Post by kbola on Apr 16, 2023 7:11:42 GMT
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FOOTBALL | KENT TEAGUE INTERVIEW
‘Orient fans know I care — I listen to them . . . and smash my TV when we lose’
Kent Teague is not your typical American football club owner — he gets stuck in with the fans, feeling all their joy . . . and pain
Jonathan Northcroft, Football Correspondent
Sunday April 16 2023, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
Leyton Orient part owner Teague can barely contain his passion for the League Two club
AKIRA SUEMORI FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Kent Teague sits on a shabby chair, in a grotty Portakabin crammed with disused gym equipment, but the blissed-out, somewhat faraway look, never leaves his eyes. Not once, throughout 90 minutes of conversation. Is this zeal? Is this love? Or something he sprinkles on his Cheerios?
Or is it football? The beautiful, crazy, goddam game. “This is the greatest thing that ever happened to me in my life. And you can tell my wife. And my daughters,” he announces early in our chat. ‘This’ is standing in the rain in the away end at Dover, and fish and chips on the bus back from Gateshead, and living every kick at the rickety palace of Brisbane Road.
Teague is not Joel Glazer. He is not Stan Kroenke. He is definitely not Todd Boehly and nor is he a Hollywood star making reality TV. He’s not Ted Lasso (“Though some of our fans call me Ted Lasso Jr, and there are times I’ll actually quote Ted Lasso — just to run amok on them”).
What Teague is, is the principal investor at Leyton Orient and guiding hand behind a rebirth of the club, which began with a takeover when they were in the National League and is poised to continue with promotion to League One.
It feels like the year of American ownership. All five English top divisions could be won by US-controlled clubs (Arsenal, Burnley, Ipswich Town, Orient, Wrexham) while no owners have made a bigger news splash than the Californians running amok at Chelsea, Boehly and Behdad Eghbali.
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Many things make Teague — a Texan multimillionaire who was a senior Microsoft executive before founding a private equity firm — different. The foremost being accessibility. On Twitter, he posts his itinerary on match days as open invitation for supporters to come and have a word with him. An example from his feed: ‘1245 Club Shop 1p South Stand Bar 130p 1181 Suite 2p Legends Lounge . . .’
Why? “The ability to interact directly with our fans makes me understand their experience and the main thing they want to know is do you care? They can see I care, because I’m there.”
Teague keeps an eye on training at Orient — but often he is forced to follow the club from abroad
AKIRA SUEMORI FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Last February, “I flew in on a Tuesday night and at half-time decided it was over for Kenny Jackett. When [Jackett’s sacking as manager] was announced, I was in the supporters’ club after the game and they were, like, ‘Are you responsible for this?’ I said, ‘Why do you think I came all the way over here?’ They’re like, ‘Oh, right.’ There’s no ‘run-and-hide’ model.”
Remoteness means “some American owners do not have an appropriate cultural sensitivity — or they would never have said there was going to be a certain league [European Super League] whose name I won’t even say. Some lack true involvement in their clubs. Stan Kroenke and Arsenal continue to be separated even though under his ownership Arsenal have been outrageously successful. The Glazers have been incredibly standoffish.”
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He loves what Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney are doing at Wrexham because it’s rooted in the community and has soul but sighs when I mention Boehly’s missteps, including floating the idea of a Premier League All Star game.
“[American owners] believe they have to be a little bit over the top so they can win over the fans, when in reality it’s the opposite,” Teague says. “That over-exuberance, that over-promising, that American style . . . is really scary to Europe.
“My experience is our fans don’t want to be over-promised, they want someone being realistic. Leyton Orient football club does not need to be fixed. It doesn’t need to Americanise. It doesn’t need to be multimedia blitzed. It doesn’t need a scoreboard . . . well, okay, we now got one, haha. It just needs to be what it is. It’s great the way it is. Let it be.”
Teague bought in when Nigel Travis was assembling a consortium to rescue the club in June 2017. It had dropped out of the Football League for the first time in its 112-year history under the murky and ludicrous stewardship of Francesco Becchetti. Travis, a Orient fan from Woodford, was in Massachusetts and chief executive of Dunkin’ Donuts. Teague, from Allen, near Dallas, was searching for a club to buy.
