S.A.F.C. - the future

Meet Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, the 23-year-old who wants to buy Sunderland

Philip Buckingham and Michael Walker 6h ago

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Sunderland failed to win again on Saturday. Leading 1-0 at Doncaster Rovers, they conceded an equaliser three minutes into second-half stoppage time to draw 1-1. After losing at home to MK Dons the week before, Sunderland are eighth in League One and becoming part of the furniture in their third season in the third tier.

Doncaster’s equaliser was met with weariness in Sunderland. There is pessimism about the team, the state of the club and its direction. “Dismal” was the Saturday night verdict from fans’ site Roker Report.

But there is one hope. In the south of France, Saturday’s game is likely to have been monitored by a 23-year-old named Kyril Louis-Dreyfus. He is understood to be considering taking on a majority shareholding in Sunderland. The club declined to comment when approached by The Athletic but chief executive Jim Rodwell said last month they had a preferred bidder currently in a period of exclusivity.

Nothing is certain and supporter scepticism is high when it comes to anything to do with the current ownership. Other alleged takeovers have already come and gone. There is also audible local concern that someone so young could be taking over an institution formed in 1879.

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(Photo: Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)
Yet even at the tender age of 23, Louis-Dreyfus may have been preparing for this moment for several years already. He does not appear to be a novice. This is someone who was brought up at French heavyweights Marseille and who went to Yorkshire to study the game and the football industry.

Most importantly for Sunderland, his interest is said to be sincere and serious.

Louis-Dreyfus is anything but an ordinary young man. The son of Margarita and Robert, he is one of three heirs to the Louis Dreyfus Company. Their worldwide empire has involvement in agriculture, food processing and international shipping, and amassed sales worth £33.6 billion in its most recent financial year.

“Was he groomed from a very early age to take on responsibility? Absolutely,” says a well-positioned source. “Margarita wanted to make sure their children would not be stupid, just spending daddy’s money. It would’ve gone against their father’s personality to be like that.

“They wanted them to be well-rounded individuals who have travelled an awful lot, to learn how difficult it was in the business world.”

Margarita told Bloomberg in a rare interview in 2012 that Kyril and his twin bother Maurice had been taken to Brazil during a school break to tour the family’s ports, plantations and juice factories. There have also been educational trips to Russia and a year at boarding school in Singapore.

Louis-Dreyfus, however, also has football in the blood. His late father Robert was Marseille’s largest shareholder from 1996 until his death from leukaemia in 2009, when control of the club was handed to Margarita.

It was then, during Kyril’s teenage years, that the bug bit. Although elder brother Eric and twin Maurice rarely showed a prolonged interest in the fortunes of Marseille, Kyril is said to have wanted little more than to be in the bosom of his boyhood club. An internship was spent at Marseille’s training ground, officially the Centre d’entrainement Robert Louis-Dreyfus but known as La Commanderie, when still at school: one of his tasks was to drive staff around in golf buggies from one location to another.

Sources say Vincent Labrune, the club’s former president, became a father figure to him, inviting the youngster along to see transfers and contracts being negotiated.

“Kyril has a clear understanding of the football world because of Vincent,” one source told The Athletic. “He saw all the good things but all the bad things also. Agents, money, who goes and stays. Good buys, bad buys. He saw everything.” He watched the tumultuous reign of Marcelo Bielsa unfold at close hand when the Leeds United manager spent just over a year at the Stade Velodrome.

Manchester City’s Benjamin Mendy, who played for Marseille between 2013 and 2016, and current vice-captain Florian Thauvin are also said to regard Louis-Dreyfus as a younger brother, such was his presence around the first-team squad.

Louis-Dreyfus told France Football magazine in 2015 he would regularly travel between Marseille and Geneva, where he attended school, to watch his family club and in 2012 he took that devotion further. Although he was by then attending boarding school in Singapore, he travelled back to Europe to see Marseille seal a famous Champions League victory over Inter Milan in the last 16. “That was worth it!” he said.

Louis-Dreyfus is understood to be a compulsive player of Football Manager, the popular computer game, and there have been long-standing ambitions to step into an industry that shaped his upbringing.

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Frank McCourt and Margarita Louis-Dreyfus watch a match in Marseille in September 2016 (Photo: Boris Horvat/AFP via Getty Images)
Despite Margarita Louis-Dreyfus selling Marseille to Frank McCourt in 2016, a five per cent stake was held back for Kyril. Previous takeover talks with Gerard Lopez, now the owner of fellow French top-flight side Lille, reportedly collapsed when the Spanish businessman declined to let the Louis-Dreyfus family retain a minority shareholding.

Marseille has significance to the Louis-Dreyfus family and, as such, there have been supporters wondering if the natural lineage was for Kyril to retake his father’s old position as owner. Didier Deschamps, head coach of France’s world-champion national team, has even admitted to floating the idea of succession with the young heir.

