John Textor, the American billionaire who has been in negotiations with Farhad Moshiri regarding a potential buy-out of the Anglo-Iranian’s majority stake in Everton, has expressed his confidence in completing a takeover before December.
In an interview with Sky Sports, the prospective Blues owner said that he is closer to making his exit from Crystal Palace than has been reported in the media and that he hopes to complete a deal with Moshiri before the November 30 deadline set in his exclusivity agreement.
Textor is the fifth bidder to enter into an exclusivity agreement to buy Everton but any deal is dependent on his Eagle Football Holdings entity selling its 45% stake in Crystal Palace. However, the 58-year-old says he has two serious bids for the Palace shares from 14 groups he claims have expressed interest, where five made it to an advanced stage in terms of talks.
“We’re into the final week or two of knowing who the buyer will be,” Textor explained to Sky northwest correspondent, Alan Myers amid speculation that Josh Harris and David Blitzer, two of Palace’s other minority shareholders, are in talks to buy him out. “The contract I have with Farhad gives us a lot of time for that as there is a long-stop date of November 30… God forbid we don’t complete it by then and I do believe we can complete it before then.
“The documents I’m going to have with Farhad are complete closing documents, subject only to Premier League approval. But you’ve got to be ready by the next transfer window because this is a time to leap forward up the table from wherever they are.
“My challenge really is to get in early enough to really deal with that.
“The word ‘buy’ is always a weird one when it comes to football clubs. It provokes a discomfort in me every time because imagine going out and saying [to a fan], ‘hey, I just bought your club’.
“These clubs have been legendary long before we were alive, walking on this earth.
“Nobody wakes up and thinks, ‘I get to buy Everton’. But if you decide football is what you want in your life, and then somebody comes along and asks you if you want to become the owner of Everton, it’s like someone asking you if you want to be President of the United States. Of course you do.
“When it becomes available, obviously I’m not just interested but hopefully we can get it done. It would be quite an honour.”
Having been denied the chance to increase his holdings at Selhurst Park — he currently only has 25% voting rights in the boardroom there — Textor has been trying to sell the shares held in Palace by his Eagle Football Group in order to move forward with a takeover like the one he proposes at Everton.
“I feel my past experience has given me a patience that other people don’t have because ultimately we want to get this deal done,” he continued.
“When you walk into a situation like Everton, I feel we are capable of enhancing a club and enhancing profitability at the same time. The two don’t normally go together, but I can handle a certain amount of PSR risk.
“At this stage, I don’t quite know the risk. I’m in an awkward spot but we’re working through it. The awkward spot is that I can understand the club’s position… the accounting position and I feel it’s manageable in terms of the PSR problem.
“I don’t quite know the Premier League’s perspective on that because there’s a bit of a Chinese Wall between me as an owner of Crystal Palace and what I’m really allowed to know as a prospective owner of another team in the same division.
“But I do think we’re developing solutions for that information gap and I feel we’re in the very last days of getting our comfort around that. We just hope from the moment we arrive, we can start looking up the table, not down it.
“I have a qualified period of exclusivity, but exclusives don’t matter if Farhad gets an offer tomorrow that is supremely better than mine.
“I wouldn’t force him to do a bad deal with me. The longer this takes, the greater the probability that there’s some other smart guy out there that wakes up and see this as a great deal, as it is.
“Right now, this seems to be our opportunity and we hope to close.”