The first time Justin Rees told his wife, Tjinta, that he wanted to buy a small football club 10,000 miles from their home, she cried. “Our plan was to open a hotel and wedding venue, have two girls and a dog and live in Bondi and then live happily ever after,” Rees told me. “But I obviously threw a hand grenade at those plans.”
A few years earlier, just before his 40th birthday, Rees had made a lot of money selling the IT consulting company he co-founded, having grown it from five staff members to more than 100 in a few years. Since then he had been kicking about looking for something to do. The idea of investing in a football club had been in the back of his mind ever since he watched the Disney+ show about actors
Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenny buying the Welsh side Wrexham, and helping them climb up the leagues with a healthy dose of cash and some Hollywood pizazz. Then one day last summer, Rees noticed an item on the BBC News app. It
said that Ron Martin’s 70.6% stake in Southend United was available for just £1, plus a few million in debt.
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Justin Rees visiting Southend’s training ground in October 2023. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
Rees was intrigued. He had grown up in the western fringe of Greater Sydney, but his dad, an Englishman with a fervent passion for Queens Park Rangers, had passed on a love of the nitty-gritty of the English game. As a young man, when Rees fired up the highly addictive football video game Championship Manager, he would choose to play not as a Premier League giant, but as Southend’s non-league local rivals Dagenham and Redbridge.
In July, Rees started to make inquiries about Southend. He came to games undercover to get a feel for the club. (His first match was an away game at his old favourites, Dagenham and Redbridge.) He was impressed by the core of the club: Maher, Lawrence and the club’s veteran head of football, John Still. Later that month, he flew over to meet Ron Martin and his son Jack, who handled the property side of things.
Rees wanted in, but he didn’t want to do it alone. He attempted to assemble a consortium of businesspeople who had emotional links to the club (and, of course, money to invest). His strategy wasn’t fancy: he sent a BCC email to as many names as he could to see how many might be interested. The answer, at first, was zero. “He told us how much debt we was in,” said John Watson, the boss of a local taxi firm. “I said, I love this club, [but] what on earth are you doing, you must be absolutely bonkers. He said, stop being a pussycat, I’ll mark you down as a maybe.” Watson started to think about the good times he’d had watching Southend for the past 40 years, phoned back and decided to join up.
Rees eventually assembled an eclectic group of 10 cashed-up Southend supporters: a mortgage broker, hedge fund manager, the son of a local MP. He said he liked the fact that the club wasn’t being bought by a nation state or American private equity. “Nothing wrong with that money, but I felt like it needed to be a Southend story. A bunch of football fans sharing the load,” he told me. They became known among fans as “the consortium”.
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From left: Justin Rees, Kevin Maher and John Still. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
Martin and Rees had agreed the principles of the deal already, but by the Friday before the 4 October hearing, Rees wasn’t confident a deal could be done. He still needed the creditors – a collection of large and small companies owed money for unpaid bills – to reduce their debts to a level the consortium felt it could pay. Lawrence flew out to Marbella to meet one of the creditors to try to persuade them to do the club a favour. Over the weekend, the scale of the task dawned on Rees. But rescuing a club like Southend United was too romantic an idea to resist. “I think football has lost its way – the money, the clubs going under,” he said. “Southend became a wonderful snapshot of a club that existed quite happily for 117 years and then through mismanagement has gone off a cliff.”
Rees saw it through, taking a bigger stake than he wanted to make up the shortfall, and reached a basic agreement with Martin on 3 October. The club was saved, and the pubs filled with fans unsure what to make of a new and unfamiliar feeling: optimism.
Icontacted Ron Martin in late September to ask for an interview, but he didn’t want to meet before the hearing had taken place. So, on 5 October, I waited in the lobby bar of a mildly ostentatious business-tourist hotel in Aldwych, central London. His previous engagement had overrun and so he arrived with a hurried and apologetic air. In person, he was a subdued and slightly shambling figure, softly spoken, reticent, rather than the domineering, gangsterish presence of lore.
Perhaps it was understandable. The Fossetts Farm project he had fought for had not happened, and 25 years had gone up in smoke. When I asked Martin what he thought his legacy might be, he said “keeping Southend alive”. (“On life support more like” said one fan, when I relayed this later.) “I don’t suppose, to be perfectly frank, I’ve done myself any favours by the number of times we’ve had petitions, but sometimes it’s liquidity,” he said. “There was hardly a year when Southend United made ends meet.”
Did he feel remorseful over staff not being paid? “If the pot is dry, what do you do?” he replied. “The staff have been fantastic, they have been hugely supportive.”
Martin reached around for a reason the club had been in such dire straits. “Double relegation on the back of Covid is what killed us,” he said. But, as fans have pointed out, surely Martin had some responsibility for the club he runs being relegated in two consecutive seasons? “Football,” said Martin, “is different from every other business. It’s like having a tiger by the tail … trying to manage it.” The more Martin spoke, the more I began to think that he actually enjoyed wrangling with this tiger. Despite the mess he had left in his wake, he did not regret getting involved with the game. “We have had some passionate, fantastic times over 25 years,” he said, sounding like a man taking the positives from a bitter divorce.
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Southend United’s home game against Solihull Moors in October 2023, which they won 5-0. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
A couple of weeks later, when we spoke on the phone, I asked Martin whether he would have been a richer man today had he not owned a football club for the past 25 years, he replied, “Oh, Christ, absolutely – massively.” He struggled to calculate a figure, but eventually said it was more than £30m. He said some of it was rent for Roots Hall that had been charged to the club and never been paid – “probably about 12 or 13 million” – and the rest was capital he had pumped into the club to keep it afloat.
He assured me that he was always going to write off the debt the club had built up due to its unpaid rent (although he still invoiced for it). “I’m not going to blow my own trumpet, but I have been kind to the club,” he said. As further evidence, he noted, “I could have put it into administration any time. Hand the keys to the receiver and let him run the club.”
I asked whether he thought this attitude – that the club was his to either rescue or dispose of – might be at the heart of his conflict with the fans. “Every board should listen to what the fans have to say, but where do you stop, putting fans on the board?” Martin said, with a slightly withering tone. “I mean there aren’t many successful clubs run by a fan group, are there?”
You could argue
Bayern Munich are quite successful, I said.
Martin laughed down the line and acknowledged the point, before returning to his position. “But generally speaking, when push comes to shove, somebody has to put their hand in their pocket.”
In the weeks following the reprieve in the high court, the excitement around Justin Rees only grew: to many fans, the Australian had already achieved messiah-like status, and he practically levitated into Southend for his first home game, against Solihull Moors on a Saturday in late October.
Pre-match, inside the Blue Boar pub, Rees met some of his fellow members of the consortium for the first time, calming whatever nerves he had with a few pints. The landlady, Michele, gifted him a scarf complete with Southend United crest, Australian flag and “G’day mate”, which he wore for the rest of the day. Fans asked Rees if they could have a selfie with him and he duly obliged, shaking hands, sharing jokes. Southend had begged for a saviour, and who was he to disappoint?
Even so, Rees was careful to temper expectations. “I’m not a Hollywood star and this isn’t Wrexham,” he told me. “I believe that a football club shouldn’t be dependent on its owners; they shouldn’t celebrate them when they succeed and it shouldn’t be all their fault when they fail. And the only way you can back that up is financial sustainability.” The two main priorities for the next five years would be fixing the stadium and returning to the football league.
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