European Qualifications
The irony of the situation is that he has been wanting to sell his shares in the club for over a year, precisely because he did not feel he had enough of an influence in the clubs running. As it stands, his Eagle Holdings company owns 43% of the shares, but this only Converts into a 25% share of the vote. Thus, control of the club is shared with two other US investment capitalists, Josh Harris and David Blitzer, who own another 25% each, and the Club's homegrown Chairman, Steve Parish, who has the final 25% as the 'golden share'.
Business Intelligence
This week a deal has been muted in the press that might resolve the situation. John Textor has found a buyer in the form of Woody Johnson the owner of New York Jets. While Harris, Blitzer, Parish and Textor have accumulated their wealth through business deals, Johnson's business model is hard to define. Johnson largely inherited his wealth from his great-grandfather's pharmaceutical business, before diversifying into capital investments and republican politics.
Johnson bought the New York Jets about 10 years ago but relinquished control to his brother Chris when he became the US Ambassador to the UK in 2017. He had been a major donor and fundraiser for Trump, and was rewarded with a senior post overseeing Brexit, for the 'prosperity and security' of US investors in the EU and UK. He is purported to be worth $9.9bn, which in terms of his spending power, puts him on a par with Harris on $10bn, above Blitzer and Textor on about $3.5bn, and well ahead of Parish on £50m.
Philanthropic Values
Woody Johnson is currently reported as having Parish's blessing in his attempt to buy Textor out for about £190m. This is well under the initial £240m that Textor was looking for last year, but still represents a £100m return on 4 years hard work. Textor's final noble acquiescence follows a season of boardroom defeats, sporting victories, and relentless targetting by regulatory authorities.
With the benefit of hindsight, Textor's business model may now be seen as having broken new ground; attempting to increase the market share of major football clubs in different national leagues, through sharing intelligence and resources for competitive success. Textor himself wanted to leverage any favourable media exposure through monetising his brands, and continually diversifying their commercial outlets. Blitzer and Harris seemed to follow suit.
Textor's multi-club vision promised great things for talent development, and he has had some success at Botafogo in Brazil, RWB Molenbeek in Belgium, and Olympique Lyon in France. But until this year it had born little fruit for Crystal Palace. He has managed to facilitate loans for some Academy players to his other clubs, but only one of those loanees has really gone on to have a successful career. That was the young Republic of Ireland defender, Jake O'Brien.
O'Brien joined Crystal Palace as an Academy player from Cork City. After excelling at U23 level, O'Brien was loaned to RWB Lowenbeek, helping them gain promotion to the Belgian top league. O'Brien was then due a starting position in the Palace first team when he was unexpectedly moved on to Olympique Lyon, for €1m, the next season. O'Brien helped Lyon get to the Cup final that year, scoring the only goal in an honorable 2-1 defeat, and was sold on to Everton for €19.5m for his troubles.
That move preceeded Textor going public with his desire to ditch Palace at the start of last season. He announced his plan to takeover Everton as majority share holder prematurely. In the end his bid failed and he found himself in the back row at the Cup Final celebrations. Thus, despite perhaps instilling some belief in the club that they had the ability to succeed if they wanted it enough, very little of what Textor has done at Palace could be said to have had any "decisive influence" on the way the club has been run.
In comparison, Harris and Blitzer were probably always more focussed than Textor on exploiting a public-private partnership model for sport, that idealises the health and wellbeing of its role models for mass consumption, whilst seeking to construct a fan base from the deprived communities of South London, and/or exploiting them as platforms for media and advertising revenues. In this sense they are aligned somewhere between Textor and Johnson, in the tradition of US philanthropic capitalists like Carnegie, Rockerfellar, Ford, Hoover, and Gates.
The philanthropic capitalists model grew out of the New England puritan movement that saw business success as being a return on spiritual, if not religious, investment in the greater good. These businessmen became quasi-political operators who invested in large scale infrastructure projects, to stimulate a virtuous circle within local economies, growing their own internal revenues, through extending the external market share of the communitues they invested in.
