Speaking to the Anatolia news agency yesterday, Bahçuvan said the companies of the four most prominent soccer clubs in the Turkish Super League -- Beşiktaş Futbol Yatırımları Sanayi ve Ticaret A.Ş., Fenerbahçe Sportif Hizmetler Sanayi ve Ticaret A.Ş., Galatasaray Sportif Sınai ve Ticari Yatırımlar A.Ş. and Trabzonspor Sportif Yatırım ve Ticaret A.Ş. -- made serious mistakes during their initial public offerings (IPO).
“They [club chairmen] don’t run their own companies with such an amateurish understanding,” he stated. These companies entered the stock market with a misunderstanding, thinking that only their fans would purchase shares to financially support their favorite clubs, Bahçuvan said, noting that this misconception simply pulled the club boards away from a professional approach regarding stock market operations. He said, “The soccer companies are almost being managed as if they were associations [rather than businesses].”
“The İMKB is a capital market with rules of its own, and you cannot overlook these rules just because you are a soccer club. If that were acceptable, the [Turkish] Red Crescent would also establish a company and enter the stock market. This would be impossible to stop if every association did the same thing,” he argued.
These sports companies are indeed registering high profits, but they are transferring them to the clubs as financial resources instead of distributing them to shareholders, he said. If a solution is not found immediately, more soccer club IPOs are not likely in the future, he added.
According to Bahçuvan, sports companies would be much more successful if they were autonomously managed and kept free from the influence of their soccer clubs. “The soccer clubs’ companies must either be managed professionally, given a special status or asked to leave the market,” he said.
