See on Scoop.it – We Want Our Rovers Back
David Conn: Relegation for Rovers is the result of 18 months under the puzzling and bizarre ownership of Venky’s.
No football club executive writes to his paymasters warning of relegation and financial collapse unless he is driven to feel desperate and Paul Hunt’s letter to Anuradha Desai of Venky’s, the owners of Blackburn Rovers, drips, almost weeps, with desperation. Urging Desai to sack Steve Kean as manager because Kean had “lost the crowd … and the dressing room”, Hunt, the deputy chief executive, argued a 10-point action plan was necessary “to save the club” and for the owners not to “allow this club to go into ruin”.
Hunt’s long letter could not have sounded the alarm more directly about the seriousness of Rovers’ dysfunction: “I feel I must now write to you to ask you to make some significant changes to save the club,” he wrote, “perhaps from relegation but also perhaps from administration.”
That was on 21 December, five months ago, and the first dire scenario, relegation, has now befallen Rovers. The second, administration, looks less likely, however. The club’s loyal supporters in a poor Lancashire town are in uproar, with clearly very little of Hunt’s advice having been taken. Most notable was the continuing presence of Kean, over-promoted to the manager’s shell-suit, an increasingly forlorn and haunted figure as his team sank.
This was the nightmare scenario when the trustees of the estate of Jack Walker, the Blackburn-born tax exile who funded Rovers to the Premier League title in 1995 and died in 2000, chose to sell to Desai’s Indian poultry company in November 2010.
Kept stable and in the Premier League for 10 years after Walker’s death, Rovers have been a chronicle of astounding episodes under Venky’s and relegated in 18 months. Yet the puzzling paradox in this implosion is that financial meltdown, as far as one can see, does not look imminent because Venky’s, founded by Desai’s father, Padmashree Dr Banda Vasudev Rao, in 1971, has put significant money in.
Hunt, writing his letter with the club being pressed by its bankers, Barclays, to put another £10m in, told Desai: “Auditors KPMG have put as many obstacles as they can in the way of signing off the accounts due to their concerns. We continue to try and work with Barclays but they are very quickly losing patience.”
Barclays, though, has told the Guardian that Rovers’ overdraft and loans have been fully paid off, suggesting strongly that the club’s owners put at least the £10m in.
The accounts, for the year to 30 June 2011, were signed off by KPMG on 20 December, in fact the day before Hunt’s letter. They show that Venky’s had injected real money into Rovers, much more than the Walker trustees had annually in their latter ownership. On top of the £23m paid to the Walker trustees to buy the club, Venky’s paid off £10m of club debt when it took over. In the year to 30 June 2011 a further £5m interest‑free loan was paid in.
Assuming Venky’s then paid off the £10m, at least, which Barclays was chasing, the Indian poultry company has pumped at least £25m into Rovers.
With increased parachute payments of £48m over four years, clauses which reduce players’ wages on relegation, and some coveted performers, notably Junior Hoilett, who could be sold, Rovers look financially quite able to withstand relegation and, even if crowds plummet, very unlikely to fall into administration. Hunt’s warning, that “the Blackburn Rovers and Venky’s brands are both suffering terribly”, is self-evidently true, however, and that crystallises the puzzle, for a company which bought an English football club, as Desai said then, to promote its own business around the world. While investing many millions it has displayed bizarre mismanagement, increasingly remotely as the Ewood Park protests meant they stayed away.
The appointment of Kean, of course, stands out like bad eggs. He was the first team coach, third in command behind Sam Allardyce and the assistant manager, Neil McDonald, but Venky’s, who had no football experience, decided Kean was the man who shared its “vision” for the club to be the “Arsenal of the north”. Kean’s agent was Jerome Anderson, who had advised Venky’s to buy Blackburn, then played a large role in signing players in January 2011. Yet Anderson has always denied he had a central hand in Kean’s immediate promotion, arguing that the owners must take responsibility for their decisions.
They must and one of the many mysteries is why a poultry company in Pune, India, spent £23m buying an English football club, invested millions more, then sidelined the club’s own executives from decision-making. Exclusion is at the heart of Hunt’s cry, a plea for him and the senior staff to be listened to and be given authority to run the club. It is an eerie near-replica of a letter written several months earlier and signed by John Williams, the then chairman, Tom Finn, the managing director, and Martin Goodman, the finance director, lamenting they had not been even consulted on the sacking of Allardyce, appointment of Kean or transfer policy.
All three resigned soon after.
Following the player signings of January 2011 Anderson, an experienced agent, fell out of favour but, with Williams, Finn and Goodman gone, business at the club was handled by Hunt, whose plea to be promoted to full chief executive was evidently unheeded, and Vineeth Rao, trusted by the family.
Hunt’s assessment of Rao seems to damn him with faint praise: “I am enjoying working with Vineeth and, although he has little experience in football, he is quickly learning.”
Hunt begged for Kean to be sacked and a new manager to report through the board, who he argued have “vast” experience, over 60 years in football, yet were not being consulted at all. As with Hunt’s predecessors in the frozen-out boardroom, he was not listened to, and Kean remained in place.
Kean publicly discussed his own monthly trips to India to meet the owners; the previous board had complained that transfer policy was done in that direct reporting line, between the manager and owners. Hunt begged for him and the two other senior executives at Blackburn, Simon Hunt and Karen Silk, to be allowed similar access in India, with at least one visit every two months.
“I am very concerned that I have not met with you properly during the six months I have worked at the club,” Paul Hunt told them.
He argued they should come regularly to Rovers, a founder member of the Football League in 1888, while accepting they did not want to after the fans’ protests targeted exasperatedly at Kean: “It is clearly evident that neither yourself, [family members] Bala or Venky currently feel comfortable coming to Ewood Park.”
At a deeply uncomfortable Ewood Park on Monday Rovers were relegated, losing 1-0 to well-organised, well-run, united Lancashire rivals, Wigan Athletic, who secured their own survival with the win. Dave Whelan, Wigan’s locally based owner, who is pondering how to pass on his own club, said at the time of Blackburn’s sale to Venky’s: “It doesn’t sound right and it doesn’t look right.”
And sadly it has not turned out right.
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Blackburn Casual 