Sporting Accumen
A business model that sells the virtues of sporting competition through the mass media will obviously rely heavily on brand recognition for the column inches that sporting success can bring. But a balance has to be struck in branding the club as its fans or its players, balancing the running of an aggressive political operation behind the image of a more desireable wholesome family club. Perhaps the most obvious evidence for this is that while Johnson, Blitzer and Harris have invested in multi-million shared-use state-of-the-art stadiums for the New York Jets and Washington Commanders respectively, they have bankrolled charitable foundations representing the more ethical side of American pragmatism, for their respective NFL clubs.
As social entrepreneurs, these American businessmen have all courted triumph and disaster through the high-risk, low-reward structures of their sporting endeavours. Arguably, however, Harris, Blitzer and Textor have had much more success during their volatile relationship at Crystal Palace than Woody Johnson has had in the spotlight as the sole owner of NY Jets. Harris and Blitzer always seem to prefer the relative safety of the boardroom, adopting a strictly hands-off approach to field-of-play matters. This may have helped them focus on growing the business, in contrast to Textor who always seemed to be more interested in catching the headlines than connecting with the fanbase.
Textor could have been accused of making himself the brand at the expense of the club. The Palace board were able to tolerate each other up to a point. But when Textor realised he would be unable to unseat Parish and take majority ownership, the regal marriage of convenience was basically over. If Textor's industry was about creating news for social capital, whether that be over match-fixing in Brazil, or state monopolies in France, Johnson is looking more like a banker for US heritage money. While Textor is a master of escalating anxieties in the same way that Donald Trump does, Woody Johnson is much more likely to be cleaning up the mess that such Presidential cascades leaves behind.
Johnson is a trusted pair of hands who could do well to play his cards as a silent partner. He has often tried to provide soundbites in the same key as Trump, but his grasp of the master narrative has failed to strike the right chord with Jets fans. A lack of tactical insight at post-match interviews, and rumoured use of gaming profiles to guide recruitment strategies, has been trolled as naivety about the sport. Whether true or not, such press will quickly lose an owner the trust and confidence of their most important constituents, the people who pay to watch his team win games. After 25 years at the helm of the NY Jets, Johnson's team are now known as 'the most unsuccessful club in NFL history'. Johnson would therefore seem to have his work cut-out, at least for a season or two, the Eagles can expect a few gaffs in his rookie year.
London Connections
Although Johnson has undoubtedly experienced problems in his role as owner of NY Jets, there is plenty that Harris, Blitzer, and Parish could learn from him, if he replaces Textor on the Board at Crystal Palace. The club have faced a number of obstacles over eight long years to finally get planning permission from Croydon Council for a £200m redevelopment of their 100 year old Main Stand. A trans-Atlantic diplomat like Johnson might have some additional bargaining chips to bring to the table.
As it stands, the costs of the project have already doubled under Parish's leadership. This drag on success, in the context of Croydon Council disclosing huge debts and a dependence on central givernment to subsidise their most basic public service functions, starts to smell of corruption. The delays have not stopped the Council praising the Club, along with several other educational establishments, as being "renowned anchor institutions" in an area that has a growing reputation as "the capital of South London". But wherever power chokes the raw ambition of young talent, serious questions really need to be asked.
Now that Crystal Palace have the chance of bringing in extra revenue to the area through participation in the UEFA Europa League, surely personal connections with the current US President could only help maximise the opportunities that are now possible. Official reports have confirmed that European Cup Competitions are driving growth in profits and inequalities across all European leagues, so the need for the influence of US-style philanthropic investment has never been greater. Yes, it is true that Johnson is linked through the MetLife Stadium, to the UEFA Club World Cup 2025 and FIFA World Cup in 2026, but he has no other investments in any other soccer club. So the problems posed to UEFA by Textor's multi-club model will cease to apply, should Johnson succeed.
Johnson was interested in buying West Ham at one point, and bid $2bn for Chelsea in the past. This probably has to be read in the context of other efforts to reduce Russian (ex-Soviet) influence in European sports at the time. Needless to say, Johnson probably has additional revenue to spend on players if he needs to, and his track record as an Ambassador for US interests overseas remains untarnished. Despite the negative press he has received in the US sporting press, the UK press are saying that he visited the Club on several occasions while living in London. He knows that his shares will only buy him a 25% voting share at the club, and a quick sale is part of the deal. The seat may be available to him at a much reduced price, but this is an inevitable reflection of the political capital at his disposal. Thus, he may not be the new Sporting Director, or a sort of False Messiah like so many others before him, but I can see why Parish has given the green light to the move.
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