How Championship owners made their money: Chicken vaccines, tinned fish and cookbooks

This is an updated version of an article first published in August 2021.

Fewer local businessmen, more Americans.

That’s the direction of travel when it comes to club ownership in the Championship, the division where clubs often spend beyond their means chasing the glory and riches of the Premier League.

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Once upon a time, many of these clubs were simply owned by a local benefactor, but the division has a very international flavour now with owners from India to Thailand, Saudi Arabia to Malaysia.

Here’s who owns each Championship club and how they made their money…

For the first time in a very long while, there are reasons for fans of the 2011 League Cup champions to feel optimistic.

A takeover by American businessman Tom Wagner has been agreed and the deal is now in the process of final approval by the English Football League — and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

The Asian connection is because, for a long time, Birmingham were owned by Carson Yeung — who was jailed in Hong Kong for money laundering. The club was then sold in 2016 to Trillion Trophy Asia, a Hong Kong sports holding company registered in the Caribbean’s Cayman Islands.

The ownership period has been chaotic, with point deductions and a crumbling stadium.

Some figures of the Trillion Trophy Asia regime have been familiar to Birmingham fans, such as former chief executive Xuandong Ren, but ultimate owner Paul Suen is elusive — barely a photograph of the man exists online. Birmingham supporters’ blog AlMajir, which has extensively scrutinised the club’s ownership, says Suen has the nickname in Hong Kong of “Penny Stocks Shell King” and has run lots of companies in the Chinese metals and minerals sector before diversifying into property and other sectors.

As for new owner Wagner, he co-founded Knighthead Capital Management and used to work at the bank Goldman Sachs. The company through which he is buying the club is a nod to the family in Peaky Blinders, the smash hit TV show set in Small Heath where St Andrews is based — Shelby Companies Limited.

Blackburn Rovers — processed chicken and vaccines… for chickens

Blackburn’s money comes from selling mountains of processed chicken.

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Indian poultry giant Venky’s took over in November 2010 and kicked off one of the most tumultuous ownership sagas English football has ever seen, which resulted in fans releasing a live chicken onto the pitch in protest during a 2012 game against Wigan Athletic and star players including David Dunn munching on legs and wings in a bizarre TV advert.

The Rao family bought the club intending to make a profit and have some fun, but they failed miserably, losing an estimated £190million ($245m) and presiding over the 1994-95 champions’ relegation from the Premier League and, briefly, down into League One.

Their business empire started as a single hatchery in 1971 and is now a globe-spanning corporation, breeding chickens, selling fast food, producing machinery and much more. The company is also big on vaccines. This sounds like a timely business to make big profits, but these products are not to innoculate humans against Covid-19, but rather chickens from Marek’s disease, Newcastle disease and other poultry-related ailments.

The Rao siblings — Anuradha, Venkatesh and Balaji — on the board have not been seen at Ewood Park in years after some humiliating protests, including Anuradha’s husband being hit by a snowball.

In the past few years, the chaos has stabilised somewhat, with instant promotion back to the Championship in 2018 and three successive comfortable mid-table finishes, meaning some fans feel more sympathetic towards a family who have put an estimated £150million-£200million into the Lancashire club over the past decade and came close to the play-offs last season.

That notwithstanding, the Rao family bought the club to improve the Venky’s brand in the UK and beyond, a project that has been an epic failure.

Bristol City — local accountant who became a fund-management billionaire

Stephen Lansdown is one of an increasingly rare breed at the top of English football, a local lad who made lots of money and chose to spend it on local sports teams: City, as well as Bristol’s top rugby union and basketball sides, including the women’s teams.

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Popular among City fans, Lansdown is one of the few billionaires in the Championship. According to the latest edition of the Sunday Times Rich List, he is the UK’s 152nd-most wealthy person, with a net worth of £1.179billion.

