During his 60-year career, Michael Eisner has bought and sold companies worth billions of dollars, backed projects that have delighted and dismayed stock markets, and locked horns with some of the most famous business leaders in living memory.
But the former Disney chairman and chief executive had never made a pitch like the one when he made at the Portsmouth Guildhall on May 4, 2017.
The value of the proposal, less than £6million ($7.5m), would have been a rounding error in some of the deals that made his reputation but, for the 1,500 shareholders present, Eisner had never bought anything this precious before.
He was asking them to trust his family with control of an institution that has just celebrated its 125th anniversary, a club that each of them had dug deep to save from oblivion four years earlier.
Without them, there would be no Portsmouth FC for Eisner to buy and some of them did not want to sell their £1,000 shares in the club, especially to a guy who admitted he wanted to purchase the club because he thought it would be fun for his family to have a project in the live entertainment space they could enjoy together, like one of Disney’s amusement parks but better engineered for the streaming era.
But he nailed it. A slide show that included references to pointillist painter Georges Seurat, The Mickey Mouse Club and the U.S’s “Miracle on Ice” at the 1980 Winter Olympics opened the door, and a Q&A session with him and two of his sons got them over the threshold.
“I’ve made a lot of presentations,” remembers Eisner. “But that one was the closest to what actually happened. We presented the strategy, we lived by it and it’s worked. So far.”
Eisner is talking to The Athletic an hour before Portsmouth’s final game of a campaign that has been equal parts glorious, nerve-shredding and cathartic.
That prompted the first pitch invasion at Fratton Park since they won the League Two title in 2017. Eisner and his family were in the crowd that day as prospective owners but stayed off the pitch. The sight of 18,000 ecstatic fans at a fourth-tier game convinced them that their search for a sports team was over.
Eric and Breck Eisner, Michael’s sons, bring the League One trophy on to the pitch before the final home game of the season (Portsmouth FC)
They, and every other Pompey fan, had hoped they would be celebrating another promotion sooner than seven years but nobody, least of all Eisner, said it would be easy.
Some, however, could not wait, as the club’s groundskeepers found human ashes on the pitch after the Barnsley game. The calcium and calcium phosphate in human ashes kill grass, so there was some repair work to do before the last home fixture against Wigan Athletic five days later.
Today’s game is at Lincoln City, who need a victory to get into the play-offs for the final promotion berth. The game is a sell-out, with more than 10,000 packed into Lincoln’s Sincil Bank stadium, including 1,000 from Portsmouth.
If that sounds like a lot for an away team in English football’s third tier, it is, particularly when you consider it is a 12.30pm kickoff and Lincoln is a four-hour drive from Portsmouth, on England’s south coast. But it is also completely normal for Pompey. Last month, when promotion rivals Peterborough United decided to cash in by giving Portsmouth a bigger away ticket allocation than the rules demand, 4,000 made the trip.
A combination of the earlier start and bumper crowd conspired to delay the start of our interview, as The Athletic was sent to three different car parks before finding a spot. This meant what was supposed to be a quiet chat at the back of the press box is now taking place in the office of Lincoln’s chief executive Liam Scully, a gesture that deserves a mention.
“Coming out of the media world, where we make presentations for actors, advertisers, investors, we thought we would do it in the most story-driven way possible,” says Eisner, when asked what he remembers of the Guildhall meeting.
“It was not a shoo-in that we would get the team — a big faction of the fans wanted to continue because we were Americans and all the rest of it — so we decided we would treat it like a media event where we would put our best foot forward.
“We had to get 75 per cent of the vote and we knew it was a long putt. I could see there were a few people who didn’t want us to do this but they were getting more upset the longer we got into the presentation, so I knew we were doing well.”
Two weeks later, when the votes were counted, the proposal to sell Pompey to Tornante, the Eisner family’s investment firm, was backed by 81.4 per cent of the 2,272 shareholders.
The women’s team have also been promoted this season (Portsmouth FC)
To understand why an American billionaire, with half a century of experience in business, entertainment and sport, had to win over so many suspicious English football fans, we need to explain a little bit about Pompey.
