Everyone is for sale - the strange world of football acquisitions

Everton, Reading and Preston North End are up for sale, but with a queue of buyers around the globe, every club dreams of doing a Wrexham

Hello Rainmakers,

With the start of the football season only days away, not only is transfer speculation running rampant, but so are takeover rumours.

Today, we pick apart a few recent developments and look at the roller coaster of Everton FC and the bizarre goings on with potential investor 777.

We hope you are enjoying these deep dive investigations into stories that concern the world of mergers and acquisitions. There’s plenty more to come, and we’re always on the lookout for tips about others we should follow up.

Enjoy.

INSIDE THE FOOTBALL DEALS FACTORY

By Michael Taylor and Neil Hodgson

No other industry seems to attract such a wild and wacky cast of characters as football.

No purchase and sale process is quite like it either. Despite the best efforts of Rainmakers to detect leaks and find traces of activity, we rarely pick up chatter on deals in software, or toilet roll manufacturing, until they are pretty much done.

But football is a leaky sieve. Fans forums, social media, specialist journalists, are all over the speculation of interest from “tycoons”, “billionaires”, and “mystery consortiums”.

And as the English Premier League season looks to kick off this weekend - Friday night, as well as Saturday morning, afternoon and evening and then the same again on Sunday and Monday - the big influx of television and video streaming income coming into the sport continues to attract investors from nation states, wealthy families, asset rich conglomerates and random mavericks looking for a quick turn, or a marketing angle.

Oftentimes it ends in disaster, and football clubs rarely turn a profit and pay out dividends, but as long as there are other buyers queuing up to buy, it’s always worth a punt.

There’s the dream that they might ‘do a Wrexham’ by which they are referring to the global success of the North Wales club under the ownership of Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, rather than the absolute shambles of the 2000s ownership of Mark Guterman and Alex Hamilton.