The ASSE Social and Economic Committee (CSE) is due to meet in an extraordinary meeting on Wednesday to examine this offer to take over the entire club. The agenda does not include a point “relating to a possible employment protection plan within the company”, which has 270 employees (210 in full-time equivalent), players and training center understood, according to club management. A meeting of the board of directors of the ASSE Groupe company, the holding company which controls SASP AS Saint-Etienne, is also scheduled for Wednesday, according to the same source.
KVS is a division of investment company Kilmer Group, a Toronto-based firm specializing in private equity, real estate and the sports and media sector. Its president and founder, Canadian Lawrence Tanenbaum, 78, has been involved for several years in the world of sports, basketball, hockey and football.
He is a shareholder and chairman of the board of directors of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd. (MLSE), a Canadian conglomerate that owns the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey franchise, the Toronto Raptors NBA basketball team, the Toronto Argonauts American football club, the Toronto Toronto FC and the Toronto Marlies ice hockey franchise. Forbes magazine estimates his fortune at $2.5 billion and Canadian media describe him as one of the most influential people in North American professional sports, with several successes for his teams in recent years.
Gazidis, future president?
Ivan Gazidis, a 59-year-old former Arsenal and AC Milan manager, was appointed managing director of Kilmer Sports Ventures on March 5. If the sale is finalized, this Greek origin, born in Johannesburg and who grew up in England, could be put at the head of the Saint-Etienne club.
According to a source close to the matter, Jean-François Soucasse, executive president of ASSE since July 2021, should remain in his post, at least initially. KSV should associate two collaborators as relays on site for Gazidis, who would nevertheless become the new strong man of the club.
For sale
According to the provisions of French law, the transfer, for which discussions began in November, cannot be formalized for around a month, the time for the employees to give an opinion. Far from their glory days, the Greens have been looking for a buyer for several years but their leaders have suffered some setbacks. In 2018, the club had already entered into exclusive negotiations with the American fund Peak 6 which withdrew a few days before the end of the exclusivity period.
Subsequently, AS Saint Etienne was officially put back up for sale in 2021 under pressure from supporter groups and the municipality. At the time, Mayor Gaël Perdriau called for “a new lease of life” arousing the interest of more or less serious, even eccentric, candidates. Foreign investors such as the American David Blitzer or the Russian Sergeï Lomakin, French people like Jacques Pauly, a businessman from Gers, or the Drôme entrepreneur Olivier Markarian, former sponsor of ASSE, but also the Cambodian prince Norodom Ravichak, showed their interest without anything materializing.
The economic situation of the club, which has a budget of 27 million euros this season and a structural deficit of 15 million, requires a new financial boost between now and the end of the season, in a city already hit to the heart by the dismantling in course of the Casino mass distribution group, at the origin of ASSE.
“Long road”
Bernard Caïazzo (70 years old), Parisian businessman, took control of the club in 2004 for an amount of 5 million euros, shortly before the return to Ligue 1. He sold all his shares to Kilmer Sports Ventures. It is “a company that knows sport with strong human values”, he assures in a press release. Finding such a buyer “will have been a long road but it was my essential mission to ensure the sustainable future of ASSE”.
In 2006, he was joined as a co-shareholder by Roland Romeyer (78 years old), a Loire entrepreneur who allowed him to establish his legitimacy in the face of reluctance from supporters and the local economic world. Romeyer would retain the presidency of ASSE-Coeur Vert, the club’s foundation. In 2010, as part of an overhaul of the ASSE organization chart, Bernard Caïazzo became chairman of the supervisory board while Romeyer took over as chairman of the management board.
The two men still occupy these positions but Romeyer has left operational management to Jean-François Soucasse (51 years old), former player of the Verts (1995-1998) and of Toulouse of which he was also manager, hired in January 2021 in a first time as general director of services.