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He had made written offers for two MLS outfits, studied options in South America and looked at 13 other English clubs — but Orient grabbed him. A self-styled “turnaround guy” he felt he could accomplish the mission Travis outlined of lifting Orient from the National League back into England’s top three divisions. They set themselves six-to-eight years to pull it off and, here they are, on the brink before the end of year six.
Teague, centre, in a white shirt, is not averse to getting among the supporters and revels in a good result
PRESS ASSOCIATION
The first week involved a daily strategy meeting at 9am UK time, which meant Teague getting up at 2.45am Texas time, for seven days straight. Then he started coming over, staying in Airbnbs and three-star hotels in Leyton to familiarise himself with the area. His embrace of it involves giving talks in schools and his wife set up a pen-friend scheme between eight and nine-year-olds in Leyton and Dallas. He brings the children’s letters over himself.
His wife’s rule is he spends more nights at home than on the road and tax regulations allow him only 100 days per year in the UK but within those constraints every day possible is spent in London, with Orient. We speak after he has watched training, in the drizzle, at Orient’s borrowed practice facility in Chigwell. He was looking forward to going to Sutton United, his first away trip since Covid.
“An away day is my favourite. I’ll spend the first half in the directors’ box and second half I’ll be out there. The away end. No coat, no tie, let’s get after it.”
His first game was at Sutton, a 2-0 defeat watched by 3,198, and he waxes about a David Mooney goal at Dover and the fish supper on the team bus going home from Gateshead. This season, with Richie Wellens, playing good football and transforming results (Wellens replaced Jackett with Orient 18th) “has just been magical.”
Teague played professional golf, spending a year on the PGA Tour in the 1980s. Was he a cautious or aggressive player? “I was an idiot player. The challenge I had with golf is I could not control my emotions. And some people say I have that same problem when I stand on the balcony [at Brisbane Road] and watch Leyton Orient football club. [The EFL chief executive] Trevor Birch says I’ll jump off the balcony one day.”
When he watches games via a live feed from his home office in Allen, he gets no less worked up. “My wife will come in but mainly she doesn’t like to watch because I have a tendency to cuss and yell. More times than I should mention I’ve picked up the monitor and actually broke it.
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“We were playing a team who were way, way down and they came to our house and beat us two or three nil in a cup match and I was so hot I just picked up the screen and smashed it. My wife was, ‘I guess we’re going to Best Buy today.’”
He is full of ideas for growing Orient – new training ground, stadium expansion, multimedia streaming of home games – and has talked to Brentford and Bournemouth about how to grow a smaller club into a Premier League force. But he doesn’t think he’s the guy to oversee it. He and Travis have been talking about looking for new investors and stepping back. But not completely. “I have such a love for the club I don’t think I could ever not be involved.”
Justin Edinburgh, the manager who returned Orient to the Football League before dying following a sudden cardiac arrest in 2019, “is always on my mind. On my phone I still have every text message we sent each other, pictures of us on the London Eye. He was just an incredible person.
“Last time I was here, his wife and son were on the balcony [at Brisbane Road] and they will always be part of our family. Our family club.”
Related articles
HENRY WINTER
Vice-chairman, assistant kit man: meet Orient’s ‘crazy’ Texan backer
October 28 2017, 12.01am
Henry Winter, Chief Football Writer
EFL RUN-IN: LEAGUE TWO
Runaway Orient express set for promotion – and don’t rule out Mansfield
March 28 2023, 5.00pm
Angus Oliver, Willis Bennett
FOOTBALL | GREGOR ROBERTSON
‘We can’t rely on legacy supporters’ – Orient’s grand vision to widen their fanbase
September 24 2022, 12.01am
Gregor Robertson
Today’s sport
PREMIER LEAGUE
Ouattara boosts Bournemouth’s survival hopes with last-gasp winner at Spurs
April 15 2023, 5.00pm
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FOOTBALL | KENT TEAGUE INTERVIEW
‘Orient fans know I care — I listen to them . . . and smash my TV when we lose’
Kent Teague is not your typical American football club owner — he gets stuck in with the fans, feeling all their joy . . . and pain
Jonathan Northcroft, Football Correspondent
Sunday April 16 2023, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
Leyton Orient part owner Teague can barely contain his passion for the League Two club
AKIRA SUEMORI FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Kent Teague sits on a shabby chair, in a grotty Portakabin crammed with disused gym equipment, but the blissed-out, somewhat faraway look, never leaves his eyes. Not once, throughout 90 minutes of conversation. Is this zeal? Is this love? Or something he sprinkles on his Cheerios?
