Southampton on Tuesday night announced that a £100 million controlling stake in the club had been acquired by an investment group, led by the Serbian entrepreneur Dragan Solak.
The club has been taken over by Sport Republic, backed by Solak, who founded Serbia’s biggest telecoms and media company, and includes former Brentford director of football Rasmus Ankersen. The group has acquired the 80 per cent stake, valued at around £100m, of Chinese businessman Gao Jisheng, which he bought in August 2017.
Ankersen and fellow Dane Henrik Kraft are directors of Sport Republic and will play a key role in applying the company’s “proprietary intelligence and data analytics”, the company said, to make Southampton successful. The club’s current chief executive Martin Semmens will continue in his day-to-day role
Solak is an entrepreneur who built the United Group in Serbia into a major broadband, mobile and pay-TV provider across eight countries. Semmens said that the takeover represented the end of a two-year search to find a successor to the Gao family ownership. Solak said Southampton would be the “cornerstone of the [Sport Republic] organisation we plan to build”.
Describing Solak, Ankersen and Kraft as the “perfect” ownership group, Semmens said Sport Republic would “provide a network of people, clubs, and technology that allows the clubs within it to grow every day and gain the advantages you need to be successful.” He added: “As a club, we have never wanted to buy success, but to earn it.”
The Gao family have been unable to invest in Southampton since acquiring the controlling stake from Katharina Liebherr. It has been a frustrating period for the club which has seen them become Premier League strugglers and may have been relegated were it not for the tenacity of manager Ralph Hasenhuttl. Liebherr retains 20 per cent of the club.
Solak oversaw the rise of United Group as one of the pre-eminent European companies in its regional sector. United Group says that it has annual revenue of €1.8 billion (£1.5bn) and 13,500 employees. It claims to be the largest telecoms and media company in South-East Europe – Solak was its founder. A majority stake in United Group was acquired by the investors BC Partners in March 2019.
