Promotion just the beginning as Wolves aim big
Midlanders are targeting 60,000-capacity ground and European football, reports Sam Wallace
As one who can remember Wolverhampton Wanderers before the takeover by global Chinese investment group Fosun, the club’s managing director, Laurie Dalrymple, will enjoy today’s Premier League opener against Everton but it would be a mistake to think ambitions end there.
Top-flight football returns to Molineux after six years, although Wolves want much more than just to survive with a squad that has been transformed. The £20million signing of Adama Traore from Middlesbrough was a club record and there was also the acquisition of Portugal internationals Joao Moutinho and Rui Patricio; Raul Jimenez, of Mexico, and Belgium’s Leander Dendoncker.
Fosun sees Wolves as the potential kings of English football in the Midlands with a fan base that would allow them to compete at the higher end of the table and perhaps beyond. In fact, speaking to Dalrymple, it is clear that ambitions are enormous, starting with the significant increase of Molineux’s 31,700 capacity.
There are already architects’ plans to push that up to 48,000, which Dalrymple sees as fundamental to driving up commercial and sponsorship revenues.
The club’s turnover in the Championship was around £27million and they posted losses of £23.2million for the 2016-2017 financial year having invested to get out of the division. The possibility of leaving Molineux, the club’s home for 139 years, caused consternation among fans this month, but Dalrymple says that is not part of current plans.
He has asked the club architects to draw up a study that will see Molineux’s capacity go up to 60,000. Whether filling a stadium that size at a club who were promoted from League One four years ago is feasible remains to be seen. Season-ticket sales have jumped from 13,000 to the limit of 22,500, with a further 1,000 on the waiting list. It is impressive but some distance from realising Fosun’s ambition for Wolves to be a top-10 Premier League team and then pushing for Europe.
“We see Molineux as our home,” Dalrymple told The Daily Telegraph. “We are a city centre club which is an increasing rarity, even if you look at clubs like Liverpool or Everton. We see that as a unique point. We would be extremely reluctant to lose that. We want fans to understand we see no limit to where the club can go. To be competitive from a commercial perspective we need to be operating from a stadium that is over 50,000 people.
“Make no mistake, the club has a desire to continue to develop in the Premier League. We don’t want to go in and make up the numbers. We want to be in the top half as quickly as possible.
“There is no public timescale but they [Fosun] want to be competitive in the Premier League as quickly as possible. What comes with that is an ability to compete with Europe’s elite. In the short-to-medium term, this club should be getting back to where we were in the 1950s and 1960s while increasing that sort of brand presence domestically, in Europe and other territories.”
That includes China, which they see as natural territory given the reach of Fosun, a behemoth that has grown rapidly in the last 20 years encompassing sport, the film industry, insurance, property, travel and tourism. Closer to home Dalrymple says that Wolves have a 20-mile radius catchment area of 1.5million people and are currently the only top-flight Midlands club.
“We want to get a stadium that is 50,000-60,000 strong. We are acutely aware that is not going to happen overnight but we think by growing the squad and playing well we are going to acquire fans extremely quickly. We don’t think 40,000-50,000 is as far-fetched as some people think it is.”
Dalrymple joined the club in 2014, two years before the Fosun takeover which has attracted most attention for the role played by Gestifute, the football agency, another part of the Fosun conglomerate, which is run by the Portuguese super-agent Jorge Mendes. The recruitment is run by sporting director Kevin Thelwell and both he and Dalrymple answer to chairman Jeff Shi. The influx from clubs like Atletico Madrid, Monaco and Porto shows just how serious the new owners are, up to the point where they alone would fund the stadium extension.
Thus far the word from the new Chinese owners has been to think very big indeed.