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Club 9 Sports is a Chicago-based company, which, according to its website “advises, invests and operates in the sports, entertainment and media industries.”They were most recently prominent in the British media last year when showing interest in, but not bidding, for the Glasgow football giants, Rangers.
In 2010, they were in talks to buy Sheffield Wednesday. Sources say Rob Beal got in touch with Club 9 and introduced himself as a Paris-based sport specialist who was also a fan of Wednesday who was often back in the city on business. Beal offered his services as spokesman for the group for nothing – and they took him up on it.
Contemporary press cuttings show Robert Beal cropping up as a bid spokesman several times before the bid fizzled and died. Sportingintelligence has seen a bizarre and lengthy set of documents that outline a ‘media plan’ drawn up by Beal at that time. “He said he’d do the job if he had total autonomy in communications,” said one source. “The Americans were on the verge of pulling out anyway and let him do it. It came to nothing.”
Beal soured his relations with some members of the Sheffield sports media that summer by claiming to offer priority access to Club 9 officials – when most media had a direct line anyway. Not that it mattered: next time Beal resurfaced linked to a football club was in 2011, when he was claiming to be intimately connected to the Qatari owners of PSG, via links he intended to milk, however ficticious they were.
