Page 5 - 360633 LP236168 A Love Supreme 48pp A5 (April 2022)

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Away from the field, and after a year of silence
on the subject, the percentages of ownership
were finally and reluctantly announced, and those details didn’t make anybody happy. Far from being the majority shareholder, KLD simply has more shares than any other individual at 41%, while
games to go. We have 67 points, and that’s too
far behind second place to realistically hope for automatic promotion. Actually, even the play-offs are a stretch at the moment, but that’s what we have to aim for. We have a game in hand on Plymouth (74 points), who we play at their place on Easter Monday, and the same number of remaining fixtures as Oxford (69 points) who we play on April 9, also away. Will Mr Methven be in attendance? Home games against 19th-placed Gillingham, and mid- table Shrewsbury and Cambridge are all eminently winnable, then we have to squeeze in the home game against top dogs Rotherham, hopefully on the beach by then, before the last game, at relegation- threatened Morecambe. An interesting set of fixtures, but aren’t they all? What it boils down to is that, should we get to the play-offs, we’ll arrive as a team in the ascendancy, rather than the team that’s tumbled down the league, which is what we’ve done on previous occasions. Hopefully that ascendancy will provide us with the impetus to get us to Wembley, where we can at last do the business in a crucial game with fans in attendance. Please.
Whatever the season brings, it’ll come with your support, so let’s give the Lads our full backing and stretch that season into May, arriving in the play-offs on an upward trajectory.
the Madrox group, which we all thought/hoped had dissolved as an entity, have the remaining 59%. Stewart Donald holds 34%, Charlie Methven 5%, and Juan Sartori 20%. Methven has quoted
a figure of £11.7 million as what they’d take to
sell their shares, and, as KLD is worth a great
deal more than that, folks are naturally wondering why he doesn’t just cough up. The fact that he hasn’t has brought Wild Bill Storey back out of the woodwork, claiming he’s putting together another bid to buy the club, thankfully, nothing has come of that claim... yet.
The whole situation also brings in the Chelsea effect. Isn’t KLD’s mam Russian? Isn’t Juan Sartori’s wife Russian? Isn’t his father-in-law Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev? While Mrs Louis-Dreyfus can legitimately claim that her money was generated outside of Russia by her late husband’s business interests, Mrs Sartori certainly can’t. What most Sunderland fans want is a clear break from the previous regime so that we can move forward, and while KLD’s position is that he has complete control in terms of running the club, as long as the other three have shares there is the possibility of them having influence at some stage. In theory they could sell their (combined) majority shareholding to someone (Bill Storey, for example) who could then demand that owning 59% of the club gives them the right to make crucial decisions. Just clear it up, eh?
...and back to the actual game. At the time of writing, we’re sitting in seventh place with seven
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