Saudi tycoon in Pompey takeover + Club Owners

[Zamoraaaah]

Saudi tycoon in Pompey takeover

Saudi business tycoon Ali Al Faraj has completed his takeover of Portsmouth, acquiring a 90% stake in the club.
Sulaiman Al Fahim retains a 10% share, just six weeks after completing his own buy-out of the Premier League outfit.
"The takeover will ensure Portsmouth's future is safe and will bring financial stability," read a club statement.
Al Fahim's decision to sell the bulk of his shares to Falcondrone Limited, a company owned by Al Faraj, will free up funds to pay players and executives.
"Contracts have been signed between the parties today to enable funds to be released to pay the players and executive board on Tuesday," the statement continued.
Lawyers for both camps had spent most of Monday locked in discussions about the future of the club.

Al Fahim, who only took over the club in August, had said he would relinquish full control in the event of a suitable offer from Al Faraj.
Under the deal, Al Fahim, who underwent surgery to remove kidney stones last week, becomes non-executive chairman.
BBC Sport understands Al Faraj has already passed the Premier League's fit and proper person test.
Portsmouth's financial problems were exposed last week when the club admitted that players had not received their pay in the build-up to Saturday's 1-0 win at Wolves.
That victory was Pompey's first of the Premier League campaign, but Paul Hart's side remain bottom of the table with just three points after losing their opening seven matches.
Their next game is on 17 October, when they entertain Tottenham, who lie third behind Chelsea and Manchester United.

More to follow: news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/p/portsmouth/8289279.stm

[QPR Report]

The Guardian/Jamie Jackson

Sulaiman al-Fahim's six-week ownership of Portsmouth must rate as not only the shortest but surely the most ill-fated tenure in Premier League history.

Even when the 32-year-old Emirates-based businessman had finally been confirmed as having bought the club in late August from Sacha Gaydamak it did little to alleviate the turmoil at Fratton Park.

The deal, which had taken three months to complete from the day in late May Fahim signed a memorandum of understanding, attracted fresh confusion and controversy. Ali al-Faraj, who was confirmed late last night as having bought 90% of Portsmouth from Fahim, had believed then that his first bid to purchase the club had been accepted by Gaydamak.

Yet on the morning when the deal was supposed to be sealed Gaydamak cancelled a meeting with Faraj and instead sold to Fahim. This left the chief executive, Peter Storrie, who had been led to believe he had successfully brokered the deal, publicly fuming and considering his future. Commenting on whether he could continue under Fahim, Storrie said: "I really don't know whether that would be possible, but we just have to wait for everyone to calm down."

In the event Storrie, one of English football's more pragmatic operators, continued. The fans, though, had patiently endured a protracted summer as Fahim prevaricated and their best players were sold to service Portsmouth's crippling debt. Once he was confirmed as the new owner they continued to give him the benefit of the doubt until Fahim began, almost instantly, to go off-message erratically.

On the field Paul Hart's team were making the worst start to a top-flight season in recent memory, losing their opening seven Premier League games, while their new owner was admitting that there would not now be any fresh finance to buy players in the January transfer window.

"We're not in a hurry to sign stars and we're not going to go into the transfer market at the moment," he said from a chess event in Valencia. "We'll probably start signing next summer when we have the necessary liquidity to do so." While Hart was forced to field questions about how he could hope to avoid relegation with this lack of funds Fahim moved to clarify his position by saying he had been misquoted.

"Chessgate" occurred on Wednesday 23 September. On the Friday Fahim was due to meet a forum of Portsmouth fans at Fratton Park to discuss their concerns and to hear his vision for the club's future. Yet the forum and the reception he might receive there due to the club's dire start to the season plus his own, uneven public performances caused Fahim to cancel on the Thursday.

Cue Storrie to again publicly question his future – and surely, in private, wonder at the sanity of continuing – but by early afternoon the next day fans' groups had been informed Fahim would honour his original promise and he duly rolled up on the south coast. At the discussion with supporters Fahim announced he would raise £50m by the end of October to inject into the club. If this allowed him a friendly reception the following afternoon for the visit of Everton to Fratton (Portsmouth lost 1-0) a few days later he was again facing a challenging battle to readjust his disintegrating public relations.

It emerged that Hart's first-team squad plus three executives, including the beleaguered Storrie, had not been paid. A bridging loan from Faraj was hastily put in place before the weekend, Fahim opened talks to sell, and with the 40-year-old Saudi businessman finally taking over last night, the missing wages will be paid.

Fahim, though, remains as non-executive chairman. What is next for him and the club he owned for so short a time remains to be seen.

