American billionaire closing in on £120m Bournemouth takeover

Bournemouth expect to announce that the club is to be sold to American investor Bill Foley for around £120 million, with the 77-year-old in Dorset on Thursday to watch the first team train ahead of an agreement with Russian-British businessman Maxim Demin.

The Premier League club have reached an agreement with the American, who owns the ice hockey NHL franchise Vegas Golden Knights, and a formal announcement will be made in the coming weeks subject to Foley passing the Premier League’s owners and directors’ test.

It will bring to an end the 11-year involvement of current owner Demin, a Russian businessman with British nationality about whom very little is known, despite his heavy investment in the club.

Foley is chairman of Fidelity National Financial, a major US insurance company, and has an estimated worth of $1 billion. As well as watching training, Foley will be at Dean Court – currently known as the Vitality Stadium – for the Premier League game against Leicester City on Saturday.

Big decisions will lie ahead for the American, first on the future of interim manager Gary O’Neill, whose strong results have bought the club time since their sacking of Scott Parker after just four games of the season. O’Neill, unbeaten in four games in charge, said again on Wednesday that he wanted the job on a permanent basis.

Demin invested in Bournemouth in 2011 when he acquired 50 per cent of the club and then the rest two years later. The year before his first investment, Bournemouth had begun their surge up the Football League with promotion to League One under Eddie Howe. Howe returned to the club in 2012 and resumed that progress with promotion to the Premier League coming in 2015.

The full scale of Demin’s investment in Bournemouth is not clear although it will be considerable. In March the club announced that for the financial year finishing the end of June 2021 they had recorded a profit of £17 million. The previous two years alone had seen cumulative losses of £92.5 million.

In 2018, the club paid a £4.75 million settlement to the Football League over financial fair play regulations. That had come down from the original sanction of £7.6 million. The club reported a loss of £38.3 million for the financial year covering the season in which they were promoted from the Championship. They spent two seasons back in that division after relegation from the Premier League in 2020.

Bournemouth are currently developing a new training ground, with the first team having trained for a long time on pitches adjoining the stadium.

The major challenge is potentially acquiring a site to build a new stadium away from their current home which they lease. There is a belief at the club that a much greater potential can be unlocked in their south coast catchment area, should they be able to build a bigger home than the 12,000 capacity ground set in the picturesque Kings Park.