Premier League Football (soccer!)

There is actually one club in there that is primarily owned and run by its own local fans.

It certainly isn't Cardiff! Actually, it is Swansea City.

www.swanseacity.net/club/club_ownership/
Of those shareholders, only Brian Katzen is not a local supporter (he is a South African businessman).

The club almost went out of the league and almost went out of business (not for the first time!) about 10 years ago, and was eventually bought by a local consortium.


www.swanseacity.net/club/history.aspx

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swansea_City_A.F.C.#The_difficult_years_return_.281995.E2.80.932001.29

That local consortium still owns and runs the club, with Huw Jenkins as Chairman.

There's a BBC documentary on the recent history of Swansea City here:


It's worth watching - it's quite a story. In 10 years they have gone from almost going out of existence from the very bottom of the league to where they are now.

Swansea is a refreshing newcomer, entertaining football...how can anyone not like them...

No, local supporters own at least 65% on the figures specified there. Most of the remaining unspecified smaller share lots will also be owned by local fans who bought as part of the consortium put together by former player Mel Nurse. The Supporters Society group owns 20%, and 45% is owned by local individuals - the consortium who took over the club were a group made up of individual supporters who had sums of money to invest, along with a larger group of fans who put in small amounts to invest collectively. Only 20% of the club is owned by any kind of 'foreign investor' - almost all of the other 80% is owned by local fans of the club. Those local fans took over the running of the club and the positions on the board when the local consortium bought it. The comment that Swansea City is 'primarily owned and run by its own local fans' is entirely, 100% accurate - suggesting that the owners who happened to have enough money to invest in the club individually as part of the local consortium, rather than just as a part of the Supporters group, weren't local fans of the club is complete nonsense - they were, and they still are.

You can keep saying 'it isn't so, it isn't so', but it still is. The club was bought by a consortium of local fans when it was virtually bankrupt. Some of them had enough money to invest individually, others via the trust. That consortium (including the Supporters Trust) took direct and personal control over the running of the club. Yes, some of them have had a dividend paid to them (2 million in total, split between them all - hardly a massive amount in terms of the finances of a premier league club), but that is after 10 years of putting their own cash into a failed business and spending 10 year of their own time turning it around from total failure into the multi-million pound success that it is today. Some people, of course, have a natural objection to people getting money out of investing their own time and money in what looked like a completely hopeless project (which was why the club was sold for one pound, and why it had struggled with finding ownership for years, since the previous time it had only just survived going bust a few years earlier) and managing to turn it around completely, but I don't - they put in the money and they put in the hours. The fact that they were business people with a bit of cash to invest in the first place doesn't mean that they weren't local fans. That is why they invested - it didn't exactly look like an attractive or financially sound investment at the time! The fact that they are local fans doesn't mean they shouldn't ever get a return on their investment when they have performed the miracle turnaround in the club/business that they have.

There are certainly very few, if any, other clubs in the Premiership who could be said to be primarily owned and run by local people who have grown up as supporters of the club and spent the years prior to their ownership on the terraces supporting that club (investing their money and time purely on the basis of trying to prevent their beloved club from disappearing entirely), and no others who have any significant investment at all from a supports trust type of group. What has happened at Swansea City over the last decade is a remarkable story, however you look at it - a failed club on the brink of bankruptcy sitting at the foot of the bottom division of the league, bought up and saved by a consortium of its own local supporters who took over the running of the club (with no initial experience whatsoever of running a football club, of course) and took it to the top half of the Premier league in 10 years. Attempts to paint it as something else on the basis that some of those investors have eventually had a bit of money out of their investment, time and effort are quite obviously just pure nonsense.

You keep going on about the 5 pence in the pound deal, but it was certainly not a 'con' - it was a perfectly normal Company Voluntary Arrangement to stop the club from going into liquidation, which the creditors themselves voted overwhelmingly in favour of accepting.
www.thefreelibrary.com/Swans+future+assured+as+creditors+vote+in+favour+of+5p+in+pounds...-a084173249

That prevented the liquidation of the club, which would have been something that it would not have come back from (and the creditors still wouldn't have got their money back anyway).

There is nothing at all wrong about a company that is deeply in debt doing this kind of deal with creditors to avoid the company failing altogether. Of course, some of them will have accepted it because they had an interest in seeing the club continue, but it was their choice whether to accept it or not. They knew it would allow the club to then continue and possibly do better in the future, which it did. And after that the new owners managed to get the finances in order and develop the company. There's nothing wrong with that at all - any company that is about to go bust tries to do a deal with creditors over its debts, and some survive and go on to make money again. That's just a perfectly normal part of business. Nobody wanted it to have to happen like that, but it was a part of what saved the club from extinction.