With fellow accountant Stephen Hargreaves, he co-founded investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown in 1981. It started by providing information on investment opportunities and tax planning, then rode the wave of privatisations in the late 1980s that saw millions of ordinary Brits become shareholders, then became a major fund manager. It is now the biggest independent financial advisory firm in the UK. Its founders’ big payday came in 2007 when the company floated on the London Stock Exchange.

In April 2009, Lansdown sold 4.7 per cent of the company to fund the rebuild of City’s Ashton Gate stadium. Now living in Guernsey in the Channel Islands, Lansdown does not attend every City match, but his son Jon is club chairman.

Earlier this year, Lansdown said he is talking to a potential buyer. “I’m in no rush, it’s got to be the right people who come in, they’ve got to add value,” he told BBC Radio Bristol. “They’ve got to have the right funds to come in and do it.”

Cardiff City — a fortune that started with a McDonald’s

One owner is one of the best-known in the Championship, with 13 years under his belt at Cardiff, two in the Premier League and three spent in a protracted spat with fans over his decision to change the club’s primary kit colour from blue to red and replace their bluebird crest with a Welsh dragon. That was ultimately reversed in 2015.

Tan has poured a lot of money into the club in the past, but Cardiff only narrowly avoided relegation last season and, in January, fans protested against Tan before a home game against Millwall.

After working as a bank clerk and in insurance, Tan, according to Forbes, secured Malaysia’s first McDonald’s franchise. He then founded Berjaya Corporation, which grew and diversified into a vast conglomerate with investments in property, hotels, telecommunications and many other sectors. By the late-1990s, with Malaysia’s economy booming, the group was raking in massive profits.

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Holdings include Berjaya Hotels and Resorts, Berjaya Times Square shopping mall and indoor theme park, and Sports Toto, a gambling giant founded by the Malaysian government. Familiar with western fast food outlets from his McDonald’s days, Tan’s group also owns the Malaysian franchises for Starbucks, Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Kenny Rogers Roasters — a chicken chain that was big in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s. The group also has big stakes in UMobile, one of Malaysia’s leading mobile operators, the franchises for Borders bookstores and 7-Eleven convenience stores, and countless other brands.

As well as Cardiff, the group also own FK Sarajevo, who play in the Premier League of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Los Angeles FC of Major League Soccer. Tan’s group recently sold KV Kortrijk of the Belgian top flight.

Coventry played 34 consecutive seasons in English football’s top flight between 1967 and 2001. That relegation was followed by two decades of turmoil off the pitch that saw the club playing home games in Northampton and Birmingham because of complex legal spats relating to their own stadium. Their owner, Sisu, was locked in a series of aggressive legal battles with Coventry City Council over the arena, formally known as the Ricoh Arena and now called the Coventry Building Society Arena.

Sisu is an offshore investment fund that has been accused in parliament of “bleeding the club dry” since taking over in 2007, at a time when Coventry were saddled with debt and supposedly just minutes from going into administration.

But everything has changed — in January 2023, local businessman Doug King completed a full takeover of the Midlands club. He is chief executive of Yelo Enterprises which produces animal feed and rapeseed (canola) oil from a headquarters near Coventry.

The new ownership was almost spectacularly successful far quicker than anybody expected, with Coventry making a late surge into the play-offs before losing in the final to Luton Town.

American businessman Kevin Nagle is the new kid on the block when it comes to ownership in the Championship. The owner of American side Sacramento Republic completed his takeover last month, bringing an end to Dean Hoyle’s 13-year spell at the club.

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Nagle started out in finance but made his big money in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries

For the most exciting period in their recent history — back-to-back seasons in the Premier League between 2017 and 2019 — Huddersfield were owned by Dean Hoyle, a local entrepreneur who made his money in the greetings card business. The Yorkshireman and lifelong fan founded the Card Factory chain with his wife in 1997. Thirteen years and hundreds of shops later, the business was sold to a private equity firm for an estimated £350million.

In 2019, Hoyle sold 75 per cent of his stake in Huddersfield to Phil Hodgkinson but returned three years later amid financial difficulties.

