Would Argyle really make a great investment in terms of profit making potential? Or would it merely be attractive as a play thing for a mega rich sugar daddy? I tend towards the latter.
Many businesses are sold when they are cheap in terms of where they are at the time of the sale. Often when they are struggling, perhaps in terms of cash flow, but have assets that a new owner could exploit. Argyle at present would not be cheap. If (and it's a big if) Simon Hallett was inclined to sell to an organisation looking to invest big in Argyle, I think we can assume that he would want a good price for a club that is perceived as well run and on the up. And quite rightly so.
Simon Hallett, and James Brent before him, have always talked about making Argyle sustainable. In other words to be generating enough money to pay the bills. That's about as good as it gets at L1 level. If you get promoted to the Championship of course, then it changes. In many ways for the worse. The Championship if full of clubs, many of whom were once famous, all dreaming of getting back to the Premier League, almost all enduring huge annual losses. If you do manage to reach the Premier League, there are huge rewards, but only as long as you stay there.
People bang on about our potential, our huge catchment area for fans, the possibility of being a "big" club. However there are massive constraints. This weekend we might sell out for a L1 fixture against once-successful Ipswich. If we reached the Championship we might sell out more often, at least initially, though our last spell in the second tier saw gates drop off as the excitement of playing some bigger name clubs waned quite quickly. Yes, we could extend capacity a bit by building Phase 2, but this wouldn't meet PL demand for tickets (should we get there), yet might be largely wasted if we stagnated in the Championship.
In most instances, football clubs are not true investments. Outside the PL, there are ceilings on potential income but a bottomless pit of expenditure. Of course there's potential for growth, but people talk much less about the potential for things to go badly wrong. We've been there before, remember, with owners seeking personal riches who almost cost the club its existence.
If Argyle were ever to reach the PL, the likelihood is that it would happen under mega rich owners using us as a plaything or for slightly dubious purposes. We might get lucky and find a genuine billionaire benefactor, but might equally find ourselves in the hands of unscrupulous wealth exploiting our publicity to make a political point. I struggle to get excited about this sort of potential "investor".
