The Premier League Owners: China, Thailand, Greece and Serbia – why they want a piece of English football

This is part five of our series on the people who own Premier League clubs. Having looked at owners from the UK, America and the Gulf states, here we look at four owners from four very different countries.

The biggest story in the UK this week has been about farmers protesting against a change to inheritance tax. Critics say it could result in farms that have been in families for generations being broken up and sold to investors, including foreign speculators more interested in asset appreciation than feeding the nation.

“One of the big worries I’ve had for a long time is that this country has been up for sale,” former National Farmers’ Union president Baroness Batters told BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday. “We’ve been selling off British businesses hand over fist.”

But over in France, the land of the aggrieved farmer, Tuesday’s news was that the political instability caused by this summer’s election has made that country less attractive to overseas investors. According to accountancy firm EY, the UK has climbed past France to retake top spot in the European “foreign inward investment” ranking it lost in the wake of Brexit. Just to be clear, EY thinks this is a good thing, and a return to normality.

Because the baroness is right: Britain has been for sale for decades. Bentley, Land Rover, Rolls-Royce and the rest of our car industry? Sold. Branston Pickle, Cadbury Dairy Milk, HP Sauce? Snapped up. John Smith’s Bitter, Newcastle Brown Ale, Strongbow Cider? In foreign hands.

So, is it really a surprise that 15 of the 20 Premier League clubs (and 16 of 24 in the second-tier Championship) are already owned by foreigners, with one more likely to be wrapped up by Christmas and another three on the market?

No.

If you have read the rest of this series about who owns our clubs, you will have worked out that the Premier League is a show with a cosmopolitan cast, a worldwide audience and global backers. The locals provide the venue, some of the staff and the sound effects.

And for doing that, the UK is well rewarded. According to another EY study, this time for the Premier League, our top division supports 90,000 jobs and contributes £8billion ($10bn) to the UK economy. When you put it like that, it is easy to see what all these foreign investors see in us.

But there is more to the Premier League than the promise of money — although that is clearly a large part of the appeal. There are eyeballs, hundreds of millions of them, all over the planet. There are myriad opportunities to tell your story or change it. Trophies to win, glory to be gained. And for some, it is just a safe place to park your money.

In this series, we have explored the clubs still owned by local, lifelong fans, the ones bought by American billionaires and those now bankrolled by Gulf states. In this final article, we are going to look at which other nationalities have been buying our clubs, why they did so and where this trend might head next.

For those keeping score, the clubs that have spent time in the Premier League since its formation in 1992 have been owned or co-owned by (mostly) men from 27 countries. By comparison, Pakistan’s Shahid Khan is the only foreign-born owner in the NFL, and he has been a U.S. citizen since 1991, while basketball’s NBA, arguably American sport’s most international league, has still had only a handful of overseas owners or co-owners.

Right. Passports ready, off we go.

There are four current Premier League clubs majority-owned by people not from the Gulf, the UK or the U.S. — Leicester City, Nottingham Forest, Southampton and Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Arguments could be made for adding Aston Villa to this list, as they are co-owned by Egyptian billionaire Nassef Sawiris, and Everton, still owned by Anglo-Iranian businessman Farhad Moshiri, but we have dealt with them in other pieces this week.

Our rationale is that Sawiris, who went to college in the U.S. and has a base there, teamed up to buy Villa with NBA club Milwaukee Bucks’ co-owner Wes Edens, and their V Sports group feels more American than Egyptian.

Meanwhile, Moshiri left Iran as a young man, then trained and worked as an accountant in the UK for several decades, becoming a British citizen along the way. We touched upon that in Wednesday’s piece on the dwindling band of British-owned clubs but his membership of that gang is coming to an end, as Everton’s sale to the Texas-based Friedkin family is imminent.

So, let’s begin with Leicester, as they are not only first alphabetically in our rest-of-the-world list but have also been owned by their current custodians the longest.

Thailand’s Vichai Raksriaksorn and his son Aiyawatt bought the then Championship club in August 2010 from Serbian-American businessman Milan Mandaric, who had previously owned clubs in the United States, Belgium and France, before coming to the UK to buy Portsmouth and then, in 2007, Leicester. He would later own Sheffield Wednesday, too.

