Venky's scores a coup with EPL buy

After Tetley’s, Jaguar and Land Rover, it is now the turn of Blackburn Rovers, an English Premier League Club to fall prey to a marauding Indian company. Blackburn, which won the premiership title in 1995, but has since fallen to 17th place in the league tables, is to be acquired by the Pune-based poultry group Venkateshwara Hatcheries, better known by the more anglicised name, Venky’s. The deal, estimated at about $73 million, makes the Mumbai-listed company — which supplies chicken to south Asian outlets of fastfood giants such as KFC, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut — the first Indian group to wholly own a Premier League club. Blackburn is only the latest EPL club to come under foreign ownership, in the latest example of the ‘Wimbledon effect’ , usually used in the context of the UK’s highly successful financial services industry that is overwhelmingly dominated by foreigners. The phrase was coined as the UK hosts perhaps the most prestigious of the Grand Slam events but few Britishers have won a Wimbledon title. Earlier this month, Liverpool was bought by New England Sports Ventures, owners of the Boston Red Sox baseball team. As with financial services, so too with football clubs, it would now appear.

For Venky’s , a group that is an outlier in more ways than one — it is run by a woman, Anuradha Desai, who succeeded her father BV Rao, a rarity in the patriarchal world of Indian business (she has two brothers) — the move is, presumably, a bid to go high profile with the brand. Tying up with a game like football, the number one sporting passion in the world, should bring rich dividends. More so since, unlike some overseas acquisitions by Indian companies , the acquisition seems less driven by hubris. Chairperson Desai seems to have her feet firmly planted on the ground, going by her statement, ‘We won’t need to buy expensive players, we can always lease them.’ Blackburn is not exactly in the pink of health, financially. It has debts of $31.6 million and made a pre-tax profit of $5.7 million last year even as average attendance at its games last season was modest. For Venky’s , it will be a challenge to improve the club’s profile. But if it succeeds (it does not expect any miracles, Desai has warned) it can surely start counting its chickens before they hatch!