Skip to main content

How do Bournemouth punch above their weight?

Back in the day, Bournemouth was hardly a footballing mecca.  Indeed, the club went through some troubled times.   Now the club is 6th in the Premier League.

As for Bournemouth itself, it was an attractive seaside resort popular with Midlanders who often retired there.  I remember going into a pub in Bournemouth with a couple of friends on New Year's Eve in 1965 and it was full of very elderly ladies drinking port and lemon.  Fortunately, one of us was driving and we moved on.  At one time it had a splendid fleet of yellow trolleybuses.   Language schools developed there, but now it is a major high education centre.

Ever since Bournemouth were first promoted to the Premier League in 2015 they have punched above their weight. But the ambitions of a club who are the smallest in the Premier League both in terms of stadium capacity and revenue have been fuelled by a man who turns 80 on Sunday.

Bill Foley, an American billionaire, was in Bournemouth last week, where he had lunch with the players and watched their 0-0 draw with Crystal Palace.

Foley made his fortune in insurance and went on to invest in often distressed business including wineries, hospitality venues and an ice hockey team. He bought Bournemouth in December 2022, three years after initially expressing an interest.

Bournemouth are the biggest asset of what has become a multi-club football model. His Black Knights consortium own a 25 per cent stake in Hibernian, purchased for £6 million in March, and have agreed to buy 70 per cent of Moreirense, who are eighth in Portugal’s top flight. His portfolio also includes an initial 40 per cent of Lorient, who are top of the second tier in France, and Auckland, top of the A-League in Australia and New Zealand. Those clubs could be a pathway for Bournemouth to sign players from around the world, who would perhaps one day arrive on the south coast in England.

When Foley bought the ice hockey team the Vegas Golden Knights in 2016, he wanted to make the Stanley Cup play-offs in three seasons and win it in six. In the sixth season, in 2023, they achieved his goal when they beat the Florida Panthers to lift the trophy. He has similarly lofty ambitions for Bournemouth: he is aiming to qualify for Europe by 2027 and is planning an initial 20,000-seat new stadium adjacent to the present ground, which holds only 11,379. The outlay for his improvements may come to about £120million, including the cost of a new training ground.

Last summer the club broke their transfer record to sign Evanilson, a Brazil striker, from Porto for an initial £31.7million rising to £40.2million, paid for by the £55million sale of Dominic Solanke to Tottenham.

Better players, however, mean higher wages. The wage bill rose from £61million to £100million a year in the 2022-2023 season — their first campaign back in the Premier League after two in the Championship. Yet that total was still the second lowest in the league, and only £1million more than the wage bill of Brentford, the lowest spenders. The present top earners, Evanilson and Kluivert, are paid about £80,000 a week.

A new era indeed.

 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's no deal say Spurs insiders over Taiwanese takeover

Senior figures at Tottenham Hotspur insisted on Friday that they had not been informed of any deal to sell Daniel Levy’s stake in the club. A business group, Eight Sports Capital — which is said to include a billionaire Taiwanese financier — claimed that it had an agreement in place to buy a 24.99 per cent stake in ENIC, the club’s majority owners, from Levy, who owns 29.88 per cent. The Times has been told Ng Wing Fai and Brooklyn Earick form part of the group, having both been linked previously to potential takeovers of the Premier League club. The Taiwanese businessman, Richard Tsai, is also said to be part of the consortium. He is reportedly worth £7 billion.  Last year Earick, the former DJ and tech entrepreneur, was part of an attempted £4.5 billion takeover, which was “unequivocally rejected” by Spurs.  An ENIC spokesperson said: “We can confirm that neither ENIC nor THFC are aware of any sale by Daniel Levy’s Family Trust of its minority stake in ENIC, THFC’...
Post a Comment
Read more

Spurs CEO attacks luxury training base

The Tottenham Hotspur chief executive Vinai Venkatesham has issued a withering assessment of the way the club was run under Daniel Levy, likening the state-of-the-art training centre to a five-star hotel rather than a centre of high performance.  Venkatesham was appointed to his role in April 2025, having stepped down as chief executive at Arsenal the previous summer. However, he has said that some aspects of the club were “in a significantly worse state” than he expected.  “Our training centre is amazing, one of the best, if not the best in the world,” Venkatesham told BBC Sport. “But when you look around, it looks more like a five-star hotel than it does a performance environment. That will change over the summer. I think there are many areas where the club hasn’t got the right level of expertise.”  He explained that the football side of operations was the club’s main downfall when he arrived last year. [One Spurs fan wryly observed that it was like a water company sayi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fulham requires big funding from owner

After lengthy delays, Fulham’s shiny, new Riverside Stand has finally opened, creating “a unique Thameside destination with first class facilities for supporters and partners on match days, as well as for the wider community year-round”. This ambitious project has increased Craven Cottage’s capacity by around 4,000 to 29,600, while it has also taken advantage of the club’s fantastic location and wealthy catchment area by including two Michelin star restaurants, a rooftop swimming pool, corporate hospitality and event space, all benefiting from views of the Thames. Chief executive Alistair Mackintosh observed, “Fulham is the sort of club that can have a business class or first class and have fans that turn left on a plane.” Indeed, there is also an exclusive members club – with a football season ticket as an optional extra. It’s fair to say that “the times they are a-changing”, as this is a long way from the traditional pie and a pint. However, in a world where clubs face the tw...
Post a Comment
Read more