You keep making the point about private equity wanting a profit and that's not wrong. Some of Silver Lake's previous & current investments have done very well so it's clear that they're quite good at this.
But the usual worries about Private Equity - leveraged debt, aggressive cost cutting, asset stripping, etc - don't really apply here.This isn't the same as Elliott Management taking control at AC Milan. There's an obvious upside at Milan, as they're not in the CL and their revenue stream has stagnated for years. If Elliott can turn that situtation round, they'll probably make a return and get out. But their involvment in Milan was via funding the original Chinese investment by Li Yonghong so when he couldn't meet his financial commitments, they became the owner by default whereas Silver Lake have made a conscious decision to invest.
It's also not a Glazer-like leveraged buyout; SL are very much a junior partner as it's a 10% stake so they've no control bar a sole director on the board. Khaldoon can do anything he wants. Second, there's already a number of connections including Oak View & Fanatics, plus a couple of names that I think have been commercial partners in the past. I suspect there's been a connection for a while and this investment merely formalised it. Maybe some of the private equity they're managing comes from the UAE. We know that the company controlled by Khaldoon, Mubadala, has a tech fund in the USA and this year announced one to be based in London. We also know that the UAE are big investors in SoftBank so there's obviosu synergies. The club has already dipped its toes into the tech investing area by inviting a number of smaller tech start-ups to pitch their ideas with about 8 being actively worked on currently.
You talked in one of your posts about Sheikh Mansour releasing equity, which seems nonsense to me. He's worth tens of billions of pounds, whereas you're comparing him to some old couple living in a house where the mortgage has been paid off and who want to help their grandkids. This investment has already transformed the valuation of football companies, with United's share price (which is the most visible) shooting up 15% at a time when their share price had dipped below $16. But they are a true case of a short-sighted investment ploy where the Glazers saw a huge upside and were prepared to put them in hock and are more interested in taking money out than putting it in.
Garry Cook said, 10 years ago, that football clubs would be competing with the like of Disney and other entertainment companies in the future. We don't really know what Silver Lake's plan ios at the moment but I really don't see this investment as a risk at this moment.
