Explained: Potential Reading Buyer Robert Platek
Alex takes an in-depth look at the man reported to have agreed exclusivity for a potential purchase of Reading FC.
In case you missed it, Reading released a statement on Monday February 24 announcing that an unnamed party had been granted a letter of intent for exclusivity to purchase the club.
On the one hand, we’re desperate as a fanbase for Reading to be sold to another owner, and after more than 500 days since the club was “officially” put up for sale, all we seem to have achieved is seeing Dai Yongge’s reputation as a difficult/unwilling negotiator become more enhanced while the club has begun to crumble. As such, being in a position where someone can effectively release us from this weird hostage situation is a positive.
On the other hand, this is the fifth time we’ve been in an exclusivity period with someone now. First we had Genevra, then Chiron Sports Group, then Rob Couhig – who, lest we forget, is now locked in a legal battle with the aforementioned Dai Yongge about the apparent unwillingness to sell and loss of earnings because of that. Finally, another exclusivity period was announced with an unnamed bidder, reported to have been Paul Taylor, which ultimately – and by this stage unsurprisingly – amounted to nothing.
Now, a day after the latest exclusivity period announcement, the ever-excellent James Earnshaw has been able to disclose the identity of the new bidder. This time, the new name is a chap called Robert Platek.
As is now traditional, for the third and hopefully FINAL time, I’ve donned my deerstalker hat and monocle eyepiece, and delved into the world of investigative journalism. I’ve kept the same format as the previous bodies of work for other owners, so you may recognise the format.
See Alex’s explainer on Chiron here, and Rob Couhig here.
Who is Robert Platek?
Platek is a 61-year-old American businessman with a long career and background in fund management and financial analysis. I suppose this is somewhat encouraging, as someone who is financially apt is always going to be a plus point, given our history. However, objectively, it could also see funding cuts made to parts of the Reading FC model. But this is pure speculation.
It seems Platek is best known for his work with a company known as MSD Capital, which manages the funds of Dell, the industrial titan of the computer industry. However, his bio on the MSD Capital website provides more information on his body of work since 1986 within the finance industry, after having graduated from Rutgers University.
Lastly, while he may not be a household name in English football, he has experience across three clubs in three countries, with a mixture of results from the ventures: Spezia in Italy, Casa Pia in Portugal and Sønderjyske in Denmark.
The closest he has come to English football, so far, was when he made a bid for the ownership of Sunderland in 2021. However, he missed out to current owner Kyril Louis-Dreyfus.
Is there anyone else involved?
I’m not entirely sure – there has been a report from The Sun that references a collaboration with a long-term business partner called Nishant Tella. However, the report provides no detail of where this name has been found from, what their role is or pretty much anything other than the sentence that I’ve just written there, so I’m taking this one with a pinch of salt for now.
Doing a quick background search on Tella provides me the information that he is an investment banker, as well as a managing director at Spezia, so it is entirely possible that he could be involved with Reading in some capacity.
Besides this, if we look at the history of the purchase of Italian team Spezia, it appears no funds were used from MSD Capital’s pockets, and instead the €24 million acquisition appears to have been paid for by the Platek family, in a personal investment.
I’ve not been able to find any details about the nature of the investments or purchases for the other two teams. However, given that he has since sold Sønderjyske – though unclear how much for – he does at least have some financial security. Hopefully.
Does he have the funds?
It’s tricky to find sources that can accurately describe his worth – the best I can find says his stockholding in MSD Capital is valued at around $7 million, which, while being more than any of us are likely to find down the back of the sofa, is clearly nowhere near enough to finance a football club.
However, this is just a snapshot of his trade details with one company, as his business portfolio covers a number of other ventures which will provide income and resources. I suspect most people prefer not to have their financial dealings and bank statements made public on the internet for people to Google, which is fair enough.
