There was a little comment hidden away in Steve Cooper’s press comments this week about majority shareholder Steve Kaplan which clearly shows that, despite standing down as a director, he very much pulls the strings at Swansea City.<\/p>\n
Kaplan stood down as being a director back in October shortly after the appointment of Jake Silverstein in what was believed by many to be a move towards new ownership with the latter taking a stake in the club at the same time through a loan.<\/p>\n
Kaplan remained part of the ownership group and his departure coincided with some other director appointments – Chief Executive Julian Winter, Kaplan and Levien’s legal adviser Sam Porter and Finance Director Gareth Davies all joining the board of the club.<\/p>\n
Documents said that Kaplan was no longer a “person of significant control” and back in an interview with Wales Online in February Levien made the following reference to Kaplan’s involvement “Steve raised his hand and said ‘Listen, I’ll be just as involved on the ownership level as your co-managing owner, as I was before, but it would be terrific to get a young, fresh perspective, someone who has experience at a different club in professional football on board and have them join the ownership group’.<\/p>\n
“As I said, I think Steve is very involved with the ownership level, but at the board level, we decided that we wanted a different voice and a different perspective.”<\/p>\n
Those in itself were interesting comments given Levien’s comments about only thinking Steve was involved at ownership level but voices from inside the Liberty say that he is very involved at team level with a regular stream of calls to Cooper taking place over the past two years which is a continuation to how they have been since acquiring the club back in 2016.<\/p>\n
Kaplan has always been seen as the man that pulls the strings in the ownership group.\u00a0 From my involvement over the course of a few years it was always he who seemed to make the final decision and that is something that evidently probably hasn’t changed.\u00a0 To use his words we may have a fresh face in the boardroom but we don’t have fresh faces pulling the strings.<\/p>\n
It was strongly rumoured to be the involvement of Kaplan and Levien that was getting on the wrong side of Trevor Birch when he was at the club, whether Winter is the same I have no idea but what is clear is that they like a front man in Swansea to take the flak for decisions that they make whilst remaining largely invisible.<\/p>\n
“Steve Kaplan will be in contact” Cooper said when asked about his contact with the owners this week.<\/p>\n
“Communications are only around the games, nothing else. Casual conversations.”<\/p>\n
The ownership group have been largely invisible in Swansea since relegation from the Premier League three years ago.\u00a0 Of course Covid has made that more challenging in the last 13 months but prior to that they were (as we suggested on here earlier this season) the invisible men of Swansea City.\u00a0 \u00a0But seemingly always on the end of a phone and always ready to offer a perspective on team matters direct to the man charged with making those decisions.<\/p>\n
It was widely rumored in January that their involvement in the signings of both Jordan Morris and Paul Arriola were potentially against the wishes of Steve Cooper which, if true, are just spectacularly as unacceptable as it was when it was suggested that Huw Jenkins was meddling in team matters.<\/p>\n
Neither signing worked out (Morris was unfortunate but it was clear from Day 1 that Arriola was not wanted here) which just adds to the fuel that meddling only causes problems.\u00a0 It started to be the downhill of our time in the Premier League and it feels as if lessons from the past are not learned.<\/p>\n
The future of Steve Cooper will rest with his namesake Kaplan no matter what anyone tells anyone else.\u00a0 \u00a0There may be a discussion, there may be a debate but ultimately it remains the same as it always was when he was gifted control at the expense of everything we worked for, Swansea City can change on the whim of one man.<\/p>\n
And that will never be a good thing for us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There was a little comment hidden away in Steve Cooper’s press comments this week about majority shareholder Steve Kaplan which clearly shows that, despite standing down as a director, he very much pulls the strings at Swansea City. Kaplan stood down as being a director back in October shortly after the appointment of Jake Silverstein […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[293,49,203],"tags":[575,317],"class_list":["post-40518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-team","category-news","category-opinion","tag-steve-kaplan","tag-20-21-season"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}