(Bloomberg) -- When Bill Foley first looked into buying AFC Bournemouth in 2019, the football club on the south coast of England was a Premier League struggler. It had another distinction, though: It was owned by a Russian.
Foley, the 79-year-old billionaire owner of the National Hockey League’s Las Vegas Golden Knights, saw an opportunity. Russian expats who had parked assets in the UK suddenly found themselves under the threat of sanctions following the poisoning of a former Russian intelligence officer, and spy for the British, in Salisbury in 2018.
“Russians were all getting in trouble,” Foley said in November at his office above the practice rink for the Knights on the outskirts of Las Vegas. “So I said, well, let me check up and see what Russians own which teams.”
He ended up buying Bournemouth in late 2022 from Russian-born former oil trader Maxim Demin. The small club from a town known more for financial services and retirees than football is now pushing to qualify for European competition and is the prime asset in a stable of teams Foley is building.
Foley paid £100 million ($124 million) for Bournemouth, with another £20 million added on after the club managed to stay in the top flight that season. Demin, a British citizen, was never sanctioned, but Bournemouth was hemorrhaging money. The total was less than half the asking price in 2019, according to Foley.
It was a signature Foley purchase. Beginning as a real estate attorney in Arizona in the 1970s and spanning more than 100 deals across dozens of industries, Foley has made a habit of picking out companies in precarious or complicated situations and waiting for sellers to come to him.
Since acquiring Bournemouth, he and his investment group, Black Knight Football and Entertainment, have gone on a spree, acquiring stakes in FC Lorient in France, Auckland FC in New Zealand and Hibernian in Scotland. A deal for Portuguese club Moreirense FC is in the works.
The plan is to establish a shared scouting network and playing style, while funneling the best players to England. Foley believes he can make Bournemouth into a fixture in the top half of the Premier League and a frequent qualifier for lucrative competitions with top European clubs.
With the season nearing its halfway point, Bournemouth is sitting in sixth place. It visits Manchester United on Sunday, having already toppled giants Arsenal and Manchester City this year. “I can’t tell you when we’re gonna play in Europe, but it’s gonna be soon,” said Foley.
Black Knight is one of several multi-club ownership groups attempting to bring order and efficiency to a chaotic and unprofitable industry. The benchmark is Manchester City, which has won the Premier League four seasons running.
It sits atop City Football Group, 13 clubs controlled by Sheik Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, who established the group in 2013. Private equity firms and billionaire investors have since gone about assembling rival empires.
In 2023, Golden Knights won the Stanley Cup in just their sixth season, a feat that Foley predicted before the franchise played its first game. He’s counting on the same managerial strategies behind that success to make Black Knight Football and Entertainment into a powerhouse.
“He has been hugely successful in Vegas,” said Trevor Watkins, head of sports at the UK law firm Pinsent Masons. Watkins has followed Bournemouth since he was a child and, in 1997, led a consortium of fans who saved the club from the brink of financial ruin. “He’s got not only as good a chance as anyone else, but probably much more of a chance of making it work.”
Foley, a West Point graduate and former US Air Force captain, made his fortune in title insurance, an unglamorous corner of the real estate market that protects homeowners and lenders from competing claims on a property.
In the 1980s, Foley began buying small title insurance agencies on behalf of the savings and loan where he was working in Arizona. When the S&L started to falter, Foley and his partners borrowed about $3 million to buy out one of its insurers, Fidelity National Financial.
Over the next three decades, FNF bought up other agencies, often in moments of crisis. Today, FNF is the largest title insurer in the US and a publicly traded company worth about $16 billion. Foley, who serves as FNF’s non-executive chairman, remade the industry by setting aggressive quotas and offering hefty incentive packages to agents based on how much insurance they sold.
He also routinely cut staff during downturns in the real estate market. “If you don't have any closings, you’ve got to grind your staff down,” said Foley, “because we make money — good times and bad.”
With the title insurance business bringing in cash, Foley began dealmaking in industries ranging from payment processing to whiskey distilleries. When the SPAC frenzy took off in 2020, he was a leading practitioner.
Privately, he accumulated the largest collections of vineyards in Sonoma, California, a ski resort in Montana, and Rock Creek Cattle Company, a 30,000-acre cattle ranch and private golf club also in Montana.
In 2009, he nearly bought the Jacksonville Jaguars for $750 million. “I was going to get out of everything else and put all my chips into the NFL,” Foley said. He backed out because he couldn’t tolerate Florida’s climate.
The idea to get into the NHL started with the Maloof brothers. In 2014, the prominent Las Vegas family — and former owners of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings — proposed that Foley join with them in trying to bring an expansion franchise to Nevada. Foley was skeptical. He didn’t see Las Vegas as a place that would support the sport.
