As Nesta99 said they probably appointed her because they wanted a high profile local to make sure they got the fan base onside. Remember - Trivela are a 'sports investment company' (i.e. a hedge fund) - and they are in the business of making money and Drogheda Utd is a means to an end not an end in itself. Their business model is to develop players and sell them for as much as they can get.Quote:
Originally Posted by EatYerGreens
Man Utd are a prime example of the consequences - The Glaziers bought it for about £800million - they then leveraged a debt of £1billion and took their own money back. This resulted in them owning the club, getting their money back and running up a big debt that costs about £40million per year in interest payments. They then sold about 1/4 of the club to Ratcilffe for £1.25billion - significantly padding their personal bank balance and indicating that they continue to own about £4billion worth of an asset. In 1994 the Gaziers bought the Tampa Bay Bucs for $192million. The Bucs are now worth about $5billion - last year the Bucs made $130million in profit.
Then you have sports-washing - using sporting outfits to wash the dirty actions of a company or country - with Man City and Newcastle being recent examples (but it prevades all sports). This is a long way from the origins of these clubs - for example Man City were formed in Gorton in the 1880s to combat gang-violence and poverty - to give kids something to do when unemployed rather than engage in criminality.
Up until the 1980s when clubs were owned by individuals it tended to be local businessmen (or very occasionally women), many of whom were fans of the club and the clubs were almost exclusively dependent on gate receipts. Man Utd from the 1950s until the 1980s were owned by Louis Edwards, a local meat-packing businessman who employed 1,300 people in Manchester - and father of Martin Edwards who later sold his shares in the club over a period of about 20 years for about £100million (a percentage of which were bought by JP McManus and John Magnier). Particularly with smaller clubs - local fan pressure could have a significant impact and when the owners ******-up or engaged in outright fraud, the fans could act and keep the club afloat. That is now extremely difficult outside of smaller countries because of the amount of money needed.
When the money began to flood in with the Sky deal in the early 1990s everything went skewed - effectively turning soccer globally from something that existed for the fans into a cash-cow for extremely wealthy individuals (I think only two of the twenty owners in the PL are not billionaires - or countries who have pumped billions into the club for sports-washing purposes). We can see how skewed things can get when Shamrock Rovers and Shelbourne can get €125,000 for being LoI champions, yet Rovers, Shels and Pats took in a combined €10million from Europe - an amount of money that completely skews the competitiveness of the LoI.
Now - all of that was to lead up to how you address the fact that an American hedge fund is dictating what a local fan of a club can say - and the only answer is fan-ownership of football. That way the fans dictate (at least somewhat) as to what happens to their club.
