Tranmere takeover awaits EFL approval
Today at 04:54 AM
Donald Trump's former lawyer Joe Tacopina is leading a consortium that wants to buy English League Two side Tranmere Rovers and replicate Wrexham's climb up the leagues.
The 58-year-old New Yorker has been in talks with Tranmere's
owners for at least six months and his proposed takeover is now only waiting
for regulatory approval from the English Football League .
Tacopina has become famous in the United States for
defending a string of celebrity clients, including the late Michael Jackson,
former New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez and rapper A$AP Rocky, as well as
being a regular commentator on legal matters on American television.
But as well as his combative legal work in American
courtrooms, Tacopina is well known in Italy for owning football teams. In 2011,
he was part of the U.S. group that bought Roma, before selling up and moving on
to Bologna in 2014. He sold them a year later and bought Venezia, where he took
the side from the fourth to the second tier and was knighted by the city for
rescuing the club. But having moved on in 2020, Tacopina bought his fourth
Italian team, SPAL, in 2021.
The Ferrara-based side, who were in Serie A in
2020, were relegated to Italy's third tier last season and had to start
the current campaign on minus three points for missing a tax payment for
January and February this year. Tacopina, as club president, was also given a
three-month suspension by the Italian football authorities. The club appealed
against the sanction, saying the late payments were a banking error, but it was
confirmed in July.
This punishment is almost certainly one of the reasons why
his group's Tranmere takeover has not yet been approved by the EFL. When asked
for an update on the approval process by The Athletic, Tacopina and
the EFL declined to comment but indicated that talks were ongoing. A Tranmere
spokesperson said: "We don't comment on rumours."
The club have developed a reputation for being one of the
best-run clubs in the lower divisions in terms of financial sustainability and
community engagement, but they have not been able to restore the club to its
1990s heydays, when they spent a decade in the Championship, including three
straight visits to the play-offs. Since
then, however, they have yo-yoed between the divisions, even dipping into the
fifth-tier National League in 2015.
