Real Football Man All of the Football, All of the time
It’s mixed news if you are a West Bromwich Albion fan as the bid to sign Diafra Sakho has collapsed due to the player failing a medical due to a back injury but there is also the wider issue of the news that the club has been sold by Chairman Jeremy Peace to a Chinese investment group.This means that West Brom join the band of clubs that are now owned by foreign investors and are also the third midlands based club to be taken over by Chinese investors as they now join Championship sides Aston Villa and Wolves in having completed Chinese buy outs.
Jeremy Peace has been looking to sell the club for over a year now and was prepared to wait until he felt that any prospective owner had the clubs right interests at heart. With a deal being completed in June it seems as Peace has found the people that are ready to take over the reigns and end Peace’s 14 year tenure as Chairman of the club.
Not much is known about this investment group but they do have entrepreneur Guochan Lai at the front of it and he is worth an estimated £1.8bn – Baggies fans may be rubbing their hands together with glee at the prospect of a rich benefactor coming in and giving the club much needed transfer funds but with the collapse of the Sakho deal it looks like they will have to go back to the drawing board in their search for a new striker. Sahko has fallen out of favour with Slaven Bilic but will now have to go back to the club and hope that someone else is willing to part with £16m, the price itself was viewed as somewhat high but now he has the blot of a failed medical hanging over him you do have to wonder if anyone else will come back in for him before the end of the month.
The collapse of the Sakho deal also is bad news for Saido Berahino. The England Under 21 international would have been well placed to depart The Hawthorns once Sakho had arrived as he would have been very much surplus to requirements but unless there are forward reinforcements found before the end of the transfer window then it looks like it’s going to be another miserable season of bench warming for Berahino. His only saving grace could be that now the club is under new ownership then perhaps it will embark on a new era for the player who was linked with a move to Stoke this Summer, if these new owners are financially savvy enough they certainly won’t want to risk Berahino leaving on a free transfer once his contract expires. You would imagine Saido will now hope that these new owners stump up some transfer funds for Tony Pulis pretty quickly to enable his departure