I’ll get more into this in the next section, but, if he has been able to purchase three football clubs, then he not only must have the financial backing from business partners in either MSD or other ventures, but he must have been able to prove his financial viability to the regulators of all of those leagues. This isn’t concrete evidence, but it is a bit more reassuring.
Does he know how to run a football club?
Some people might say “yes” whilst others might say “no”. However, it would seem more people would be inclined to say “yes.”
However you view it, it is undeniable that he has the requisite experience of running a football club, which is not necessarily a bad thing, BUT it is also worth tempering expectations here a bit because a certain someone else has had experience with two teams, neither of whom exist any longer.
First, the good news story: Casa Pia in Portugal, and you can read this excellent article from Breaking The Lines in full if you want to allow yourself to dream of what could be.
To summarise, there seems to be a lot of similarities to Reading here. Based in Lisbon, the capital city of Portugal (yes, I know where Reading is but we’re a stone’s throw away from the capital), Casa Pia are a historic team, having been formed in 1893 (ticks the historic team box), a history of having a successful academy in the early days of the club (ticks the youth development values box) and have largely floated around between the second and fourth tiers of Portuguese football (much like us, we haven’t had much time in the big league).
Platek bought the club while they were in the Portuguese second tier, during the 2020/21 season, finishing ninth in his first campaign with them and then second in the next, earning them promotion to the Primeira Liga for the first time in 83 years.
In their first season there, they finished 10th and, after a slow start to the next season, changed manager when they were 16th (out of 18) and eventually finished ninth. This season, they currently find themselves in sixth place.
In an interview conducted in October 2022 with Portuguese publication Record, Casa Pia CEO Tiago Lopes (after running a translation through Google because, I don’t know about you, but my Portuguese is a bit sketchy) refers to Platek as “a person of unique integrity, reputation and experience managing a very strong economic group”, while “we don’t promise what we can’t deliver” and the promise of “nothing more than a serious, professional and honest job.” It would be a bold move to come out and slander your boss, but these are pretty much the kind of buzzwords that we are longing to see from our ownership.
There is another interview, conducted this time with Tribuna Expresso, by Platek in August 2022. In this piece, he speaks eloquently about his passion for Casa Pia and provides quite a good level of knowledge about the club performance, the strategy for having hired Tiago Lopes and the vision he had in mind for the club. He speaks about his attendance at his first game and acknowledges the importance of the fans. Imagine that – an owner with a plan?!
Without getting too misty-eyed about it, it’s the kind of interview I would want to see any owner of Reading put out there. Though, it must be noted, this will have been a kind of “fluff” piece, without difficult questions having been asked.
The backbone of this team’s success has been around smart, cheap and data-driven scouting that Platek has implemented and complemented by putting the right people in charge of the day-to-day running of the club. That’ something we do quite well these days, with Brian Carey, and we could benefit from an owner coming in who knows money doesn’t buy success, and is willing to invest sensibly in the playing staff. If we could have a similar story to Casa Pia, something will have gone very right for us.
For Sønderjyske, it’s mostly a different story, and for the full version, you can read about it here. In Platek’s two years owning the club, it seems he didn’t really understand the Danish cultural way of doing things, made a number of unsuccessful appointments to try and build out the structure of the club and over-invested in recruitment, seemingly not understanding the low level of funding in the Danish leagues.
While I suppose you can applaud him for his attempt to try and build something bigger there, alienating the local fanbase and not reading the room didn’t go down well. However, he got out quickly in 2022 and largely, it seems, has learned the lessons from the mistakes made here, given how things have been going for Casa Pia.
The last club to discuss is Spezia (or “La Spezia”, as they are sometimes known), who Platek had involvement with until selling up a few weeks ago, alongside his brother Philip Platek Jr as CEO.
This was the biggest of Platek’s investments, coming just as Spezia had been promoted to Serie A. In his first season in charge, 2020/21, they defied the odds despite being favourites for relegation and managed to finished 15th. This is relatively comparable to what most of us as Reading fans would expect if we got promoted to the Premier League – the gap between Serie A and Serie B is just as difficult to bridge as it is between the Premier League and Championship.