“The Louis-Dreyfus family had a lot of problems before they sold but I’m certain he still knows every player — who is good and who is bad,” said one source. “He loves Marseille but he thinks Sunderland is better because it is interesting and also quieter. He will try to apply some ideas he has on football business but also grow up with the club.”

Privately, there is optimism Louis-Dreyfus can secure a deal that would introduce him to English football from the banks of the Wear. Reports in L’Equipe, the renowned French sports newspaper, have even suggested Louis-Dreyfus has already considered who he wants to become sporting director at the Stadium of Light. The potential of Sunderland is said to be the attraction; an opportunity to rebuild a club who already have both a modern stadium and a training ground fit for the Premier League.

“He will not spend like an oligarch,” says a source. “This is not like buying a helicopter. It’s rational. It will be a project. He is passionate about football and he sees this project as interesting. He is taking it very seriously. He will not come into it to lose money.”

The thread linking Louis-Dreyfus to Sunderland is Juan Sartori, a Uruguayan businessman and politician whose Russian father-in-law, Dmitry Rybolovlev, owns Monaco, neighbours and rivals of Marseille. Sartori, who married Rybolovlev’s daughter Ekaterina on the family’s privately-owned Greek island of Skorpios in 2015, has owned 20 per cent of Sunderland since the summer of 2018 but has largely been an enigmatic figure.

Sartori initially revelled in the experience of joining Sunderland’s apparent revival in League One. He regularly sat among supporters with owner Stewart Donald, even wearing a microphone to capture the atmosphere for the Netflix documentary series Sunderland ‘Til I Die during an away game at Charlton Athletic in January 2019.

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Sartori at the Stadium of Light in August 2018 (Photo: Ian Horrocks/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images)
He was also the beaming board member happily posing for selfies and hoisted in the air as supporters partied in Trafalgar Square on the eve of the EFL Trophy final loss to Portsmouth at Wembley in March 2019.

By the end of that season, when Sunderland also lost the League One play-off final to Charlton, Sartori had purposefully become a more distant presence. Political ambitions at home in Uruguay were calling.

A background in business and a move into politics with the right-leaning National Party brought comparisons to Donald Trump and, like the outgoing US President, there was a defeat at the polls.

Luis Lacalle Pou comfortably won the race to become the National Party’s candidate for last year’s general election ahead of Sartori and was subsequently voted in as Uruguay’s president. Sartori instead became a senator in the environment commission this past February.

Sartori was often touted as the man to increase his investment in Sunderland by Donald but his political ambitions in Uruguay have demanded another figure joins him in taking control at the Stadium of Light. Louis-Dreyfus, a figure well-known to Sartori, is now positioning himself to become that new force.

The Leeds campus of RIASA (the Richmond International Academic & Soccer Academy), 2017.

The new intake is usually mainly American and sometimes there are boys from glitzy Hollywood families who have enrolled on a course that covers the football industry from playing to coaching to history and administration. In 2017, two teenagers from France enrolled, one was named Philippe and the other Kyril. The latter is Kyril Louis-Dreyfus.

Students on the RIASA course at Leeds Beckett University live in halls of residence on the campus in the Headingley district of the city. They learn and train there and RIASA has teams playing in the local leagues and also arranges higher-profile friendlies against EFL clubs such as Bradford City and Sheffield Wednesday. Some players advance from there into professional football, such as Bristol City striker Nahki Wells and Colorado Rapids’ US international forward Jonathan Lewis.

Others, though, concentrate on the academic side and play recreationally. They take up different roles, such as Matt Reda, who is now in charge of corporate development at the lower-divisions United Soccer League in Florida. Kyril Louis-Dreyfus was one of these.

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(Photo: RIASA)
“He worked hard, played in central midfield, tidy on the ball,” remembers Rob Jones, the former Hibernian, Grimsby Town and Doncaster defender who was the lead coach on the course at the time.

“Kyril was never going to reach a professional level but he knew that — he was mature in that sense. He’s a lovely guy. I think he’d just come out of military school in France and joined RIASA. He was doing his degree in the football industry. We had him for a year, a lovely guy, down to earth, loves his football. It’s a big passion for him. You can see his background with Marseille and his father and family.

“He was very knowledgeable about football, about individuals — just passionate about the game, really. It was nice to see. He was doing sport and business and management, it was all together.

“Kyril listened, and he was always asking questions about formations and styles. There was an interest there. He was asking about coaching sessions, strength and conditioning sessions, how things fit together on and off the pitch. His interest was the all-encompassing football world.

“He was in Leeds for a year and then he moved down to the campus in Richmond in London to finish off the academic side.”

Although he did not socialise a lot with the other students, Louis-Dreyfus mixed easily within his peer group. He advertised neither his status nor his wealth, but among the students, there was talk of him taking a private jet from Leeds-Bradford airport back to Switzerland on weekends. Gradually, those on the course and those who ran it understood what the Louis-Dreyfus name meant.

“We became aware as he progressed,” Jones says. “It was not something that he made known, he kept it quiet. He just wanted to fit in and his degree was his priority.