It is unlikely, though, to be dull.

www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2009/oct/06/portsmouth-sulaiman-al-fahim

[QPR Report]

The Guardian/Richard Williams

'Tis a pity clubs are reduced to lifting their skirts to rich menThe Premier League is a gruesome spectacle with clubs mortgaged up to the eyeballs

A new book on the morals of Georgian England depicts London in the 18th century as Europe's capital of debauchery, with bordellos on every fashionable street and one woman in five engaged in prostitution. Spool forward to the present day, and for sex read football: an innocent pastime inflated and corrupted by the forces of commerce, indulged in by a population who, as Rupert Murdoch so profitably recognised when establishing his media empire, are strangers to moderation when it comes to taking their pleasures.

Less than two decades after Murdoch's money funded the establishment of the Premier League, the top tier of English football presents a gruesome spectacle in which clubs who should be leading prosperous existences find themselves lured by financial promiscuity to the brink of disaster. Even those few who start each season in the legitimate hope of ending it with a trophy are mortgaged up to the eyeballs. So now skirts are lifted to any passing oil sheikh, while more and more clubs are willing to tie their destinies to a web of holding companies with tax-haven addresses, behind which the "ultimate beneficial owners" can safely preserve their anonymity, like the customers of exclusive brothels.

What use is a fit-and-proper-person test for incoming owners who cannot be identified? And when they can be pinned down, recent history suggests that no meaningful action is taken. Your father is accused of arms dealing? You acquired your fortune through hoovering up the rights to natural resources that were supposed to become the property of your humble compatriots? You are accused by Amnesty International of sanctioning human-rights violations? Come right in and take that upholstered seat in the directors' box.

Sven-Goran Eriksson summed it up in Sunday's interview with the Observer. Asked the source of the funding behind his new project to revive Notts County, he replied: "Where exactly [the money] is coming from, who could care as long as it's legal?" Dear disingenuous Sven, if you don't know where it's coming from, how can you assess its legality?

It's hard to know how seriously to take all this and to what extent it should be treated as a gigantic pantomime, part of the cavalcade of national life, with a cast of villains and grotesques providing ever more exotic entertainment (some of the leading figures, and one or two who are relatively blameless, are skewered in 50 People Who Fouled Up Football, Michael Henderson's harrumphingly entertaining new volume). At a time when the education secretary is promising to take £20bn out of the schools budget and a funding drought is forcing stem-cell research scientists to move abroad, for an intelligent person to worry over the fate of a handful of venerable football clubs seems frivolous. And it could be said that if their fans are so fond of them, they should find the resources to keep the clubs in business at whatever level of the game is appropriate.

Notts County's fans did exactly that, of course, only to drop their knickers once the big money was waved in their faces. You will not persuade many of their fans – or those of Manchester City and Leeds United – to deplore the arrival of optimism in a little world that had run out of hope.

But to anyone outside those clubs, and others in similar positions, the spectacle is a ghastly and potentially life-threatening one. No matter the ostensible success of the clubs at the top of the pyramid, a structure based on debt and passing fancy cannot survive indefinitely.

Among the rules governing the Premier League's academies is one that restricts recruitment of young players to those living within 90 minutes' drive of the club in question. Were a similar residential qualification applied to owners and investors, English football would be less likely to dominate the Champions League. But it might regain some sort of connection with the more modestly proportioned world in which the rest of us have to live.

Raise the scarlet standard high for brass at the Bridge
An excellent brass band enlivened the pre-match period at Stamford Bridge on Sunday, their repertoire including euphonious arrangements of The Final Countdown and Land of Hope and Glory. Sadly, like the vast majority of the crowd, Roman Abramovich had not taken his seat when they played a stirring version of The Red Flag, the labour movement anthem written in 1889 by the Irish socialist Jim Connell and set to the tune of the old German folk song, O Tannenbaum. I refuse to listen to the cynical voice inside me suggesting it was merely an oblique tribute to Abramovich's associate and fellow club director, Eugene Tenenbaum. Anyway, it was certainly good to hear live music returning to a top London league ground, more than 30 years after the retirement of PC Alex Morgan, Arsenal's "singing policeman", who entertained the Highbury crowd with items from the light classical repertoire, accompanied by the Metropolitan Police Band. Brass bands with eclectic repertoires were a popular feature of Euro 2000 and the 2007 Rugby World Cup. Encore, please.

Button sees red at yellow flags of convenience
Jenson Button is an easy-going sort of chap, but he was showing the strain after Sunday's Japanese grand prix. His slightly tetchy suggestion that a stewards' hearing into Nico Rosberg's excessive speed under the yellow flag might give him an extra championship point was ill-considered on two counts: it made him look petty and it turned out to be wrong. But how unsurprising was it that, ahead of the race, those stewards would find a way to penalise Button and his team-mate, Rubens Barrichello, also for yellow-flag infractions, thereby – quite incidentally, of course – helping to prolong the title race?

