Carol Shanahan: “The pros were to help the community, the cons were that we were getting robbed!”

English Football League club owners face a near-impossible dilemma. Pushing for the Premier League can risk a club’s entire future, but focusing on sustainability can see a club swallowed up by the pack. SportBusiness Professional spoke to three English club owners, each with distinct ambitions, about why they took the plunge and how they intend to succeed.

Carol and Kevin Shanahan have owned and operated Synectic Solutions, a data management and IT solutions company, for the past 27 years. The company has been based in Staffordshire for its entire existence but an office move to the town of Burslem brought the couple closer to Port Vale, a fourth-tier club close to their hearts.

They paid £4m for the club and its 19,000-seater Vale Park stadium in May this year, but the club currently averages just 5,000 spectators per home match. Carol and Kevin plan to return the club’s status as a central pillar of the local community, filling those seats in the process.

When you were deciding whether to make a bid for Port Vale, what did you decide were the pros and cons of buying the club?

Well, the implication of ‘pros and cons’ is that this was thought through! Buying a football club just isn’t like any other business transaction. The first time we tried to buy the club three years ago, Norman Smurthwaite [Port Vale’s former then-owner] pulled out. We asked him for guarantees that there weren’t any creditors or debts that would appear out of the woodwork once we bought it and he wouldn’t give us those guarantees. We needed them, he wouldn’t give them, so it fell apart.

Three years later, we tried again. We’d gone down a league, the club was falling apart and Norman goes on the radio in a meltdown and said he’d put the club into administration by May 5. The whole place was hostile and toxic. If it went into administration, it would have gone into liquidation because he was the sole creditor. We would have gone the same way as [League One side] Bury FC, no two ways about it.

We took a decision. The way Kevin [Shanahan, Carol’s husband] and I looked at it was like a ransom that needed to be paid. Someone had our loved one hostage and we had to pay the ransom. If you view it like that, you can then do things you would never do with a regular business deal. I couldn’t hold my head up in the business community and say that buying Port Vale was a good deal!

There are other clubs in the same situation that could end up like Bury, and people just like us saying ‘we’re not getting involved because it’s a bad business decision’. Hopefully, people look at us and understand where we’re coming from, because if we get this right then the money we paid for the club will be worth the equivalent of one Port Vale player’s leg.

If it wasn’t so much a case of pros and cons, what was your motivation for pressing ahead and buying the club?

Our community, Stoke-on-Trent, is not in a great position. We’ve lost industry, we have serious social and economic problems, particularly in Burslem, and we want to help. We’ve fed kids and provided activities to disadvantaged kids, but if we really want to help, we will make Port Vale successful. If we can do that, it will permeate out into the community.

The pros were to help the community, the cons were that we were getting robbed! But if we get it right, maybe people like us – who are reticent to take that step forward – will see that it’s possible to prevent other clubs going down like Bury did.

Were you able to buy the stadium, as well as the football club itself?

We bought the stadium outright and I’m so glad that we did. We have a stadium that can fit up to 20,000. I’ve had people say to me that the stadium is too big and I said no, the league we’re in is too low. It’s a Championship-standard stadium. We’re averaging about 5,000 a game and one of the problems in League 2 is away support is generally a lot lower than in League 1. We played Morecambe at home, who are a wonderful club with wonderful people there, but they brought 111 away fans. That is very low. We are at home to Stevenage in two weeks and they won’t bring many.

Buying it outright has meant that we can look at other ways to use the stadium. We only play football there 30 days a year, so on the other 330 days a year, what do you do? Currently, Netflix are parked on it with their entire entourage [filming a new series]. That’s bringing in some income. We’ve got offices, hospitality and conference centres. It’s key to bring in as much as you can from your stadium. A lot of stadiums you go to, they don’t have the facilities. We do, and we want to do a lot more with them.

You’ve hinted that player development will be key to keeping the club in the black. Will you be taking care of this yourself, or have you hired staff to control player transfers?

One of the great things for us was the management team already in place when we bought the club. John Askey brought Macclesfield up from the National League and he’s used to doing a lot with a little. His staff are bringing players in that are growing and improving, which is why I’m happy with where we are in the league. We knew we were bringing players in to develop them, so to be 10th is phenomenal.

Have you been able to get your message across to the staff and the players that club’s ethos has changed?

I keep talking with them about the relationship between how the club is run, how the team is run and how fans behave. In teams we’ve played I see it, but if you look at Port Vale before we got here, there was a detachment between club, team, fans, academy and the Port Vale Foundation. There was no cohesion. We’re looking to integrate all those aspects, but the top priorities were to get the team up and running so it could win, get the stadium compliant and boost income generation. Those are the first three priorities, and then we’ll be working on getting players into the community and getting the academy integrated into the club.

Burslem is a small catchment area, and there are other, bigger clubs in the area. Does this affect your ability to reach out into the community?

It’s interesting for us because we have Stoke City nearby. You can attack things in different ways when there are two clubs in one area and we need to coexist with them. The Stoke Opportunity Commission asked myself and Liz Barnes [vice-chancellor and chief executive of Staffordshire University] to chair the partnership board, which I do. On that board we have Adrian Hurst from the Stoke City Community Trust and Tom Sherratt from the Port Vale Foundation. We’re already working together on community projects, taking activities into community centres and schools, employing the Stoke City Community Trust to do this as well as the Port Vale Foundation. There’s no place for squabbling.

Do you think this kind of commitment to helping the community can be turned into increased revenue, especially on matchdays?

I do think it can boost matchday revenue. Making everybody welcome is key, whether it’s home fans, away fans, or the away team’s staff and directors. That has to be part of the club’s value system.

But, you asked why we do this? We have a ‘knit and natter’ group on Thursday mornings, and a 71-year-old lady is emigrating to Canada next week. This morning was her final session. She’s been a Port Vale fan since she was 5, and I gave her a card signed by the whole team and she burst into tears! She said it’s going in a frame! Port Vale runs through that woman’s veins. So you ask why I do this? It comes down to a 71-year-old lady who has been with 66 years, telling me that the only reason she nearly didn’t go to Canada was because of the club and its community.

This article is part of a series of interviews with football investors. To read our interview with Andrea Radrizzani, owner of Leeds United, click here.

To read our interview with Dale Vince, owner of Forest Green Rovers, click here