This is the news of this start of the season at CA Brive: the British Ian Osborne has invested in CA Brive by becoming one of the shareholders with 33% of the shares. This businessman is known for having created the Hedosophia investment fund of which he is the CEO. At 38, the entrepreneur turned to CA Brive on the advice of Yannick Bolloré, chairman of the supervisory board of Vivendi, the first sponsor of CA Brive, who presented him in July 2021 in Corrèze lands. . He would even have played rugby in the Richmond club, which Simon Gilham managed at the time.
But what does that change? In the long term, is this a good thing for the club, as for the Top 14? We asked the question to Guillaume Gouze, economic consultant at the Center for Law and Economics of Sport in Limoges.
First, the arrival of a foreign investor is rare, because there aren’t that many in the Top 14 today?
No, there are very few, if any. There are presidents who have dual nationality but who are in fact very integrated people in the city. I can cite Montpellier with Mohed Altrad or Jacky Lorenzetti at the Stade Français: you can’t even qualify them as foreign investors, they are so involved in the city. So the arrival of Ian Osborne is a rarity to my knowledge. This is a fairly atypical and quite innovative scenario. But it’s rather good news for CA Brive for several reasons, whether it’s the boost it can give or the strengthening of the strengths that the club already had.
In the case of Ian Osborne, we are talking about the first shareholder, but not the majority a priori.
All the capital models exist and the companies are limited companies, so they are distributed among different shareholders. And there, all the models exist. We can have 99% of the shares held by a single person or a slightly more classic or more historic model in rugby where we can count up to a hundred shareholders for the same professional club with a primary shareholder who has 25%-30%. The shareholders in place must remain at his side, which is rather good news. It dilutes the risk by allowing with this new contribution of funds, this new contribution of network of skills to continue to develop CA Brive currently.
Can this show that the Top 14 has a real financial interest?
We are not on the sounding board of football, where we see the majority of Ligue 1 clubs, now owned by men or structures from abroad. There is not the same desire, the same notoriety for rugby either, we remain on a sport which focuses on ten countries at the international level.
You have to see the opportunity cost for Ian Osborne of investing in a healthy club, a club that develops its structures, a club that relies on training, a club that has no debts. .. That’s important too, since usually when there’s this type of“uncle from america“, if we want to summarize, who intervenes to take over the management of a club, it is often to pay off debts. Here, we are in a club which has no debts, except for a few investments they have made, (loans or PGE reimbursed to the State following the covid crisis), it is rather a club that is in balance, which is rare.
But the Top14, as such, despite the fact that it is the leading league at international level, despite the money it generates, despite the media notoriety it may have (for example, TV rights have was still sold in the United States last week) is not a target for foreign investors. French investors or local business leaders from the population pools around the clubs can themselves afford to invest and take over the management of certain clubs, which we have seen on many occasions at the local level for a lot of clubs. .
So the situation of Brive is quite atypical….
Although the CAB is a club with a small catchment area (Brive is not Toulouse, Lyon, Bordeaux, or Paris), it is nevertheless a club whose shareholder was Vivendi, a multinational in the leisure sector , television, or the media, whose president Simon Gillham is English. Through these networks, they managed to meet Ian Osborne who saw the interest they could have in investing in this type of club rather than in an English club which is largely loss-making and for which his money would perhaps have be used to pay off debts rather than to accelerate the development of a healthy club.
Ian Osborne does not come with philanthropic aims or does not make a “coup de coeur” purchase.
He made several site visits. He had his books opened, he realized that the club was well managed, was in balance, had chosen to invest in infrastructure, to invest in training. We have seen the signing or extension of certain players, such as Abadie in particular. Perhaps without this new shareholder contribution, this player would eventually have left to respond to requests from other clubs. What has been done on this player extension can serve as an example to continue to seduce with a project and lock, as they say, other young profiles to contribute to the sporting development and sporting stability of CA Brive.
Ian Osborne is also keen to help invest in infrastructure….
The resources of a Top 14 club, it is between half and almost two thirds for some of the resources that we call “match day”, that is to say the resources generated by the stadium, the infrastructures or by what spectators consume on a match day. Having a stadium tool that makes it possible to promote and earn a little more money on match days and to diversify outside match days by offering ancillary services is crucial, all clubs go through this. All the business models are built from this reality there the club.
But I would like to add an important point, there will be the club on one side and there will be the local authorities on the other, which must continue to support the club and put it in the best conditions so that it can develop. It is not because there is a millionaire who arrives that all the local actors who have been steeped in the CAB project for years must disengage. On the contrary, you have to see it as an opportunity to accelerate, stabilize and fill in the points that were weak until now compared to other clubs.
If everyone expects the new investor to work miracles, the project can seize up very quickly.
Is the Top 14 “bankable”? Can you succeed by investing in a Top 14 club?
The Top 14 is bankable. Investors do exist. There are enormously successful businessmen who invest. There are also large-scale entrepreneurial projects. The LOU develops on real estate issues in Gerland. Stade Toulousain has long been shown as a benchmark for matchday-non-matchday diversification. Stade Rochelais continues its 70ᵉ sold-out match. These are great entrepreneurial successes.
There are structural projects like that, which are, which are highly valuable. And on the other side, there are private investors, taken with a passion for a club, who want to develop their territory as in his time Pierre Fabre in Castres and who contribute to a high level rugby club. Both models exist: patrons on the one hand, entrepreneurial projects on the other. I’m not sure that Ian Osborne sees himself as a patron and that’s good because there is a stable and structured entrepreneurial project in Brive.