1 Football Club For Sale
Friday, 20th Jul 2001 00:00

For Sale: Hotel, Air Con Company, Swansea City FC

The Offending Advert

If we go back in time to when Mike Lewis took over at Swansea City. 12th July 2001, Mike Lewis buys the club from 9th Floor for just £1. The official statement from the club read as follows " At this stage my role is purely that of a custodian. I have no interest in retaining my new shareholding, other than to formally allow it to be apportioned to new investors. This has been necessary to conclude ongoing negotiations and I expect to be able to give details of these by the early part of next week. These plans also include provision for a Supporters Trust initiative."

Now we read into that the fact that new investors would not deal with Mr McClure so the club had to pass through the hands of Mr Lewis and presumably straight into the hands of the new investors after completion of the necessary paperwork. Now we see the advert so we have to assume that Mr McClure was not capable of placing his own advertisment in the papers?

Monday this week (16th July) and Mike Lewis faces the press at the Vetch field. "Until the sale of the Club was officially completed, it was impossible to get potential investors, with whom I have been in constant discussions for the past few months,to finally commit new investment. This is now possible because, by completing the sale on the terms agreed, loans of around £800,000 to Ninth Floor plc have been effectively ring-fenced, and are now repayable only after specific events. As a result, the Club is now in the position to offer itself effectively debt-free to new investors, and all monies forthcoming will now go directly into the Club, and not to repaying previous debts"

Again, that tends to suggest that there is someone there ready to take on the club and that it is just a case of the old dotting of the i's and crossing of the t's? Evidently not, as today's advert suggests.

Also from Monday's statement we had "The other potential investors are all living in South Wales. TheClub is, therefore, being effectively returned to Welsh ownership." Well, unless this is a strategically placed advert for a Welsh investor to read it looks as if returning the club to Welsh ownership is not necessarily the way that Mr Lewis is preferring at the moment.

Many people have questioned over the last week or so why we don't get behind the man and back him for having the guts to put his money (all £1 of it) where his mouth is but the simple fact is that even inside the first eight days of his ownership we are in the same boat as we were with 9th Floor- we cannot trust a thing that they are saying to us.

Seeing OUR football club advertised for Sale next to a hotel and an Air Conditioning company smells just a little bit of desperation. The new investors that Mr Lewis promised us are clearly not there otherwise we wouldn't be resorting to this, would we? And, in all fairness, would we be that interested in a buyer that only saw the advert in the paper?

And of course, he has been touting the chairmanship around to people he thinks can do him favours. Mike Lewis is not filling me with any more optimism than he was before he took over and the season starts in three weeks. Just how desperate we are for money remains to be seen.