But after conducting market research that found 140,000 avid ice hockey fans in the desert city, Foley convinced NHL commissioner Gary Bettman to let them test appetite. In less than two months, he said, they took 13,000 season-ticket deposits for a team that didn’t exist playing in an arena that hadn’t been built.
In June 2016, the NHL sold Foley and Maloof brothers–George, Gavin and Phil–expansion rights for a team to begin playing at the new T-Mobile arena the following year for $500 million. (The Maloofs have since sold their 15% stake in the team back to Foley.)
Over the next 12 months, Foley threw himself into building a team, sitting in on mock drafts with his staff to decide which players to take from the rest of the league’s rosters. Foley also repeatedly made the same bold prediction about how his new franchise would fare: “Playoffs in three; Cup in six.”
To almost everyone’s surprise, the Knights made the Stanley Cup finals in their first season, losing in five games to the Washington Capitals. In 2023, their sixth season, they beat the Florida Panthers to win the Stanley Cup. The franchise has grown to be worth $1.77 billion, according to the most recent estimates by news site Sportico.
“What Bill has led through his vision, his passion, and his resources has probably been the most successful expansion in the history of expansion in any sport,” said Bettman. “He built a first-class organization.”
The plan is now to transpose that model for success onto Bournemouth. Foley doesn’t have grand plans to disrupt the English Premier League, and he’s not planning on sharing his own ideas about how to set up a midfield. He believes that he and his managerial team just know what they’re doing.
“I love buying something that someone else has discarded and then I can put my focus on it for a bit and fix it, but I have to be careful of how many things I have going because things can go sideways,” said Foley.
Foley has been sending executives from the Knights to his various soccer clubs. After acquiring Bournemouth, he hired Jim Frevola, former chief sales officer for the Knights, to be the club’s head of business operations.
The top priority off the field is replacing the club’s 115-year-old stadium with one that can accommodate more hospitality suites. With a capacity of about 11,300, the current stadium is by far the Premier League’s smallest.
Early in 2023, just after acquiring Bournemouth, Black Knight took a 40% stake in FC Lorient, a French club now playing in the country’s second division, in a deal that provides a path to full ownership. Almost immediately, Lorient sold Dango Ouattara, a promising young winger from Burkina Faso, to Bournemouth for about £20 million.
By the time Bournemouth finishes paying the fee, said Foley, Black Knight will own 100% of Lorient. “So, we’re paying ourselves,” he said, “I don't know why everyone else isn't doing this.”
Black Knight also has a verbal agreement, Foley said, to buy 70% of Portuguese club Moreirense FC. Portugal is a way station for players from Brazil, while Auckland FC, Foley’s expansion franchise now playing in its first season in New Zealand, provides a foothold in Asia.
In March, Foley paid around £6 million for a 25% share in Hibernian, which plays in Scotland’s Premiership. By the league’s rules, his ownership is limited to less than 30%. In July, after the Edinburgh club finished a disappointing eighth, Foley told the BBC that the club had not been listening to his input.
“Lorient really wouldn’t listen to us and they got relegated, and so now they’re listening,” he said in November. “Hibs wouldn't listen and they really screwed up.”
Foley said Hibernian’s leadership ignored his advice on appointments for manager, sporting director, and other key roles. When Hibernian later came around seeking additional investment from its owners, Foley said he gave them an ultimatum: “You can dilute us, but until you start listening, we're out. So now they’re going to be listening.”
In October, Hibernian director Ian Gordon and CEO Ben Kensell flew to Las Vegas to meet with Foley. Earlier this month, the club appointed Garvan Stewart, who spent the last 12 years at AFC Bournemouth, as head of recruitment. Foley and the club’s leadership are on good terms, a Hibernian spokesperson said.
Football is littered with cautionary tales of overconfident investors losing millions. Unlike American sports, a bad season can see a team relegated and left with a fraction of its former matchday and TV income while playing talent gets sold to cover losses.
“You can be the smartest people in the world, but eventually someone's going to bring on a 100 million pound winger against you and you're going to suffer, ” said Tim Keech, co-founder of the football consultancy MRKT Insights.
Now that he’s added a far flung soccer empire to his holdings — and may be getting into the NBA — Foley is looking to step away from the day-to-day management of most of his other interests and focus on sports. He will be in Bournemouth, where he now has a house, he said, for most of January, the mid-season transfer window for Premier League clubs.
The ultimate aim is for Bournemouth to finish in the top four and qualify for UEFA’s Champions League, a daunting task that will require outperforming larger clubs backed by sovereign wealth funds and private equity groups. Foley is up for it: “Once I get involved in something,” he said, “I’m all in.”
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