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Tranmere takeover awaits EFL approval

Donald Trump’s former lawyer Joe Tacopina is leading a consortium that wants to buy English League Two side Tranmere Rovers and replicate Wrexham’s climb up the leagues.

The 58-year-old New Yorker has been in talks with Tranmere’s owners for at least six months and his proposed takeover is now only waiting for regulatory approval from the English Football League .

Tacopina has become famous in the United States for defending a string of celebrity clients, including the late Michael Jackson, former New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez and rapper A$AP Rocky, as well as being a regular commentator on legal matters on American television.

But as well as his combative legal work in American courtrooms, Tacopina is well known in Italy for owning football teams. In 2011, he was part of the U.S. group that bought Roma, before selling up and moving on to Bologna in 2014. He sold them a year later and bought Venezia, where he took the side from the fourth to the second tier and was knighted by the city for rescuing the club. But having moved on in 2020, Tacopina bought his fourth Italian team, SPAL, in 2021.

The Ferrara-based side, who were in Serie A in 2020, were relegated to Italy’s third tier last season and had to start the current campaign on minus three points for missing a tax payment for January and February this year. Tacopina, as club president, was also given a three-month suspension by the Italian football authorities. The club appealed against the sanction, saying the late payments were a banking error, but it was confirmed in July.

This punishment is almost certainly one of the reasons why his group’s Tranmere takeover has not yet been approved by the EFL. When asked for an update on the approval process by The Athletic, Tacopina and the EFL declined to comment but indicated that talks were ongoing. A Tranmere spokesperson said: “We don’t comment on rumours.”

The club have developed a reputation for being one of the best-run clubs in the lower divisions in terms of financial sustainability and community engagement, but they have not been able to restore the club to its 1990s heydays, when they spent a decade in the Championship, including three straight visits to the play-offs.  Since then, however, they have yo-yoed between the divisions, even dipping into the fifth-tier National League in 2015. 

 

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