Ashley looks right at home in house of fun.
By Ian Ridley, The Mail on Sunday, 26th May 2007
Welcome, Mike Ashley, to the Billionaires’ Boys Club, also known as the Premiership, also known as the house of fun, the title of a song by the appropriately named Madness.
Ashley, Britain’s 25th richest man with £1.9 billion to his name aged just 43 after building up the Sports Direct retail group, is the latest to purchase the ultimate executive toy, or at least 41.6 per cent of one, in the shape of Newcastle United.
It cannot be long before others follow Sir John Hall in selling shares so that he can depose the current chairman Freddy Shepherd, owner of 29 per cent, and take full control.
When he does, it is unlikely he will need lessons in how the game works.
Ashley launched his bid by paying £55 million for Hall’s stake at 3pm on Wednesday at a time when most folks were beginning to think about knocking off to get home for the Champions League final. And at the time when Shepherd was lying in a hospital bed with pneumonia and a collapsed lung.
Talk about taking advantage of an opponent when he is down.
It could be the sort of ruthlessness that Newcastle are going to need if they aim to muscle in on the top four clubs. It is the same sort of timing that the Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez has been demonstrating in trying to get money out of owners George Gillett and Tom Hicks.
The real target of Benitez’s criticisms has been chief executive Rick Parry, who is accused of sometimes being slow to finalise signings. This at a time when Parry has been beset by the Champions League ticketing fiasco in Athens and its aftermath. Benitez had a clear path to say what he did and remind the club of where their priorities must be.
An associate of Shepherd’s, meanwhile, confided that the Newcastle chief executive felt he had been stabbed in the back.
Actually, it looks as if it was a full-frontal assault. Besides, if you live by the dagger, as he has often done — Glenn Roeder the most ecent victim — the expectation must be to perish by it.
Most of us would simply admit that the game is up and walk away happily with the £40m cheque that Shepherd would be due to trouser. Not him, though. He seems determined to fight. You can only wonder why — just as you wonder why Ashley, who has always been happy, apparently, to live a life of luxurious anonymity, wants the hassle that will inevitably come his way.
Ashley moves from warranting the odd paragraph on the City pages to acquiring a huge profile in the toy department that is the sports pages.
Football is a seductive business. As well as providing a diversion to businessmen who fancy they can manage their fortunes, in both senses of the word, football clubs also offer certain financial advantages.
There may be profit to be made in the Premiership but for the majority of clubs who lose money — and debt-ridden Newcastle are one of them — there are tax breaks on losses for parent companies who own them.
There has been a suggestion that Ashley and Shepherd could work together in Newcastle’s cause. It is unlikely to happen. With such businessmen, there is usually room for only one head honcho.
After Gillett and Hicks in February, Ashley will represent the ninth takeover of a Premiership club in the last couple of years. The former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra is thought to be close to reclaiming some limelight for himself by taking over Manchester City.
There always used to be a mug, often a benefactor, willing to bale out a struggling football club. Now they are no longer mugs, but very shrewd operators. It looks as if Mike Ashley, who once got the better of the Wigan chairman and JJB Sports founder Dave Whelan in the row about price-fixing of replica shirts by retailers, is in no need of expressions of good luck.