West Brom: Kieran Maguire uneasy as uncomfortable Guochuan Lai developments laid bare
Football finance expert Kieran Maguire admitted the ongoing developments with West Brom and owner Guochuan Lai make you feel “very uneasy”.
Maguire claimed that he feels a degree of sympathy for those involved at the club who are independent of the owner and trying to do a professional job.
Speaking on The Price of Football podcast Maguire shared that there was talk at one stage of Lai paying dividends to shareholders, who would of course be himself.
“I’m in regular contact with our friend Alistair who set up Action 4 Albion,” he said. “He’s been working his trolley off trying to uphold the profile of what’s happening and shine a light.
“And to be fair I think the club and Ron Gourlay has agreed to some meetings and made some progress, in terms of these particular loans it is within the legal framework, what happened with regards to the loans in 2016.
“So as far as Guochuan Lai is concerned and as far as the frustration fans are concerned you can see that especially given that there have been two deadlines come and gone and been we are presently operating on yeah the money will be paid in early 2023, today is the 19th of February, I think that is quite early in 2023, so it does make you feel uncomfortable, I do feel a degree sympathy for people at the club because they are an independent of the owner and they are trying to do a professional job.
“West Brom on the pitch have been on fire which makes things even more frustrating because they have got a chance of returning to the Premier League which I expect is what the owner is hoping for and then we will see what happens because there was talk at one stage of Guochuan Lai paying dividends to shareholders, who would, of course, be Guochuan Lai and that dividends would be paid to himself, it was a classic case of being paid from one hand to another and it does make you feel very very uneasy.”
Terrible.
No football fan should be left to ponder whether or not their beloved club will exist or not in the next 12-18 months and this is something West Brom fans have been faced with.
And all from the doing of one individual who seems laser-focused on ignoring requests from the club to meet deadlines set.
At this point more needs to be done by the EFL, Premier League and football, in general, to combat owners from simply treating clubs like swing trade stock.
This pressure has evidently started to translate onto the pitch with Carlos Corberan facing his first bit of adversity as the Baggies manager.
It’s hardly surprising, without promotion to the English top flight it’s hard to imagine or paint the picture of where the Albion might be next season.
The playoffs will be the team’s best hope of achieving promotion but even that isn’t currently set in stone, it’s nervy times for the Albion right now for more reasons than one.
In other West Brom News, a defender may never feature for the club again after what happened recently and may even leave for free.