Back in 2007, Leicester were only five years removed from a spell in administration. They were also relegated to English football’s third tier in the season after Mandaric bought them but he had a knack for turnaround jobs and the club he sold to the Raksriaksorns was on the up.

Unlike the media-friendly Mandaric, little was known about the new owners apart from the fact that Vichai and his company, King Power, which was only founded in 1989, had come a long way fast.

Long story short, Vichai had successfully navigated a polarised political scene to claim a monopoly on duty-free retail in Thailand. King Power’s big break came in 2004 when it got exclusive retail rights at Bangkok’s new airport.

Apart from an understandable blip during the Covid-19 pandemic, King Power’s stores have been a bonanza for the family, who were bestowed a new name by Thailand’s king in 2012. Raksriaksorns no longer, they became the Srivaddhanaprabhas, which means “light of progressive glory”.

Leicester fans would not disagree. Promotion as EFL champions in 2014 was followed, via a minor miracle, by the Premier League title in 2016, a Champions League quarter-final in 2017 and an FA Cup final triumph in 2021. Even when the club took a backward step with relegation last year, they bounced straight back up as champions.

Sadly, there was a tragic end to Vichai’s story in October 2018, when his helicopter crashed outside the stadium, killing him, the pilot and three other passengers. It had only just taken off from the pitch, following a game against West Ham.

Vichai was, and still is, a hugely popular figure in Leicester. Thousands of fans took part in a walk two weeks after the accident to raise money for its less-well-off victims and a memorial garden, blessed by Buddhist monks, now stands on the site of the crash.

Aiyawatt, who is better known as Top, took over at King Power and Leicester. The company’s commitment to the football team remains solid, having invested almost £450million since 2010, but it is a two-way relationship, as it has enjoyed significant marketing benefits from its association with the club. If we are looking for reasons as to why Vichai gambled on a team then in England’s second tier, the fact that Premier League football is massive in China, Indonesia, Malaysia and so on must have been attractive to a chap who owned duty-free stores in a country trying to become Asia’s top holiday destination.

But it should also be mentioned that the Raksriaksorns/Srivaddhanaprabhas were neither the first Thai owners in English football nor the most recent, as the country’s former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a controversial figure who helped King Power build its empire, bought Manchester City in 2007, before selling to Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Mansour a year later, and both Reading and Sheffield Wednesday have had/still have Thai owners since. There is clearly some kudos to owning English brands in the Land of Smiles.

Once upon a time, the same could be said for the owners of our next club, Wolves, as it was not that long ago that every ambitious Chinese entrepreneur wanted an English club in their investment portfolio.

This was because President Xi Jinping, in a series of policy statements between 2014 and 2016, wanted football to be the engine that drove a large domestic sports industry, and for China to go a long way in a World Cup it was hosting.

This acted like a starter’s pistol for a trolley dash through Europe’s football leagues, as Chinese investors snapped up clubs, including Aston Villa, Birmingham City, Reading, Southampton, West Bromwich Albion, Wigan Athletic and Wolves. As well as these trophy assets, Chinese firms threw money at their own league and bid huge sums for the domestic rights to broadcast the Premier League and other leading competitions.

At the peak of the Chinese football boom, Xi visited Manchester City in October 2015 to pose for a selfie with City striker Sergio Aguero and Britain’s then Prime Minister David Cameron. It was a picture that screamed Britain is open for business and China is ready to shop. A month later, two state-backed Chinese firms bought a minority stake in City Football Group. Two months after that, the Chinese Super League broke its transfer record three times in 10 days.

Prime Minister David Cameron and President Xi Jinping visiting Manchester City in 2015 (Joe Giddens/WPA Pool/Getty Images)

However, the boom had started to fizzle out long before the pandemic stamped all over it. Xi cooled on his World Cup dream (China remain hopeless at football — ranked 92nd by FIFA, three places behind Luxembourg), government officials realised that Chinese businesses were using these overseas investments as a means to avoid tax, and the economy started to slow under the weight of domestic debt. New policy: no more foreign football clubs.

The retreat has been chaotic and, as of today, only Reading and Wolves remain under Chinese ownership in England, and Reading fans have been counting down the days until their club’s catastrophic custodian clears off. Their worry is how bad Reading’s financial problems will get under Dai Yongge before then.

