Yverdon Sport FC are not a household name in European football, but Jamie Welch is determined to make his purchase of the Swiss club earlier this year the start of something bigger.
The former Credit Suisse banker turned oil trader from Houston sees his purchase of scrappy upstart Yverdon, which just won promotion to the top-flight Swiss Super League this year, as a step towards buying other underrated clubs.
“We’re looking at other clubs” elsewhere in Europe, and envision a “multi-club platform, which is really what we’re trying to create,” Welch said in a recent interview from the Houston headquarters of his Kinetik Holdings Inc, listed in New York. He says talks with one or two clubs are more advanced, but no deal is likely in the next 30 days.
Yverdon, a modest town of 30,000, is just over an hour’s drive away, but a long way from the financial center of Geneva. The club plays in the city’s modest 4,500-seat Municipal Stadium, which sits less than 200 meters from Lake Neuchâtel, making it one of the smallest but possibly most picturesque arenas of any stadium in the Swiss Super League.
Welch, a native of Australia, is the lead investor in a group that bought a 90% stake in the club in June for an undisclosed sum, with the help of 20 investors who were required to commit at least $100,000 to the investment . Renovations to add new lighting, security and other improvements that stretched into late summer led to the team playing its first home games on the road. Any discussions about adding capacity will have to wait until the 2024-25 season, says the club’s new chairman Jeffrey Saunders, who is among the investors.
Welch says his aim is to buy majority stakes and build something, albeit much smaller, “a microcosm”, as he put it, similar to the company that controls Manchester City. The English club is the flagship of the City Football Group, which includes 11 other smaller clubs around the world from which it draws intelligence and players. The multi-club ownership model has grown in popularity as a way to develop stars of the game without the need for high transfer fees.
The immediate priority for Welch and Saunders, who managed Portuguese club Estoril Praia for four years and won promotion, is staying in the Swiss top flight. Six games into the season, Yverdon sit a solid seventh out of 12 teams in the Swiss Super League and on Sunday upset perennial Champions League regular FC Basel.
After a number of signings over the summer, “we think the roster we have right now is designed to make us competitive and we think we’ve been able to land some great talent,” Welch said.
While deals like 777 Partners LLC’s deal to buy Everton FC in the English Premier League earlier this month make headlines, other American companies are buying smaller clubs in Europe more quietly. Pacific Media Group LLC, co-founded by Florida-based Paul Conway, now owns a number of clubs including AS Nancy in France, Swiss club FC Thun and KV Oostende in Belgium. Saunders himself developed Blackstone executive David Blitzer’s multi-club strategy to acquire stakes in six teams across Europe, including Estoril, FC Augsburg in Germany and ADO Den Haag in the Netherlands.
Welch says his immediate goals fall squarely into that category. “This is not Man City,” he quips. The purchase of that club by Abu Dhabi investors in 2008 for around £200m sparked a spending spree that secured Manchester City the Premiership title four years later.
Switzerland, which has qualified for the last five World Cups, has achieved international success. But investment in its domestic league has lagged, with limited broadcast revenue to match, and that needs to change, Saunders says.
“Why is the broadcasting revenue of Belgium’s first division so much higher than that of Switzerland?” he asks “Better broadcast deals bring more attention to the league, which brings more attention to the teams. It’s this overall growth of the Swiss brand that’s needed.”
To contact the author of this story:
Hugo Miller in Geneva at hugomiller@bloomberg.net
