Wigan Athletic and Wigan Warriors owner Mike Danson speaks of 'problems' - 'It's a lot more difficult...'

[josie andrews]

Mike Danson has spoken for the first time about the 'problems' he's encountered since taking control of Wigan Athletic in the summer of 2023.

The 62-year-old billionaire - who owns Wigan Warriors and the Brick Community Stadium as well - has also admitted running a football club has proved to be 'a lot more difficult'.

Danson made the revelations in a rare media interview with The Times, given to raise the profile of his main business GlobalData, which is about to hit the London Stock Exchange.

When asked why he’d agreed to be quizzed, Danson replied: “I don’t know...(PR advisor) Emma told me to."

But it's his comments on both Wigan sporting clubs that will be of most interest to fans of Latics and Warriors.

Warriors have done well,” he said. “The Athletic has had a few problems. I think football, the ownership, is a lot more difficult.”

Danson then spoke about the time he was invited by Warriors CEO Kris Radlinski to join their players on their short trip from their Robin Park training base to the Brick - through a sea of supporters.

“Me and Kris walked behind them,” he said. “And it’s like one of those things where immediately all the cameras go down. And people think: who’s that little bald bloke walking along behind the players?”

The interview concludes with Danson being asked if he'd one day like a statue of himself to join that of Dave Whelan outside the stadium.

"No, no, no," he said. “Not at all. No. I’m not bothered about that.”




https://www.wigantoday.net/sport/footba ... lt-4993237

[Charriots Offiah]

Has anyone read the article in the Sunday Times? I know it is behind a paywall but I was hoping that somebody could enlighten us further.

[josie andrews]

Has anyone read the article in the Sunday Times? I know it is behind a paywall but I was hoping that somebody could enlighten us further.

I’ve have but it’s very long & just really covers his businesses

I’ve posted it next.

That’s the reason I always post a complete story with the link as you can’t always read what’s behind a paywall. So it’s a bit pointless

[josie andrews]

Mike Danson, the Wigan warrior with a plan to challenge Bloomberg
The enigmatic billionaire’s £1.6bn GlobalData company is about to move to the main London exchange. Next stop: tackling the American data giant

Mike Danson is not exactly what you would expect of a Rich List media mogul, football club owner and sometime resident of Michael Jackson’s former New York mansion. Slight, softly spoken and often inscrutable, Danson is, to quote his former longstanding finance chief Simon Pyper, “probably the most unassuming billionaire you will ever meet”.

Last year, after his rugby league club Wigan Warriors established itself as the best in the land, the owner was persuaded by chief executive Kris Radlinski to accompany the players on a short walk from their training ground to the stadium, through a mob of adoring fans.

“Me and Kris walked behind them,” recalls Wigan-born Danson, whose northern accent has been eroded somewhat by decades in London. “And it’s like one of those things where immediately all the cameras go down. And people think: who’s that little bald bloke walking along behind the players?”

I meet Danson, 62, in the chairman’s lounge that looks down into the Brick Community Stadium, a 25,000-seater that serves as a home for both the league-winning Warriors and Wigan Athletic, the struggling League One football team that Danson saved from financial oblivion in 2023. At the stadium’s entrance stands a statue of the last man to own both clubs, Dave Whelan.

"Warriors have done well,” says Danson. “The Athletic has had a few problems. I think football, the ownership, is a lot more difficult.” With an attempted nod and a wink, Danson teases: “I can’t tell you who I actually support.” When I tell him I already have an inkling — Manchester United — he looks slightly crestfallen, and briefly loses his composure. “Oh. You know? OK. Sorry. But anyway …”

I used to work as a small cog within Danson’s media empire, as a writer for both the New Statesman magazine and Press Gazette, a journalism trade title that Danson saved from closure in 2009. But I only met him for the first time last year when he invited me to his no-frills London boardroom and enthusiastically talked me through a lengthy, graph-heavy slideshow on his listed data analytics business, GlobalData.