The Hoyle era is now over and Huddersfield fans will be hoping that, under Neil Warnock, their season will be more like the 2021-22 season — when they lost the play-off final to Nottingham Forest — rather than the 2022-23 season where they only escaped relegation thanks to an extraordinary late surge after spending much of the season fearing the drop.

Hull City — telly in Turkey

It’s not uncommon to see Turkish flags in relation to Hull City these days, be they flying in the MKM Stadium or in the social media usernames of online fans.

That’s because Turkish media mogul Acun Ilicali bought the East Yorkshire club in January 2022 after months of speculation with fans desperate for the deal to go through, putting an end to the Allam family’s controversial 11 years at the helm.

After starting out as a journalist, Ilicali climbed the pole in the world of Turkish media and built a TV empire. He invested in overseas franchises, such as Deal or No Deal, Fear Factor, Survivor, MasterChef and Dancing With the Stars. All were presented and produced by Ilicali, with the Survivor series now in its 16th season.

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Deal or No Deal was considered the game-changer for Ilicali when it launched in 2007. Despite initially receiving low ratings, he went on to make more than 450 episodes of the show, regularly topping the TV ratings in Turkey.

He owns TV8 and the streaming service Exxen, as well as working as a presenter on the Turkish spin-off of The Voice, the show on which he announced he had bought Hull City on New Year’s Eve 2021.

For a while, he also held a stake in Dutch club Fortuna Sittard and, in June 2023, he purchased a stake in Shelbourne, the League of Ireland club managed by Damien Duff.

Hull’s Turkish flavour extends to the squad, which now features two players with international caps for the country, Dogukan Sinik and Ozan Tufan — who scored against the Czech Republic at Euro 2016.

Ipswich, who came fifth in the Premier League in 2000-01, are back in the Championship after spending some time in League One, meaning the mouthwatering prospect of an East Anglia derby against Norwich City.

The club are an example of the shifting sands when it comes to English football finances. They were owned between 2007 and 2021 by local businessman Marcus Evans, who is in the entertainment and hospitality industry.

But his ownership came under heavy criticism from fans following relegation and sustained poor results. He eventually sold up in April 2021 to U.S. investment group Gamechanger 2020, while retaining a minority stake.

The investment group is ultimately owned by Ohio-based investment group ORG, which oversees a major U.S. pension fund.

This makes Ipswich another English club with American cash and with links to an American sports team — the takeover included three board members of the U.S. club Phoenix Rising: Brett Johnson, Berke Bakay and Mark Detmer.

Leeds United — athletes and investors

Leeds are yet another club with deep ties to an American sports team — or at least that is soon to be the case.

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Last month, 49ers Enterprises reached an agreement in principle with Andrea Radrizanni to buy Leeds, marking the end of the Italian’s six-year reign that saw promotion back to the Premier League for the first time in 16 years and then a disappointing relegation last season after three years in the top flight.

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The U.S. fund has been a shareholder at Leeds since 2018 and has held over 30 per cent since 2020. The organisation also invests in non-sporting ventures, such as renewable technology. There is a clear link to the San Francisco 49ers NFL team, but the team itself is not taking over Leeds United.

It is made up of a diverse group of investors and venture capitalists and the president is Paraag Marathe.

“At the core of its group are a collection of around 11 key investors, the big players in this takeover and the source of a high percentage of the cash needed to buy Leeds,” says The Athletic’s Phil Hay. “Behind them is a larger collection of more minor investors, seen as bringing ‘added value’ to the buy-out. Many of those injections are far smaller, around the six-figure mark.”

These include some athletes, including New Orleans Pelicans basketball player Larry Nance Jr.

Leicester City — duty-free and a family commitment 

Winning the Premier League as rank outsiders in 2016 was followed by tragedy for Leicester City two years later when club owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha was one of five people to die when his helicopter crashed outside the King Power Stadium.

