Bill Foley
Also, if you look back at our public company investments, they’re really a result of something that was private that converted into a public asset.
Dun & Bradstreet, we engaged in a go-private transaction, then took it public, and we still have our position in that company. Alight was the result of a private company that was converted into a
public company via a SPAC that we had sponsored, and Ceridian, or Dayforce, of course, is a long-term investment, that was private for years and years and years, and as it went public, we then began disposing of our interest in Dayforce and
we’re down to a fairly small number of shares. Paysafe, again, was a SPAC transaction that we participated in and were a sponsor of, and the same with System1. So, really, our public company assets that we’ve acquired have generally
started out as private company assets that converted into a public company.
Jonathan Bass
Okay, thank you, and on Ryan’s last point there, touching on the multi-club strategy, with the new minority stake in Hibernian, can you maybe
highlight the multi-club strategy, what it is and why it makes sense, why it can be successful?
Bill Foley
Well, the Premier League is a difficult league to compete in. It’s the best football league in the world, with sovereign wealth funds as owners,
private equity firms as owners, and, obviously, we own the interest in Bournemouth. But we found, as we got involved in the investment, that having interest in other clubs in top leagues is very advantageous, in terms of the transfer window and
acquiring players, and also loaning players to those clubs.
The Scottish Premier League is a terrific football league. Obviously, there’s no
immigration issue with regard to Scotland and the U.K. They develop a lot of good players, that can also work their way down to Bournemouth. The other thing that we can do with Hibernian is, actually, give them players on loan to develop in the
Scottish Premier League, so they can eventually rotate back to the English Premier League. The same is true with FC Lorient, which is, again, in in Ligue 1, in France. Recently, we had loaned a player to Lorient, we just took that player back in
January, and last year, we acquired a player from Lorient, Dango Ouattara, and he’s now playing at Bournemouth.
The result is, if you own a
piece of another team, say, 40% that we own of the Ligue 1 team, when we buy a player, we really are only paying 60% to the other owners. So, strategically and financially, it’s a very advantageous situation to be in, and we’d, frankly,
like to invest in a couple more clubs and other leagues that could be supportive of goal to continue to develop Bournemouth and move it up in the table in the Premier League. Right now, you’d have to say that Bournemouth sits at the top of the
pyramid and the other teams are supporting Bournemouth, but we’re also supporting them in terms of delivering players and helping them develop their teams and coordinating on the manner in which we play, coordinating in the transfer window. So,
it’s really a—it’s not an original model, Manchester City really has developed it over the last 15 or 20 years, and they now have 13 or 14 clubs that they’re invested in. We will never have that many clubs, but a few more would
be interesting.
Jonathan Bass
All right, thanks for
the color, guys.
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