What Huddersfield Town fans can expect if Marcus Evans takes over
(Image: Lewis Storey/Getty Images)
Brady Frost, Feature Writer
Twitter: @brady0894
With rumours and reports circulating of former Ipswich owner Marcus Evans being in talks to take over Huddersfield Town, we spoke to Ipswich fan Benjamin Bloom for the fans’ perspective on his time at the club.
While performances on the pitch for The Terriers have been attracting all the noise this season, the rumblings behind the scenes at the club are beginning to grow louder.
Huddersfield Town fans have known for some time that the long-term future of the club is under speculation after Phil Hodgkinson’s businesses, which are unrelated to Town’s finances, went into administration in November. The Huddersfield Town Chairman has been absent at the John Smith’s for a few months now, with former owner Dean Hoyle, who still owns a 25% stake in the club, stepping in as Interim CEO following the departure of Chief Executive Mark Devlin in late December.
Reports of Marcus Evans being interested in taking over Huddersfield Town first surfaced in November following the news about Hodgkinson, and it’s not Evan’s first foray into football ownership, having been taken over Ipswich Town in 2007, before selling the club in 2021. We’re not going to delve into Marcus Evans, the businessman here as you can read great features in The Examiner, The Yorkshire Post and The Athletic. Instead, we’ve spoken to an Ipswich fan, Benjamin Bloom, to hear the fan’s perspective on Evan’s time in charge.
Benjamin, a YouTuber who covers the Championship on his channel and for Football 365, talks about Evan’s investment, disastrous managerial hirings and how he could work with Dean Hoyle.
It’s been assumed that Dean Hoyle will still be involved with the club if Marcus Evans’ takeover of Huddersfield Town is successful. Photo source: Sky Sports
Marcus Evans took over Ipswich in 2007 and sold the club in 2021. How would you briefly sum up his time at the club?
Wrong time, wrong place. Evans took over at a time where a man of his wealth could make a difference in the Championship. After a couple of bad managerial hires and money wasted on poor recruitment, parachute payments dropped to three seasons and went up steeply with the new Premier League TV deal, FFP kicked in and Evans cut his losses and tried to stick within the rules. This resulted in a very slow and not very fun drop down to League One.
During his time in charge, Ipswich stayed in the Championship for years before being relegated to League One in 2019. How responsible is Evans for this?
Ultimately responsibility falls on the owner and an overreliance on Mick McCarthy to hold things together followed by a disastrous reset in 2018/19 which spelt relegation. Under Evans’ tenure, Ipswich sadly went from a stable Championship side to a League One side.
From the outside view, he invested heavily into Ipswich over the years but a majority of fans weren’t upset to see him sell the club after remaining in League One, can you tell us why?
Evans did invest heavily into Ipswich but obviously given where he picked up the club and where he left it unsuccessfully so. For the first three-quarters of his ownership he didn’t address the fans and when he did, he could clearly be seen reading prepared notes from a board. There was always a sense his heart was in the right place but a dangerous combination of micromanaging and absentee ownership made him highly unpopular amongst fans.
What could Huddersfield Town’s future be like under Marcus Evans? Photo source: Twitter
From various reports, Evans is rarely seen and has little interaction in person with managers and fans. Do you think this negatively affected the opinions of him from the fans?
Absolutely. Fans don’t want an attention-seeking owner constantly putting himself in the public eye, but they also don’t want a silent reclusive owner. There is a middle ground that Evans never quite reached in his time with Ipswich.
According to the rumours, if Evans is successful in taking over Huddersfield Town, he plans to keep former Huddersfield Town owner Dean Hoyle as chief executive. What has Evans’ relationship been like with chief executives previously?
It has varied, the first was considered too much a non-football person, whilst later on, they were considered ‘yes men’ and seemingly just the public face. Perhaps with someone like Dean Hoyle who has more experience and knows the club inside out it will be a better mix?
Dean Hoyle has shown previously during his tenure at Huddersfield Town that he’s not afraid to speak his mind. How has Evans dealt with big personalities in the past?
The obvious example of a big personality would be Mick McCarthy and Evans was very happy to hand over the keys and basically let Mick run the club. It felt like he was very happy for McCarthy to be out front, which he was fine with, and Evans stayed hidden in the background.
What are your thoughts on the takeover if it goes through for Huddersfield Town?
Just surprised that he would want to do it again. It can’t have been a positive experience and he lost a boatload of money. Hopefully, if it happens, for the sake of Huddersfield fans, he’s learned a lot and it’s just a better fit than at Ipswich. It should be added that his parting gift to Ipswich was to write off a large amount of debt and pass the club on, as I suggested his heart was in the right place and rather than a ‘bad owner’ he was more a ‘hapless owner’.
What do you make of the rumours of Marcus Evans’ proposed takeover of Huddersfield Town?
