A Way Forward?

How Wolves recover from their season-ticket crisis.

It began with disbelief, quickly turned to anger, and has now crept into the realms of farce. Through it all, the reputation of Wolverhampton Wanderers has taken a pounding. The season-ticket price hike is an episode which will be added to the unwanted folklore of a club that knows how to reach for the lows as well as the highs.

Sack The Bhattis, The Golden Tit, Pie and a Pint. When it turns sour at Wolves it tends to do so spectacularly. The previous owner to Fosun still has a piece of paper screwed up in his office desk drawer reminding him of the moment he knew there was no return. “Steve, spend your cash or fuck off out of our club” the note read. It was pinned under the windscreen wiper of Steve Morgan’s car, parked outside Deepdale in September 2015, following a 1-1 draw with Preston North End which left Wolves with just two wins from the opening eight games of the Championship season.

We are not at the point of no return here, but a strong strategy and clear-minded approach must be taken to guide the club through the single biggest challenge it has faced off the pitch during the Fosun era.

Constructive dialogue comes before anything else. Personal emails from Jeff Shi being shared across social media to the bemusement and amusement of supporters are serving no purpose. It would be the script of a parody were there not so many serious issues at stake. A Hitchhiker’s Guide To Your Season-Ticket Galaxy posted on the club’s website on Friday has only further antagonised supporters. It has to stop.

The first step is for Shi to meet with representatives of supporters’ groups, to be given the opportunity to articulate their concerns. That is an olive branch that will surely come from the club. A meeting is not a concession to change - and supporters should not view it as such even if it should be - but instead a basic starting point for fans to have a hearing in the manner they deserve.

There is a huge positive that can come out of this from the supporters’ perspective. Not since Albert and Muriel Bates stood on Waterloo Road with many hundreds of others holding their “Bhatti Must Go” placards has there been such a mobilisation of the fan base.

For several reasons Wolves supporters have struggled to find an effective, collective voice in recent times in the same way that an organisation like the formidable Spirit of Shankly at Liverpool has, to call on one example. This is primarily due to small numbers, the means of communication and the difficulty of effecting change at Premier League level.

This chapter in the club’s history has demonstrated that there is an appetite for effective representation. Just as strong government needs credible opposition, so a strong club should be held to account by supporters. If one outcome of this saga is the formation of a robust and coherent group with serious numbers behind it who can effect change, then that will be a step forward for all parties.

The alternative to dialogue is a stand-off between ownership and supporters - with respect eroding on both sides – and that would be a sorry, sad and destructive state of affairs at a club which has made so much progress under Fosun. For many, only a concession on the prices will be enough. It is easy to see why. The past week’s events have highlighted countless stories of supporters’ difficult circumstances. For Fosun, there is still time to modify prices and make savings elsewhere within the business. Just as FSG were able to move forward at Liverpool with a different pricing structure in 2016, so Fosun can work a way through the numbers and produce a long-term pricing strategy that allows the club to gain the revenue it insists it deserves as an established Premier League club.

And the point about establishing itself in the Premier League is relevant. For all the vitriol and mud-slinging of the past 10 days, Wolves have occupied a very solid position on the pitch for several seasons thanks to some strong investment from these owners. Chaos and mismanagement can happen in the blink of an eye, but Fosun have never sailed close to the wind while troubles have appeared elsewhere. Everton represent the epitome of this, but speak to West Bromwich Albion or Birmingham City fans about ownership in the recent past and it is easy to see why Fosun Out is a slogan not a solution.

In any case, investment has been sought for the best part of two years, yet the scarcity of prospective funds has been telling. Sell up! Sure, but who to? If there was an attractive buck to have been made then that transaction would have happened already.

Perhaps a far healthier solution is to bring the structure of the present ownership up to speed with an aspiring Premier League club. There are similarities with the dramas that unfolded on the football side of the business last summer with Julen Lopetegui. Fosun found a way out of an incredibly difficult situation, but the former head coach’s rogue interviews revealed a flawed leadership structure.

Now, Shi is once again at the centre of a storm, but this one has nothing to do with football and instead belongs in the Sales and Marketing division of the club. What do Fosun want and expect from the man in the chairman’s office at Compton? How can such a wide range of decision-making processes involving many millions of pounds in a multi-billion-pound Premier League industry be effectively channelled through such a narrow artery between Shanghai and Wolverhampton?

This football club is just a small cog in a huge wheel of global investments, yet it is a strategically visible one. There are so many successful companies within Fosun’s portfolio, but the football club does not operate with the same power dynamics of these big businesses. It has neither a traditional centralised pyramid, nor does it resemble a decentralised structure with collaboration and agility at its heart.

In a different age, a couple of years after The Golden Tit outburst, Sir Jack Hayward realised that leaving his kids in charge of the house probably wasn’t the best idea. He hired Jez Moxey as the club’s first CEO. One of Moxey’s first actions was to gatecrash a meeting between Sir Jack and Colin Lee. The manager was trying to extract more funds from the same source that had created so much waste during the latter part of the 1990s. “You can’t have these meetings without me,” Moxey told Sir Jack. “Otherwise, what is the point of bringing me to the club?”

Moxey may have been a pantomime villain for supporters, but he stripped back the chaff and within a couple of years Wolves were promoted. There were mistakes during his 16 years at the club and there was the devasting double relegation too, as Wolves discovered on more than one occasion that it was an entity not yet fit for purpose among the game’s elite. But by the end, the club was on a sound enough footing to attract this huge global investment. Throughout it all - crucially - managers, staff and supporters knew where they stood. Even when those in the South Bank were sold down the road for a pie and a pint.

If an organisational structure befitting one of the country’s elite football clubs can be found, then perhaps Fosun, Shi and the many working departments of Wolves could move forward more productively from this point. The progress these owners have brought to the club in the last eight years is admirable, and there is still so much potential for further development at a club brimming with good staff and good people. This avoidable saga could – and maybe this is an optimistic suggestion – represent a line in the sand and become the start of Fosun’s next chapter of ownership.

Any successful organisation needs to look into the future. A scenario where a disillusioned fan base is watching an under-strength team lose its opening matches of the 2024/25 season is unthinkable for Fosun. The crisis of the past week should not be allowed to turn into a more calamitous plight.

So, what if the club is to dig its heels in and pursue the current path with its season-tickets? Then it can ill-afford to head into next season without serious squad strengthening. That, at least, would allow the “benchmarking” argument to stand up to some scrutiny. If the intent is to ride out the current maelstrom then Wolves must be fit for purpose on the pitch before a ball has been kicked in August.

Yet, it feels disingenuous to be writing about team strengthening at a time when the stark realities of those price hikes are still being laid bare. What has happened since the new prices were made public may well be used, in years to come, as a case study in crisis management failure. But – importantly - this is not an irretrievable situation, and Fosun are certainly not the first owners faced with restoring Wolves’ reputation. A pathway can still be found and what happens next may give us a far clearer indication of Fosun’s direction of travel.