100 Owners: the English football club owners who shaped its history

Every English football club has had an owner who mattered more than any manager. Some built grounds and paid wages out of their own pockets. Others borrowed against the stadium, sold it, or simply stopped paying the bills. 100 Owners is the record of those football club owners, written one profile at a time and counting down.

English football club owners, one profile at a time

The countdown started with chairmen whose names still divide supporters. Peter Swales took Manchester City from the optimism of the 1970s to a club in open revolt by the time he left Maine Road. Irving Scholar floated Tottenham Hotspur on the stock market and then watched his idea of football finance unravel, twice. Ken Wheldon, a scrap metal dealer from the Black Country, presided over Walsall and Birmingham City through the bleakest decade West Midlands football has known.

Not every profile is a villain. That is the point of the series: the same English boardrooms produced visionaries, chancers and plenty of people who were simply out of their depth.

A history written in balance sheets

Read together, the profiles are a history of how English football has been owned. The model moved from local businessmen spending their own money, through the stock-market floats of the late 1980s and 1990s, to the leveraged takeovers and overseas consortia of the modern game. The football club owners in this countdown sit at every point on that line, which is why their stories still read as current.

That history has a sharper edge now that English football is getting an independent regulator with an owners' test. Several of the people profiled here would have struggled to pass one.

Questions and answers

What is 100 Owners?

A long-running countdown of football club owners in English football, each profile covering one owner, the club or clubs they controlled and what was left when they went.

Which football club owners are covered?

Profiles so far include Peter Swales at Manchester City, Irving Scholar at Tottenham Hotspur and Nottingham Forest, Ken Wheldon at Walsall and Birmingham City, Graham Westley at Farnborough Town and the Bhatti brothers at Wolverhampton Wanderers.

How does 100 Owners connect to the Club Crisis Index?

Where an owner's time ended in administration, a winding-up petition or expulsion, the profile links to that club's page in the Club Crisis Index, which records every insolvency event in the top five tiers since 1986.

Who were the worst football club owners in English history?

The countdown does not rank owners from best to worst. It records what each one did, and several, including Peter Swales at Manchester City and Ken Wheldon at Walsall and Birmingham City, left their clubs in a worse state than they found them.