Sports consultant shares West Brom takeover view after £7m revelation by ex-Aston Villa chief
Sports consultant Andrew Mills doesn’t believe there will be many suitors lining up to buy West Brom due to how hard it is to make money in the EFL.
Albion confirmed last month that new funding had been acquired from MSD Holdings to help with business costs while takeover talks continue to be held behind the scenes.
TalkTV journalist Jonny Gould has suggested the issue West Brom face could ultimately be down to the unfairness surrounding TV revenue between the Premier League and the EFL while sharing what ex-Aston Villa CEO Christian Purslow told him while the Villans were in the Championship.
Speaking on TalkTV on Sunday (10 December, 08:12pm), Gould said: “What is it about the imbalance of football finances that really needs to be addressed?
“I remember speaking to Christian Purslow when he was chief executive at Aston Villa, when Villa were in the Championship and Villa were a particularly over-sized Championship club.
“They were on the tele all the time but they only amounted to something like £7million of television revenue whereas the 20th-best club in the Premier League had £100million of television revenue. It just seemed an absolute nonsense.
“We need to deal with that nugget to save the pyramid, don’t we?”
Mills said: “The reality is that the model at its very basic self is broken and essentially, most clubs are reliant on an individual or a group of individuals or loans to sustain their spending, to sustain their business.”
The former Brentford CEO added: “The problem would be, what if there isn’t a [Brentford owner] Matthew Benham or a Tony Bloom at Brighton? What if there isn’t? And as you drop lower and lower down, the reality is there isn’t a great queue of people there lining up to take over the debt, as is the issue now at West Brom.
“It’s not a great business model or a great business to sell unless they look like they’re going to achieve a promotion or achieve something which would change the income.”
This is about Albion
It’s all well and good talking about the financial gulf between the Premier League and the Championship and while that issue is connected to the woes at The Hawthorns, it’s not really what fans are up in arms about.
Our biggest issue is that Guochuan Lai and the Chinese ownership have put nothing into West Brom but have taken away almost everything.
They haven’t done anything unlawful but it feels like they’ve bought a business, crippled it by failing to invest in it, robbed it blind of what it had left and then put everything about it at risk by taking out more loans.
And now, we’ve been hearing takeover rumours for well over a year and we don’t seem like we’re anywhere near to getting new owners.
The loan that was confirmed last month received a mixed reaction because while it wasn’t good news with the club’s debt increasing and The Hawthorns’ ownership coming under more threat, it was good in the sense that it suggested we won’t be forced into a January fire sale and that there’s at least some hope of a takeover being done soon.
But we needed it before January. We needed it before the summer. We needed it years ago.
It’s being dragged out and the protests against the ownership have basically stopped because we’re doing alright in the league.
In other West Brom news, Albion are involved in a perfect advert in support of what Wolves fans protested against.