Bournemouth’s Bill Foley – ‘I don’t want to be arrogant, but I’m a good owner’

The supply of people hoping to get into the Bill Foley business would appear to be almost inexhaustible. In the three years since he bought Bournemouth, the 80-year-old has built up a considerable footprint in football. He already has stakes of varying sizes in teams in Scotland, France, Portugal and New Zealand. His inbox would suggest there are plenty who would happily be added to that list.

These days, he receives a steady stream of pitches and propositions from agents, executives and middlemen across Europe and beyond, all hawking their clubs to him. They are generally unsolicited. That is not, in this case, necessarily a synonym for unwelcome. Foley’s network is not yet closed.

“We’re actively looking at teams in certain places,” says Foley, sitting in the boardroom of Bournemouth’s package-fresh performance centre on a recent – and typically flying – visit to the south coast. “Fortunately, we’re getting contacted by all kinds of different people, in different countries, representing different teams. We have a wide range of options.”

He has become so used to fielding these enquiries that the process of sifting through them is so smooth it borders on mechanised. He forwards each suggestion on to Tiago Pinto, Bournemouth’s president of football operations, to perform rapid due diligence.

“Within 24 hours, I’ll get a write-up on the league and the team,” Foley said. “90% of the time we pass. But 10% we’ll get involved, and start looking at it.”

There is no great mystery as to why so many teams should be keen to align themselves with Foley. European football is chronically chasing two things: money – obviously – and, even more elusive still, success. Foley is keen to stress that he does not have “unlimited resources”, not by football’s insatiable standards. But he does have a net worth of about £2bn, which is more than enough to be worth courting. What really makes him stand out, though, is his record of success.

When he first launched the Vegas Golden Knights, the NHL franchise that represented his first foray into sport, he promised they would win the Stanley Cup within six years. He was right. They made the final in their debut season and then won it in their sixth. He did not set a timetable for Auckland FC, the expansion side he introduced to Australasia’s A-League last year, but there was no need: they were crowned champions at the first attempt.

It is Bournemouth, though, that may well be his masterpiece. In the first full season after his takeover in December 2022, they finished 12th. Last season, they spent much of the campaign in the thick of the race for Europe. Before Saturday’s games, they sit fifth in the nascent Premier League table; the only teams to beat them so far are Liverpool and Manchester City.

Foley replaced manager Gary O’Neil with Andoni Iraola – in the face of substantial external scepticism, though you would do well to find anyone who would admit to harbouring even the slightest doubt now – and then held his nerve after a slow start in his first campaign. He absorbed the blow of losing his technical director, Richard Hughes, interpreting it instead as a chance to bring in “someone who was a little more my guy”.

He trusts his choice, Pinto, implicitly. “He’s humble, low ego, low maintenance, and very, very smart,” he said.

Foley has overseen the construction of a recruitment department sufficiently resilient that the loss of three first-choice defenders for about £150m over the summer has caused barely a ripple. He has built the club a new training centre, and is about to start a long-awaited stadium expansion. Foley is, it seems, extremely good at this.

The 80-year-old demurs just the right amount when that is pointed out: not so much that it seems impolite, but not so little that it comes off as disingenuous. “I don’t want to be arrogant,” he said. “But I believe I am really a good owner. I had a simple goal [with all my teams]. We want to win. My job is to do all I can to take away barriers to winning.”

It is to his immense credit that he does not explain how he does that by citing abstruse business-school principles, or weaponising corporate jargon for long-winded, self-aggrandising exposition. He does not once use the word “synergy”. Instead, he talks, both habitually and helpfully, in anecdotes. To put it in the lingua franca of TikTok: he brings receipts.

His assertion that he wants to make his players’ life “so simple that all they have to think about is playing and winning” is, for example, best illustrated by a story about a car wash that has the narrative cadence of a parable. “In the first year in Las Vegas, I was in the parking lot and [goaltender Marc-André] Fleury’s car was dirty,” he said. “He told me he hadn’t had a chance to wash it. Two days later, I announced free car washes and detailing for players and coaches. But then the first day the detailers came on site, I got my car washed, and nobody else was using it. I went into the locker room and told them: ‘OK, boys, use or lose. They’ll be here again on Thursday, but if they’re not busy, they won’t be here again.’ That day, the line was out the front gate.”

His description of his management style – “macro until I have to be micro, and then I can be as micro as it gets” – is illuminated by the fact that, when we speak, he has just come from a recruitment meeting, discussing possible targets for January not just for Bournemouth, but for Lorient in France and his Portuguese club, Moreirense, too.

He likes the granular, regardless of the industry in question. On his vineyards in both California and New Zealand, he once told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he attends blending sessions with winemakers. He helps to pick out the barrels used to store the wine. He is happiest, in that case in quite a literal sense, when he is in the weeds.

“I am a very good delegator,” he said. “I listen to the people I am working with. Sometimes I hire people and they aren’t the right person, and I’m not afraid to make a change, but if it is the right person, I’ll do anything to keep them. But it’s not my style to be remote. If I’m going to be involved in sports, I am on duty. I am up to bat.”

That, more than anything, is where Foley believes he has an edge: his ability to forge teams, to create cultures, where everyone feels much the same way as he does. It is something that he learned, he said, in his time at West Point, the United States military academy. “They teach you to be a team-mate.” It is the trait he looks for, now, in his employees, the tendency he feels enables his teams to “swing way above our weight”.

Another anecdote: before he won the Las Vegas NHL franchise, he conducted a thorough examination of all the league’s other owners. Some of them were “successor entities”, operated by family trusts. Some were backed by a consortium, “a group of people meeting and talking, instead of having a leader”.

“At the end of the day, there was only one team I felt I could not beat: the Tampa Bay Lightning. They had a great ownership structure. Apart from them, I felt we could beat them all.” He has subsequently decided that the Florida Panthers are a problem, too, at least partly because their owner also went to West Point.

When he performed the exercise ahead of buying Bournemouth, he came to the same conclusion. “I went through them all: the structure, who the ownership was,” he said. “Is it a Saudi prince? That’s competition monetarily, but not in terms of creating a team. It is tough, because the big boys have so much money, but we are proving it.”

It is to bridge that most intractable gap, of course, that Foley has embarked on his quest to build a network of teams. Once the emails are sifted, the process is characteristically surgical, targeting specific markets to help with recruitment. He considered a deal for the Croatian side Rijeka because it would offer access to Eastern Europe’s player pool; he is examining options in Scandinavia, and negotiating a partnership with a “major” team in Belgium.

“Money is the differentiator, so we have to be smart in what we do,” he said. “We’ve chosen to find other clubs for a feeder system. But we want to hire the sporting director, the coach, the analysts, for the teams to play the way Bournemouth play, so that if we do have to pay a fee for a player, we are paying ourselves.

“We want everyone – coaches, players, analysts – to feel that being part of our system is to their benefit. We want Bournemouth to be a destination for people, one they will enjoy. It’s the only way we can stay competitive. But you have to have good people.”

Photograph by David Becker/Getty Images