League One Promotion Betting: Saints new billionaire owner brings punting plunge on St Mary's success

English Football League / Ralph Ellis / 09 July 2009 / Leave a Comment

There may be money at Southampton now, but Ralph Ellis does not see any value in investing yours on the red and whites.

There's an old saying that there's only one way to make a small fortune out of owning a football club - and that's to start with a large fortune. Yet it's amazing that the queue of successful billionaires wanting to buy into the British game never seems to dry up.

The latest to join the exclusive club is Swiss-based German businessman Markus Liebherr who yesterday completed a deal to take control of Southampton. The romantic takeover would have seen Saints legend Matt Le Tissier head up a local consortium to rescue the club from going out of business. In the real world the bottomless pockets of a man whose fortune is valued at around £3billion gives Southampton far more chance.

The deal has come in the nick of time to make sure Southampton can start the season, and 61-year-old Liebherr has already ordered a stop to any further sales of players.

"I believe we have a superb opportunity to rebuild this great club," he said.

"We will assemble a strong management team at every level. We will act rapidly but plan for the long term."

Now that's well worth decoding if you're tempted to think that Saints, with the backing of billionaire, might suddenly be good value to win promotion from League One. And there are those who have fallen for that trap, because their odds crashed yesterday from [7.4] to the current level of [4.0], with £200 being traded at [4.2] on the way.

Southampton's first task will be to reach nought points, and that won't be easy for a side that was shot to bits towards the end of last season as they crashed out of the Championship. There are still too many imponderables to think anything else. Will Mark Wotte remain in charge? If he does stay, is he any good anyway? And if they are starting late in the transfer markets what sort of players can they recruit in a League which is full of big clubs this season?

Saints are now in a division with Leeds who are, quite naturally, League One favourites at [1.84] to go up and [4.3] to win the division - and there are more former Premier League clubs who have fallen on hard times and now have recovery plans. Charlton [8.6] and Norwich [8.2] will both also be threats and those three won't have a minus ten points handicap. And that's before you think about MK Dons with Paul Ince back and wanting to prove a point, Brighton who were a revitalised force at the end of last season, or Tranmere under John Barnes.

I reckon laying Southampton for promotion at about [5.0] and seeing if you get it matched is a safe way to make 25% on your money over the next ten months - billionaire or no billionaire.

Five things you might not know about Markus Liebherr

1. His father Hans, orphaned in the First World War, served on the Russian front in the engineering corps in the Second World War and when he came home invented the world's first mobile tower crane to found the family fortune

2. Markus was the third of four brothers, Hans junior, Willi and Hubert, they also have a sister Isolde, and they all worked in different divisions of the rapidly expanding company

3. They moved to Switzerland in 1983 to avoid inheritance tax. But when his father died in 1993 Markus, who had studied agricultural engineering, gave back his shares in the group to start his own business which is now called the MALI group

4. He still follows the business principles of his father who refused to borrow money at any time during the company's expansion. "Borrowing is a form of gambling," was his mantra

5. His companies follow dad's ideals in other ways by inventing new equipment - they recently filed a patent for a "Hydrostatic axial piston machine and use of said machine"