Search: ' George Gillett'

Supporters Direct is gaining momentum and credibility, with friends in high places. Adam Brown reports on their annual conference

A cabinet minister making a keynote address, a speech by the chair of the FA and even the shadow sports minister in on the act – it’s hardly what you would expect at a conference for several hundred fan activists. But this signalled just how far Supporters Direct, the ­government-funded agency promoting fan ownership of clubs, has travelled as it held its 2008 conference.

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Bologna have been taken over by Americans. Matthew Barker assesses whether this heralds a new era in Italian club ownership

Earlier this summer, after three years in Serie B, Bologna won promotion back to Italy’s top division. The celebrations were two-fold; not only was there success on the field, but off it a new takeover deal was announced just as the season was coming to a close. Joe Tacopina was the public face of an American consortium that paid €20 million (£16m) for an 80 per cent share of the club, with current owner and president Alfredo Cazzola set to cede the remaining 20 per cent in August 2009.

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Clubs ruined by debt are finding themselves in a continuous cycle of money problems, writes Tom Davies

One of the more depressing features of recent years’ club crises is just how recurrent they are: a threat is averted temporarily, only to resurface a couple of years later, with underlying problems unsolved. At few places is this more evident than at Rotherham United, who last month entered administration for the second time in less than two years, as a three-year decline, which has seen ownership of the club change hands twice and the ground once, has again pushed the Millers to the brink. The League Two club owe what is thought to be “several hundred thousand pounds” to the tax authorities and, needing funds to pay players and rent their ground from octogenarian former chairman Ken Booth, are in another fight for survival.

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Liverpool’s American white knights have become the focus of protests after less than a year, so fans including John Williams are dreaming of the day that 100,000 of them will buy out Hicks and Gillett

Sat, irritably, on the Kop at the recent home match against Sunderland, I hunched, as always, next to the man now charged with raising some £500 million for a Liverpool fans’ buyout from the current, unloved, American co-owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett. Rogan Taylor enjoys ambitious projects. Back in 1985, after Heysel, he formed the national Football Supporters Association to give fans a public voice that the press and the authorities might listen to, before later setting up a football MBA at the University of Liverpool. Today, he thinks this club are in even greater danger than back then, when the fans were labelled beasts and the English game seemed spent. “The biggest crisis in over 40 years,” he says. Since Bill Shankly first arrived, in fact, with Liverpool languishing in the old Second Division.

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Justin McCurry examines the issues facing clubs looking to conquer the Japanese market

It is a measure of English football’s global reach that the American owner of an English club has plans for commercial expansion in Asia. His description of Liverpool as a “franchise” might have upset traditionalists, but George Gillett’s enthusiasm about the commercial potential of the Far East has a predictable ring to it.

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