Mixed messages for Everton and Bordeaux: What came next after other high-profile takeover failures

It’s been quite the busy summer for takeover failures, with Liverpool pulling out of their bid to buy Bordeaux and Everton seeing rescue efforts from investors collapse not once, but twice.

So what might lay in store for them now? Well, going by this little lot, missing out on a takeover proposal could be a disaster…or it could be a blessing in disguise.

Michael Knighton and Rupert Murdoch miss the boat on Manchester United
Adjusted for inflation, the sale price to buy an entire Manchester United in 1989 was pretty much exactly the cost of a single Leny Yoro today.

That meant that for just £20m, moustachioed real estate magnate Michael Knighton (who then had more than a bit of Jim McDonald from Corrie about him) looked set to take over at Old Trafford as the leader of a consortium, even being introduced as the new chairman on TV before taking to the pitch at half time to do some keepy-uppies.

Unfortunately for Knighton, his partners in the bid – a former Debenhams chief exec and the owner of Parker Pens –  got cold feet shortly thereafter and pulled out, leaving Knighton unable to complete the transaction.

With Old Trafford desperately in need of renovation (the more things change…), United floated on the London stock market two years later, ambitiously hoping that at least a third of the now-publicly available shares would be taken up by fans, who turned out to be almost entirely uninterested and they ended up selling less than half the shares made available – though they did raise enough money to rebuild the Stretford End.

Knighton must have been knocked sick, then, when United went from strength to strength throughout the 1990s, and especially when Rupert Murdoch agreed a £623m deal to buy out the shareholders and take control of the club.

But the UK government blocked that bid, because obviously, the owner of Sky Sports also owning one of the clubs featured on their Premier League coverage was a massive anti-competition risk. Never mind: United only went and won the treble without him anyway.

United remained publicly traded until Malcolm Glazer bought enough shares to de-list them in 2005 – though they re-floated, this time on the New York Stock Exchange, in 2012.

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Steve Morgan, Thaksin Shinawatra and Dubai all fail to spare Liverpool the misery of Hicks and Gillett
Desperate to fund the construction of a new stadium, in 2004 Liverpool were put up for sale by long-term chairman and owner David Moores, the heir to the Littlewoods fortune. (Yes, we’re enjoying the retro nature of these people’s backgrounds too. For the kids: Littlewoods was like Argos and also ran the pools, which was like if Paddy Power ran the National Lottery and went door-to-door collecting 50ps.)

Another real estate man, local property developer Steve Morgan submitted a £70m bid to buy Liverpool to which he didn’t even get a response, since it was less than half what Moores was actually asking for. Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra lent more of a modern flavour to proceedings with a rival bid, but was also unsuccessful.

The eventual winning bid came three years later from Americans Tom Hicks and George Gillett, who held off a bid from Dubai Investment Capital (DIC) to get the deal done. DIC remained in the picture regardless, agreeing in principle to buy half the club straight back off Gillett, but that, too fell apart.

Hicks and Gillett made a lot of noise about building that new stadium on Stanley Park, and there was some optimism about the future for the Reds, who reached their second Champions League final in three years a few months after their arrival.

But it soon became apparently that all was not well as Stanley Park remained resolutely untouched, chief executive Rick Parry and manager Rafa Benitez were publicly alienated, and Hicks’ son resigned in disgrace after sending an amusingly obscene email to a fan. Oh, they also appointed Roy Hodgson as manager.

The club was eventually sold out from under them against against their wishes in a Succession-style bit of manoeuvring from managing director Christian Purslow. The new owners, NESV – now known as FSG – remain in charge today and actually have transformed the club’s fortunes.

Oh…Morgan took over at Wolves in 2007 where he was owner until 2016; meanwhile Shinawatra went off to buy Manchester City instead, before his deposition by a military coup led to a swift sale to to Sheikh Mansour.

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Saudi Arabia’s Newcastle United hokey-cokey
The Saudi-backed Newcastle United takeover eventually went through, as you well know, but for a brief while, it looked like it was off the table altogether.

The PIF-led consortium submitted themselves to the Premier League Owners’ and Directors’ test in April 2020, expecting the process to take about a month.

But come the end of July they were still awaiting a decision, thanks to objections having been lodged by Qatari broadcasting company beIN Sport, (one of the Premier League’s broadcasting rights holders abroad) who had been banned by the Saudi government; and rather more seriously, by Amnesty International, who had major concerns about Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.

That led the consortium to pull out of their bid, effectively accusing the Premier League of putting their decision on ice because of Qatari influence and objections from other Premier League clubs.

All hell broke loose, to the point that then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson backed calls for a proper review, with the Premier League moving to deny the consortium’s allegations of outside interference and pointing out that they had doubts about PIF’s ability to distinguish itself from the Saudi state.

After finally issuing an official rejection to Newcastle in August 2020, the club brought two league actions against the Premier League. This was finally held in September 2021, with the takeover finally approved the following month after Saudi Arabia reversed their beIN Sports ban.

Birmingham City jump the gun and waste their own time more than anybody else’s
A four-year Premier League fixture turned yo-yo club in the 2000s and early 2010s, Birmingham have been knocking about in the lower end of the Championship table for years under a rotating cast of Asian investors in a structure that is honestly too complex and boring to recount here.

Suffice to say that one of those investors, the extremely unfittingly-named Trillion Trophy Asia, immediately took Birmingham from sixth in October 2016 to finishing 19th after their absolutely nonsensical decision to replace Gary Rowett with the more glamorous but much less capable Gianfranco Zola.

That remained about Birmingham’s level thereafter as they finished somewhere between 18th and 20th every season under their new owners, always flirting with relegation but never actually getting in a taxi home with it. Meanwhile, two stands at the shockingly out-of-date St Andrew’s were closed down due to disrepair and asbestos.

So it was cautiously optimistic news for Blues fans when their years of troubles looked to be over in 2022, with former Barcelona ‘star’ Maxi Lopez made the face of a £35m takeover alongside businessman Paul Richardson and former Charlton chief exec Matt Southall – known collectively as MaxCo.

So confident were they of getting the deal done that they started wielding influence over how Birmingham were being run – a direct contravention of EFL rules that landed all three men a slap on the wrists. By then, the takeover had already collapsed, with MaxCo’s version of events effectively being that they looked at Birmingham’s books and went ‘yeah, it’s not worth what we’ve offered’, with attempts to renegotiate proving unsuccessful.

In what should have been a happy ending, Birmingham received significant new investment from an American consortium led by American hedge fund chief Tom Wagner and NFL legend Tom Brady.

Unfortunately, they repeated the exact mistake of their previous regime, sacking John Eustace with the club in 5th in October to bring in Wayne Rooney in his place. By the time he left just 15 games later, Birmingham were 20th. Successor Tony Mowbray had to step away on health grounds, leading them to bring in – of course – Gary Rowett to see out the season.

A late-campaign mild turnaround in form came too late to save them from finally going down to League One, where they are currently spending (for the third tier) an absolutely enormous money in a bid to get promoted straight back.