The Guardian reports that although Blackburn Rovers have bagged themselves an up-and-coming manager, they have lost the financial support of the Jack Walker estate.
Paul Ince isn’t the kind of person who takes bad news well, he is a self-styled winner and one can only imagine his incandescent rage when he was told that he wouldn’t be able to enjoy the same financial security that previous Ewood Park bosses have done. David Conn, master of all things football and finance related, revealed all:
Paul Ince was officially unveiled as Blackburn Rovers’ manager yesterday, with John Williams, the club chairman, promising to support him in the transfer market and insisting that Rovers would remain “ambitious” in their spending, but Ince may not enjoy the same financial backing as his predecessors because Jack Walker’s trust has withdrawn its funding.
The club are owned by the Jack Walker Settlement, a Jersey-based trust set up by the club’s then owner. Before he died in August 2000, Walker reassured fans that the trustees would continue to provide money for Rovers “for the foreseeable future”. The end of that future was apparently reached in January, when Williams announced, in a paragraph in the club’s 2007 accounts, that the trustees “see no immediate requirement to invest further”. (Guardian)
Ince is already coming under quite a bit of scrutiny for not yet having the requisite coaching badges to coach in the Premier League, and the news that he’ll have less transfer moolah to wave about might increase the pressure on the young boss still further…