Portsmouth is the home of the British Navy and was once the most heavily fortified city on the planet. Situated on Portsea Island, it is the UK’s only island city and it is also the most densely populated. It was bombed heavily during World War Two and has been the embarkation point for many of this country’s military adventures.
Pompey are one of only five teams to have been champions of all four tiers of English football’s traditional professional pyramid, which would suggest their fortunes have ebbed and flowed. They were the best team in the land for two straight seasons in the years immediately after World War Two but were in Division Four 30 years later.
When the club’s finances have been secure, Pompey have thrived. When the off-field situation has been difficult, as it has several times, they have dived.
It was during one of their fallow periods, the 1998-99 season, that the club’s recent history starts. With Pompey in administration, an insolvency process similar to a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States, Serbian-American businessman Milan Mandaric arrived to breathe life into the patient.
Seven years and a promotion back to the top flight later, Mandaric sold the club to a French-Israeli businessman called Sacha Gaydamak. The idea was that Gaydamak, the son of Russian-born arms dealer Arcadi Gaydamak, had the firepower to secure Pompey’s Premier League status.
For a few years, the plan worked, with Pompey enjoying the best-of-the-rest success that clubs like Brighton & Hove Albion, Leicester City and West Ham United have fought for recently. They finished ninth in 2007 and eighth in 2008, when they won the FA Cup and had the seventh-highest wage bill in the country.
But by the time they drew 2-2 with AC Milan in the UEFA Cup in November 2008, the next cycle had started. With Arcadi Gaydamak in legal trouble related to allegations of arms trafficking, his son’s financial support for the club stopped.
One year after that cup triumph, Pompey were sold. And then they were sold again. And then again. The club’s fourth owner that season, Hong Kong-based, Nepalese-born businessman Balram Chainrai, put the club into administration in February 2010, as the third owner, a Saudi businessman nobody at the club or Premier League ever met, had defaulted on a loan. That confirmed Pompey’s relegation, although they managed to reach a second FA Cup final in three seasons, losing 1-0 to Chelsea.
A Russian called Vladimir Antonov was the next cab off the “white knight” rank but in November 2011, five months after taking club out of administration, he was arrested for asset-stripping a Lithuanian bank he owned. A Russian court would later sentence him to a penal colony for a different fraud.
This left Pompey in administration for the third time in just over 13 years. Another points deduction condemned them to a second relegation in three seasons, which would soon become three in four. The 2012-13 campaign was epically grim, as they started with no players, went out of both cups in the first round, lost 10 more points for financial irregularities, went 23 games without a win and finished bottom of League One.
Portsmouth’s fans celebrate promotion at end of season parade (Portsmouth FC)
This was the sinking ship that the Pompey Supporters Trust and 16 “presidents”, a group of wealthier fans who bought bigger stakes, clubbed together to save in 2013. With seven games left in that first campaign under fan ownership, Pompey were two places off the bottom of League Two.
But they pulled away and four years later they went up as champions. This was the turning oil tanker the Eisners took on. But why?
“We had decided early on that sports was that piece of media that distributors had to have — it was sticky,” says Eisner, who left Disney after 21 years in charge in 2005.
“A live sporting event is demand television. So we looked at U.S. sports teams, which (Disney) had owned before — we had the (Anaheim) Angels when they won their only World Series (in 2002), and we had the (Anaheim) Ducks who went to the Stanley Cup finals (in 2007).
“We looked at MLS, we looked at European football. (Tornante) owned (sports trading cards company) Topps, so we knew a lot about international football. We eventually decided that if we were going to do football, we had to do the UK. We talked to five or six teams in the UK. I remember one weekend, (his son) Eric and I, my sister Margot, we went to four or five teams that were kind of in trouble but famous and historic.
“We came to Portsmouth almost unannounced — (former CEO) Mark Catlin knew we were coming — and we went around the place in a car, met the directors, saw a game. Eric said to me: ‘Dad, it’s Portsmouth or nobody — we finally found the team you’ll feel comfortable owning’.”
