Indian Spice for a Bland EPL Club

The club Ahsan Ali Syed wants to bid for is one of the least fashionable in the EPL.

In the days before Lalit Modi weaved a homespun opportunity to own a top-flight sporting asset, successful Indian businessmen sitting on massive piles of cash dreamt of buying global cachet in the form of a Formula 1 team or even an English Premier League (EPL) football club. While liquor baron Vijay Mallya now owns a less than middling F1 team, Indian efforts to break into the ultimate playground of Forbes listers, the EPL, have been rather effete. At various times, Anil Ambani was speculated to be interested in Newcastle United—EPL’s perennial underachievers but with the most fanatically loyal fan base—and Everton. Then there’s Subroto Roy’s Sahara group, whose name pops up each time a storied club such as Liverpool is put up for sale. Finally, it looks like there will be some Indian representation in the rowdy league. Ahsan Ali Syed, 36, who claims to be an Indian entrepreneur, has stitched up a £300 million bid to buy Blackburn Rovers, possibly the least fashionable of the 18 EPL teams, located in the rusting industrial belt of Lancashire. Not only are details about Syed’s antecedents and indeed his India connections sketchy, his Bahrain-based investment company Western Gulf Advisory (WGA) seems little known in the world of finance and wealth management. But curiously, Syed is trying hard to play up his Indian roots. He claims his Hyderabad-based business family has traded with the East India Company, and that he himself has a law degree from an Indian university.  In an interview to The Guardian, the reclusive Syed (except for a couple of odd photographs on his website, there aren’t any pictures of him available) said that he wanted to “market the club rightly in other parts of the world, specifically in India and the Middle East.” When Open asked the company’s spokesperson about its business interests in India, she said she couldn’t “confirm or deny” WGA’s investments in the country. Slush money’s love affair with EPL continues it seems. Only, this time there’s some Indian flavour to it.

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