Here's the best and worst of Foreign owners at British footb

Here's the best and worst of foreign owners at Britsh football clubs





Daily Mail


Monday 27th April 2020


Roman Abramovich (Chelsea)

The meeting at the Dorchester Hotel that saw Roman Abramovich purchase Chelsea from Ken Bates for £140million in June 2003 was done and dusted in 20 minutes.

It's doubtful few realised at the time just how the billionaire Russian oligarch - who apparently fell in love with football watching Manchester United's 4-3 win over Real Madrid a few months earlier - would transform the landscape of English football.

At that time, only Chelsea's west London neighbours Fulham were under foreign ownership in the Premier League but Abramovich sparked a clamour to invest from the world's wealthiest.

Chelsea were transformed as well, from a cosmopolitan Cup-winning team unable to sustain a title challenge to serial winners of the top trophies.


They have won five Premier League titles, the Champions League, the Europa League twice, the FA Cup four times and the League Cup three times in the 17 years of Abramovich's reign.

It's been achieved through lavish spending on world class players and the alarmingly regular chopping and changing of managers.

The Russian chooses to keep a low profile, though did attend games at Stamford Bridge from time to time before his visa issues a couple of years back.

Given what Chelsea have accomplished since his arrival, every football fan lives in hope an Abramovich-style figure will come and take over their club.

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Thaksin Shinawatra (Manchester City)

It's been well and truly forgotten in the light of what's happened to Manchester City since but there was giddy excitement when the deposed Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra bought the club for £81.6m in the summer of 2007.

After all, the previous season under manager Stuart Pearce had been dreadful, with the club flirting with relegation before eventually hauling themselves to 14th place.

Then from absolutely nowhere and following failed takeover attempts at Fulham and Liverpool, Thaksin arrived on the scene.

Any moral concerns about his history of human rights violations, brutal drugs war in Thailand and alleged corruption were swiftly forgotten when he laid down £40m for new signings and appointed Sven-Goran Eriksson as manager.


In came the likes of Rolando Bianchi, Geovanni, Vedran Corluka and Elano which, given the context of City prior to this point, were positively exotic and exciting signings.

On the field, City finished ninth, qualified for the UEFA Cup and beat rivals Man United home and away.

But with Thaksin's assets frozen, he was actually financially crippled and in the end departed almost as soon as he'd arrived when Sheikh Mansour and the wealth of Abu Dhabi arrived the following summer.

With hindsight, however, his very brief time in charge gave City fans a tantalising glimpse of what could be and what would actually become reality in the years that followed.

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Venky's (Blackburn Rovers)

For the majority of football fans, Blackburn's ongoing ownership by Indian poultry company Venky's is summed up by two images.

The first is the cringeworthy TV advert that saw David Dunn and his team-mates performing the sign of the cross before tucking in to plates of Venky's chicken in an inexplicably vibrating dressing room.

The other is a real live chicken draped in a Blackburn flag released onto the pitch at Ewood Park in protest and having to be scooped up by Wigan goalkeeper Ali Al-Habsi during the 2012 fixture that confirmed their relegation to the Championship.

To say the relationship between Rovers fans and Venky's after their £43m takeover in 2010 was fractious is a colossal understatement.


Sacking manager Sam Allardyce was their first move, replacing him with Steve Kean in a move that baffled everyone until it emerged Kean's agent Jerome Anderson had advised during Venky's takeover.

Kean was at the helm when Rovers' 11-year stint in the top-flight came to an end in 2012 and they dropped further to League One in 2017, bouncing straight back.

Anuradha Desai and her brothers Balaji and Venkatesh Rao certainly kept a low profile during this dramatic fall from grace for the former Premier League champions.

They have kept the club, now little more than mid-table Championship filler, afloat financially but quite what their ambitions are remains a mystery.

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I remember on holidays when Chelsea were sold.

Getting newspaper in the mornings to read another massive signing.

The start.

Vincent Tan (Cardiff City)

There should be certain golden rules when it comes to taking over a football club. One should be not to tamper with the club's colours when they've been the same for a century.

None of that bothered the Malaysian businessman Vincent Tan, who announced in May 2012 that Cardiff City, the club he'd taken over two years earlier, would change their kit from blue to red.

