American billionaire Bill Foley, owner of English Premier League side AFC Bournemouth and National Hockey League champions the Vegas Golden Knights, is the preferred bidder for an A-Leagues expansion licence in the Auckland market for the 2024-25 season.
The managing general partner of multi-club football group Black Knight Football Club, which also secured a significant minority stake in French side Lorient early this year, Foley, 78, was announced as league administrator the Australian Professional Leagues' preferred owner for the latest A-Leagues club, which will operate men's and women's teams from inception, on Wednesday.
The bid is subject to final approval by both the leagues and national federation Football Australia, which operates as the game's regulator, before being sent for endorsement by the Asian Football Confederation, Oceania Football Confederation (in which New Zealand competes), and New Zealand Football.
- ESPNfootytips: Set up your A-League Men tipping competition
- View the full A-League fixture: Men's | Women's
Beyond his sporting interests, Foley possesses extensive business ties to New Zealand, owning a hospitality group that owns venues in Auckland, Wellington, and Queenstown, as well as the Wharekauhau Country Estate on the Wairarapa Coast at the south of the North Island. Before stepping down earlier this year, he also chaired Foley Wines, which operated vineyards in Martinborough, Marlborough and Central Otago.
A graduate of the United States Military Academy and a former member of the U.S. Air Force, Foley has adopted the Black Knights moniker of West Point's sporting teams as his own during his forays into sporting management -- potentially opening the door for the A-League return of the New Zealand Knights brand, which represented New Zealand's largest city in the competition's first three seasons before folding in 2007.
"My family and I have a genuine appreciation and love for New Zealand," Foley said in a statement. "We will look to strengthen this connection even further by acquiring an A-Leagues expansion licence in Auckland, which will allow us to establish both a men's and women's club in the city.
"Black Knight Football Club operates with a commitment to excellence on and off the pitch. Our goal will be to build a winning organisation while simultaneously serving the community and growing the sport - and passion for the sport - at all levels. We are extremely excited to reach this stage in the process and look forward to the next steps."
No mention was made of the expansion fee to be paid for a licence, but the league previously declared it was seeking a sum of $A25 million -- a figure chief executive Danny Townsend told ESPN he was confident it would receive in August.
Auckland represents one of two expansion locations the A-League has targeted for its 2024-25 campaign, with Canberra, which has been an active player in previous rounds of league expansion, previously tapped as the other market the competition would look to place a men's team. Canbera does already have a team -- Canberra United -- in the A-League Women's competition, and this will be absorbed into the new licence if and when it is granted.
"We're in similar discussions with similar consortiums [in Canberra]," Garcia said at the A-League 2023-24 season launch on Tuesday. "It's further behind but we're expecting to move that forward in the coming weeks as well."
In addition to Canberra and Auckland, the A-Leagues, which operates without promotion and relegation to the tiers below it on the Australian football pyramid, is seeking to add two further teams for its 2025-26 campaign.
After reviewing 13 markets as possible targets before landing on Canberra and Auckland as preferred options, Garcia said at the season launch that the research would form the basis for the next round of growth, with the locations deemed to be next most suitable having a head start.
"This is why we were so confident in Canberra and Auckland; they were outliers," Townsend, addressing questions with Garcia, said at the season launch. "You could make a case for a cluster of five or six different cities in that next group. And then there were some outliers at the bottom end of the scale.
"The obvious ones that you can think about; you've got Tasmania, you've got another team in Queensland, you've got Wollongong, you've got creating derbies potentially with Fremantle, or another team in Adelaide. So there's lots of options there. They all have pros and cons, and finding the right balance is what we're looking for."
Garcia said: "That's an important point. Whilst we were kind of, in phase one, looking at unserved football markets, putting derby situations in phase two is definitely a possibility."
Beyond expansion, ESPN also understands that negotiations between the league and the NSW Government, first reported by The Sydney Morning Herald and AAP in September, are continuing regarding the alteration of the widely unpopular deal to sell the A-League Men's and Women's grand final hosting rights to Sydney, and instead replace it with a concept similar to the NRL's Magic Round and AFL's Gather Round.