Interesting Guardian article:
ck Venky’s puzzle with passage to India
Rovers’ manager secured a return to the Championship and will ask for money this summer to make the club competitive
David Conn
Tue 1 May 2018 17.39 AEST
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Bradley Dack of Blackburn Rovers celebrates with their fans after securing promotion back to the Championship. Photograph: Anna Gowthorpe/BPI/Rex/Shutterstock
So Blackburn Rovers, the scrambled remains of the Jack Walker-funded club which once won the Premier League, have been promoted to the Championship, reversing the precipitous slide since they were bought in 2010 by Venky’s, the egg and chicken conglomerate of India.
After the recent 3-1 home victory against Peterborough United their manager, Tony Mowbray, told the Guardian he would travel to Pune, India, this summer to talk to the Venky family and ask them to invest some more of their money to give his team a chance next season. He did the same last summer after relegation and they released £1.5m, of which Mowbray spent £1.25m, including £750,000 signing Bradley Dack, the midfield craftsman whose performances have been outstanding.
Anuradha Desai, the chair of Venky’s known respectfully at the club as “Madam”, and her two brothers Balaji and Venkatesh Rao have not been to a Rovers match or even to Ewood Park for almost three years, since the dire and difficult fourth season in the Championship in 2015-16.
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“I will go to India and say in the Championship there are at least 12 clubs with parachute payments, with a minimum wage bill of £40m, some of them £60m,” Mowbray said. “Our wage bill now is £8.5m; we have to significantly improve that otherwise we will be struggling. The conversations in the summer will be: what is the ambition, what do they want?”
The answer to that question has been a head-scratching mystery, their knowledge of English football in doubt, their plans always apparently sketchy, from the moment they bought the club in 2010. Walker’s Jersey-based millions had rebuilt Ewood Park on three sides and bought a team to win the 1995 Premier League, but after he died his estate’s trustees funded the club modestly and reluctantly for 10 years. Still, Rovers finished 10th in the Premier League in 2009-10, averaging crowds above 25,000. In six-and-a-half years, Venky’s venture into English football brought two relegations, 10 managers, countless players, sundry advisers, and spending put at £120m.
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Some involved say the Venky family’s appetite to buy a football club was prompted by their enjoyment of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. They were introduced to the Rovers acquisition by Kentaro, a TV rights and sponsorship company now in administration, who had advised Thaksin Shinawatra, the former Thai prime minister, on his 2007 purchase of Manchester City. The prominent football agent Jerome Anderson, best known for representing Arsenal players over 20 years, advised Thaksin at City, working to bring in players who were mostly good value, including the Brazilian international Elano.
In 2008 Kentaro bought 51% of Anderson’s agency, SEM, for a reported £6.5m, so they were a formal partnership when they came to advise the Venkys on their purchase of Rovers. Desai’s father, Banda Vasudev Rao, founded the Venkateshwara Hatcheries in 1971 and developed a vision: “To see India in the No 1 position on the poultry map of the world.” In initial interviews Desai talked of the Rovers acquisition more for what it might do for his poultry business than for the football club’s future, saying: “I feel that the Venky’s brand will get an immediate recognition if we take over this club, and that is the main reason why we are doing this.”
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What followed has certainly brought Venky’s recognition but as a byword for bewildering decline, rather than an advance on global poultry domination. Supporters are still incredulous at the immediate sacking of Sam Allardyce and the elevation of his first-team coach, Steve Kean, an Anderson client, for his first managerial job. Anderson, advising initially on players, hoped to repeat the quality of signings made at City, but the arrivals of the Argentinian Mauro Formica from Newell’s Old Boys and Rubén Rochina from Barcelona’s youth system were not sufficient ballast for a club plunged into turmoil. Senior players spoke out in bemusement and soon the long-serving chairman John Williams and other directors departed, having complained to Desai that an established transfer policy had been abandoned.
Kean’s team did beat Liverpool 3-1 in January 2011 and finished 15th but in 2011-12, despite beating Manchester United 3-2 at Old Trafford, Rovers’ 11-year tenure in the Premier League ended in a bitterly rancorous relegation.
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Blackburn manager Tony Mowbray talks to his players. Photograph: Steve Bardens/Getty Images
Kean was backed to sign nine players in the summer of 2012 including the £8m striker Jordan Rhodes, but there were tensions with Shebby Singh, an Asian football TV pundit whom Venky’s appointed as “global football adviser” and Kean resigned at the end of September with Rovers third in the Championship. They went through two more managers that season, Henning Berg and Michael Appleton, and finished 17th, Gary Bowyer made steady progress but was sacked after a difficult start to the 2015-16 season; Paul Lambert kept Rovers up that season but activated his own release clause as the new finance director, Mike Cheston, warned that spending had to be reined in because Premier League parachute payments had finally been lost. Owen Coyle, formerly manager at their nearest rivals Burnley, did not cheer the Ewood Park stands and left last February with the team second bottom in the Championship; Mowbray could not effect a rescue last season and Rovers dropped into League One.
Yet throughout, the Venky family have continued to fund the club and fend off financial collapse, loaning £95m in total, as the club lost £36.5m in 2012-13, £42m the following season and £17m in 2014‑15. Home crowds have halved; 11,679 watched the Peterborough victory, the hardboiled core in the Blackburn End stubbornly chanting “barmy army”. Mowbray spoke of needing to rebuild supporters’ enthusiasm and trust, and hoping to prompt more engagement from the owners when he travels to Pune. “I haven’t seen them for a year; I speak on the phone every now and then,” he said. “I met them last summer; they are nice, humble people; I think they have been poorly advised and the club has been managed poorly. I’m just trying to bring some honesty, integrity and hard work. I think financially they can do it.
“But they have been burned so much, maybe they need to get a bit of love and enjoyment back in football, and hopefully this year might reinvigorate that.”
Perhaps it will; as with much of Venky’s approach in the calamitous years since they decided to buy long‑established Blackburn Rovers, it is all a bit of a puzzle.
