Athletic article on him by Madeley from other day now i'm home:
"It was the summer of 1998 when Shilen Patel fell in love with football.
At the World Cup in France, Zinedine Zidane was weaving his magic on the pitch, Ronaldo was plundering goals and Michael Owen was announcing his arrival as a world-class talent.
Patel, on an extended summer break before heading for business school, was watching it all unfold, often from the surroundings of English pubs.
A quarter of a century later, he received a call that began the process of fulfilling the ambition that began emerging in that late-90s summer thousands of miles from home.
The American entrepreneur from Florida is now the new majority shareholder of West Bromwich Albion, a traditional football club in England’s industrial heartland of the West Midlands.
It is a long way from his early days at Carrollwood Elementary School in Tampa.
“It wasn’t hard times but we weren’t plotting anything either,” says Will Hutson, a friend of Patel’s who has known him since they were class-mates at Carrollwood.
“One of the bigger things that happened was that one of our class-mates got Reebok Pumps and another one got Air Jordans and that was insane to me and Shilen. It was very classically suburban Florida in the ’80s and it was idyllic.”
Patel had a relatively normal upbringing; never poor but yet to enjoy the success and accompanying wealth he has since acquired.
His father Kiran, born in Zambia into a Hindu, Indian family, and mother Pallavi are doctors, and during their only son’s school years, Kiran flexed his entrepreneurial muscles.
He launched two significant healthcare companies, selling both for huge profits. So it was little surprise when his son followed suit, building HealthAxis Group during a 10-year stint as CEO before selling his shares in January 2022 to the major investment company Revelstoke.
It was then that Shilen began looking seriously to invest some of the proceeds in his long-standing ambition to own a football club. In September 2023, he received a call from a lawyer looking to broker a deal for the sale of West Brom.
A month later he toured the training ground and stadium and met head coach Carlos Corberan.
Patel was one of several reputable bidders to have the red carpet rolled out, but by November 2023 he had become the preferred bidder of the Albion hierarchy.
A second high-interest loan from lenders MSD, secured in November, provided the breathing space Patel and the club needed to put the wheels of the sale in motion.
In China, former owner Guochuan Lai was continuing to hold conversations with rival bidders as he stared at the prospect of a huge loss on his 2016 investment, worth almost £200million ($253.2m).
But on the ground in the UK, efforts were focused on completing the deal with Patel — a deal on which controlling shareholder Lai was eventually sold.
For Patel, who has been a minority shareholder in Italian Serie A club Bologna since 2014, it was the chance to live a football dream.
“It’s a strange, under-reported phenomenon that American kids play a lot of soccer up to the age of 11 or 12,” says Hutson. “It’s a recess game and a big after-school game but, in our generation, a switch flicked at 11 or 12 when kids went to more contact sports or more finesse sports like tennis or golf.
“I don’t have any specific memories of us playing soccer but we would definitely have done it.
“In the early-’90s Tampa had one of the MLS franchises. He’s an entrepreneur and a businessman but he approaches it with a love of sport.
“(Patel) is a big supporter of the American sport franchises in our hometown and when I’m around his kids they talk to me about their favourite players, so sport is definitely in their family.
“He has a fantasy hockey team with a couple of other dads in his neighbourhood and it’s a very American thing for parents to share their love of sports with their kids.”
Patel, a father of one daughter and two sons, had held regular meetings with senior Albion officials and passed the English Football League’s owners and directors’ test before the club announced a sale had been agreed. This was in time for him to attend the 2-0 defeat to Southampton at The Hawthorns on February 16.
The discussions with the EFL included proving his ability to fund Albion’s operations for at least the next two seasons.
For a club losing an estimated £2million per month and owing more than £30million to MSD, Patel provides a financial stability that has been lacking.
There is no plan to pay back the MSD loan immediately, with Patel revealing in recent interviews that the debt would be ‘rolled over’ and cleared at a future date.
Time will be the judge on his success at West Brom in a league — the Championship — with a history of owners who have found the financial demands tough to deal with.