Go on. “We had negotiated with two Premier League clubs and, for one reason or another, the deals couldn’t be made,” Eisner says.
“That’s when we decided to do what I had done my whole career. At (U.S. TV network) ABC, we were fourth among three. The only way to build there was to find new talent.
“And then I went to (Hollywood studio) Paramount and we were eighth among seven. We couldn’t afford the big stars — Warner Brothers was buying all of them — so we decided we would go with young directors and actors, guys like John Travolta, who became big stars. We did it with the Angels, who were in trouble, and we went with youth. That was our strategy.”
OK, build from the bottom up, think long-term. What next?
“At Portsmouth, it was somewhat unexpected because your due diligence is only as good as how much time you can spend on it, we found out that Fratton Park had lots of issues because of its wood structure,” says Eisner. “So, we spent a lot of money on Fratton Park. We have also spent a lot of money on the training ground. We decided to build the infrastructure, so that when we got promoted, we would be ready.”
He is right. The Eisners’ total investment in Pompey is north of £35million and most of that has gone into making the club’s old-school ground safe and bringing it into the 21st century.
When they took over, there was a real risk that its 18,000-seat capacity could be cut to 10,000 because of safety concerns. Coincidentally, but aptly, Michael and Eric took part in a pre-match ceremony after this interview to commemorate the 39th anniversary of the Bradford City stadium disaster, which occurred when a fire started under one of the stands, killing 56 fans, including two from Lincoln, that day’s visitors.
Eric and Michael Eisner, third and fourth from left, at the wreath-laying ceremony at Sincil Bank on Saturday (Portsmouth FC)
“Shock is a strong word but if someone tells you something isn’t safe, the fire protection system isn’t right, there are too many pinch points, you have to act,” Eisner explains when asked if the state of Fratton Park shocked him.
“I also understand when people tell me the ladies’ bathrooms aren’t big enough or the food isn’t good enough. All of those things, how you deal with safe standing, how you improve the merchandise, they’re things I’ve been doing all my career and it was fun fixing that.
“There was also a lot of interest in the past about building a new steel-and-cement stadium somewhere — all sorts of plans for sites off the island. But I thought: here was a stadium that could be beautiful as a piece of architecture and history.”
It is a notion most Pompey fans, and fans of traditional football grounds, would wholeheartedly back. But some fans have wondered if the Eisners spent too much time worrying about the stage and not enough thinking about the actors. “The bottom line is people want to win,” he says.
This explains why, only 16 months ago, a group of fans hired a private plane to fly a banner above a home game that read “Eisners: no ambition — no plan”. They also published an open letter which demanded answers to three key questions about the club’s direction of travel, and they set up a Twitter account under the handle “@ShowAmbitionPFC”.
The group never stepped out of the shadows and had only limited support among the wider fanbase, but their frustrations were shared by many. If there was a typical campaign in the Eisner era until this one, it went something like this: budget to make the play-offs, start well, be top by Christmas, falter, fail to strengthen in January, stagger into the play-offs, lose, repeat.
The Eisners do not see it quite like this — they point to Covid-19 interrupting what looked like a promising push for promotion and plenty of January transfer action — but they admit it took them a while to find the right formula.
“We realised that letting the coaches have full autonomy wasn’t as good a system as having the coach focus on what happens the pitch and a sporting director responsible for player development and a lot of other things,” says Eisner.
“One coach wouldn’t work that way (Kenny Jackett, who was sacked in 2021). Danny Cowley (his successor) would but it was when we got (sporting director) Rich Hughes and (manager) John Mousinho, who fully embraced it, that it really worked. Youth, strong transfer windows, fewer loans.”
Eric, sitting alongside his dad, chips in. “I talked to Rich today and he’s been working on the Championship for two and a half months,” he says. “But John hasn’t studied it at all because he’s been totally focused on going up.”
“Our competitors have probably figured it out but that strategy works in any institution,” says Michael. ‘The guy in charge of the day-to-day wants to succeed immediately, he wants to keep his job, he wants to be a star. But others, with a longer-term view, want to make sure we’re building for the future.”