Or is it football? The beautiful, crazy, goddam game. “This is the greatest thing that ever happened to me in my life. And you can tell my wife. And my daughters,” he announces early in our chat. ‘This’ is standing in the rain in the away end at Dover, and fish and chips on the bus back from Gateshead, and living every kick at the rickety palace of Brisbane Road.
Teague is not Joel Glazer. He is not Stan Kroenke. He is definitely not Todd Boehly and nor is he a Hollywood star making reality TV. He’s not Ted Lasso (“Though some of our fans call me Ted Lasso Jr, and there are times I’ll actually quote Ted Lasso — just to run amok on them”).
What Teague is, is the principal investor at Leyton Orient and guiding hand behind a rebirth of the club, which began with a takeover when they were in the National League and is poised to continue with promotion to League One.
It feels like the year of American ownership. All five English top divisions could be won by US-controlled clubs (Arsenal, Burnley, Ipswich Town, Orient, Wrexham) while no owners have made a bigger news splash than the Californians running amok at Chelsea, Boehly and Behdad Eghbali.
ADVERTISEMENT
Many things make Teague — a Texan multimillionaire who was a senior Microsoft executive before founding a private equity firm — different. The foremost being accessibility. On Twitter, he posts his itinerary on match days as open invitation for supporters to come and have a word with him. An example from his feed: ‘1245 Club Shop 1p South Stand Bar 130p 1181 Suite 2p Legends Lounge . . .’
Why? “The ability to interact directly with our fans makes me understand their experience and the main thing they want to know is do you care? They can see I care, because I’m there.”
Teague keeps an eye on training at Orient — but often he is forced to follow the club from abroad
AKIRA SUEMORI FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Last February, “I flew in on a Tuesday night and at half-time decided it was over for Kenny Jackett. When [Jackett’s sacking as manager] was announced, I was in the supporters’ club after the game and they were, like, ‘Are you responsible for this?’ I said, ‘Why do you think I came all the way over here?’ They’re like, ‘Oh, right.’ There’s no ‘run-and-hide’ model.”
Remoteness means “some American owners do not have an appropriate cultural sensitivity — or they would never have said there was going to be a certain league [European Super League] whose name I won’t even say. Some lack true involvement in their clubs. Stan Kroenke and Arsenal continue to be separated even though under his ownership Arsenal have been outrageously successful. The Glazers have been incredibly standoffish.”
SPONSORED
He loves what Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney are doing at Wrexham because it’s rooted in the community and has soul but sighs when I mention Boehly’s missteps, including floating the idea of a Premier League All Star game.
“[American owners] believe they have to be a little bit over the top so they can win over the fans, when in reality it’s the opposite,” Teague says. “That over-exuberance, that over-promising, that American style . . . is really scary to Europe.
“My experience is our fans don’t want to be over-promised, they want someone being realistic. Leyton Orient football club does not need to be fixed. It doesn’t need to Americanise. It doesn’t need to be multimedia blitzed. It doesn’t need a scoreboard . . . well, okay, we now got one, haha. It just needs to be what it is. It’s great the way it is. Let it be.”
Teague bought in when Nigel Travis was assembling a consortium to rescue the club in June 2017. It had dropped out of the Football League for the first time in its 112-year history under the murky and ludicrous stewardship of Francesco Becchetti. Travis, a Orient fan from Woodford, was in Massachusetts and chief executive of Dunkin’ Donuts. Teague, from Allen, near Dallas, was searching for a club to buy.
ADVERTISEMENT
He had made written offers for two MLS outfits, studied options in South America and looked at 13 other English clubs — but Orient grabbed him. A self-styled “turnaround guy” he felt he could accomplish the mission Travis outlined of lifting Orient from the National League back into England’s top three divisions. They set themselves six-to-eight years to pull it off and, here they are, on the brink before the end of year six.
