Getting to know BFC’s corporate structure
And a “too early to panic, but things might get worse yet” intro and some Bournemouth chat
One point from three league games. Not great, is it? Then again, you only have to look at the mood going into the opener at Bristol City, this newsletter included, to realise it was fairly predictable we would face a tough start. We still don’t have a right back. We still have quite a lot of injuries. Richard Keogh still exists.
The late equaliser at Ashton Gate perhaps settled everyone down a bit too much given it’s a game we didn’t really deserve to take anything from. And while the home defeat to the school bullies of Cardiff brought us down to earth with a bump, it all looked rosy again following a comprehensive Energy Drink Cup win over Middlesbrough.
Back to back home league defeats does not look good though, and for any wrong ‘un who likes to look at league tables after three matches it’s probably not one you’ll be using as your lock screen on your phone. August 2010 it is not.
A trip to Dean Court this weekend and then another long away day against Millwall, followed up with the hosting of promotion favourites Fulham at Bloomfield Road is not the schedule you’d want when in search of a first win either, so we may have to accept things could get worse before they get better.
Don’t despair too hastily, however. There are bright spots, in that somehow we managed to just about stay in the game against Coventry and then got Shayne Lavery into goal scoring positions on a number of occasions. If we’d had Dick Turpin-mode enabled we could easily have done a job on Mark Robins’ side and the torrid opening half-hour and Richard Keogh disaster-class may have been forgotten about. Maybe not the Keogh performance, actually.
Results will come. Even the Jose Riga / Lee Clark Class of 2014-15 were able to drunkenly stagger their way to 26 points, and this side (and the club in general) is nothing like that. So yes, we are still missing a sodding right back and some quality loans wouldn’t go amiss, but dig in for the next few weeks and I think September will have brighter days ahead, if not literally (summer to autumn, you see).
When Simon Sadler acquired Blackpool FC in the summer of 2019, he had a very clear goal for where he wanted the club to be in five years:
“I’d hope we’re solidly established in the Championship. I’d also hope we’d have new training facilities, like we should already have, an academy on some way to be developed where our own players are coming through and for the stadium to look a bit tidier than it looks now.” Blackpool Gazette, 2/7/19
The aim was to be promoted within two or three years with Sadler stating he would be “gutted” if it didn’t happen in that timeframe. So, safe to say the club is well on track. It’s a truly remarkable accomplishment because you don’t have to look far to see a whole host of other clubs who have had new owners come in promising the world only for it to go horribly wrong.
Of course, we are used to new investors coming in with grand plans, targeted investment and achieving the stated ambition. Valeri Belokon talked about “Premier League in five years” and with his backing the team managed it in four, despite how outlandish it might have sounded in 2006.
One suspects Sadler’s sights are not set quite that high, at least not publicly, but with sole control he can look to put in more solid foundations to make the success more sustainable and long lasting this time around. And once the club has that more secure footing, who knows the upper limits?
Mere days before the play-off final Blackpool FC Ltd released its accounts for the 2019/20 season which painted a stark picture of the financial landscape facing lower league football going into the pandemic. The bulk of this season was conducted as normal before the abrupt halt in March, and later cancellation, so while there was a COVID impact in the financials, it will be minimal compared to those for the season just gone (20/21).
I’ll take a look at some of those financial results in the coming weeks and months and how it relates to the club’s direction and strategy, but for today the focus is just on how the club has been set up now Sadler has settled into life as the owner of BFC.
In terms of how the club is now structured, there are four entities to consider, the names of which are all transparent and easy to understand. None of your Segestas, Protoplans or Zabaxes of years gone by to be seen here:
Blackpool Football Club Holdings Limited - the parent company, of which the following three are all subsidiaries:
Blackpool Football Club Limited - what we traditionally think of as the club, holding the player registrations, earning football-related revenue, etc.
Blackpool Football Club Stadium And Property Limited - a non-trading entity that holds the land assets, i.e. Bloomfield Road and Squires Gate, etc.
Blackpool Football Club Hotel Limited - the trading entity for the hotel in the South stand
So far, so standard. You can argue that it could all just be one company and that having the land assets in the football club company would be more reassuring, but it’s a common structure to separate them and as long as you have an owner you can rely on, it’s not too concerning. Based on what we’ve seen so far Sadler more than qualifies as reliable and he is still the ultimate owner of everything related to the club.