Spezia followed this up with finishing 16th the next season, but finally succumbing to relegation in their third season in Serie A, finishing 18th. They are in their second season in Serie B and currently find themselves competing for promotion in third place. Again, it’s worth noting that it seems in Spezia’s history they had never found themselves in Serie A, so while relegation will have hurt, they were rather punching above their weight to be there in the first place.
He also appointed Thiago Motta to the club for one year, in the first season in Serie A, after their manager was poached by Fiorentina. Motta later then left for Bologna, and now coaches Juventus. It seems Platek has overseen successful coaching appointments with Spezia, given how their coaches seem to end up going to bigger clubs. That’s nice to know, in case someone decides to pinch Noel Hunt.
Lastly – I have seen a reference to Platek having some involvement with Real Salt Lake City, a US-based football team. However, I cannot find anything anywhere that demonstrates what or how. As such, while worth noting, I just can’t draw anything of relevance from this. Unless he’s a fan?
Why would he want to buy Reading?
As ever, the reasons are speculative and some are similar to the other two potential owners that I’ve written about.
- Platek does seem to have a genuine passion for the sport, rather than being driven by financial motivations. In that interview with Tribuna Expresso, he said: “Football is not where you make a lot of money. In football, you are in it for the love of the game. If you want to make money, buy property. If you want to have fun, and maybe get lucky and make money, then go into football.”
- Platek has referred in interviews covering Spezia, Casa Pia and SønderjyskE to liking the “underdog” approach. Reading’s status in English football fits that mould.
- The bones of the club are there for success to be achieved. Clearly, he sees value in the facilities on offer at Reading.
- Simply put, location. England is a big football market to be involved in, and being based closed to London will make commutes easier. The commute from New York to London is around seven/eight hours by plane, which, while long, is relatively simple enough to be completed given the flight connections between the two cities.
- The opportunity to grow the multi-club network, similar to the Red Bull model. This would be the second club in his portfolio, following previous involvement in Italy and Denmark, which could see us building relationships with Casa Pia to develop our academy players on loan, or indeed, have loan agreements for players from Portugal, which sounds nice.
Summary of key points
What do we know now? Well, he seems to have a passion for running football clubs, as well as being a very driven individual who wants to develop teams through smart structuring and recruitment, and has been present and accounted for at clubs where he’s been involved. These are plus points.
The biggest challenge that he seems to have faced, while typically managing smaller sides, was managing smaller teams in smaller leagues. Now, given we are in a lower league than any of the other acquisitions in the portfolio, England is the most cash-rich football country in Europe, so his ideas for developing us ought not to be too big, but prudent. However, we do really need to build up stronger income revenues through sponsorships, greater use of the facilities and better trade negotiations in selling players to keep the club running.
We have a name for the prospective new owner, and from this name, we have a little bit of an idea of what the leadership could be like, but this is entirely speculative despite him seeming to boast a fairly positive CV for football club ownership.
We have no idea of timelines, notably whether we’re going to see a sale done in the near-enough future to allow the club to do… something, anything, to prepare for the daunting reality of only having five players left in contract at the end of the season.
However, the wording of the most recent statement hints at the groundwork being in place that will allow it to be quick. But, really, who knows? We also have no idea what his body of work would be like for Reading Women, which urgently needs some attention as well.
Many questions remain, but all we can do as a fanbase is try to be patient, remain positive and keep our ears to the ground for more news, as and when it is released.
There are no guarantees and we cannot rule out this deal falling through either, or if it is completed, we don’t truly know how good Platek will be for the club until after a couple of seasons of his tenure.
Right now, we need to focus our support behind Hunt and the lads, while they continue to push for an unlikely place in the play-offs, and hope for the best. It’s all we can do.