The art of the outlandish ownership statement – The Athletic 13/10/23
Phil Hay
The joke around Sheffield Wednesday, or one of those that
writes itself, is that two months into the season, the club have accrued more
statements from their owner than they have league points. The cogs of crisis
are turning at Hillsborough and not many are as riveting as the wait to see
what Dejphon Chansiri says next, like the wait to see which Jenga block Elon
Musk pulls from X, the website formerly known as Twitter.
Chansiri’s last effort, published on Wednesday’s website a
fortnight ago, was textbook: 1,466 words long, confrontational and gung-ho,
ending with a threat to withdraw his funding and a suggestion that supporters
criticising him pay the club’s way themselves. For all the flaws of Chansiri’s
stewardship, he scores well on a metric used to analyse owners like him; the
art of the outlandish club statement, launched in the face of public
exasperation. On that front, Chansiri is on a roll.
The tradition is as old as Hillsborough itself and
Wednesday’s all-powerful chairman seems to have mastered it. There is a knack
to statements like his, a basic list of core aspects which are necessary to
achieve the intended tranche of attention and headlines. Nobody publishes a
deep, 1,466-word missive in the hope that few people bother to read it. This is
an owner’s chance to drag the public by the nose, as fans sit, stare and try to
find the words themselves.
But what differentiates a fast-and-free statement from the
plain, run-of-the-mill press releases that clubs deal in every day? How best to
cross the line between corporate-speak and bewildering prose?
The length of Chansiri’s most recent state-of-the-union
address was relevant because in these moments, length matters. And length is
often what separates statements that are supposed to rock the boat from those a
club would rather not write, or are forced into publishing with cattle prods.
For an example of the latter, go back to February 2014 and
the day after Brian McDermott was sacked as Leeds United manager, only to be
reinstated amid the biggest ownership shambles Elland Road has seen (and that
is some stiff competition). McDermott was caught in the crossfire of Massimo
Cellino’s proposed takeover of GFH, the Bahraini bank which pretended to run
Leeds for 13 months. Cellino, thinking the deal was done and the club were his,
sacked McDermott instantly, but it transpired very quickly that he had no
authority to dismiss anyone until the EFL approved his buy-out.
For the best part of 24 hours following McDermott’s
dismissal, Leeds said nothing. Then, with the fanbase in riot mode, GFH chose
the second half of a 5-1 win over Huddersfield Town as the perfect moment to
clarify matters by issuing a statement which read, in full: “The club would
like to make it clear that Brian McDermott remains our first-team manager. He
has not been dismissed from his post as has been suggested and we look forward
to him continuing in his role with us in taking Leeds United forwards.”
McDermott, who was absent from the Huddersfield game, was
not aware that the update was coming. GFH had to be pushed into authorising it.
This was an ownership statement concocted under duress, ridiculous for its
nothing-to-see-here nature and the thousands of questions it left unanswered.
But as a rule, choice statements have to be long; so long
that supporters feel compelled to read them because the longer the text, the
more potential for trolling and PR disasters in them. Take the 1,600 words from
the mouth of Mike Ashley in 2008 when he promised to bow to pressure and sell
Newcastle United (13 years before he actually did so!).
What Newcastle’s support were crying out for, evidently,
were Ashley’s memories of Mexico ’86 and Diego Maradona. They absolutely wanted
to read Ashley’s insistence that he “bought Newcastle because I love football”
and to see the owner of a club going nowhere remark that “this is not fantasy
football”. “You don’t need to demonstrate against me again,” Ashley said, which
proved to be the least prescient comment ever in hindsight. Newcastle’s
statements in that era, some regarded as thoroughly tone-deaf, could make an
article in themselves.
Tone is as crucial as length. The content has to be spiky
and at least slightly ludicrous, otherwise, readers will get bored and give up
halfway through.
No fan is sitting down to read a bland statement that has
passed through PR filters or communications departments and been stripped of
the juice. Rambling is fine, as rambling adds to the theatre and the sense of a
loss of control. Better still, it has to read as if it has been written in
person; as if the club’s owner was sat at a laptop, glugging vodka from the
bottle, smashing the keyboard to bits. And above all, do not allow anyone to
interfere.
Ken Bates’ programme notes when he owned Leeds were almost
the precursor to today’s online outbursts, a unique and maddening stream of
consciousness in which it was not unusual to find scores being settled or
dissenting fans being described as morons. Bates’ wife, Suzannah, would help
him put his column together. Generally speaking, staff at the club knew better
than to edit them.
That, though, is essential; the personal touch which removes
any doubt that a statement has landed uncensored.
Up at Heart of Midlothian in Scotland, once the domain of
Lithuanian businessman and submarine owner Vladimir Romanov, that was how it
was whenever he decided to have a pop. Where Romanov differed from many
out-there owners was that his outbursts — weird, wonderful and cryptic — tended
to be a dig at the Scottish football authorities and referees rather than
Hearts’ own support.
Some would be addressed to no one in particular and would
contain such beauties as “it is not without your help that traitors were
presented as heroes, thus showing the road to children for betrayal” and “I beg
you Mowgli, take the monkeys back to the safari park!”. They would refer to
“the mafia” and “maniacs”, with Romanov’s hackles rising. A nonplussed SPL
spokesman responded to one of his statements by saying: “We’ll wait to hear
back from Hearts. The SPL board will take it from there.”
Paul Kiddie worked in the communications department at the
Edinburgh club towards the end of Romanov’s time as majority shareholder. “You
got no warning of these things coming,” Kiddie told The Athletic. “It wasn’t
like you got a phone call from Lithuania saying, ‘I was thinking of writing
this, what do you think?’. You didn’t actually know if or when he was thinking
of putting a statement together. He just did it. They’d appear from nowhere and
you were told: ‘Publish this straight away, as it is’. That’s what we did.
“I couldn’t tell you who actually wrote them. It (the
writing) sounded like him, and it might well have been him, but who knows? It
was impossible to guide the local journalists because I couldn’t explain what
the statements were about. Sometimes you got the gist of it. You could guess
what or who he was getting at. But even then you were in the dark. I’d stick a
statement out, I’d get phone calls asking what it meant and all I could say
was, ‘I have no idea’.”
A signature on a statement is fairly fundamental, making it
clear that this is coming from the person at the top and not just a generic
broadcast, but unsigned statements are another trick up the sleeve: the
annoyance factor of a message which is attributed to no one and therefore
apportions no direct responsibility.
Newcastle’s announcement of Chris Hughton as manager in 2009
concluded with whoever wrote it casually inviting offers for stadium naming
rights (“moving forward off the pitch,” you know?). Hello to the Sports Direct
Arena. Leeds fell foul of the same thing at the end of last season, issuing an
unattributed apology for relegation. What the crowd wanted was an apology
direct from Leeds’ then owner, Andrea Radrizzani. The internal suggestion of a longer,
more human statement had been kiboshed. It could almost be said that if the
intention is to say nothing, saying nothing would be better.
And, lastly, if you’re brave enough, be reckless. Make
comments that cannot be brushed over.
Hearts won the Scottish Cup in 2006. A few months later,
Romanov came calling with some copy for the club’s website, referring to the
officiating during their run to the final. “Last season, you didn’t manage to
protect the Scottish Cup and gave it to Hearts, despite all the referees’
efforts and intrigues,” he wrote. The Scottish Football Association took a dim
view and arranged a disciplinary hearing that Romanov did not bother to attend.