The situation in Wolverhampton is different, as they were treading water in the Championship in July 2016 when Chinese conglomerate Fosun International bought Wolves from English businessman Steve Morgan for £45million. After a couple of false starts, Fosun landed on Portuguese head coach Nuno Espirito Santo and they romped to promotion in 2018. A year later, they finished seventh in the Premier League and qualified for Europe.

The secret to their success was Fosun’s financial muscle and a close relationship with Portuguese super-agent Jorge Mendes, whose first ever client was… Nuno. That link, which was cemented by Fosun’s investment in Mendes’ Gestifute agency, gave Wolves first dibs on future stars such as Raul Jimenez, Diogo Jota and Ruben Neves.

But the magic started to wear off in 2021, as the Mendes connection faltered, Nuno left and China’s hardline approach to Covid-19 caused Fosun trouble at home. Wolves fans are not as desperate to get rid of their Chinese owners as their Reading counterparts but the writing is on the wall and the West Midlands club have quietly been on the market all year. Last month, Fosun bought out an American minority interest it sold in 2021. It looks like Wolves are being groomed for a sale.

Southampton, of course, have been here before.

In August 2017, after more than a year of talks, Chinese businessman Gao Jisheng paid their Swiss owners £210million for an 80 per cent stake in the south coast club.

Gao’s original plan was to buy the club via Lander Sports, the Shenzhen-based sports and leisure development company he controlled, but he had trouble getting regulatory approval for that deal so ended up buying the majority stake in his name and his daughter Nelly’s. From this inauspicious start, things went downhill.

There were two problems: bad timing and not enough money. Southampton had played in the Europa League the season before Gao got the keys (and reached the competition’s play-off round the season before that) but they had already started to cash in on their best players and from those highs were returning to the Premier League’s mushy middle. And, as just discussed, the Chinese government was starting to make it harder for money to leave the country, which meant Southampton were going to have to fund themselves.

But it also became clear pretty soon that Gao was not quite as rich as believed and Lander Sports was not up to much, either.

To his credit, though, Gao did not interfere with the running of the club and he did not, unlike Reading’s Dai, massively overstay his welcome. In January 2022, he sold his stake to Sport Republic, a new, London-based investment firm bankrolled by Serbian media baron Dragan Solak, for £100million, which is less than half the sum he paid in 2017, but is £100m Gao managed to get out of China.

Solak’s motivation for buying the club is still something of a mystery but the best guess is that he decided to buy a Premier League club because he needed a seat around the table when it comes to deciding who should get its live broadcast rights in south-east Europe, where his United Group is the largest privately-held media company.

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This theory is based on his uneasy relationship with the increasingly pro-Russian Serbian government, which does not like the more liberal, pro-European Union output of his company’s news outlets. As a result, the state-backed Telekom Srbija started outbidding him for premium football rights in the republic, spending sums of money that made no economic sense but certainly hurt Solak.

Whether buying Southampton has solved that problem or not is hard to tell. United Group is still the largest pay-TV platform in the former Yugoslav republics — with significant operations in Bulgaria and Greece, too — but the Telekom Srbija spat certainly drove up the cost of football rights in the region.

The jury is out on the Southampton investment, as well. They were relegated in 2023 but came straight back up, with Solak at Wembley to see their play-off final triumph over Leeds United in May. But, despite almost £100million in funding from Sport Republic since the takeover, they are bottom of the table 11 games into the season.

Forest are another example of a club in their second iteration of foreign ownership, having spent five years under rather peculiar Kuwaiti control between 2012 and 2017. Fawaz Al Hasawi made all the right noises when he bought the club but it soon became apparent that he could not afford to run a middling Championship side, let alone one striving for promotion.

In June 2019, two years after he had sold the club to Greek shipping magnate Evangelos Marinakis, the club had to threaten legal action to get Al Hasawi to return the replica FA Cup trophy he had borrowed to display at his home in the affluent Mayfair district of London.

Marinakis is no stranger to controversy, either. In fact, he has over the past decade found himself having to strongly deny allegations of drug trafficking, match fixing and political interference back home in Greece. He would no doubt say this is the price of success in his country, and there is probably something to that.

