And now for something completely different...

http://www.swanstrust.co.uk/2016/10/...forum-address/

So it's all (partly) come out in the past week for Swansea City. I've been following this whole farce for a while now, and my gut feeling over this American takeover being dodgy as all hell turned out to be true. I won't expect anyone to read the whole tract from that link so I'll give you the not-very-abridged version.

Wordy exposition for the unfamiliar:Ownership of SCFC was until fairly recently shared more or less equally between Martin Morgan, Brian Katzen, Huw Jenkins (chairman), Rob Davies and the Swansea City Supporters Trust. The Trust is made up of thousands of regular fans who pay an annual tenner and get to have a say in the goings on at the club through the fan director who sits on the club board. It had been this way (give or take a few individual other local businessmen involved in shareholding over the last ten years) since 2002 when all parties, including the trust, literally bought the club on a hail mary to save it from folding altogether. I remember the people shaking buckets on match days and the posters in shop windows calling out to people to join the trust and raise the money they needed to make the (at the time, completely doomed) investment.

Of course, everyone's wildest dreams actually happened and less than ten years later we were in the Premier League. The rest is fairly straightforward, so we'll zip forward in time to early 2015 and the first whisperings of a 'foreign investment' deal (ie. shares being sold), with all shareholding parties involved in talks. Those talks fell through, which is worth remembering for the moment when we consider what follows.

So earlier this year the Kaplan and Levien show were first announced to be coming to Swansea. During the negotiations, the Trust were suspicious only by their complete radio silence over the whole thing, with nary a statement, forum, or even a tweet as to what role they were playing in discussions. It turns out now that this is because they were not party to any of these discussions, deliberately. Yes, basically what happened was that the other board members had decided to sell up and didn't want the pesky Supporters Trust getting in the way of holla holla get dolla, so did it completely on the down low.

"But Manus, surely that must contravene some sort of agreement that was made at the start?" I hear you ask. Well, you'd be right! The 2002 Shareholder's Agreement signed by everybody mentioned above should have stopped this from happening, but Huw and the gang decided that all that didn't matter and even went as far as telling Kaplan and Levien that it was invalid and that they could forget about it. When the Trust caught up to this fact and confronted them over just what the hell they were playing at, they were asked to sign a new agreement which gave the Trust some pointless extra freebies and which also confirmed that said Shareholder's Agreement was no longer valid. Obviously the sellers got told to do one.

Hidden talks continued, and once the Trust managed to find out what had actually been happening, it was too late. Kaplan and Levien had bought out the previous shareholders' stakes, and now had a 75% grip on the voting rights of the club. The previous board members had made off with their millions and will probably never be seen again (and for their own safety, they probably don't want to). Francesco Guidolin was sacked, again without any consultation with the Trust, and an untested American was installed in his place. Welcome to the New Swansea City.

A word on our American overlords. For all the fanfare in the press releases about "being drawn to the community-based club" and "wanting to work with the Supporters Trust", in reality Kaplan and Levien's attitudes towards the Trust have been lukewarm to say the least. They didn't seem particularly bothered about the mountain of deception and collusion that took place in order to get the sale done, have only had a few face to face meetings with Trust board members, where they repeatedly give no guarantees over the Trust's stake and continuing role in the football club. At the same time they maintain that they are 'keen' to work with the Trust. To be frank, if you want my opinion, these are businessmen who come from a world of American sport where the concept of fan ownership (or even, really, "supporters" altogether) is a foreign and not altogether too appealing one. I'm not holding my breath.

The fact is, the worst part of this whole sorry saga is not that the previous owners have sold up (they were a group of slightly-more-well-off fans who bought the club for a pittance and now have the chance to make some life-changing bucks, no fan would begrudge them), but the fact that they have gone behind the backs of the fans to do it. If the Trust knew that there were shares up for sale, they would have undoubtedly gone for them hammer and tongs, because the Trust's stated aim is to obtain a 25% stake and secure the future of the club.

Literally all the Trust cares about is the success of the club. It will still be there four years from now when we're back at the bottom of the Football League. It's especially sad because for the most part the sellers were genuine, lifelong fans of the club. Huw Jenkins continues to claim what he did was in SCFC's "best interests", but £7M makes people claim a lot of things. He's gone from dream chairman to local pariah in the space of 12 months.

By the way, all this intrigue was totally illegal, of course. The Trust is considering court action, but as stated earlier, all it cares about is the success of the club, and it also knows that senior exectives engaging in protracted court battles with its own fans is not going to be great for results on the pitch, so we'll see what happens.

All in all, depressing, infuriating, and sobering.