So, Why Is The Leeds United Takeover Taking So Long, Then?

Editorial | Article posted on January 23rd, 2025

So, Why Is The Leeds United Takeover Taking So Long, Then?
By Ian on Jan 22, 2025 in Finance, Latest | 2 comments

This evening, the supporters of Leeds United AFC could well be forgiven for contemplating the fact that it wasn't meant to turn out like this. When Ken Bates finally surrendered the chairmanship of the club in July of last year, a new era was supposed to be at the point of dawning for a club – and a city – that has now been almost a full decade without Premier League football, but over the last couple of months a much-reported takeover of the club has stalled, whilst on the pitch the team has started to look every bit as dysfunctional as most of if its recent predecessors.
It was at the end of March that the announcement was made that the club's current owners, the Bahrain-based GFH International, had agreed a deal with the British-based Sport Capital, a consortium featuring the club's former managing director David Haigh and Andrew Flowers, the managing director of Enterprise Insurance, the club's present shirt sponsors. It was not presumed that the deal would take terribly long to conclude. After all, Haigh and Flowers are hardly complete outsiders to Leeds United, and the club is believed to be in reasonable financial health after the disasters that cast such a long shadow over Elland Road for much of the last decade.
Somehow or other, however, the deal continues stutter. It was initially believed that all loose ends would be tied up by the end of March, but even now, in the third week of January, there are few signs that the takeover is to be completed, and questions are now starting to be asked on the thorny subject of why this should be. After all, GFH and made no secret of their desire to sell the club, and it had been widely reported that, in terms of a sale price, they were not looking for a great deal more than the £30m or so that they have spent on their purchase of the club and its running costs since doing so. Meanwhile, there was little doubt that Sport Capital were serious about this. Quite asides from what we already know about the two men tha have become the public faces of the bid in recent weeks, the consortium already claims to have invested around £6million into the club of late.
It is, perhaps, unfortunate that talks regarding the takeover have come at a time during which the team itself's fortunes have taken a sudden nosedive. Since beating Wigan Athletic at the start of March, Brian McDermott's team has won just one match, and in over the last