However, his time in English football has also involved controversy, as Forest were docked four points for breaching the Premier League’s spending rules last season and only a few weeks ago he was given a five-game ban for spitting on the floor in the tunnel as match officials walked past. He appealed against this sanction, saying he spits regularly because he smokes cigars, but his appeal failed.

On the other hand, Forest have flourished under his control. They have gone from candidates for relegation to England’s third tier in 2017 to fifth in the Premier League table today. There is also no dispute that Marinakis really likes football for football’s sake. He has owned his hometown team, Olympiacos, since 2010 and they have done pretty well on his watch, too, and Forest are clearly worth more now than the £150million or so he has spent on them.

So, four clubs, four nationalities, four different motivations for investing in English football.

There is, however, one nationality we have not mentioned yet and it is, perhaps, the most significant in terms of the history of English football’s foreign owners.

We are talking about Russia, of course, as it was Roman Abramovich’s arrival at Chelsea in 2003 that really signalled the end of one era and the beginning of another. It was Abramovich who introduced the UK to the term “oligarch” and would come to personify the wave of Russian money that swept through London in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The softly-spoken billionaire had made his money in the Wild East years that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was one of a cadre of entrepreneurs who were in the right place, with the right friends, when a fallen empire’s state-owned assets became available for peanuts.

Why he chose to then invest £2billion of his rapidly accumulated wealth in Chelsea has been a topic of debate for more than two decades.

A banner at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge in April 2022 (Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images)

David Conn, of UK newspaper The Guardian, opened his book about the 2004-05 season, titled The Beautiful Game?, with a trip to Arsenal vs Chelsea, “the aristocrats of the Barclaycard Premiership against the team stocked from the shameless wad of Roman Abramovich, a shy thirtysomething who arrived at debt-soaked Chelsea… with a fifth of the Russian oil industry to spend”.

In the book’s epilogue, written at the end of that season, Conn suggests the real reason Abramovich invested in Chelsea was that he needed somewhere public and safe to put his money just in case Russian President Vladimir Putin came after him in the same way he had taken down other oligarchs who flew too close to the Kremlin.

Abramovich’s spokesman, however, told Conn his boss was just a football fan, who had no political ambitions and therefore, as Conn put it, “no need to use English football as a 21st-century escape vehicle”.

Looking back now, it seems more likely that Abramovich was, and still is, just a football fan with no political ambitions, but that escape vehicle was pretty handy, too, as he managed to avoid any trouble with Putin.

And while he was eventually forced to sell Chelsea in 2022, when he was placed on the UK government’s list of sanctioned individuals following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the £2.5billion Todd Boehly and company paid for the club then is still sitting in a government-controlled bank account waiting for an agreement on how it should be spent.

With many now predicting an end to hostilities in Ukraine next year, maybe Abramovich has just given us a textbook definition of what investors call “patient money”.

What is certain, though, is that Russian money has been off the table for English football for several years. Even before Abramovich and fellow oligarch Alisher Usmanov, who spent years trying to buy Arsenal before moving on to provide Everton with millions in sponsorship cash, were sanctioned, a motley crew of Russian investors had tried and failed to make money here.

Who/where is next, then?

China will come back, it is too big to stay on the sidelines forever, which is presumably why the Premier League has just opened its third overseas office in Beijing, with the other two in Singapore and New York.

Nigeria’s economy and population are growing rapidly, so it would not be a surprise if an individual or group emerges from that football-crazy west African nation to buy a club. There have been two very mixed attempts already: one by the country’s richest man Aliko Dangote, who has discussed making a $2billion offer for Arsenal, and the other by Dozy Mmobuosi, who wasted Sheffield United’s time last year.

Many believe India’s growing billionaire class could be the next to join the football investors’ club, although they are more focused on cricket at the moment and one of the most-tipped candidates, Gautam Adani, has just been charged with fraud by the U.S. authorities, so we might have to cross him off our likely-lads list.

In truth, it is impossible to predict where the Premier League’s next owner is coming from — it could be Manchester or Mumbai, Chicago or Shanghai. It is a global game now and every billionaire can play.

(Top image: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)