The next time I saw him was at the New Statesman’s glamorous election night party in a Westminster private members’ club. There was leftie euphoria in the air but Danson, standing away from the crowd with a glass of warm wine in hand, appeared to be having a lot less fun than the last time I’d seen him.

In Wigan, I find him more upbeat — he is here for Warriors’ opening fixture of the season — but he also seems nervous and initially a little breathless when answering my questions. Danson is a media man who does not really do media. He has been described in the press as low-profile and even secretive. When I ask why he’s agreed to this interview, he looks momentarily lost for words. “I don’t know,” he shrugs shyly. “Emma told me to,” he offers, gesturing to his onlooking PR adviser.

The reason Danson has reluctantly agreed to expose himself to awkward questions is to raise the profile of GlobalData, which he is about to move from the Aim market for small companies to the London Stock Exchange’s main market. His goal is to establish the firm, currently valued at £1.6 billion, as Britain’s answer to Bloomberg. “The Bloomberg of industries,” is how he puts it.

Bloomberg, a financial data giant led by former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, has established its information portal, the Terminal, as a must-have service for bankers and traders. Danson says GlobalData is earning the same status across numerous industries and sectors, such as pharmaceuticals and food production. The idea is that a pharma company, for example, will buy a subscription to GlobalData in order to access its large patents database, its clinical trial records and its company hiring data. GlobalData has developed an AI assistant to produce industry reports for clients and, as with the Terminal, a single subscription costs around £20,000 a year.

On Aim, Danson’s grand vision has not quite garnered the investor support he thinks it merits. While GlobalData’s share price has remained relatively flat since the end of 2019, its annual earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (ebitda) have risen from £45 million to £140 million.

"It’s just mad,” he says. “Everything in our sector is valued at 20 to 25 times ebitda. Absolutely everything … All the companies that get bought by private equity. And, as of a month ago, I think we were ten times — so half the valuation.” Danson says of Aim: “I think that it’ll just keep on declining … and we sort of don’t want to necessarily be the last one there.”

Presumably he’s feeling optimistic about the main market? “No, not really,” he says, drily. He hopes the senior market will offer more “stability” and better share price growth. But, if not, he is prepared to look elsewhere. “There’s lots of companies I know that have been taken private. We get calls every week saying: ‘Do you want to go private?’”

He adds: “I think there’s obviously options to go to the American market”, before backtracking slightly to reason that GlobalData probably needs to build more of a presence in the US first.

Danson spends around a week every month in New York. When I ask if it is true that he owns Michael Jackson’s old Upper East Side home, he looks uncomfortable. “Er, yeah,” he says sheepishly. “He lived there a long time ago. In the 1990s.”

Both Danson’s grandfathers were Wigan miners. Neither of his parents went to university, but they worked as teachers and moved their family to nearby Bury. They had Danson educated at the private Bolton School and he made it into the University of Oxford, where he studied law.

He started his career at Strategic Planning Associates as a management consultant, a job in which he conducted market research and produced business plans for corporate clients. In his late 20s, he quit his well-paid job to go solo from his flat in West Hampstead, London. He started out by producing reports on the frozen food sector. “I’d do it all,” he says. “I’d ring somebody up, I’d interview them, collect data, then write the report. And then ring somebody up and try and sell it.”

He originally funded the business, which became known as Datamonitor, using four credit cards and racked up “a pretty bad debt”. But after a few years he started to make his money back — and then some. He enticed clients by offering them reports sold for “a couple of thousand pounds” that he reckoned would have cost £1 million from consultants McKinsey.

Danson later began hiring, and he propelled his business ahead of the opposition by selling his reports online as early as 1995. Datamonitor floated in 2000 and by 2007 it was an employer of 500, with revenues of more than £40 million. It was then that Informa, a larger rival, swooped — buying the business for £502 million.

