Milan Mandaric: Former Portsmouth, Leicester City and Sheffield Wednesday owner dies aged 87
Mandaric, 21 -year -old Serbian City Novi Sad’de his father’s engineering business took control.
Five years later, he was one of the largest companies in Yugoslavia and was a collision course with the country’s communist dictator Marshal Tito.
When Tito took his entrepreneur family to Switzerland, he condemned Mandaric as a “capitalist traitor.”
Mandaric spent a year there, desperately tried to remove his money from the Balkans, then moved to a computer components company and moved to the United States, where he founded an electronic business.
The US acquired citizenship and signed George Best to play San Jose earthquakes in the first professional sports team in Silicon Valley.
Disappointed with the slow progress of the game in the United States, Mandaric bought Belgian club Charleroi and then moved to Nice.
Portsmouth was on the verge of bankruptcy he bought in 1999 before he was revived in a model that would gain fame as ‘Mr. Fixit’ in 1999.
The owner and the club would be a shaky start as he met, a few turns of the administrative cheerful go-Round, investment, improvement, promotion, consolidation, sales.
With the appointment of Harry Redknapp as a manager, Mandaric’s Portsmouth won the championship in 2003 before selling his club French-Israeli businessman Alexandre Gaydamak in 2006 for £ 32 million.
In 2007, Mandaric acquired Leicester City for £ 6 million. The foxes fell to League One in 2007-08, but returned as a champion at 08-09 and lost in the championship play-off semifinals at 09-10.
He sold Leicester to Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha from Thailand for £ 40 million that year and bought a heavy debtor Sheffield on Wednesday for £ 1.
Owls, Mandaric won them promoted from the League One in 2012 before selling them to another Thai Dejphon Chaansiri for £ 37.5 million.
Manadaric was also interested in Redknapp in an epic of corruption, which began in 2006 with a BBC Panorama investigation and was acquitted of tax trafficking in 2012.
Earlier this year, Mandaric thought of buying on Wednesday to save the “destruction” under the current president Chansiri.
However, he decided to follow the idea because he could not devote enough time to “return the club to the healthy situation I left”.