Despite this, the Thai family’s hold on the club is as strong as ever, with Vichai’s son Aiyawatt — known as Khun Top — celebrating with players on the pitch after their 2021 FA Cup win over Chelsea and issuing a statement reasserting his commitment following the club’s surprise relegation at the end of last season.

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Khun Vichai made his money by founding duty-free giant King Power in his native Thailand. The basic principle of duty-free shops is that customers are not required to pay the same taxes as they do in other retail outlets, making products significantly cheaper. Vichai founded a small duty-free shop in Bangkok in 1989 before securing a near-monopoly on the capital’s airport, expanding the business to other airports and developing a giant shopping mall in Bangkok.

The King Power empire secured lucrative deals, such as being awarded the duty-free concession at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport by former Manchester City owner Thaksin Shinawatra, shortly before Thaksin left office as prime minister in 2006. The company was given a royal warrant in 2009, a big deal in a country where the monarchy is deeply revered.

Although duty-free is the company’s main revenue stream, it also has investments in other sectors, such as hotels and aviation. As well as Leicester City, the group also owns OH Leuven in the Belgian top flight.

After narrowly missing out on Champions League qualification in 2020 and 2021, Leicester had to pare back financially because of financial fair play regulations and the Thai owners’ diminishing desire to keep putting money into the club.

But they are sticking around in the Championship and are keen to bounce straight back up, as evidenced by buying proven Premier League talent like Conor Coady and Harry Winks.

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Middlesbrough — transporting liquids, gases and powders around the world

Next time you’re stuck behind a lorry on the motorway, Middlesbrough’s owner may be to blame.

Steve Gibson is a local lad who bought his local club and has made it to the Sunday Times Rich List. Gibson made his money after founding Bulkhaul Limited in 1981, a Teesside firm dedicated to transporting liquids, gases and powders worldwide. The company claims to operate in 150 countries. They build “iso tanks” with a capacity of upwards of 14,000 litres to carry liquid goods across the ocean, including “food quality” substances including wine, spirits, vegetable oils and juices. The company also deals in “dry bulk”, such as chemicals, metals and food, carried on lorries throughout Europe and around the world.

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Gibson also owns Rockliffe Hall, a luxury hotel outside Darlington that sits next to Middlebrough’s training ground. He is one of the Championship’s longest-serving owners, joining as a director in the 1980s and becoming the main owner in the early 1990s. He has overseen the 1995 move from Ayresome Park to the Riverside Stadium, a League Cup triumph in 2004, and a UEFA Cup final appearance two years later.

Middlesbrough were in the Premier League for 11 consecutive seasons up until 2008-09, but have only been back up for one year since then.

They came close last season, finishing fourth and losing in the play-off semi-finals under manager Michael Carrick — who has spoken highly of Gibson’s ownership.

Millwall — cinemas

On July 4, Millwall announced that John Berylson had died at the age of 70 following a “tragic accident”. There was an outpouring of affection from fans of the south east London club who took the American to their hearts in his 17 years of ownership.

American money was rare in the Championship in 2006 when John Berylson bought Millwall. He most recently owned the club via his Chestnut Hill Ventures, a U.S. private equity firm.

Tracing the origins of Berylson’s wealth involves going back to America’s movie theatre boom at the start of the 1920s.

Philip Smith bought the National Theatre in Boston in 1922, made it profitable, and bought more cinemas in the area before riding the boom in drive-in theatres and mall theatres in the 1950s. His son, Richard, grew the company further, reaching over 600 theatres at its peak before it was sold in 2001 to cinema giant AMC.

The Millwall connection is that Berylson is Richard’s son-in-law and served as an executive at the company from 1993.

It remains to be seen what the Berylson family will choose to do following the owner’s tragic death.

Norwich City — cookbooks and a family ethos

Norwich have a sustainable business model, which is admirable in many respects but has made it hard for them to compete in the Premier League. They have been a “yo-yo club” for a long time, but this status is under threat after the club missed out on the Championship play-offs last season.

