Welcome to part three in our series this week on The Premier League Owners, the people behind English top-flight clubs. Here, we look at the last surviving homegrown owners and ask how long they can hold on. You can read the other articles in the series here, and there are more to come this week: No 1: Who has invested the most? No 2: Why half of Premier League clubs will soon be in American hands If you search online for who was making global news in 1992, you will find familiar names, including Bill Clinton, Madonna and Mike Tyson.
You might come across stories that seem ancient, but there was plenty going on 32 years ago that could happen next week and nobody would think twice about it. That is not something you could say about the comings and goings of English football’s owners. When the top 22 teams broke away from the Football League to form the Premier League , 21 were English-owned.
Advertisement Wimbledon were the exception and their owner was Sam Hammam , a civil engineer from Lebanon who came to London in 1975 so that his wife could have their second child somewhere safe. He initially chose Wimbledon because he liked tennis but two years, later Hammam bought a £40,000 ($50,000 at current exchange rates) stake in the local football team, who had just reached the fourth tier. Now, just over three decades later, there are only three Premier League clubs that are entirely English-owned, with one more that is majority English-owned, two run by Englishmen with minorit.