Knighthead could keep investing in 'hotbed' after making Birmingham City addition
Knighthead have helped to create a 'hotbed of investment' in the city of Birmingham and are beginning to develop what is considered to be a 'powerful' brand by a leading sports finance expert. Dr. Rob Wilson, who is a professor of economics at Sheffield Hallam University, believes that the money being committed by the owners of Birmingham City will stand the Second City in good stead for years to come.
It was confirmed on Wednesday that Knighthead had bought just under half of The Hundred cricket franchise Birmingham Phoenix for a sum in the region of £40m, to add to their sporting portfolio in this country. The Phoenix, who have Men's and Women's teams, boast a host of English internationals in their squads and play at Edgbaston throughout August.
Coupled with the huge impact Knighthead have already had on Blues in the 18 months they've been in situ - in that time plans have been unveiled to build a £3bn Sports Quarter which will include a new home, academy and training ground for the club - multi-club models across different sports point to an exciting future.
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“With this I can see the Midlands being a hotbed of investment. When you look at club ownership, any professional club ownership, you've gone from domestic owners to foreign investors to multi-club models and sovereign wealth and then multi-club models are morphing into multi-sport models," Dr Wilson told Grosvenor Casinos.
“If you go back 20 years, what everybody was saying we needed to do was acquire multi-use venues, alignment of marketing strategies, sponsorships dialed in across a variety of different brands. If you do that on a city basis, so in the context of Birmingham, you've got Birmingham City Football Club and you've got the cricket franchise as well. You can start to join the dots up quite nicely.
“That's great from a cost perspective, but it also enables you to market the bigger Birmingham sport brand as well, which I think could be quite powerful. You naturally get those indirect benefits for each of the teams within that set up. We're seeing it already in Nottingham with Nottingham Forest and their investment in Nottingham Forest netball.
“As a netball franchise it’s probably the best structure that we can see in Super League right now because they're borrowing all of the football expertise and structures and they're really pushing the kind of performance pathway with that. So I think that's exactly what we see with the same ownership group in other sports as well.”