They'd also change their badge, with its traditional bluebird, to one featuring a prominent Welsh dragon. All in the interests of an 'appeal to international markets' apparently.

Malaysian owner Vincent Tan courted controversy by changing Cardiff's colours to red


Vincent Tan to many diehard Cardiff City fans destroyed the heart and soul of their club.

Once Cardiff fans checked it wasn't April 1, there was understandable outcry but Tan pressed ahead anyway and City's home kit was a 'lucky red' number for three years.

In that time, Cardiff won promotion to the Premier League but there was more controversy when Tan clashed with the club's head of recruitment Iain Moody and then manager Malky Mackay.

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer couldn't keep Cardiff in the top-flight but at least Tan did change the colours back to blue during the 2014-15 season in the interests of 'unity'

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The Srivaddhanaprabha family (Leicester City)

Few owners can claim such a deep emotional bond with a club and their supporters, through glory and tragedy, as the Srivaddhanaprabha family and Leicester City.

Billionaire Thai businessman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, who made his money through duty free shops, took over Leicester when a Championship club in August 2010.

We all know the story, of course. Promoted to the Premier League in 2014, they pulled off a great escape in their first season and then, at odds of 5,000-1, pulled off a miraculous title triumph in 2016.


Vichai's tragic death in a helicopter crash outside Leicester's King Power Stadium in October 2018 brought about an outpouring of grief not just in that city but from the whole football world.

It showed the close bond the family had established with everyone connected with the football club and the general high esteem in which they were held.

With Vichai's son Aiyawatt, now Leicester chairman, has continued the legacy with the Foxes thriving in third place in the Premier League when football shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic.

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Alexandre Gaydamak (Portsmouth)

Businessman Gaydamak, the son of a Russian billionaire, became owner of struggling Portsmouth in 2006 with Milan Mandaric stepping aside.

It appeared that with some investment, exciting times lay in store for Pompey. And, for a time, that was certainly the case - they won the FA Cup in 2008 and finished eighth in the league.

It had followed extensive investment in players - for a club of Portsmouth's size anyway - with the likes of Sol Campbell, Glen Johnson, Jermain Defoe, Peter Crouch and Benjani all on sizeable wages.

But it was all spending facilitated through borrowed money and when Gaydamak - and his father Arcadi - took a hit in the financial crisis, things unravelled very quickly.

By 2010, having sold the club on to Emirati businessman Sulaiman Al-Fahim for £60m, Gaydamak was making demands for £32m he believed he was owed including a £2.5m upfront payment at one stage.

Pompey were in administration by then, sliding out of the Premier League and into a downward spiral that saw a merry-go-round of owners and a plummet to League Two by 2013.

It was a classic case of wealth belonging to an owner, rather than the club, and very quickly disappearing when circumstances changed.

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Sheikh Mansour (Manchester City)

If there was excitement at City when Thaksin took over, it was nothing compared to when Sheikh Mansour and his Abu Dhabi United Group took control a year later.

With a personal wealth approaching £20billion and in a family worth $1trillion, City fans have every reason to expect something transformative.

In the next decade, a direct investment into the club totalling £1.3bn changed City from plucky but generally hopeless to challengers for every major honour going.


The tone was set on the day the takeover was agreed, September 1, 2008, when City went out and spent £32.5m on Real Madrid's Robinho and they've rolled from there.

Four Premier League titles, two FA Cups and five League Cups since have made up for years of chronic underachievement, though the Champions League remains the final frontier.

City have also been transformed off the field with a state-of-the-art training complex and now have sister clubs all around the world.

But this spending has now caught up with City and their Abu Dhabi backers. A two-year ban from European competition - an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport pending - for breaches of Financial Fair Play regulations, could hamper City's progress.

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Eggert Magnusson and Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson (West Ham)

West Ham were deep in the relegation mire when an Icelandic consortium headed by Eggert Magnusson bought the club for £85m back in November 2006.

The main backer was the billionaire financier Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson, the chairman of the Icelandic bank Landsbanki, and the usual promises about debt clearance and transfer funds were made.

Despite having Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano (that's a whole different tale, as we know) in their side, the Hammers languished down the bottom and the new owners soon showed a cold-bloodedness by sacking Alan Pardew for Alan Curbishley.

