According to an expert, every Premier League and EFL club might follow West Brom’s lead and have US-based owners within the next ten years.
Albion became the latest English team to be taken over by US owners in February, when Shilen Patel and Bilkul Football paid around £60 million for the club’s majority stake.
Baggies fans welcomed the move following Gouchaun Lai’s troubled reign, and the owners have delivered in recent months.
They have paid off debt, improved the training facility, and invested in the first-team squad.
And they are the latest success story in English football, following the well-publicized Hollywood ownership of Wrexham and Tom Brady at Birmingham City.
Prior to that, the great US names in English football were at Manchester United and Liverpool, while clubs like Wycombe Wanderers had received US funding.
Football investment specialist Adam Summerfield believes the trend will only accelerate in the coming years, with all top-tier teams and the EFL being exposed to US investment within the next five to 10 years.
He responded to BBC Radio 5 Live: “Fourteen of the 20 Premier League teams are LLP [limited liability partnership] minority-owned [by Americans] and at least a third of the EFL are.”I don’t see how all of them won’t receive American investment within the next five to ten years.
“I know what we have in terms of our trend line and competition, and I’m not aware of any team that hasn’t spoken with an American investor in the last several months. Every team is speaking with them.”
Sommerfield also feels there are two reasons why US owners want to invest not only in the Premier League, but also in League One and League Two clubs.
One of these reasons is the cost, while the other is the distinctive feature of promotion and relegation, which does not present in American sports.
He continued, “It allows them to validate an investing thesis in a cost-effective manner.
“These are super smart, well-financed investors with a lot of ego and bravado, and they want to prove that they are up to the challenge of picking up a team in League Two or League One and ‘doing a Wrexham’, taking it to the Championship and, possibly, the Premier League.
“You’d be surprised how many investors we had during Covid who saw Welcome to Wrexham and Ted Lasso and said, ‘I want to own a team’.
“Romanticism is a big aspect of it. It’s something they [US sports] don’t have with the FA Cup or promotion and relegation. It’s incredibly seductive and very simple to promote.”
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