On January 5, Southampton Football Club officially announced that Sport Republic acquired ownership of Southampton Football Club. Chinese boss Gao Jisheng has fully withdrawn.
Sport Republic is an investment firm involved in the sports and entertainment industry. They bought Gao Jisheng's stake in the club, while another minority shareholder retained her minority stake. In August 2017, Gao Jisheng bought an 80% stake in Southampton, and he chose to leave in January 2022.
In fact, negotiations began in 2020 and lasted for almost a year, mainly due to the pandemic and the impact of the Super League. Southampton Football Club's results were not ideal, and Gao Jisheng did not satisfy Southampton fans. And Southampton's youth training in the Premier League is very famous, to know that before Gao Jisheng entered the home, they sold Mane, Pele, Luke Shaw and other players have been richly profitable.
However, after the arrival of Gao Jisheng, only the 2018 winter window sale of Van Dijk proceeds are not bad, the other is very boring, Gao Jisheng even invested a lot of money, but Southampton performance has not improved much, since the four seasons since the takeover, Southampton is basically the 17th or 16th place on the verge of relegation, the best is also 15, and in the previous seasons this team has basically maintained the top ten.
With the ebb and flow of foreign investment and strict management, Gao Jisheng can only give up the management of the Southampton team. For Gao Jisheng, the outside world has always been skeptical about his motives for acquiring Southampton, such as a lot of speculative ideas, but in the end, from the perspective of the body, he did make a bad deal, because the original 250 million pounds of shares, and finally only one hundred million pounds was sold to the Serbian boss. But the outside world believes that this time can sell this price is already burning incense!
It can be said that with the withdrawal of Chinese capital from Southampton, Chinese capital continues to have little left in European football, how to play professional football clubs, there are still many tuition fees to pay, of course, many people may not really want to start a club.