But West Brom fans will be banking on Patel’s proven pedigree in business.
With his flagship business, HealthAxis Group, now owned by new investors, Patel has turned his attention to the portfolio of other businesses within the family office.
Family offices are used in the United States as a tool to manage every aspect of their wealth, often using a small team of investment managers to use the office as investment funds.
The Patel family office, which includes Shilen, his father and several other members, is claimed to have assets worth around $2billion.
It has invested in hotels and real estate as well as charitable initiatives and colleges around the world, training doctors and nurses and preserving the Patels’ links with the healthcare sector that brought their wealth.
Its website details Patel’s business interests and roles since selling his controlling stake in HealthAxis Group.
They include a position on the board of trustees of the University of South Florida and chairmanships of a not-for-profit organisation that supports community projects in Tampa and a fund to help start-up businesses in the city.
Now he faces a new challenge in the very different environment of professional football and is hoping lessons learned from Bologna will serve him well as he embarks on what he described in the statement confirming the takeover as an “exciting project”.
Patel has been largely a silent partner at seven-time Serie A champions Bologna but has been close enough to observe the majority shareholder, Canadian entrepreneur and philanthropist Joey Saputo, calling the shots.
Patel has attended games periodically. One of which was the 2015 Serie B play-off final second-leg against Pescara, where Bologna clinched promotion back to the top division.
He is expected to adopt a similar approach at Albion. He is not expected to relocate from his base in Florida but to attend games semi-regularly — a step up from absent former owner Lai.
“My goal is to be here as often as I can, especially early on,” said Patel. “There’s a lot I need to learn about the club. Experiencing the matches, which is the coming together of so much of what the Albion community means, is going to be something which is very important to me.“
In the short-term, he will be unable to have a direct impact with Corberan’s squad in place for the remaining 12 games as they bid to secure a play-off spot.
Promotion to the Premier League, with its guaranteed income boost of more than £100million, would change the short-term outlook drastically for the better. Patel appears to have a longer-term vision.
“The long-term goal has to be to get back home to the Premier League. That’s where a club like West Bromwich Albion belongs. We are going to do our best to return.
Day to day, it is anticipated that Patel will leave the running of the club to managing director Mark Miles and the leadership team based in the UK.
Patel has been installed as chairman and will assume strategic control alongside advisors, including his father, who is a co-owner of the holding company Bilkul Football WBA, which was set up as the vehicle for the takeover, and investor Andy Nestor, who was a director at the Tampa Bay Rowdies (of the USL Championship, U.S. soccer’s second tier) and Bologna.
It is expected that Patel and his team will set the strategy for the club with Miles and Co implementing it.
Corberan was the first senior figure to receive a ringing endorsement in interviews. “I had the chance to meet with Carlos very briefly when I made a visit here towards the back end of October,” said Patel. “He certainly made an impression.
“He has a great sense of detail and his intensity is apparent. The work that he has done and the results that he has achieved here, they speak for themself.
“I’m really excited and happy that Carlos is our manager; he’s the manager with the perfect mindset for the project we are embarking on.”
Patel has made a positive impression with his calm manner during a handful of in-person meetings during his recent trip to the UK to complete the deal and a host of further sessions online.
He will be counting on the human touch that has earned him loyalty from friends to help him galvanise a club that has been neglected at ownership level for too long.
“From a business and ambition standpoint, he was a really optimistic guy,” says Hutson. “He just saw the world as glass-half-full and he was a great, consistent friend. As a kid, that’s a weird thing to notice, but I did.
“We’ve had a couple of instances as adults where he’s gone out of his way to be there for me and I try to do it for him. Once my oldest daughter got hospitalised in New York — she was born with rare genetic epilepsy.
“Within two weeks of us being in the hospital he, his wife and their oldest kid and their newborn flew up to see us and that took my breath away.
“There are a lot of wealthy people that don’t have his experience in the trenches, leading and inspiring people, doing the community outreach and doing all that while you build a world-class team. He’s a guy who can do that.”