The Tevez and Mascherano third party ownership row was a distraction all season - and costly to the owners with a £5.5m fine - but they did ultimately win their relegation fight.


Magnusson soon took a back seat and left in December 2007 but the Hammers' league position improved in the following two seasons.

What nobody foresaw was the catastrophic collapse of the Icelandic banking sector, notably Landsbanki, in 2008 which meant investments like football clubs were very much unsustainable for Gudmundsson and Co.

Within another year, the club had been sold on, with a credit crunched Gudmundsson left to lament: 'My fortunes have changed.'

The financial crash meant we would never know whether this Icelandic investment would have truly transformed West Ham.

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What a load of crap written again. VT is without the best owner this club has had it likely to have in the bear future.

If they wanted a bad owner at this club then I'm sure Scam would be at the very top

PMSL he shut Cardiff city AFC the bluebirds down for Two and a half years and you call him the best owner the club ever had LOL.

PMSL he shut Cardiff city AFC the bluebirds down for Two and a half years and you call him the best owner the club ever had LOL.

Dont talk nonsense, the man has kept us afloat for 10 years and written off millions upon millions of pounds. And btw I walked away when it went red so I understand how fans felt but that's the past so let it go

PMSL he shut Cardiff city AFC the bluebirds down for Two and a half years and you call him the best owner the club ever had LOL.

Totally agree, Tan for nearly 3 yrs ripped the heart out of our club and for many like you and me we were broken and will never forgive.

Others can disagree but that’s their view / opinion and they should respect ours as we were more than broken that’s saying it mildly .

My worst years of following Cardiff City in 48 yrs, for me that’s was not Cardiff City and it hurt badly , I would rather keep our identity than Premier League football .


Stripping a club of its identity is beyond and you can’t go lower than that in my eyes, as to many out Club was no longer .

If people want to still hold past mistakes against Vincent Tan, that is up to them. Personally In my view everyone makes mistakes.

Much as I hated the red, that mistake has now been rectified and is in the past as far as I'm concerned.

Would be interesting to find out though, the people who have said they will never forgive Tan for changing the colours, or think he has been a terrible owner, out of all the owners Cardiff have had over the years, who do they think has done a better job overall than Tan, and would they want that person in charge instead of Tan.

If people want to still hold past mistakes against Vincent Tan, that is up to them. Personally In my view everyone makes mistakes.

Much as I hated the red, that mistake has now been rectified and is in the past as far as I'm concerned.

Would be interesting to find out though, the people who have said they will never forgive Tan for changing the colours, or think he has been a terrible owner, out of all the owners Cardiff have had over the years, who do they think has done a better job overall than Tan, and would they want that person in charge instead of Tan.

The media has brought it back up this week and will do in years to come it’s part of history and sadly we can’t erase it.

Also fans will forever talk about it.


And yes I am allowed to have my opinion and yes I will never ever forgive .

As to a better job we are in more debt than we ever have been.

As to enjoyment under owners Bob Grogan European football Rick Wright( Eddie May) and Sam Hammam I loved those years


48 consecutive seasons I have had a season ticket for City and in my opinion they were my best seasons

I loved our rightful identity / colour as well and the badges .


I detest the current badge and Tans previous badge even more.

There my honesty

Yes you are entitled to your opinion Annis, of course you are, and if it is your view that you will never forgive Tan, that is up to you.

I am entitled to my opinion as well, and I have forgiven Tan. You ask people to respect people's views who hate Tan. That's fine, but then you must respect people's views who have forgiven him.

You say that the club is in the most debt it has ever been. That would imply the club is in dire financial straits. I would hardly say that is the case. The days of HMRC constantly threatening to wind us up over unpaid taxes, which was not that long ago are thankfully over. I don't hear stories of the bank forcing us to sell players (Graham Kavanagh springs to mind) to keep afloat. The debt is mostly to one man, Vincent Tan.

I too enjoyed the days of Bob Grogan, Rick Wright, and Sam Hammam apart from the later days with him. Would I want them in charge of the club now, as the world of football, wages etc has changed considerably, and not for the better. Never in a million years would I want them anywhere near.

should have two VOTE threads...one for best owner and one for worst owner...

good chance that he would win both..?