The feeling is one of relief.
Relief that Guochuan Lai is gone. Relief that the bank of West Bromwich is no longer open for his personal use. Relief that the saga is over. Relief that we can move on.
The takeover of West Bromwich Albion by Bilkul* Football WBA – owned by Florida-based Shilen Patel and his father Kiran – was approved by the English Football League on Thursday. It was Albion’s ‘Where were you when you heard?’ moment.
How the Patel family will fare is a wait-and-see exercise. What is clear from an online search is the strand of community-growth and philanthropy running through their work. Generosity and encouraging collective spirit are at the thrust of their work in Tampa.
They already sound better than Lai.
The club has effectively been sold for about £20m – paid for over a period of several instalments - if you take into account debt of just over £35m. The new owners take on a wage bill that is forcing the club into arrears of £2m each month. The club still have significant outstanding payments to West Ham (Diangana) and Huddersfield (Grant), along with other transfer related add-ons, though it is worth pointing out that transfer fees are often staggered – for accounting and tax reasons.
And what of Lai’s sale?
Well, Lai will be entitled to a bonus fee of £10m for every year Albion spend in the top-flight should they be promoted. This will be fixed to a finite period of time – so the clause will be active only for a few years, before it expires (I'm unsure of the period, but it has been suggested that it doesn't extend beyond five years).
The province was somewhat different eight years ago.
Lai bought the club for around £208m in summer 2016. Jeremy Peace actually rejected an offer of just under £200m from another party – that’s how much value there was in the club at the time. As part of that Lai deal, Peace was kept on for another year or so as a consultant, earning just shy of £1m.
At the time Albion had just finished 14th in the Premier League. It was their sixth consecutive campaign in the top-flight and, within 18 months, would go onto pay two loanees, Grzegorz Krychowiak and Daniel Sturridge, in excess of £100,000 per week. Every single first-teamer by this point was on more than £55,000 per week.
As far as his ownership was concerned, Lai was guilty of several serious errors of judgement.
And that’s before we come onto the loans.
His first mistake was making the assertion that his stewardship of the club would effectively adopt a business-as-usual transition from Peace. That was a poor call. To run the club in the same manner as Peace, Lai made one major misjudgement: he wasn’t Jeremy Peace.
There were reasons why it worked for Peace: because of how he operated, the people he employed, the understanding he gleaned from some rather clumsy early years. Peace was certainly lucky at times. He wanted Gordon Strachan before the credentials of Tony Mowbray were put in front of him by another director. He wanted Chris Hughton in 2011, while Dan Ashworth pushed for Roy Hodgson. Ashworth won that battle of wills. Before that, Peace had all-but appointed Alan Irvine in 2009 to replace Tony Mowbray. Only an 11th hour rejection by Irvine – who would eventually become manager in 2014 – shifted Peace’s focus to MK Dons boss Roberto Di Matteo. But to suggest Peace was merely lucky or an opportunist would be wrong. He was streetwise. He was shrewd.
Jeremy Peace ran WBA to within an inch of its boundaries. He knew how to make it work. He was a master of operating within strict margins of error. And, whether you liked him or not, there was a confidence about the Peace regime that we never had with Lai.
Even when Peace appeared to get it badly wrong, he managed to get away with it. When Simon Hunt was abruptly dismissed as the club’s first-ever sporting and technical director for non-footballing matters, he was replaced by the next cab off the rank: some bloke called Dan Ashworth. See what I mean about those fortuitous moments of good fortune…?
Lai did none of this. He wasn’t a lucky general in the way Peace could be. At times he was simply incompetent. The appointments on his watch were substandard in the main.
Boardroom comings and goings were uninspiring, while the likes of Luke Dowling were kept on way, way too long. Giuliano Terraneo… remember him? His notable contribution as a technical director was a very awkward falling out with CEO Mark Jenkins during a meeting with Bristol City execs over Bobby Reid. As for Jenkins, he returned and didn't regard Barca-gate as reason to dismiss Alan Pardew. I'm told that by the end of Pardew's time with the club, matchday staff were finding his presence awkward in a 'surely they're going to sack him after today's result?' kind of way. And yet Pardew had to force his own exit. Again, that's on the staff that Lai had entrusted.
And then there was the Tony Pulis saga in summer 2017. Pulis was going to leave during that summer – his No2 Dave Kemp even took ‘retirement’ thinking he’d soon be out of work – only for Lai and co to plead to their manager to stay for another two years. That was a mistake. Pulis was gone by mid-November.
Recruitment went into steep decline, player contract management was poor, and the appointment of bosses became sporadic and muddled. How do you go from Pulis to Alan Pardew to Darren Moore to Slaven Bilic and Sam Allardyce in the space of three-and-a-half years and expect some strand of continuity, let alone success? If you were to create a Venn diagram of managers/head coaches appointed by Albion since 2016, the only thing they have in common is that they are, in fact, football managers. And that’s about it.
And then there were the loans – not only alarming to supporters, but worthy of column inches by football finance specialists and many hours of podcast content. And then there were elements of jeopardy: the stadium, other estate, the club’s identity, digital and social media assets – all secured against various loans, with significant interest.
I first became concerned about Lai in early 2020, just as we were all starting to google the word ‘Coronavirus’, wondering what all of that was about. It was then that I had a call from someone informing me that Lai wanted out. Further checks and calls led to me discovering that Lai had taken out a substantial personal loan – some sources claimed it was close to £100m – that he had put towards his purchase of the club in 2016. It was suggested to me that wanted to sell the club because he needed to repay that loan. And then Covid happened, and the world was put on pause…Lai's sale would have to wait.
I am also aware that two separate concert parties – both led, somewhat coincidentally, by people of Albion background – were sniffing around the club. Neither party were willing to go much above £60-70m. They were not even afforded the courtesy of a response from Lai, nor his people. One of those consortia has since gone onto invest into another EFL club. That club currently sit above Albion in the league.
I know of another person – a shareholder, with experience of forensic accountancy – who claimed to have had his email blocked by a senior member of Lai’s staff when he pursued them for information about certain matters. This guy, might I remind you in case you missed it a couple of sentences ago, was a shareholder of the club.
Frankly, I didn’t know much about Lai in 2016. And I still don’t. I do know that the Civil Aviation Administration of China were in some way involved with his companies, and therefore our club. And then there were all the other strands of uncertainty surrounding the club’s ownership. Who was Lai? Who is he? I am still none the wiser.
Thankfully, he’s gone.
Football is changing. As fellow journalist Adrian Goldberg and I have discussed so many times on The Liquidator, the days are long-gone of someone coming in and spending big money. Proposed rules mean that spend will be capped to revenue. But, importantly, the new owners can do things differently. They can find ways of growing the club without the need to spend. That’s their biggest challenge. I'm told Mr Patel and his entourage asked for a tour of the corporate facilities before the doors opened to fans. There was a will to absorb, a want to explore opportunities. They seem engaged. They seem invested.
I wish the Patel family all the best. All things considered they appear to have the most credibility of the various people linked with the club in recent months. And, as their work with Bologna shows, they are already involved in football. That helps.
Lai? I’m just glad it’s over.
*Bilkul means 'Absolutely' in Hindi.
,