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The club maintains a family ethos and feels firmly rooted in Norfolk.

One Norwich owner is a genuine UK household name and stands out as being a rare female in the boardroom. Delia Smith, 80, is a TV chef who has released a range of bestselling cookbooks and has been a majority shareholder with her husband Michael Wynn-Jones, a writer and publisher, since the early 2000s.

The couple’s net worth is low even by Championship standards, but they have run the club shrewdly over the years.

Last year, a minority stake in the club was sold to Mark Attanasio, the principal owner of Major League Baseball’s Milwaukee Brewers.

Plymouth Argyle — U.S. investments via Devon

Simon Hallett is an increasingly rare example of a local businessman who has spent his fortune on his boyhood club.

Hallett lived in Plymouth as a child but moved to the U.S. at a young age and started working in finance. He owns 78.81 per cent of the club after selling 20 per cent to Argyle Green LLC, an American investment fund, for £4million in 2022.

Repping the brand in Iceland @Argyle #pafc pic.twitter.com/5JDWKVZgqx

— Simon Hallett 💚 (@SimonHallett) July 3, 2023

He co-founded Harding Loevner, an investment management fund headquartered in New Jersey.

After Plymouth topped League One last season, Hallett will be hoping Argyle have a shot at a first-ever season in the top flight.

Preston North End — horse lover whose money comes from property

Trevor Hemmings was born in London before his family moved to Lancashire when he was five. He then became known as a racehorse owner, with three of them having won the Grand National in the past 16 years.

His main source of family wealth became property, with the vast Northern Trust company owning “over 8m square feet of industrial, trade counter and office parks, together with more than 5,000 acres of land throughout the UK”.  Most of these properties are in the north of England. The company also owns Trust Inns Ltd, which operates hundreds of pubs across the UK, and Classic Lodges Ltd, which owns hotels.

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After his death in 2021, the club stayed in the family, with son Craig now at the helm.

Though Preston have not been one of the league’s big spenders in recent years, Hemmings’ defenders would say the family has put the club on a stable footing, which is more than can be said for many of the teams around them in the table.

Queens Park Rangers — the steel billionaire richer than Abramovich and the airline owner

Sheffield United may be nicknamed the Blades and play in the Steel City, but Queens Park Rangers were the division’s true steel club even before Paul Heckingbottom’s side were promoted.

With their stadium’s prime location in west London, just a mile or two from some of the world’s glitziest postcodes, QPR have attracted some glamorous tycoons in recent years, including Formula 1 bosses Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore. Those two have since sold their stakes, but the club are still part-owned by the richest Championship owner of all — a man even wealthier than former Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich.

Lakshmi Mittal placed sixth in this year’s Sunday Times Rich List, with his net worth estimated at £16billion. Mittal’s father ran a steel company, which Lakshmi worked for before setting up his own business and expanding all over the world. He is chief executive of ArcelorMittal, a steel giant based in Luxembourg that gives its name to the striking red tower in London’s Olympic Park.

In 2018, Mittal’s son-in-law, Amit Bhatia, became QPR chairman, and still holds the position. However, the Mittal family have reduced their stake over the years and now own just a very small portion of the club. The majority shareholder is Ruben Gnanalingam, through his business Total Soccer Growth. He is also chief executive of Westports Malaysia, which runs a major cargo port in that country handling containers and vehicles.

There has long been a strong Malaysian connection at QPR — Tony Fernandes, founder of AirAsia, bought the club in 2011, but sold his final parcel of shares in the club this month.

In 2008, Tony Stewart was approached by local councillors who were looking for investment in cash-strapped Rotherham, whose future looked uncertain after two spells in administration.

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He decided to go all in, becoming the majority shareholder of a club that has become something of a yo-yo side between England’s second and third divisions, narrowly avoiding yet another relegation back to League One last season.