“He was very driven, knew what he wanted to do. Routine-wise, he very good, very set, focused on the academic side. He didn’t socialise too much, he had a good buddy with him from France also on the course, Philippe. A lot of the time Kyril was back and forth to home.”

Louis-Dreyfus did not complete the full four-year degree course, RIASA says. He did two years of it but it was another sign that he was thinking about football as part of his future.

“It was a shock to see (Louis-Dreyfus linked with Sunderland) at first,” says Jones, now coaching down the road at Middlesbrough’s academy. “But then you think about him and it’s not a surprise if he goes down that route. He was very interested in football as a whole, the off-field as much as what’s on it. And he has a background in that environment.

“Obviously he’s an unknown entity in the football world — so far — but then there are a lot of unknown entities buying football clubs across the world. You would take it as a positive that the young man wants to invest in Sunderland. He’s a forward-thinker.”

Back in Sunderland, there is still a wariness.

The proposed retention of Donald, albeit as a minority shareholder, has left the club’s followers asking questions. A survey conducted by fan-group Red And White Army in July revealed 90 per cent of supporters wanted the current regime to sell up and Donald told BBC Radio Newcastle in the summer he was “desperately trying to get out”.

It has become a marriage all parties want annulled. Donald has steadfastly sought a precise asking price of £37.6 million before he walks away, with a financial picture complicated by a £9 million loan taken out from US investors FPP.

Defaulting on repayments would hand control of Sunderland to FPP, a company established by three American billionaires, Glenn Fuhrman, John Phelan and Robert Platek, who have links to computer mogul Michael Dell. The loan, taken out last October, was secured against the Stadium of Light and Academy of Light, and any sale of shares in Sunderland would require either approval from FPP or the loan to be paid back in full.

Donald has effectively spent most of his two and a half years in charge of Sunderland either seeking fresh investment or a new buyer. Failure to win promotion back to the Championship at the first attempt eroded his bargaining power and popularity. The appetite for change is now enormous.

Manager Phil Parkinson, a canny operator in these surroundings, might well do enough to take Sunderland up this season but it is a club craving a fresh drive and impetus that only a takeover can bring.

Parkinson said before the Doncaster game that takeover talks were “progressing” and the next week could turn out to be decisive.

Having a new owner who is the same age as the Stadium of Light itself would be unconventional but Louis-Dreyfus is a fascinating figure on the horizon.

 

I can't help but read that article with a huge smile on my face. Can't believe I was underwhelmed initially. Hope it comes off.

One of my favourite points in here is that he won't just come in and splash the cash. He's going to make it a long term project. This is what we need. Let's hope he's a starter-finisher.

 

That's a smashing article that. I was sceptical at first, but I'm all on the Kyril bus now, he sounds great.

 

Great read that, I’m glad you posted it as I’m to much of a tightarse to pay for it

 

Can someone c&p the Athletic article please?

EDIT: Bugger, someone has - cheers

 

Yes I am somewhat heartened after reading that article, the new owner may well be young but he is not naive!

Now will it happen

 

This lad needs to be made very welcome. He appears sincere and committed which is something that has been lacking in our owners. There is more and more coming out and I am convinced this is already done!!

 

Excellent stuff

 

Great article giving a little bit of insight into what we might expect.

 

Sir Bob Murray is the chancellor of Leeds Beckett Uni, gave my daughter her degree on graduation day a couple of years ago......I didnt have a clue at the time he was there, might have had a word in KLD's ear (or the family) when he was over here

 

That article has filled me with hope. This lad seems very grounded,intelligent and worldly wise. The comments about his family not being able to sell Marseille because they wanted to retain a minority holding will have been deja vu for him when dealing with Donald,and the comments about him recognising us being a real attraction as we already have excellent ground,academy and facilities in place,justify what we have all been saying for years. His years at Leeds will have given him some insight into football life in England. All in all, I'm optimistic he might be a perfect fit for us. Just hope he can get it done!

 

I hope this takeover happens soon, I've spent hours and hours reading every post (except for Kittens, which I just passed over after reading the first couple), my wife thinks I am more interested in this, than her. Every day morning and evening I log on to read the latest, thinking this might be it, only to be relegated to reading all the separate posts to see if it's almost there. I think I'm becoming obsessed with it, I would cancel Christmas for this to happen instead. Come on guys sign on the dotted line announce it and give us all a break!

 

Just my opinion, but I reckon regardless of result, Parky is gone after the Fleetwood game and announcement will be over the weekend.

 

Don't mention the "R" word!!!!

 

Aye I think you are right I said exactly the same 2 weeks ago and look how that turned out, the twat is still here.

 

Like I said to someone else yesterday....you are not alone marra!

 

Having a word would have done nothing but good.....Sir Bob is one of us...loves us with a passion.

 

Thats what im on about

 

Nice one Kyril, nice one son, nice one Kyril let's score another one

HTL's

 

Reckon mine was better like.....​

https://www.not606.com/threads/takeover-rumour.385223/page-889#post-14310364