It’s hardly on the same level as the multimillion-pound takeovers of Liverpool or Manchester United, but US tycoon Robert Rich Jr’s investment in an amateur team in northeast England has fans of Bedlington Terriers dreaming of the big time.
“Mr Rich said he wants to help the underdogs and he wants to help Bedlington achieve what they are capable of,” Terriers club secretary David Collop said on Thursday. “This is like a fairytale come true with him getting involved.”
Bedlington are nowhere near the stature of Liverpool, which was bought by the owners of the Boston Red Sox last month for £300 million (then US$476 million) and are hardly on a par with Manchester United, which was bought in 2005 by the Glazer family, the owners of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, in a leveraged buyout worth US$1.4 billion.
Instead, the tiny club are in the ninth tier of English soccer and only five years ago were minutes away from going out of business. Now the club has a wealthy benefactor in the form of Rich, a 69-year-old businessman from Buffalo who owns three minor league baseball teams.
“Could the Bedlington Terriers become an international brand —even an international icon?” Rich told local newspaper the Journal in Newcastle, without answering his own question. “We’re having fun. I’ve been in baseball for a long time, so I know the fun you can have with a business. But we’re not in that — we’re helping people who need help.”
Rich is No. 488 on the Forbes rich list after making his US$2 billion fortune in the food manufacturing and catering empire. He hasn’t bought Bedlington, but he has become the shirt sponsor and has even lavished the club with a new electronic scoreboard valued at £30,000.
Rich’s association with Bedlington, a town devastated by the collapse of the coal industry in the 1980s, charts back to last year. He discovered he had ancestral links to the town, which is located 16km north of Newcastle and bears similarities to his native Buffalo.
For a Christmas present last year, his wife bought him the title “Lord of Bedlington” and he soon became interested in the local team, into which he is now putting a tiny part of his vast fortune.
The chairman of Rich Products Corporation has been to see one Terriers match — a league game against northern rival Dunston UTS — and he has been in regular touch with club chairman Dave Holmes.
Rich is planning to sell Bedlington shirts around the stadiums of his baseball teams — the Buffalo Bisons, the Northwest Arkansas Naturals and the Jamestown Jammers — with the aim of making them a cult item for US sports fans.
“He is merchandising all our replica shirts and scarfs in America, through his teams and through his corporation,” Collop said. “His PR team are giving us advice on merchandising and marketing and I’ll sure he’ll be investing more in the future.”
But will the Terriers, currently in seventh place in the STL Northern League Division One, soon be marching up the league ladder? Not according to Collop.
“We’re not going to be splashing the cash,” the club secretary said. “Everybody is asking us what our ultimate ambition would be. Mine would be to see the Terriers run out for a [fourth-tier] Football League game. But that’s a while off yet.”
“We’re aren’t looking for a quick-fix promotion. Remember, five years ago, the Terriers were within five minutes of going out of business, from folding. That would have been the end of Bedlington Terriers,” he said.
Bedlington are hardly a household name in English soccer. The club’s most famous player may be Trevor Benjamin, a 30-something journeyman striker who played for former Premier League side Leicester City from 2000-2005, and the team has an average attendance at Welfare Park that barely scrapes 100.
“I haven’t made any promises,” Rich said in the Journal. “Having said that, I would love to see them do well and let them challenge me to increase our participation, whether to increase sponsorship or whatever.”
“I’m still learning about British football, and I understand that if they do well on the field it can move up in divisions. If this is the dream the community has, I want to help. I don’t want to become an owner, I just want to help,” he said.
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