Swansea City’s lead investors Steve Kaplan and Jason Levien have agreed to sell their stake in the Championship club, subject to English Football League (EFL) ratification.
Levien, also the co-chairman and CEO of Major League Soccer team D.C. United, and Kaplan, led an ownership group that acquired Swansea at a valuation of £110million when the side were in the Premier League in July 2016. The precise value of their sale is contested but sources close to the situation, who spoke anonymously due to the confidentiality of the agreement, did not dispute the figure represents a vast drop on the initial investment.
Upon acquiring Swansea, the club had been in the top-flight for five years following their promotion in 2011 but they were relegated in May 2018 and have been unable to return to the Premier League since. They are currently ninth in the Championship with 19 points after fourteen games of the league season.
The Athletic has been told that control of their majority stake in the club will be bought out partly by the club’s existing chairman Andy Coleman, while Brett Cravatt, an American businessman who secured a place on the board of directors in the summer of 2023, and Nigel Morris, a British businessman who already has a minority stake in the club, will buy out the remainder of Levien and Kaplan’s shares.
Coleman became the club’s chairman in May 2023 after acquiring a shareholding in the club. Club sources told The Athletic on Thursday that Coleman’s portion of Levien and Kaplan’s shares would be the largest followed by Cravatt and then Morris. The transfer of control will also see over £20m invested into the club.
Coleman, Cravatt and Jason Cohen, a business associate of Cravatt’s, will take over the U.S. entity, which previously accounted for over 65 per cent of the club. Morris’ previous investment was directly into the club and represented just under 20 per cent. The club’s Supporters’ Trust also maintained a small shareholding. The precise makeup of the remaining shareholding is not known but club sources indicated that the Coleman, Cravatt, Cohen share will be around 80 per cent, Morris at over 10 per cent, and the rest will be owned by the Trust and smaller investors.
Kaplan (left) and Levien (right) acquired their stake in Swansea in 2016 (Stu Forster/Getty Images)
The new owners of Swansea will take on the costs of operating and covering losses at the club, while Levien and Kaplan will also be in line for a bonus if they are promoted to the Premier League within a set number of seasons and subsequently stay up. This, however, will still represent a huge loss relative to the investment made in the club.
Cravatt is a Los Angeles-based businessman and founding partner of Magellan Entities, a private equity firm. He is a graduate of Stanford Law School and the University of California, Berkeley. Cohen, Cravatt’s co-founding partner at Magellan, will also form part of the Swansea ownership team.
When approached by The Athletic on Thursday, Andy Coleman, Swansea City AFC Chairman, said in a statement: “It is critically important for Swansea City to move on from the previous owners. I want to thank Brett Cravatt, Jason Cohen, Nigel Morris and our partners for coming together to make that happen. Together we are bringing more than £20 million directly into the club. This gives us a great foundation to drive Swansea City forward.”
Cravatt added: “I can confirm Andy Coleman, Jason Cohen, Nigel Morris and I are acquiring the outstanding shares from Jason Levien, Steve Kaplan, and all their investors, pending EFL approval. In addition, our collective group, including new strategic partners, is making a sizable investment into the club. Andy Coleman is running the club and we are all united behind his leadership, and excited for this new chapter for Swansea City.”
‘Fans will welcome an era coming to an end’
Analysis by Stuart James
There is no point in sugarcoating it — the vast majority of Swansea City supporters will be delighted to hear that the Steve Kaplan and Jason Levien era is coming to an end.
Kaplan and Levien arrived in Wales full of promises, presided over relegation from the Premier League within two years and had no discernible plan as to how to get back. Instead, Levien talked about the need to “take the hard medicine” after some costly mistakes in the transfer market.
To say that Kaplan and Levien “arrived” is a bit of stretch because the reality is they rarely showed their faces. “Get out of our club” read the front cover of the Swansea Oh Swansea fanzine early in 2019, on the back of another calamitous transfer deadline day under Kaplan and Levien that prompted the players, not just the supporters, to show their dismay on social media. Connor Roberts tweeted a gif showing Milhouse, a character from The Simpsons, throwing a frisbee to himself in the park. That frisbee didn’t come back but Dan James somehow did from Leeds.
Their first appointment as manager, the former USMNT coach Bob Bradley, lasted 85 days in the job. Others came and went after realising they were, to put it bluntly, better off elsewhere. Graham Potter, Steve Cooper and Russell Martin all ended up in the Premier League after managing Swansea in the Championship.
There was briefly hope in 2021, when Swansea reached the Championship play-off final only to lose 2-0 to Brentford. They have finished 15th, 10th and 14th since, and felt the financial pain of treading water in the second tier (a pre-tax loss of £17.9m in the last set of accounts, for the year ending July 2023) to a backdrop of falling crowds.
(Top photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)
