Week by week, more and more multimillionaire sports stars from the USA seem to crawl out of the Leeds United woodwork. The current 49ers Enterprises landscape could not look more different to the vision we expected to unfold when Paraag Marathe was paraded in 2018.
Yesterday, The Athletic reported Rudy Cline-Thomas, a US sports entrepreneur, and Andre Iguodala, a four-time NBA champion, were the latest names to emerge as investors in the 49ers vehicle. Cline-Thomas could even end up with a seat on the Elland Road board.
You can add their names to the likes of Larry Nance and T.J. McConnell, of the NBA, and prospective investors Rickie Fowler, Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas, world-class golfers. All of them millionaires, all of them with high-profile followings and potentially legions of new Leeds fans.
It’s all a far cry from summer 2018 when Marathe turned up at Elland Road to front an investment of around £11m. At that stage, it felt like this chapter in United’s history would play out as a conventional deal, primarily involving the San Francisco NFL franchise itself.
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Massimo Cellino’s ownership had run into Andrea Radrizzani’s and, in due course, Marathe or Jed York, 49ers chief executive officer, would go on to front something exclusively connected with the NFL outfit. In the years since then, through the shareholding increases to 37 and then 44 per cent, it has morphed into something entirely different.
More and more external investors have come aboard, with their varying levels of influence and expertise, but this is very different to what fans may have expected five years ago. From the traditional arrangement of one single figurehead at the wheel, see Cellino or Radrizzani, Leeds is about to be steered by a broad church of voices, guided by a new-look board.
An example of what rich and famous owners can do is being illustrated at Wrexham. Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney may be running the show on their own at the Racecourse Ground, calling all the shots, but it remains to be seen what a Nance or Fowler might bring to the party with a minority stake.
Might there be an advantage to spreading the financial burden of running a major football club across dozens of wealthy individuals rather than sticking it all on one, under-pressure individual? Time will tell just how this fresh chapter is written and just how many more sporting icons we see popping up with the Leeds salute on global television.
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