agreement, an exception, with the powers-that-be, to side-step the usual industry standards. That being, if someone takes on more than 30% of the shares they must offer the same rate to all shareholders.
We’re told (and I don’t believe much of what I’m told anymore), that neither Delia, nor the Attanasios, want more than 40% share. So they don’t want to offer you, the fans, the option of cashing in on an opportunity to earn some cash during tight times.
So once again, we’re told, “in the best interest of the club”, that shareholders should allow the dilution of their share, not take up the option of selling (as legally allowed), and that at some unknown time later on the Attanasios may become majority shareholders.
What is unclear to me, is whether this deal of share purchases will ever be offered to shareholders again (this information may be in the documentation).
This seems like an incredibly long winded, expensive, and non-fan centric way of ensuring Delia remains central to the club.
Virtually every other football club is a private limited company, indeed, NCFC were the same until 2002, when, following the collapse of ITV Digital, we became a Public Limited Company.
This does mean additional protection to shareholders, in the form of the Takeover code, which requires a greater level of oversight than would otherwise be the case with a private limited company.
The requirement to make an offer to other minority shareholders is enshrined within this protection, although the Rule 9 waiver provisions can be applied in certain limited circumstances, but only if minority shareholders are given the opportunity to vote on it. This is exactly where we are at the moment.
Cheers for that, Gaz.
So, daft question… what would happen (I’m sure it won’t btw) if the minority shareholders didn’t vote to accept the Rule 9 waiver?
The Club would have to come up with an alternative solution, as these unsecured loans are still overdue for repayment.
The are some unsecurred loans whose repayment is overdue??
How’ve I managed to miss this? 🙂
This, presumambly, is in addition to the £66 million they borrowed against two-year’s worth of parachute payments?
The ownership debate seems to me to come down to this. When the money eventually falls out of football, which it must, surely, though possibly/probably not in our life time, do we want to say we opted out of the madness? Or will we be glad if we’ve joined in? Or ashamed, or sad we missed it?
For the record I’m not suggesting MA is the new Golden Goose. Far from it.
When everyone runs screaming for the hills, in apparent states of madness, is one wise to hang back? (There’s an old story of a running man in Italy a whole village pointlessly joined) It’s a risky conundrum. I completely respect anyone who is of the opinion we should find new investment and ‘have a go’. Life is short. I myself am seemingly impossible to please as the money thrown around in the ‘window’ made me sick, but I do want to watch us compete with the best, on the pitch. The last prem season though may have shown you have to do both (spend and play), and perhaps noble self-funding*TM cannot work with the big guns. A pity.
I don’t know if I ever want to see us ‘scrambling around’ on transfer deadline day for a £40m striker to ‘try’ and keep us up. Not for me thanks. Though fair play to those who do.
I like your article Andy, and personally agree with your points
(prob should just have said that)
Selling a business is much the same as selling a property. You need three things, a willing buyer, a willing seller and a realistic price.
Contrary to the view of some, there is no obligation to sell an asset, unless you actually want to.
However, there’s one fundamental difference, a football club is a community asset, but it’s probably much easier for an outsider to say that an owner should sell, especially when it’s not their decision to make. Delia and Michael clearly care passionately about the club, some would say too much so, but that doesn’t mean that makes them unfit or improper owners, as frustrating as that may be to outsiders.
Hi Gary F
Everything in life has a time span – the art is to know when yours has expired.
I had a season ticket late 1960s until 1981 and was spending more that I could realistically afford travelling from South Yorkshire for home games, and took the decision to give it to a very good friend who lives in Gt Yarmouth.
With all the rumours of bankruptcy and the club going cap in hand to the bank to bail them out, surely when it happened the first time the club’s financial advisors should have suggested self-finacing wasn’t working and outside investment was required.
It didn’t help with announcements that no-one is interested in investing in Norwich and then being told numerous offers have been turned down, or that we will do it differently to other clubs whose methods were being successful.
We are now going to be in a three-year transition. Please tell me what other business gets a major investor in and then holds their hand for that long while learning the ropes. He already runs a sport franchise and other American investors take the bull by the horns and run with what they know.
This has more of a feeling that our present owners want the best of both worlds – putting no money into the club but controlling how their equal partners spend theirs.
Plus she has her nephew to help swing decisions at boardroom level her way.
I’m unsure what you’re advocating here? What they’re trying to do is run it properly as a business. That’s not without its challenges, simple because of the huge revenue differentials between the Premier League and the EFL, plus the soft FFP regulations. We either continue down this path or “follow the herd” and abandon sound business practices altogether.
I was saying that she has know for a very long time that they couldn’t afford to own a football club and knowing that she should have sourced investors earlier on or sold to someone that could have taken the club further.
Due diligence is all well and good but it depends on how far you – dig how many clubs have thought they got the best investment into the club only for it to go poorly. Like anything it’s a gamble and their gamble hasn’t paid off.
