Chairman Gao Has Left the Building

 

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When I first started writing this blog in 2009, it was partly as a reaction against all the boardroom shenanigans that had been going on involving Rupert Lowe, which culminated in the club nearly going out of business. I was sick and tired of talking about boardroom level activity, rather than what was actually happening on the football pitch. Mind you, what was happening on the pitch was just as bad, as we got deducted 10 points and relegated to League 1. The boardroom had suddenly become the primary focus of Southampton FC and what happened on the pitch was almost secondary. It wasn’t really what I signed up for in the first place.

Consequently, I’ve always tried to steer clear of talking too much about what goes on upstairs but today is a day when we can’t avoid it. After four years of, what you can only call, stagnation under Chairman Gao, he has sold his 80% shareholding to Sport Republic, a company owned by two Danes, Rasmus Ankersen and Henrik Kraft, which is an investment vehicle for Serbian media mogul Dragan Solak.  Solak's United Sports Group were Premier League rights holders in Serbia until recently, so he'll have been aware of Southampton from that and also, the Premier League would be aware of him which must have smoothed over the Fit and Proper Persons Ownership Test but the less said about that the better.

The intention of Sport Republic is to use Southampton as the start of building a multi-club empire along the lines of the City Group which of course is dominated by Manchester City. That is not anything for us as fans to worry too much about as yet but you can’t accuse the new owners of lacking ambition.  Ankersen has come in from Brentford who have a link-up with Midtjylland in Denmark (remember them?).

It’s very easy to get carried away when the club is taken over and assume that everything is now going to be rosy but there has to be an element of caution. Ownerships can only be judged over time. There were many who were excited when Chairman Gao came in with “untold riches from China” but as we know, things can change very quickly and they did when the Chinese government refused to let him invest any money overseas within a few months of taking us over.

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Even when the Liebherr’s took us over, there was of course a change after a year when Marcus Liebherr passed away, which set in motion the series of events that ultimately lead to Chairman Gao arriving.

What I like about this takeover is that it appears that they are adopting a light touch approach in that they recognise which parts of the club are working well and want to add to that rather than ripping up the whole thing and starting again. As a result, it appears that Ralph Hasenhuttl, Martin Semmens and Toby Steele will all still be in place and doing their current jobs but they will be joined on the board by Ankersen and Kraft. How much involvement they have on a day-to-day basis will of course play out over time but the noises coming from Martin Semmens indicate he is 100% happy with the way things have gone, concluding his two-year search for a new buyer. The other massive thing of course is that it appears the club has been purchased with equity, rather than some sort of leveraged buy-out against the club (Burnley’s recent takeover) or by something similar to the infamous reverse takeover (small company taking over big company) which we had in the 90s when Rupert Lowe swung into our lives.  More optimism can be taken from the fact that it was Martin Semmens brokering the deal and that Ralph Kruger had nothing to do with it.

Part of the problem when Gao came in was that there was just him and his daughter and no one else and we hardly heard from either, ever since.  Rasmus Ankersen has a track record having been involved with Brentford for the last six years and in that time, Brentford have gone from being a middling Championship club who were always more likely to go down than up, to what they are now, above us in the Premier League. Kraft has vast experience of investing on Sports and Technology and as long as the personalities involved can all get along, the new guys experience makes this a win-win situation.

The initial comments from the new owners are very encouraging, as are the comments from Martin Semmens.  Dragan Solak spoke of a long-term investment and praised the existing set up of the club. Henrik Kraft talked of Sport Republic being an engaged owner and of evolution rather than revolution. With those promising statements alone, we have already had as much if not more than what we had out of the Gao regime.

So, I look upon this taken over as a chance for the club to move forward and get out of the holding pattern that we have been in for the last four years. I don’t expect it bound forward at 100 miles an hour because when you try and do that you invariably end up crashing into a wall or falling over a cliff anyway.  I’m sure that many would prefer an owner that came in and threw money about but that’s not for me and has bever been what Southampton are about.  

I can't be any more than cautiously optimistic at the moment.  I have some excitement and anticipation, which comes from the reasons outlined above but that's tempered by the healthy dose of cynicism, built up through supporting Saints for as long as I have. With the transfer window now being open, I would anticipate that there is now more of a chance of us bringing in a player this month but don’t expect us to suddenly be punting £50 million on someone.  With the new owners being big on Data Analytics, it'll be interesting to see if the "Moneyball" principles of recruitment that have served Brentford well, are implemented here.  Of course, it's not too different to when we were all cocky about the "black box" but it would be great to get the recruitment up to full throttle again.

Chairman Gao has gone. He hasn’t been the best of owners but he hasn’t been the worst either. His four years at the helm can be summed up as a bit of a void. There is nothing much that anyone can say about him because there has been no interaction. Hopefully now we can move on with the new more dynamic ownership of Sport Republic.

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