Kyril Louis-Dreyfus is now confirmed as biggest the shareholder in Sunderland, and that will be a huge relief to the club’s supporters.
Perhaps the clouds will finally lift from the Stadium of Light. It’s not quite the closing of a chapter, but the confirmation that Kyril Louis-Dreyfus and Juan Sartori have increased their combined stake in Sunderland to 81% is welcome news for the club’s supporters. Promotion back to the Championship through the play-offs had been greeted with huge celebrations, but in true Sunderland style this moment of sunshine was followed by weeks of uncertainty after some extremely unwelcome takeover news indeed.
It didn’t take long for the promotion glow to wear off, though the club had already announced that it had sold more than 28,000 season tickets for the new season after beating Wycombe Wanderers in the League One play-off final – a timely reminder of Sunderland’s untapped potential – when the news broke. Eighteen days after those Wembley celebrations, it was confirmed that minority shareholders and stars of the Sunderland Til I Die Netflix series Stewart Donald and Charlie Methven were in talks with a cryptocurrency group known as The Fans Together (TFT) to sell their combined 39% shareholding in the club.
It was a pattern that has started to feel familiar. TFT released a 102-page white paper of aims and objectives ending with QR codes for ‘donation links’, with talk of being ‘an organisation dedicated to bringing large scale widespread fan ownership to reality’ (they didn’t mention that the majority of these fans would likely be fans of other clubs), all against a backdrop of increasing disquiet from the club’s actual fans at the possibility of Methven and Donald offering one last flourish, leaving a substantial shareholding in the hands of a group with no previous connection to Sunderland, taking experimental decisions based on highly volatile and speculative alternative currency.
The club’s largest shareholder, Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, initially stated that he was happy with his 41% shareholding, although he did seek to distance himself from the TFT interest. But something has changed, and it has now been announced that Louis-Dreyfus is increasing his shareholding to 51%, while Juan Sartori will be increasing his from 20% to 30%. Of the previous owners, Methven will finally now be leaving the club altogether, while Stewart Donald retain a reduced 19% shareholding. TFT said themselves that…
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