WOLVES AT THE DOOR
Billionaire owners insist they will be bigger than City — so watch out Premier League, it’s ...
WOLV ER HAMPTON has a population on 249,000, so aiming to make their team the top football club in the world might seem fanciful. But Jeff Shi, Wolves executive chairman, born and raised in Shanghai where the population is 24 million, offers some perspective. ‘If you are comparing Manchester to the cities in China, it is a very small city to us,’ says Shi. ‘But they have two top football clubs.’
In fact, there are 40 cities in China bigger than Greater Manchester. ‘If your goal is to have a global club, your fans will be around the world,’ says Shi. ‘In Wolverhampton maybe the population isn’t so high and for every game 50,000 or 45,000 is the max, it’s no problem for us. Because you want an international club and fans in the US, in Canada, in China, in Europe. Football doesn’t need a very big metropolitan area. It’s more about the people and their love and passion. That I can feel here. And for that reason, I like Wolverhampton very much.’
It is at this stage in the conversation you realise that Wolverhampton, long since a punchline in cheap jokes, and its football team, which has existed on life support at times in the past 40 years, is genuinely changing. And how quickly that might happen — Manchester City were football’s oldest running gag until 10 years ago.
Shi doesn’t balk at the suggestion that they want to match them. ‘In the future? Yes, why not? I do hope we can be the top club in the world. But it’s not so useful to talk too much about that now. It’s step by step. If you ask me the long-term goal, of course, we want to be as good as Man City, even better than them in future.’
He will stress the need for humility, how they have to learn and adapt, respect the fact that they are newcomers in the Premier League but the goals are clear. ‘We know how much Man City have invested into their squads and personally I don’t think if you give me 10 years or 30 years, it’s not impossible to match. And football is not all about money. We can learn from them. And maybe we can do better than them, with the people, the team, the coach, the players. If combine that, maybe you can do something sooner than them or invest less and achieve the same goals.’
Most people recognised t hat Wolves were stirring when Nuno Espirito Santo was appointed manager last year and they signed Ruben Neves for £15million. More heads turned when they ran away with the Championship, which they won with 99 points. Still more when they spent £66m this summer after promotion. Their opening four displays in the Premier League suggest that they are here to stay. There are plans to expand Molineux, eventually perhaps to a 50,000 stadium if they can. ‘ Step by step,’ insists Shi, though.
It was 2014 when Fosun, the Shanghai-based international conglomerate which Shi represents, turned their attention to football.
Within a year they were being advised by Jorge Mendes, agent to Cristiano Ronaldo, Jose Mourinho and a source of contention to some Championship clubs last season, who accused them of breaking the rules that prohibit owners of clubs investing in agents. They have been cleared by the EFL and Premier League. Fosun bought Wolves for £30 min 2016.
‘Before that we had been approached by many clubs in Italy, France, the Premier League and the Championship,’ says Shi. ‘We were looking for a club that was clean, by which I mean no debts. But a club with history and fanbase.’
Initially it would have been easy to write off as the usual naive overseas investors. They sacked the traditional, decent British boss ( Kenny Jackett), brought in an expensive, unsuitable international replacement (Walter Zenga), relied extensively on one agent for advice (Mendes) and proceeded to end up in relegation trouble.
The difference is that Fosun, though unknown in the UK until they brought Wolves, area respected international brand, initially a market research firm set up by a group of twenty-something post- graduates from Shanghai University in the Nineties, who have risen to become one of China’s major overseas investors.
And they have learned quickly. Shi uprooted his family — he has two daughters — from Shanghai to the nearby village of Tettenhall last year. His office now overlooks the training ground. When we met on Friday, he had to be dragged away from watching training. This is not remote leadership. ‘ I came to live here because the owner ( Fosun chairman Guo Guangchang) told me to come,’ said Shi. ‘He said: “Wolves is too important.” At that time I wasn’t so sure I should come as it’s a big change for my family. But now I’m here and it’s proof the owners were right. ‘We think some fans of Wolves are sleeping. Maybe their grandfather or father were fans. But this club has gone through a tough period so we have a sleeping fanbase and the target is to wake them.’ John Richards, now 67, remembers the most recent glory days. He played in the 1972 UEFA Cup final for the club with players like Derek Dougan and Kenny Hibbert. He scored the winning goal in the 1974 League Cup final and played in the 1980 League Cup final win along with England captain Emlyn Hughes and Andy Gray, signed for a British record of £1.5m. That was their last major trophy. ‘We were a really good team, on the up,’ he says. ‘It was a really exciting time in the city because people still remembered the great teams of the Fifties with Billy Wright and Jimmy Mullen. We would see them around as they lived locally.’
Of course, the Fifties were the real glory years. Wolves won league titles in 1954, 1958 and 1959 and the FA Cup in 1960. The Daily Mail christened the team ‘champions of the world’ when they beat Hungarian team Budapest Honved in a friendly in 1954. That claim and the match led to the setting up of the European Cup, which Wolves played in 1959 and 1960.
The Seventies team revived some of that hope before a downturn. From 1983-1986 the club dropped from the top flight to Division Four in successive seasons.
With Steve Bull’s goals and Graham Turner’s coaching, a slow recovery began, Sir Jack Hayward bought the club in 1990 and rebuilt the stadium. Former England manager Graham Taylor couldn’t get them into the Premier League but Dave Jones did in 2003. They lasted a season but returned under Mick McCarthy from 2009 to 2012.
This time, however, it feels different to a survival battle. ‘We want to compete,’ says Shi. ‘ Every club with ambition should consider that they should win something. And our long-term goal is to do something comparable to the Fifties. That’s what we’re aiming for.’