You referencing overdue unsecured loans and sound business practices really don’t go together very well.
AlexB, “cannot afford to own a football club”, plays into the narrative, common throughout the game, that ownership should be benchmarked upon how much money owners put in, rather than how much money the business is capable of generating itself.
Given that the club is in a huge hole despite years of Premier League finance, parachute payments, huge profits from player trading and sold out stadium, one might be inclined to believe that the club can’t generate nearly enough money.
These regulations are in place to ensure there is no ‘back door’ fix by directors to pass over control of an organisation without going through the proper process.
If mr Attanasio and colleagues wish to take over the club then let’s have an open bidding process to ensure we get the best for the club.
Whatever our opinions about the current regime and their failure to establish the club in the top flight we must be careful to replace them in the proper manner. Delia has been the custodian of the club and has contributed greatly to its development over the years. However, time moves on and it would be far better for her to step aside and hand over complete control rather than a cobbled up agreement with our American friends.
I have always believed in fan participation on a much greater scale than is the norm.
I do wonder how many years we will have to wait for some sort of vision for the future from the Attanasios or will it be another 30 years of be careful what you wish for (once again sincerest apologies to Mr Chase) having a team that threatens to establish itself in the Premier league for more than the blink of an eye once every quarter century probably too much to expect I guess. Owning a grand 50 shares gives me no more insight into the intentions of our American suitors than anyone else. I honestly don’t know what I want, not another embarrassment of a promotion without a spud gun and a squad full of 30 somethings for sure, maybe annual failure in the play offs is still aiming too high. Maybe we should have singed George Santayana when we had the chance.
I am not quite sure that signing a Spanish-American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist (George Santayana) would have done the club much good. 🙂
To be fair to Kurt, I believe that’s the joke.
https://metro.co.uk/2016/01/13/will-norwich-city-sign-anyone-who-is-not-a-dead-philosopher-this-transfer-window-5619828/
Ha, I completely missed that at the time!
Nice one, Kurt!
Delfi,
Some excellent points and, if I may, expand upon or add one or two of my own.
1.) 20-20 hindsight or woulda, coulda, shoulda. Yes, much has happened over the last 26 years…opportunities taken, missed, ignored – no business can ever be called perfect. But, the club is still in business, providing a part of the foundation that is Norwich as a city and Norfolk as a county, so there is positive to be drawn from that. So, move on and look forward, don’t repeat the same mistakes and adjust to the business changes that are currently happening and will happen in the future.
2.) While writing this from sunny San Diego, and having the pleasure of seeing the mess that the owner of the LA Dodgers has brought upon Chelsea (actually kind of enjoying it), the MA group is bringing an business knowledge, admittedly American, to NC along with, given the years long length of the acquisition process, a real, dare I say, sensitivity to running a small market professional sports business. This is a good thing -minimizing the “this is the way we do things in A-mer-ca’ and understanding that this is the way football works and how it works with the uniqueness that’s NC. I can conceptualize what would happen if NC were bought by a Far East company, or had petro-dollars pumped in because it is a business and if things go badly, they could really go south if funds are pulled.
3.) Expectations. Honestly, having read years of comments about NC, I’m still not sure of what people really want. Prem football? Attractive football? Anyone but D&M? What? What appears to be on the horizon is a company that understands the challenges of small market, professional sports, and the challenges with competing with the big boys -sounds like NC and as a ‘profile’, one I’m comfortable with. The reality is that if NC had an owner who pushed the club over the edge completely, there would be no white knight riding in to save the club. The market, Norfolk, is too small and financially it would not make sense for an investor to get the club back on it’s feet.
4.) Lastly, I’m actually pleased with recruitment, and the side we have. South American and small market (i.e. cheaper players) scouting seems to be working. There was an article the other day posing the question that with all of the money being spent by the Saudi’s, how exposed are Prem clubs, and other EU clubs, if they decide not to pay the fees, or want to renegotiate. Our next cup opponent, Fulham, was one of the clubs mentioned. Not sure we want to be in that boat. Maybe safety first, removing/minimizing risk and managing what risk remains, isn’t such a bad approach after all.
I would, however, ask the question that if we did achieve promotion back to the Prem, what are MA’s aspirations and strategies, and what will his financial support look like? Or will it be a hat-trick of relegations back to the Championship?
My two pence…(or cents)
Hi Ennis+pipe,
thanks for your kind words. As you so rightly point out the past can never be relived so learn from the past mistakes and the good things that came along and don’t repeat the bad and develop the good. The Attanasio group seem level headed and astute with access to funding streams that most clubs can only dream of. It seems to me without this waiver going through Norwich City could be in acute trouble as I believe the funding from the Attanasios would be withdrawn. After all who wants to own 20% of an ailing business. If that happens then you really will see the worst of the financial sharks circling ready to rape and pillage our club.