Stewart started out as an apprentice electrician but formed his own company, which became ASD Lighting, a major employer in Rotherham. ASD build all sorts of lighting products from their South Yorkshire warehouse, from streetlights to office lights.

Sheffield Wednesday — tins of fish

Dejphon Chansiri’s ownership of Sheffield Wednesday has rarely been dull — this month, he used the occasion of the unveiling of new manager Xisco Munoz to go on a surreal rant against club legend Carlton Palmer over a perceived slight.

Wednesday have a proud history, with four league titles and three FA Cups and long periods spent in the top flight, including in the 1990s, where they won the League Cup in 1991, finished third in the last pre-Premier League season of 1991-92 and got to both domestic cup finals in 1993. But times have been hard recently, with three separate stints in the third division since the millennium.

When a consortium led by Chansiri took over a then-Championship club in early 2015, he targeted rapid promotion to the Premier League — which has not come to pass, despite getting as close as the second tier’s play-off final at the end of his first full season. The period has been tumultuous, with Wednesday getting a points deduction in 2020 for breaching EFL spending rules, though some of the criticism of the Thai businessman has lessened in recent months after Wednesday won a dramatic play-off final against neighbours Barnsley to reach the Championship.

Chansiri’s family run Thai Union Group, which is the biggest producer of canned tuna in the world. It is headquartered just outside Bangkok in the centre of his home country of Thailand and has offices all over the world.

Southampton’s 11-year stint in the Premier League ended this year when, unusually, all three promoted sides stayed in the Premier League.

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The ownership situation has added to the chaos at St Mary’s in recent years. Sport Republic, a London-based investment firm, completed a takeover of Southampton in January 2022, buying a controlling 80 per cent stake in the club from Chinese businessman Gao Jisheng.

The lead investor is Serbian Dragan Solak, who has repeatedly injected cash into the club in the 18 months since the takeover, which was financed with a loan.

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Like Hull City, a media tycoon is involved in the Southampton ownership, making money by reselling the rights to TV shows and films, then launching a cable TV business in his native country.

He later founded United Group, a major seller of TV rights across eastern Europe.

Stoke City — local online gambling firm that went global

Decades ago, companies used to be associated with their towns almost as closely as football clubs. A rare example of that is Bet365 and Stoke. The company is headquartered in the city and gives its logo to the chests of Stoke’s red-and-white shirts and its name to the club’s stadium.

Peter Coates signed for the club on amateur terms in the 1950s but never made it as a professional, going on to work in catering and setting up some betting shops around the town, becoming wealthy enough to become the majority shareholder at Stoke in the 1980s. He sold up to an Icelandic consortium in 1999, putting an end to an acrimonious period in club history after an unpopular stadium move from the old Victoria Ground, the departure of manager Lou Macari and relegation to the third division.

In 2000, Coates set up a new company after his daughter Denise had a hunch that the internet would transform the world of gambling. She was right and the company exploded, making the Coates multi-millionaires and enabling them to buy the football club back in 2006, after which they became billionaires, setting up offices all over the world.

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The year after the takeover saw promotion, then 10 successive years in the Premier League bankrolled by the Coates family, including an FA Cup final appearance that brought European football in 2011-12 and three successive ninth-place finishes.

The years since relegation in 2017 have been bad for Stoke, with the club flatlining in the Championship due to league rules forbidding the Coates from spending too readily and “parachute payments” from the Premier League having long ended.

While the football has been tough, Stoke’s owners have done well otherwise, sitting in 16th place on the most recent Sunday Times Rich List with a net worth of £8.795billion.

Sunderland — a French industrial family

While most football club owners are old men, Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, who acquired a stake in Sunderland in 2021 and became the majority shareholder a year later, is just 26.

If you recognise the surname it’s because the Louis-Dreyfus family has an illustrious history at the forefront of French industry and commerce. The Louis-Dreyfus Group these days is most involved in agriculture, food processing and transportation and is chaired by Kyril’s mother, Margarita.

His father, who died in 2009, was chief executive of Adidas and Saatchi & Saatchi before becoming majority owner of Marseille for a period.

