Our potential new investors. A bit of due diligence.

First things first. This investment has nothing to do with Crescent Capital Group. The ownership of the Brewers is completely separate from Crescent, so the large number of billions Crescent has under management is a red herring.

Mark Attanasio is one of the most senior figures at Crescent, and will no doubt be earning big bucks however.

His wiki page says that he cut his teeth working alongside Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham. For those of you who have read anything about Wall Street history, you may remember Milken - he was basically a con artist who took other people's money and "invested" it by lending it to crap companies with little ability to repay (junk bonds). When companies defaulted during an economic slow down, the investors lost their money, not Milken, who made his money by taking issuance/management fees. He was imprisoned for racketeering amongst other things and eventually received a presidential from..... The Donald. (nice draining of that swamp Donald).

Anyway, after Drexel folded, Attanasio stayed behind to oversee the management of their portfolio of low grade and distressed debt, so it sounds like he was one of the responsible ones at Drexel. And he obviously learned a s**t load about debt investment - how to find higher yield investment that the rest of the market wasn't interested in, but to manage the risk that comes with lending to companies others won't.

That was the business model that led them to create Crescent capital. The easiest way to understand that business is this. Crescent creates an investment fund, then takes the idea round investors that have money and invites them to subscribe to the fund. That is, they market their fund to pension fund managers to try to get them to sink, say, $100m in their investment vehicle, based on the sales pitch for what they will do with it (lend it to mid-cap companies that a bit higher risk than large, solid companies). So they raise, say, a couple of billion of other people's money from a few pension funds, alongside some of their own (usually pension funds will want evidence that the management are heavily invested themselves....if you wont invest your own money, why would anyone else?), and then start investing. The fund will have clear rules for how it will work. Like you must stay invested for X years. Or the fund will close and return all investor capital plus returns after Y years. Or the fund will never close but each year the fund will pay out Z% of its earnings and if you want your capital back you need to follow steps A, B and C. That sort of thing, but all agreed with investors up front.

So currently it says that the firm has $34bn under management. This is NOT Attanasio's money. It's not even Crescent's money. It is other investors money that is under Crescent's management. Crescent will earn their money by taking an annual management fee, likely to be 1% to 2%, or something like that. Lovely business, and the senior individuals will be making a LOT of money (as long as they don't f**k up, and lose their investors cash). But don't hear "34 billion" and think that this in any way belongs to Attanasio. It doesn't.

The delegation that came over were, it seems, all the senior management/exec of the Brewers. They're all listed here. User Posted Link

A lot of those names are familiar from the Pinkun photo.

So this looks like a due diligence meeting. Get a load of people that know a s**t load about managing a "sports franchise" over to kick the tyres on everything to do with the club and how its run. I doubt any of the individuals are actually putting their money in (other than Attanasio), and it may be that they won't get involved in any way in running Norwich (probably).

It isn't clear whether Attanasio is doing this solo or on behalf of all the owners of the Brewers. Attanasio is the principal owner - the big cheese - but the Brewer's are owned by a collection of investors. Full list of owners can be found here. User Posted Link

Clearly the idea is a reasonably close affiliation with the Brewers, but we'll need to wait and see if its all the investors acting together, with Attanasio as the figure head.

What I take from this is that this is a serious development. These people are clearly very smart generally, and know a lot about sports. Based on their day job, they are investor managers who like risk, and back themselves to manage it. But they are business people, and will be looking over the long term to make money from this. The idea that they intend to buy Norwich and give us £100m a year to spunk up the wall is, I think, far fetched.

Hopefully their plan carries mutual benefits for us and them, e.g. to establish Norwich as a reasonably permanent member of the Premier League with all the growth in revenue/marketing opportunities that this entails (and the large increase in the value of the business that would result). As with all US investors though, don't expect anyone to run the club as a labour of love, or a charity.

Posted By: Under soil heating, May 28, 10:29:24