A mini thread on the owners that got away & where we dodged a bullet.....literally!

The ownership troubles at Charlton got me thinking, for the last 20+ years we have been owned by fans, people who paid to be on the terrace long before they had made their millions.

2 administrations would suggest it hasn’t all been a bed of roses but with Goldberg, Jordan & the 2010 four, they all put the club first in everything they did.

Through this period there has been interest from others to buy into the club. Spoiler alert: there is no Jerry Lim!

Colonel Gadaffi. Absolute peak Palace. There I was with fellow Palace fans in Belfast for our preseason tour to hear the breaking news that the Libyan revolutionary wanted to buy Palace.

Once described as the worlds most dangerous man, Godaffi approached Jordan in July 2004.

Nicknamed Mad Dog, Godaffi wasn’t a stranger to football. A 5% investment in Juve as well as an ‘investor’ in Perugia where his son was a player had Godaffi looking for a club in English football. Having heard first hand stories from Godaffi’s time at the Umbrian club.....

I get the feeling SE25 might have become party central! Shacked up in the most high profile hotel in Perugia, Godaffi hired a suite that saw wild parties that 15 years later locals still talk about.

Jordan knew the sale to the man held responsible for Lockerbie as controversial:

"many people might see Abramovich's involvement at Chelsea as less than palatable, but he is moving the club forward. If Gaddafis money was able to progress Palace and allow them to compete at the top of the tree & be a successful football club, then one would have to look at it”

Worth an estimated $200bn & sat on oil reserves of $3trillion who knows where Palace would be now if Godaffi had gone ahead with the acquisition. Champions of Europe or an international arrest warrant?!

Next-up, the Pozzo family.

They are the first family to own clubs in the top flights of England, Spain and Italy at the same time but it nearly wasn’t Watford that Giampaolo and his son, Gino, purchased. Not long after CPFC2010 took over talks with the Pozzo’s started.

With an innovative model of leveraging their cost base across several clubs & a leading scouting network in South America, especially Chile, the Pozzo’s were keen to buy into a club with potential in England.

Bringing players such as Alexis Sanchez to Europe lit up eyes in SE25.

The Pozzo’s have pushed the boundaries: Their use of their two other clubs, Udinese and Grenada, to sign 14 players on loan prompted a change to the Football League’s rules in the summer of 2013 as Watford made the PO Final against us. The irony that 2 loans for us stopped them!

It’s easy to be dismissive of the Pozzo’s, for all the change of managers at Watford & their recent relegation the Pozzo’s have continuously invested in the infrastructure at the club, Vicage Road is now unrecognisable to when we used to visit a decade ago.

Watford will be back, the Pozzo model is sustainable & who knows how it would have played out if they had bought into Palace, I get the feeling that they wouldn’t have been the worst owners.

So ‘Diddy’ want to buy Palace?

Puff or P Diddy or simply Diddy was linked with Palace in 2010 & the story goes that the rapper from NYC was interested in buying a ‘soccer’ club & had looked at South London’s finest.

He explained: "I'm always looking into different business ventures and it's definitely one of my dreams to be part of a sports franchise, especially a football team."

“There was somebody that had looked at it [for me] but ... it just wasn't the right business move at the time,"

With a net worth of $750m & a profile even bigger, Diddy would have been some coup for the Championship club.

If Palace would have been anything other than just a play thing we’ll never know, I suspect we’d have got the message on match day that
‘I’ll be missing you’

Up fourth is David Gold.

Gold, Sullivan & Brady appear to go hand in hand together. Birmingham & then West Ham, the 3 have been in football together for over 20 years.

In 2008, Gold was looking to sell his shares in Birmingham & conversations with Palace started.

How far those conversations went I do not know but in 2014 I sat in the posh seats at Wembley next to DG, Palace were in a relegation battle & one of the team down the bottom were playing, I was checking for score updates non stop. Gold asked me to keep him updated.

We got talking Palace, he said it was now his local club & more than once he’d come close to buying into the club.

Gold was great company but would he have been a good owner for Palace I don’t know, the thought of GSB makes my stomach turn. I really wouldn’t want to be West Ham.

Last up is the former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Last summer a number of journalists led with the story that with the US investors in Palace wanting to sell, the controversial Shinawatra wanted to buy himself back into English football.

As prime minister, Thaksin had unsuccessfully sought to buy the Premier League football clubs Fulham and later Liverpool, in what critics claimed was a publicity stunt in response to his political problems.

Ousted from government by the army, Shinawatra became the owner of Man City in 2007 having paid £82m for the club. 12 months later he had sold the club for £200m to the Abu Dhabi Group.

Convicted of corruption & money laundering, Thaksin went into exile & applied for political asylum in the UK, which was later turned down. With a net worth of close on $2bn, the Thai has the money, if he’d pass the Premier League fit & proper test is another matter!

There you have it, 5 who could have been Palace owners.

If you read this far, thx for sticking with it!