Steve Morgan sells Wolves
NORTH West entrepreneur Steve Morgan has sold Championship football club Wolverhampton Wanderers to Chinese giant Fosun International.
The deal, which completed this morning for a reported £45m, sees Redrow chairman Morgan exit the club after close to a decade of ownership.
The Liverpool-born entrepreneur, who now lives in Cheshire, is known to have been a lifelong Liverpool FC supporter and has made several unsuccessful attempts to take control of the club in the past and it has been suggested that his ownership of Wolves was his consolation prize.
But in 2007, following the acquisition, he told the Birmingham Mail: “I’d be absolutely delighted to bring Liverpool here. And give them a good stuffing.
“I only have the desire to be successful here because this is a great club and this is where my future lies.
“That is my own motivation, nothing to do with Liverpool. The Liverpool history is just that, history, and I’m not looking back, only forward.”
While he didn’t get to see a Wolves victory over his boyhood club at Molineux, he went one better when his club won 1-0 at Anfield in 2010.
Morgan announced last September that he was seeking to sell the club, which he had bought in 2007 for £10 on the condition he would then invest £30m.
The club deal comes two months after Aston Villa was also bought by a Chinese investor while West Bromwich Albion is also understood to be attracting interest from Far East investors.
Fosun is an investment group worth around £9bn run by billionaire Guo Guangchang. Its Western leisure investments include holiday companies Club Med and Thomas Cook, and entertainment group Cirque de Soleil.
Wolves’ most recent published accounts, for the year to May 2015, showed a pre-tax profit of £731,000 on turnover of £26.4m.
Two years after Morgan’s 2007 takeover, Wolves were promoted to the Premier League, where they stayed for the next three seasons.
But the club were then hit by two successive relegations before an immediate promotion put them back in the Championship.
Last season they finished in 14th place. There has been speculation about the future of manager Kenny Jackett, who has been in charge at Molineux for the last three seasons.
Morgan founded North West housebuilder Redrow in 1974, before retiring as its chairman in 2000 to focus on private development and other business interests and then spectacularly returning in 2009, after rebuilding his stake in the company to 30% and staging a boardroom coup.
He is also the founder of The Morgan Foundation, which supports charities that work directly with children, families, disadvantaged, elderly and disabled across North Wales, Merseyside, West Cheshire and North Shropshire.
Squire Patton Boggs advised Morgan’s investment vehicle Bridgemere UK plc, Morgan and shareholders of Wolverhampton Wanderers FC on the sale.
Partner David Hull said: “We are delighted to act once again for a leading, and historic, football club on a major cross-border investment. We have been seeing continued and unprecedented interest in English football among overseas buyers, particularly from Asia-Pacific where the sport is expanding at an exciting pace.”
