Top English football clubs for sale in Thailand

18 July 2011

Dispatches: How To Buy A Football Club. Mon 18 July, 8pm, Channel 4

This spring a Channel 4's Dispatches went undercover posing as a consortium of Indian businessman, to try and buy a British football team in South East Asia, and explore the secretive world of club ownership.

Their journey, broadcast tomorrow night [Monday 8pm C4 July 18] reveals a long list of famous clubs offered for sale in the backroom of a Bangkok bar.

After weeks of negotiation the consortium was offered one of the biggest names in the football league; a club with a large fan base, a rich heritage but like so many outside the Premier League, it has fallen on hard times and is desperate for a sudden cash injection. During negotiations, the undercover team asked whether it would be possible to buy a second club. Owning two English football clubs is completely against FA rules. No problem; our new-found business partners make it clear they will be able to offer us a front organisation to disguise the fact that we are about to own two big clubs. 

Channel 4 will reveal the name of the club offered for sale tomorrow night and ask if in football's desperate search for cash, transactions like this could become commonplace.

It's a risk former FA chairman Lord Triesman, who appears in the film, acknowledges. A sale like this would have gone ahead he admits describing the film as remarkable and disturbing saying

‘It's a very worrying thing to watch is the truth of it. ‘

We explain how the plan had been to buy a second club using the same contacts and he agrees dire consequences for football lie ahead.

Greg Clarke, Chairman of the Football League has viewed the film too and again confirmed our purchases could have happened and admits

‘We are a simple alliance of 72 football league clubs who largely lose money. We don't have hundreds of thousands, let alone millions, to get to the bottom of these complicated organization structure'. 

Asked if he is confident that he knows who the owners are of every club in the Football League he replies

‘No, I'm not ... there's a process of validation that let's the Football League know who the owners are. Who the owners of the owners are gets more difficult. And who the owners of the owners of the owners are gets even more difficult'.

Lord Triesman tells Dispatches he hopes the FA will rise to the challenge this presents but admits that if not it may require a new fully independent Sports Commisioner to step in and take control of the game.

In the course of the film the fictional Indian consortium were offered a total of nine clubs that they were told were for sale. Omitting the one they were about to hand over cash for, the eight other famous outfits that they could have apparently bought were Leeds United, Leicester City, Cardiff City Sheffield Wednesday, Oxford United, Derby County, Birmingham City and Crystal Palace. Striking those off the list who is left?

To find out if it was YOUR club we were to buy tune in to Dispatches: How To Buy A Football Club, Channel 4, Monday 18 July 8pm.

If you are tweeting about the show hashtag your tweets #ForSaleFC