For some strange reason I have always thought Tiger has good intentions for Oxford United and most fans are happy with our present owners now. But we did have some financial issues for a year didn't we? Many people thought our present owners didn't have enough money to subsidize us for 2.5m a year.
It is difficult to judge potential owners even if they have a lot of money.
Yeah this is the issue I always have with people decrying the ‘fit and proper person’ test. All the EFL can really judge, surely, is the financial capacity of a person to run a football club. Fans seem to be under the impression that the EFL should be able to assess the degree of malicious or benevolent intent of a new owner, but that is surely unrealistic. For one thing, fans have different conceptions of what an owner should be putting into a club - Newcastle fans treat Ashley as if he’s literally worse than a genocidal nation state, but compared to many of the owners we’ve seen in the EFL in even the last decade, he really hasn’t been that bad. He’s kept the club afloat and competing at the top level. He maybe hasn’t allowed it to push on as much as he should have done, but he’s hardly on the level of an Oystons. The EFL can’t be the arbiter of what a ‘good’ owner is, only that they have the means to run a football club and that everything is above board.
That said, I think the issue here is that the deal for the takeover looks, even without the benefit of hindsight, astonishingly suspect. 20% interest on loan repayments by an already cash strapped club to, essentially, the same owners? Definitely fishy, and an absolute abdication of responsibility by the EFL to let it go through.
I saw on TV this week that The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) has purchased pandemic insurance for the last 17 years, so are set for a pay-out estimated at around £114m. Why did the EFL not do the same?
Mm I saw this, and to be fair I think it’s being considered an astonishingly fortunate act of foresight by the powers that be at Wimbledon rather than an example of something all sports industries should have had. Also, can you imagine the uproar if it had come out a year ago that the EFL were paying £2m a year (AEC’s premium I believe) to an insurance company for a policy that included pandemic insurance? People would, probably rightly, observe that the minuscule likelihood of such a pandemic occurring would mean that the money would be put to far better use supporting EFL clubs in the form of immediate cash payments (for example).