A vote of confidence from a tiny constituency
Read the findings of the Rugby Football Union's Image of the Game "task group" and you will see that, as predicted, here was the most inadequate official inquiry since the Hutton report. According to the RFU's president, John Owen, the answers they got from England's professional players prove that cheating is the game is "not commonplace". His conclusion might carry some weight had three-quarters of the eligible players not declined to respond even to a confidential survey.

www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2009/oct/06/premier-league-finances-ownership

[cpr]

Good, wouldn't be right hating the pompey scum if they didn't exist.

[Zamoraaaah]

You have a point there CPR.
For a while it was fun gloating at Luton's demise but I miss our encounters with them.

[QPR Report]

Kind of like I felt about Chelsea when they had their financial problems I wanted them down, down, down (Say Division 4/League 2) but still there to be kicked around!

Meanwhile at Liverpool, the opposite of a Vote of Confidence!
(I liked this line "American questions Benítez's scouting and recruitment" - Change the name and it could be applied as a QPR Report subject title!)


The Guardian

George Gillett blames Rafael Benítez for Liverpool's poor start• Gillet points to £128m investment in last 18 months
• American questions Benítez's scouting and recruitment


Liverpool's co-owner George Gillett has defended his and Tom Hicks's reign at Liverpool and pointed the finger at the manager, Rafael Benítez, after a disappointing start to the season.

Liverpool's defeat at Chelsea on Sunday was their third in the Premier League this season and followed a 2-0 reverse at Fiorentina in the Champions League. Gillett pointed to the investment he and Hicks have made when saying the owners were not responsible for any shortcomings.

"We have invested more money than our competitors, in keeping with the history of the club," he is quoted as telling a representative of the fans' group Spirit of Shankly last week. "In the last 18 months, we have invested £128m on top of what has come in.

"That means it should be getting better. Now if it's not getting better, it's not Gillett and Hicks; it's the manager; it's the scouting. You have to make sure you balance out your analysis. There was plenty of money, so if you have any complaints, take a look at the ins and outs."

Gillett said the £30m from Xabi Alonso's sale to Real Madrid "went straight back" into Bénitez's kitty and added to funds of "£22-23m as part of our budgets".

The American also claimed that Liverpool are "in an extraordinarily good financial position. Far better than Manchester United, Chelsea or Arsenal."

www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/oct/06/rafael-benitez-liverpool-george-gillett

[cpr]

Gillet is right, all that money spent and no decent squad, no strength in depth and no Hyppia (sp) so they cannot defend. Watching his latest attempt at zonal comedy on Sunday was highly entertaining. ;D Remove Gerrard and Torres and they would be midtable, minimum.

Al the "ITK" football people say it is arse that will lose their top four spot to Citeh. I tihnk it'll be the scouse if anyone. Arse were absolutely awesome , incredibly entertaining and the best of the top four that I've seen this season. Arse have promised a great deal in the past two seasons and this season could be theirs, I'll be surprised if they win nothing this time.

As for Liverpool, last season they looked on the verge of taking over, then they lose two of their best players and the lack of strength in depth in Rafa's squad has been seriously exposed.

[QPR Report]

The craziness continues!

Sky - Grant in Pompey talks
Avram Grant is in talks with Portsmouth about a return to the club, according to Sky Sports sources.

The Israeli has not worked in football since departing as Chelsea manager at the end of the 2007/08 season when he guided them to the UEFA Champions League final, only to taste defeat to Manchester United on penalties.

He has been linked with a number of roles around the world, but he could now be set to return to Fratton Park, where he spent over 12 months as director of football before joining Chelsea in the summer of 2007.

Grant - who appeared on Goals on Sunday last weeked - is now locked in talks with Pompey, who have just been bought out for the second time in three months.

Ali Al-Faraj is the club's latest new owner and he seems keen on bringing Grant back to Fratton Park.

Hart stay
The news of talks with Grant has emerged as chief executive Peter Storrie moved to deny claims that Paul Hart was to be replaced as manager.

"Paul is going nowhere. He has done a tremendous job throughout and been an absolute brick," Storrie told The News.

"Now people are starting to see what a shrewd manager he really is. Tactically he is getting it right and is nurturing the team.

"I think everyone involved in the club saw the victory against Wolves coming.

"It was an excellent performance against Everton the week before and we are unlucky not to have come away from that even with a point.

"The eight or nine players signed before the transfer window closed have now settled and I think we've got a real balance to the side.

"So much for people having a go about supposedly having Championship players in the team. I don't think that can be said anymore.

"It takes time for a team to gel. We even saw that when Pedro Mendes and the rest of them arrived in January 2006 when Harry was here.Once they settled they kept this club in the Premier League.

"Paul Hart has done a terrific job and will continue to be manager.

"He has done fantastically well in incredibly difficult circumstances. I am very confident for the future of the club."

www.skysports.com/story/0,19528,11661_5615539,00.html

[cpr]

Average Grunt is appointed director of football at the pompey scum.