Teague, centre, in a white shirt, is not averse to getting among the supporters and revels in a good result
PRESS ASSOCIATION
The first week involved a daily strategy meeting at 9am UK time, which meant Teague getting up at 2.45am Texas time, for seven days straight. Then he started coming over, staying in Airbnbs and three-star hotels in Leyton to familiarise himself with the area. His embrace of it involves giving talks in schools and his wife set up a pen-friend scheme between eight and nine-year-olds in Leyton and Dallas. He brings the children’s letters over himself.
His wife’s rule is he spends more nights at home than on the road and tax regulations allow him only 100 days per year in the UK but within those constraints every day possible is spent in London, with Orient. We speak after he has watched training, in the drizzle, at Orient’s borrowed practice facility in Chigwell. He was looking forward to going to Sutton United, his first away trip since Covid.
“An away day is my favourite. I’ll spend the first half in the directors’ box and second half I’ll be out there. The away end. No coat, no tie, let’s get after it.”
His first game was at Sutton, a 2-0 defeat watched by 3,198, and he waxes about a David Mooney goal at Dover and the fish supper on the team bus going home from Gateshead. This season, with Richie Wellens, playing good football and transforming results (Wellens replaced Jackett with Orient 18th) “has just been magical.”
Teague played professional golf, spending a year on the PGA Tour in the 1980s. Was he a cautious or aggressive player? “I was an idiot player. The challenge I had with golf is I could not control my emotions. And some people say I have that same problem when I stand on the balcony [at Brisbane Road] and watch Leyton Orient football club. [The EFL chief executive] Trevor Birch says I’ll jump off the balcony one day.”
When he watches games via a live feed from his home office in Allen, he gets no less worked up. “My wife will come in but mainly she doesn’t like to watch because I have a tendency to cuss and yell. More times than I should mention I’ve picked up the monitor and actually broke it.
ADVERTISEMENT
“We were playing a team who were way, way down and they came to our house and beat us two or three nil in a cup match and I was so hot I just picked up the screen and smashed it. My wife was, ‘I guess we’re going to Best Buy today.’”
He is full of ideas for growing Orient – new training ground, stadium expansion, multimedia streaming of home games – and has talked to Brentford and Bournemouth about how to grow a smaller club into a Premier League force. But he doesn’t think he’s the guy to oversee it. He and Travis have been talking about looking for new investors and stepping back. But not completely. “I have such a love for the club I don’t think I could ever not be involved.”
Justin Edinburgh, the manager who returned Orient to the Football League before dying following a sudden cardiac arrest in 2019, “is always on my mind. On my phone I still have every text message we sent each other, pictures of us on the London Eye. He was just an incredible person.
“Last time I was here, his wife and son were on the balcony [at Brisbane Road] and they will always be part of our family. Our family club.”
Related articles
HENRY WINTER
Vice-chairman, assistant kit man: meet Orient’s ‘crazy’ Texan backer
October 28 2017, 12.01am
Henry Winter, Chief Football Writer
EFL RUN-IN: LEAGUE TWO
Runaway Orient express set for promotion – and don’t rule out Mansfield
March 28 2023, 5.00pm
Angus Oliver, Willis Bennett
FOOTBALL | GREGOR ROBERTSON
‘We can’t rely on legacy supporters’ – Orient’s grand vision to widen their fanbase
September 24 2022, 12.01am
Gregor Robertson
Today’s sport
PREMIER LEAGUE
Ouattara boosts Bournemouth’s survival hopes with last-gasp winner at Spurs
April 15 2023, 5.00pm
Comments(1)
Comments are subject to our community standards and participation guidelines policy, which can be viewed here. By joining the conversation you are accepting our community rules and terms. Update your commenting notification settings here. Our policy is for readers to use their real names when commenting, find out more here.
Kit Rickabono
Reply
Recommend (1)
Share
Feedback
PREVIOUS ARTICLE
Gambling ruling is inconsistent nonsense that does little to tackle dangerous culture
Previous article
NEXT ARTICLE
Ouattara boosts Bournemouth’s survival hopes with last-gasp winner at Spurs
Next article
© Times Media Limited 2023.
Registered in England No. 894646. Registered office: 1 London Bridge Street, SE1 9GF.
Privacy & cookie policy
Licensing
Site map
Topics
Authors
Commissioning terms
Terms and conditions