Where things become a little more muddier is in fine print of the club website and tucked away on Companies House. If you’re sad enough to navigate your way to the Policies section of the club’s new all-singing, all-dancing website, and I am dear reader, you’d be confronted with this:
This adds another entity into the mix, clarifying that Blackpool Football Club Holdings Limited is not actually the top company in the hierarchy and bringing to light a company called Seaside Holdings Limited. There is a UK company you will find on Companies House by that name, but it is clearly not the same company and has no BFC links.
If we take a look on Companies House at the page for Blackpool Football Club Holdings Limited you will see that on 8th June 2021 they filed what is called a Confirmation Statement, which essentially provides detail on who the shareholders are. It’s necessary to file this document annually with Companies House, but typically these are filed “with no updates”, but the most recent one was with updates.
When you look at the document itself you can see that it appears that Simon Sadler transferred his shareholding in Blackpool Football Club Holdings Limited to Seaside Holdings Limited on 29th April 2021.
What we know about Seaside Holdings Limited beyond the fact it is the ultimate owner of BFC is literally extremely…limited. The key question really is where this company is based. Given Sadler’s Hong Kong connections it is a reasonable guess it might be there, but some basic internet-sleuthing hasn’t turned up any confirmation. It could easily be registered elsewhere and we’ll have to do more digging on this.
So should we be concerned? I don’t really think so, at least not based on everything we currently know. We are told that Sadler wholly owns this company, so in that sense it shouldn’t raise any alarm bells. It does dilute the transparency a little however, if Seaside Holdings Limited is indeed based outside the UK, so it’s worth taking note of at the very least.
This quirk aside, the structure of the club is now much more streamlined than ever. No strange interrelated companies like we had with the previous owners specialising in “hunting, trapping and related services” or “publishing of computer games”. Sadler looks to have professionalised the corporate hierarchy of the club in fairly short order.
Financial performance is still lagging on-pitch success with heavy losses in the first two years of Sadler’s reign. League One clubs just do lose money unless you’re Accrington Stanley and it seems to have been part of the plan to throw a bit of money at it to get into the Championship. If that hadn’t worked then the situation would be a lot more concerning for sure. What that now means for how the club is approaching life in the second tier we’ll explore in future newsletters.
Some things what I liked this week:
OK, he’s the competition but I really enjoyed Mitch Cook’s Left Foot’s Coventry match report. Park up with a brew and some custard creams and enjoy. This little snippet in particular made me laugh:
“[Keogh] makes a really big deal of passing the ball 5 or 10 yards to the side. It's like he's being filmed for one of those 90s VHS 'Soccer Skills' vids where pros show their technique and you copy them. He's so precise about how he does it, arms out for balance, leg following through in the direction of the pass. It looks like Liam Brady spraying it 50 yards onto a sixpence, not a centre half knocking it square to another centre half.”
Accredited Sports Journalist Sean McGinlay wrote a thoughtful and positive Twitter thread on where we are right now with all your xG and xA goodness for those of a certain persuasion:
Bournemouth preview that’s not really a preview
It’s been a while since we last played the Cherries. The last two encounters were in 2014-15 when Lee Clark’s clown show team got absolutely ripped to shreds. A 6-1 home defeat and 4-0 down at Dean Court. Incredibly there is one name on the away team sheet in the current Blackpool squad, with Gary Madine featuring in his first spell. The rest of that team sheet is enough to give you nightmares.
Urgh. I mean just look at it. Parish, Aldred, Dunne, Oliver, McMahon, Ferguson. Those names alone should have meant we tried to get the season abandoned much sooner than just after half time against Huddersfield on the final day of the season. How anyone emerged from that mess to have any success is a miracle, but on the bench there you’ll see, *checks notes*, Fenerbahce’s Bright Samuel. Incredible really.
Our last win at Dean Court was the infamous Paul Ince tunnel incident in the previous season. If you have a few minutes it’s worth reading the official FA report into it which led to a five game touch line ban. He was lucky to get away with that really. This bit is just full of that Paul Ince charm:
Nice! What’s even more incredible in hindsight is that our esteemed local paper at the time, and clearly before this report was published, took it upon themselves to jump to Mr Ince’s defence following the incident and handed out Paul Ince masks for people to wear to Bloomfield Road to show their support. Not a good look guys, not a good look!
Anyway, here’s hoping we can have some better memories after Saturday’s game. Perhaps some Richard Keogh face masks in celebration of a 96th minute winner from a bullet header?