Danson, who personally made £174 million from that deal, could have comfortably retired in his mid-40s. But instead, he went on a buying spree of media and data assets to build a new empire made up of several separate and sometimes interconnected companies. They included TMN, an online marketing services group that ultimately gave its Aim listing to GlobalData. Danson also owns Progressive Media International, publisher of niche news titles such as Cranes Today, Tunnels & Tunnelling and Wood Based Panels International.

In 2015, he bought back a chunk of Datamonitor from Informa for the cutdown price of £25 million. “That was good,” says Danson. Asked to explain the value change, he is vague. “I think with big companies, it’s just different priorities.”

Danson, who owns 57 per cent of GlobalData and serves as chief executive, has attracted questions over the interconnectedness of some business interests in the past. For instance, back in 2020, GlobalData declared that it had spent £2.9 million renting three buildings from a property company owned by Danson. That is no longer the case and GlobalData, in pursuit of cleaner corporate governance and more investors, has significantly shortened its “related party transactions” list.

However, I note that GlobalData’s latest annual report shows the company paid £34,000 to host an event on a private yacht “owned by Mike Danson”.

"Yeah, it wasn’t actually my yacht, it was a yacht we rented,” says Danson. “That was more because I’d rented it. And basically we had to disclose that. I actually didn’t know that was being disclosed.”

Throughout my time with Danson, I find him straightforward and honest, if not always the smoothest of communicators. And yet, he remains an enigma.

It is easy to understand his main business: buying up data and specialist media assets that can fit together to form a formidable fountain of corporate information. But it is difficult to fathom why a private man, who enjoys a low profile and shuns even industry get-togethers, would want to invite public scrutiny by buying up high-profile political magazines and his local professional sports clubs. Danson’s explanation, expressed several times during our conversation, is: “I’m sort of just interested in building things and investing in things and trying to create world-class companies.”

Colin Morrison, a media veteran who runs an industry blog called Flashes & Flames, offers his backing of this explanation. He says Danson has a reputation as a “workaholic in the extreme” who enjoys the “polymath challenge” of making businesses work in numerous fields.

Still, I wonder whether there is a part of Danson that craves some form of adulation. When I ask him if, one day, he would like a statue of himself to stand alongside Dave Whelan’s outside the Brick Community Stadium, he looks mortified. “No, no, no,” says Danson quickly, eyes wide. “Not at all. No. I’m not bothered about that.”

The life of Mike Danson

Born December 1962 in Wigan
Status Married to Helen with four children, Lucas, Ella, Sienna and Tom
School Bolton Grammar School
University University of Oxford
First job Door-to-door scratchcard salesman aged 11
Home London
Car None
Favourite book Can’t choose. The last one he enjoyed was Damascus Station
Film Again, can’t choose. But last enjoyed One Life
Music Keane
Drink Red wine
Watch Apple Watch
Gadget Phone
Last holiday Lake District

Charity The Brick, an anti-poverty charity in Wigan, which offers services to people at risk of homelessness and financial hardship.

Working day Mike Danson wakes up at around 5.30am and is often in the office by 7am. His days are filled with meetings with clients, investors and employees. He finishes at around 6pm and usually heads home to spend time with his family and friends.

Downtime Watching sport and reading.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/9d39ac ... 843ae9e212

[Charriots Offiah]

Has anyone read the article in the Sunday Times? I know it is behind a paywall but I was hoping that somebody could enlighten us further.

I’ve have but it’s very long & just really covers his businesses

I’ve posted it next.

That’s the reason I always post a complete story with the link as you can’t always read what’s behind a paywall. So it’s a bit pointless

Thanks Josie.

[fozzie58]

Isn’t it nice to have an owner you really don’t see,he just pays the bills and let people he trusts get on with running the club it’s very clear the football club is a bigger drain money wise because they’re time in the sun has been and gone and getting the club to accept its position is a bigger ask than the rugby club.

I’m sure the people in charge at the football club will get it right and cut the cloth a accordingly as is the right thing to do.

[Wiganer Ted]

Thanks Josie.
A very good read.