Blackburn start their Championship campaign with Steve Kean at the helm

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At the start of the new championship season Blackburn Rovers will have a manager in the shape of Steve Kean. Shebby Singh, the club’s new global advisor, announced that an agreement has been made with Kean.

Rovers were relegated in May, following 11 years in the Premiership. Supporters have been putting increasing pressure on club owners Venky’s and Keane himself since Sam Allardyce was replaced in December 2010 be the Scot. The 44-year-old flew to India at the end of last season for talks with Venky’s, and it appears he will be trying to lead Blackburn back to Premiership football in the first year.

Mr Singh who is a former Malaysian international, and has been working as a football pundit recently in Asia, was appointed by Blackburn Rovers Football Club at the start of the week.

Although he reportedly called for Kean to be sacked in a Singapore paper (New Paper), he now appears to support the Scot. In the newspaper column he said that Steve Keane was not the man to lead the club back to the Premiership. He has stated that when the article was written, he was looking at him critically as a sports pundit, not as a work colleague.

Mr Sing goes on to explain that they need to talk about certain aspects for an extremely long time. He feels that there were a lot of areas which weren’t looked into in the last season. In particular He mentioned tactically naïve, lightweight teams, players past their prime, team members who were played out of position and unhappy players.

He said they weren’t going to wallow in self-pity, but quickly move on. Mr Singh agrees he has been critical and in his new role as global adviser his views need to be more constructive.

 

Ex manager Walter Smith seeks to buy Rangers

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A new bid to buy Rangers has been announced by former manager of the side, Walter Smith. The offer is thought to be approximately £6m and Mr Smith will put part of the money in alongside other Scottish businessmen, to include Douglas Park and Jim McColl. Mr Smith has asked the previous leading bidder, Charles Green, to stand aside. Mr Green and his consortium were about to complete their £5.5m purchase.

Mr Smith has confirmed in a statement that he is leading a bid for the club, saying that he and his partners want the club to be in the capable hands of Rangers people, to help stabalise the club. He continued by saying that he had asked Mr Green to step aside so the deal could proceed, saying that the new deal would be in the best interests of the clubs employees, the fans, the creditors and all other stakeholders of Rangers F.C.

This development came on the day the CVA (company voluntary arrangement) was rejected. This failed after Revenue and Customs told the club’s administrators that it would not vote in favour of the proposal. The club required 75% backing to move it out of administration. Rangers Football Club now moves towards liquidation and Mr Green will soon acquire the business and assets of Rangers Fc on a newco basis. On Thursday the administrators confirmed an ‘imminent’ newco deal, following the rejection of the CVA.

Mr Smith, who was at the Ibrox helm for two successful spells, said that the motivation behind the 11th hour bid was simply to save the club, and not because anyone in the group wanted to own Rangers Football Club. The consortium hope to make the club self-sufficient, and stress that long term sustainability is essential.

Rangers demotion could lead to Sky pulling out of SPL TV deal

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Sky is ready to pull out of the £110million deal to show SPL games should Rangers plunge to Division Three, causing terror and stress in the boardrooms. However, it may not be such a bad thing. Matches were traditionally played from 3pm on a Saturday but now times differ according to TV air time, putting many supporters off.

Club chairmen are dreading the thought of the SPL without the funding that Sky gives. Stephen Thompson, of Dundee United, said that they day the club has to go without satellite cash could be described as Armageddon; Michael Johnston from Kilmarnock is not too pleased about the idea either.

If the game went back to the old days, kicking off at 3 o’clock on Saturday afternoon, the clubs would be taking a huge gamble. However the management teams do not want to ignore what the supporters want. They understand that a club needs supporters to survive, however they also need large injections of cash flow, which is one thing that Sky TV coverage regularly brings.

They have a difficult decision ahead of them on how to find the balance. Generally the two main revenue streams are TV money and sales of season tickets, but smaller clubs need the TV money to remain in business.

A huge 30% of the SPL income received by Dundee United this season came from television contracts. With clubs such as Kilmarnock in considerable debt it is important to have a regular income, which is promised with the Sky deal. Kilmarnock FC have tried a number of ways to pull more crowds in, however they remain unconvinced that a return to the traditional kick off times would help bring punters in. He described the idea as “a step into the unknown”.

The League Cup is renamed once again after deal with Capital One

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The Football League has announced that the League Cup will be known as the “Capital One Cup” next season. The value of the four year agreement which includes sponsorship and naming rights has not been disclosed.

Richard Heaselgrave, the League’s Chief Commercial Officer stressed the cup was in good shape with some exciting finals in the last few years. The cup is played on a knockout basis amongst the teams making up the league competition – including the Premier league.

The last cup, then known as the Carling Cup, was won by Liverpool on penalties, beating Cardiff 3-2. Heaselgrave went on to say that the competition gave the public a chance to see some exciting mid-week cup football and a chance to see future stars. The first round draw will take place on June 14th for the rebranded cup; the final will be played at Wembley on February 24th.

Manchester United named as the most valuable club in the world

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Manchester United named as the most valuable club in the world The chief operating officer of Manchester United, Michael Bolingbroke, has said that football clubs should not just be after quick money on offer from overseas sponsors’ interested in the Premier League. He said that clubs need to focus most of their marketing on the core fans or they run the risk of damaging the brand.

Bolingbroke was speaking at the annual Global Leadership Summit at the London Business School. Manchester United has 333million fans across the world and 139 million of these are core fans. These figures come from research carried out by TNS Sport in 2007. Brand Finance has labelled it the most valuable sports club in the world.

United say that their core fans are more important than any sponsors or broadcasters to the club’s marketing strategy. Bolingbroke backed this up by saying that getting the insight from these core fans had been critical in recent years to the club’s commercial success.

He said that although core fans are not a key revenue driver, they drive growth with the atmosphere they provide at the club and their invaluable insight. The club maintain interaction with their global fans by interacting with the core fans and Bolingbroke says this is more important to the future of the club than sponsors or broadcasters. He said that other clubs should be wary of alienating their core fans by going after quick money.

Manchester United make their strategy work by asking how core fans like to be treated as opposed to, say corporate fans. There are differences and United use these to make all their fans happy especially on match days. Manchester United have, however, also been one of the busiest clubs when it comes to overseas sponsorship, signing deals recently with telecommunication companies, Globul and Du.