“If you change managers, they always want to change the team,” says Eric.
“The same thing happens in the movie business,” says Michael. “If you hire a new head of development, they want to get rid of all the projects, fire the directors and start over again.”
As for not spending money in January, Eric is adamant: “We did buy players but because we didn’t have a Rich (Hughes) type person in there, we bought the wrong players. I don’t want to name the players but we did buy them!”
And, just to prove his point, when an injury crisis threatened to scupper another Pompey promotion campaign this season, the Eisners spent money on five new players, three of whom helped Portsmouth beat Lincoln 2-0.
In fact, the first goal, a flowing break that started in Pompey’s goalmouth, began with January loan signing Myles Peart-Harris carrying the ball forward and passing to fellow winter arrival Owen Moxon. Having beaten a defender, he then found summer-signing Abu Kamara, who moved the ball onto Paddy Lane, who joined in January 2023. His measured pass into the box was then cooly tucked home by Peart-Harris. From one end to the other in 23 seconds.
But seven years, though! Surely, there must have been times when you were tempted to just throw money at the problem…
“The answer is 100 per cent no,” says Michael. “It has nothing to do with the amount of assets that you have. Whether you’re managing a club, a company, your family, whatever, you have to sit back and think about what is right for the future.
“We never deviated from wanting to be a sustainable club. There was no point in throwing darts against the wall, looking for instant gratification. We all know the history of people trying to do that — the darts fall to the ground.”
What came across clearly during this conversation, and in a shorter one after the game, was that Eisner has emphatically delivered on one of the promises he made in his Guildhall pitch. Supporting Pompey has become an Eisner family pastime.
As well as Eric, who had been at three of the previous four games, Michael was joined on this trip by his wife, sister and several grandchildren. And they were all heading to Portsmouth on Sunday for what ended up being a double promotion party at the city’s Southsea Common, as the women’s team also won their league and will play in the second tier of the English game next season. The women’s team were only brought back under the main club’s umbrella in 2019.
“I remember when I was at Disney and we were looking for a good slogan,” says Eisner.
“We came up with ‘the family that plays together, stays together’, a play on the old line about families praying together. So, that worked for Disney and it’s what Disney is.
“Well, having three children, nine grandchildren and tons of cousins, I thought having something where the family could play together would help keep the family together. That was the main reason (for buying Pompey) but it was good business.”
Mousinho and his players with the League One title (Peter Nicholls/Getty Images)
The club have made losses of about £3million in the last two seasons but that is relatively modest for English football and Pompey have no debt. They have just been promoted with only the eighth-highest budget in the division, Fratton Park is back up to a capacity of 21,000 and Mousinho and his players will move into new facilities at their training ground this summer.
The Championship represents far choppier waters, though, and Pompey will have to triple their playing budget to even compete with recently-relegated Premier League clubs and their £44million parachute payments. Pompey’s entire income last season was £12.5million, and their wage bill was £8.3million.
Eisner, however, is not alarmed. The broadcast revenue should quadruple, too, and he believes they can and will increase commercial and match-day revenues. The improvements at the academy and training ground should help develop more homegrown talent for Mousinho’s use and perhaps, one day, to sell.
Eisner thinks the club can break even next season. And, further ahead, there are plans to rebuild Fratton Park’s North Stand, complete with modern hospitality offerings and a hotel. But, in terms of the football, is this mission accomplished?
“If you had asked me when we bought the Angels if our dream was winning the World Series, I would have said ‘I guess so, why not?’” says Michael.
“Were we obsessive about it? No. But we wouldn’t have done this if we didn’t think we could get to the Premier League without going under.”
“The analogy I use is: we’ve got to the top of one mountain but you can then see there is another peak, and there is probably another one behind that, too,” says Eric.
“It’s one thing to get into the Premier League,” answers Michael. “I would like to get into the top six… but then there will be another peak behind that one.”
It sounds like the Eisners finally did get their team. But it also sounds like the team has really got the Eisners, too.
(Top image: Portsmouth FC)
