The Hindu Business Line : For wannabe little sports tycoons

Over the last few years, India has seen the rise of who must be, without doubt, the greatest male Indian role model ever. And I say that without too much hyperbole.

Vijay Mallya.

Let me count the ways.

First of all the man owns breweries. He must have fast cars. Mallya owns an F1 team and airlines. (Where he employs many hundreds of cabin crew.) And there’s that Kingfisher Swimsuit calendar as well.

Really. Is there anything that the man does not have?

Many of us spend our entire lives hoping to achieve a mere fraction of what that man has managed to pull off in the last few years. Freelance writers, the rational creatures that we are, harbour no such hope whatsoever.

Our Nobel ambitions, as journalists, are limited to somehow being on the list of the PR firm that sends out free copies of that calendar to the press.

But then I am sure there are those among you with the solid ambition and drive to make those millions and then spend it all on planes, cars, sports team and such like.

I wish all of you the best of luck and hope you appraise, when the time is right, your PR agency of this writer’s coordinates.

Football club, for a price

Yet for the rest of us normal human beings, with modest goals in life, all is not lost. I have good news for you. You office-going, 2 BHK buying, package-tour going types can now be little sports tycoons of your own.

Own teams, choose managers, buy expensive sportspeople to play for your team and so on.

Well, in a manner of speaking.

Earlier last week, there was some news about Liverpool Football Club that should make a lot of you eager sports investors with shallow pockets very, very happy indeed.

It has been no secret that loyal Liverpool fans detest the American owners of the club. Liverpool, one of the greatest and most famous clubs in English football, are currently owned by George N. Gillet Jr. and Tom Hicks.

Incidentally, both Gillet and Hicks are pretty interesting characters themselves. The former made his millions in business, including ski resorts and junk bonds. Tom Hicks is an ex-leveraged buyout hawk with a reported $1.3 billion in the bank.

Recently both gentlemen refinanced the club to the tune of £350 million with over a hundred million tied up as debt funding on the club.

Fans are not pleased with this. Many expect that this will lead to rising ticket prices in the future as the club struggles to pay back debt. And this displeasure is not particularly discreet.

At a recent match, fans publicly asked for the owners to sell the club to the DIC group from Dubai. (Strange bedfellows, if you ask me.)

When the owners refused to sell out, the fans decided to make a bid for the club themselves. How do they plan to do it? Using the Internet, of course.

Deal on Net

ShareLiverpoolFC.com will ask fans to come up with £5,000 each to buy up an investment block in the club. A lakh such blocks will make up the half a billion pounds that the loyals hope will be enough to buy the club from its owners and build a new stadium.

Think it’s a cock-and-bull idea? Think again. The site has crashed and remained crashed all week.

So if you are a true-red Liverpool fan or a general member of the public harbouring grandiose dreams of tycoon-ery with none of the capital to back it, then this is probably the chance for you.

Buying a piece of Liverpool will now be as easy as logging on to a Web site and filling in some Credit Card details. When they get the site up and running again, that is.

Shared ownership is not a new idea, though. The equally well-known Barcelona is already owned by 156,000 fan members. Myfootballclub.co.uk did a similar thing a year or so ago.

They rounded up several paying members, collected much money and are now close to buying a controlling stake in Ebbsfleet United FC. It’s no Liverpool or Barcelona. But you can buy a share for just £35. Which is great value any way you look at it.

All this is beginning to give me an interesting idea. What if, just if, all the gazillions of Indian cricket fans could gang up and buy out the BCCI? Tempting no?

The writer, an alumnus of IIM-A, was a management consultant before quitting to work as a freelance writer, author and general handyman. He blogs at www.whatay.com

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