As Graeme Souness bids to buy Wolverhampton Wanderers, Pies celebrates some of English football’s more unusual and colourful owners.
5 Delia Smith – Norwich City
The TV chef has been a director at Carrow Road since 1996 and is now co-owner of the club as well as being Head of Catering (this is true, not a bad joke!). Most Canaries fans must have been wishing she had stuck to the cooking when she made her infamous drunken "Let’s be having speech" at half-time during a match with Manchester City.
4 Francis Lee – Manchester City
Despite playing for City, Franny Lee did so at a time when it didn’t pay to be a footballer. It was selling toilet rolls that made Lee enough money to takeover the club in the 1990s.
3 Spencer Trethewy – Aldershot
Trethewy was the 19-year-old self-proclaimed property developer who stopped Aldershot going bust in 1990 by signing a £200,000 affidavit. Trethewy served as a director for three months, but it later emerged that most of the money had been borrowed and that Trethewy had no means of paying it back. He was jailed for two years in 1994 for fraud.
2 Simon Jordan – Crystal Palace
Jordon makes the list purely because he looks so out of place as a chairman (OK, the orange-ness probably doesn’t help him to fit in anywhere, but still!). I’m sure he would be more at home on a beach in the Caribbean than a boardroom at Selhurst Park!
1 Elton John – Watford
Sir Elton became Watford chairman in 1976 and enjoyed a fairly successful spell at the helm before standing down in 2002 to let someone with more time on their hands than a multi-millionaire middle-aged musician take over.
[Rob Parker]