After much ownership turmoil over the years, the mood is relatively optimistic on Wearside, with Sunderland reaching the Championship play-offs at the first time of asking after four years languishing in League One, pulling huge crowds for a club at that level.

Swansea are a rare club where the fans have a significant stake — Swansea City Supporters Trust owns 21 per cent. However, the majority shareholder is a consortium led by two Americans, Stephen Kaplan and Jason Levien, who took over the club in a £75million deal in July 2016 — two seasons before the Welsh side were relegated from the Premier League.

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Kaplan started as a lawyer before, in 1995, founding Oaktree Capital Management. Before Swansea, Kaplan’s firm also bought a minority stake in the Memphis Grizzlies of the NBA.

Levien started as a lawyer and agent, setting up his own firm representing athletes in various American sports, landing some huge fees from negotiating big NBA contracts, before working as an executive at the league’s Sacramento Kings. He emerged as a sports investor a decade ago as part of a group, which included actor Will Smith, that bought the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers. A year later, he moved into football, becoming a majority owner of DC United of MLS, the Washington-based club he co-chairs with Kaplan.

Some investors in the group made their money in more unorthodox ways compared to other Championship football owners.

Mindy Kaling, an actress who starred in the U.S. version of The Office, owns a small share, alongside USMNT legend Landon Donovan, and U.S. filmmaker Chip Rosenbloom, whose family used to own the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams. Another key figure is Jake Silverstein, son of a U.S. cable TV industry pioneer, who co-owns Houston Dynamo of MLS and invested a significant sum into Swansea last year.

Watford — from power tools to a family empire

The Pozzo family’s stint running Watford has become notorious for rapid managerial turnover.

Giampaolo Pozzo founded Freud, a metalwork and mechanical engineering company, which expanded from northern Italy to the U.S. and China in the 1960s. In 1986, the family bought its first football club, Italian side Udinese. In 2008, the Pozzo’s firm was sold to power tool giant Bosch, giving the clan more time to focus on football.

Giampolo’s son, Gino, was deeply immersed in the family’s football business from a young age, having a role at Udinese as well as Granada in Spain, which the family owned between 2009 and 2016, giving the Pozzos three clubs in major European leagues for a time.

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Although it does not get as much attention as the likes of City Football Group or the Red Bull network, the Pozzos’ empire is a serious border-spanning operation. Gino Pozzo became the sole owner of Watford in 2014, with his father owning Udinese.

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The list of disastrous deals in English football is long, but one very astute financial decision was Jeremy Peace’s sale of West Brom for around £175million in 2016.

Years after the takeover by Chinese businessman Lai Guochuan, the club are now worth considerably less than that and are locked in a state of semi-paralysis, with Lai accused of being an “absentee landlord”. The club is owned by many entities — which has been a puzzle for journalists and fans to piece together — but Lai is listed as the majority shareholder.

He made his money through something called the Palm Eco Town Development Company, which sponsored the club in the 2017-18 season. The design and construction company was founded in 1984 and is listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

Based in the city of Guangzhou, its Chinese language website carries a message “warmly celebrating the anniversary of the Communist Party of China” alongside showcasing various elements of the business — construction in China, planning and design, and “eco-towns”. In 2017, it was reported in the Chinese media that “West Bromwich Albion sports towns” would be built there, but, like so many promises of foreign investment creating new markets for English clubs abroad, this never came to fruition.

Chinese money started gushing into football a few years ago, with rich men following president Xi Jinping’s encouragement to invest in the game at home and abroad. But the bubble rapidly burst and the country now has strict controls on overseas currency movements, making investment tricky.

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Thankfully for West Brom fans, the Lai era may be over soon, with a group that includes Egyptian businessman Mohamed Elkashashy and Manchester-based sports lawyer Chris Farnell in talks to buy a minority stake in West Bromwich Albion that could eventually lead to a full takeover.

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

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