Two goodbyes are coming at St Johnstone.
One is a goodbye from the man who’s owned the club for 37 years, a British record.
The other is the good buy for whoever purchases his 75% majority shareholding in Scotland’s best run club.
I think Saints are about to leave local hands for the first time in their 138-year history.
Although it’s Geoff Brown’s shareholding which is up for sale and not the club as such, it amounts to the same thing, with any new owners buying his controlling interest.
Between Perth and its traditional catchment area of 100,000 of a population, it’s very hard to profitably run a club the size of Saints in an era of big wages, without the sort of major unpaid investment in time and effort and knowledge that Geoff, and latterly Steve the outgoing chairman, have put in.
Saints are potentially a very good purchase though for an outside investor.
European football and all the attendant publicity which accompany it are much easier and cheaper to achieve in Scotland than in England, where far bigger clubs than Saints can scarcely dream of the prospect.
Saints have had huge positive exposure with their Scottish Cup and League Cup triumphs, and have been the country’s most successful club outside of Celtic in recent years.
They are on a high not a low so there will be buyers for Geoff’s shares, just not local ones I suspect.
He told me in a long conversation the other day that he didn’t get into Saints to make money.
And the fact that he intends to put the returns from his shares straight back into the community for something like a sports hub for folk in the area speaks volumes for the man.
American dream?
I said here recently that both Dundee clubs would be in American hands for many years, and I wouldn’t be surprised if St Johnstone joins them.
For investors with the kind of wherewithal which is unlikely to exist locally there are big opportunities in a changing football world – European competition and partnerships with bigger clubs are among them.
I also wonder about the possibility of any new owners looking at relocating to a new purpose-built ground.
That might seem incongruous given that McDiarmid Park was only opened to replace the old Muirton Park in 1989 but Saints don’t need a stadium with a capacity of over 10,000.
Selling McDiarmid would generate the cash to build a smaller ground with a seven or eight thousand capacity, more than adequate for the crowds Saints attract, and which could incorporate the community sports hub which Geoff Brown intends the money from his shares to develop.
Geoff handed the Saints reins to his son Steve in 2011, having kept the lights on in their darkest days in 1986 when he saved them from extinction.
Their future today is as bright as it was dark all those years ago when he rescued them.
New and perhaps foreign ownership awaits.
As Geoff prepares to sell his majority stake to them, they’ll soon discover they have a very tough act to follow.
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