Asia rising as Chinese magnate agrees to buy Villa
Print Edition
A CHINESE magnate has agreed to buy historic English club Aston Villa, the latest in a series of investments from China into football worldwide as President Xi Jinping looks to make the country a global powerhouse in the sport.
The deal, reportedly worth 60 million pounds (US$88 million), will see the chairman of little-known Recon Group, Xia Jiantong, become the first mainland Chinese to fully own an English team.
Chinese investors has made it a goal to one day win the World Cup, and has ploughed huge amounts of investment into grassroots academies, TV rights, transfer deals for overseas players and investment in clubs abroad.
China’s biggest overseas investment in football so far occurred in December last year, when a consortium led by China Media Capital took a US$400 million stake in the owner of Villa’s richer rival, Manchester City.
The Villa deal, however, with 100 percent ownership, is not just an investment.
“The Chinese ownership now get to decide how to run the club,” said Mark Dreyer, Beijing-based founder of sports information website China Sports Insider.
Crosstown arch-rival Birmingham City is also run from Asia, following the 2009 takeover by businessman Carson Yeung of China’s Hong Kong.
Fans will hope Xia now follows the lead of another Asian-owned club, recently crowned English champion Leicester City, which has Thai ownership.
Villa’s American owner Randy Lerner, who put the club on the market in 2014, struck the deal after former English champion Villa suffered a miserable season that left it relegated from the country’s top football league.
Recon Group, Xia’s privately owned holding company, owns a controlling interest in five publicly listed firms on the Hong Kong and Chinese stock exchanges.
The deal with American-educated Xia, 39, ends an unhappy tenure for Lerner, who bought the midlands club for 62.2 million pounds in 2006. Fans have openly demonstrated against his continued involvement with Villa, which was European champion in 1982 and has won the English top-flight title seven times.
Xia, who studied at Harvard University and has a doctorate, took to his official microblog late on Wednesday to wish the club’s fans “health and happiness”.
The club said Xia’s immediate objective was “to return Aston Villa to the Premier League and then to have the club finish in the top six, bringing European football back to Villa Park”.
It added that the deal would also help make Villa the most famous football club in China.
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