What are Wolves?

While attention has been hot on the various ownerships of Premier League clubs, Wolverhampton Wanderers have stayed under the radar, hoping geopolitics won’t have any implications for their parent company Fosun, the $100bn multinational conglomerate owned out of Shanghai.

The lesson is that, whatever your ownership, get it sorted out in the wild west of the EFL where nobody cares, then when you’re in the Premier League everyone will assume you’re plucky upstarts on a shoestring just glad to be there. The difference of attention, even if it’s not backed up by regulations, was enough to frighten Ken Bates into buying Leeds United from ‘persons unknown’ at the first slight chance of promotion and hard questions. The foundations for Leicester’s gallant Premier League title were built by going into administration to shed their debts, prompting the Football League to add their points deduction rule after the Foxes bolted. Wolves built their Europa League team in the Championship, Chinese money combining with super-agent Jorge Mendes’ generous contacts, helping them underpay for a team packed with Premier League talent, mostly from Portugal.

Andrea Radrizzani was a lone voice complaining about them on Twitter, frustrated into tapping and sending that the Championship was not “a fair competition” with Wolves in it. Plenty of EFL owners were saying that behind the scenes, but Radrizzani was the only one daft enough to post it out loud towards the end of Leeds’ 3-0 defeat to Wolves in March 2018. At the time, despite a £44m net spend on transfers, Fosun’s accounts didn’t even mention their asset in Wolverhampton in among the pharmaceutical, mining and high tech industrial operations, retail brands, asset management funds, insurance companies, real estate investments, private hospitals, nightclubs and private equity funds that were generating more than $100bn of profits. Nowadays Fosun do acknowledge their little Premier League operation, but the business side of Wolves remains something of a mystery to fans who don’t wonder, when they’re not there, why games at Molineux are often preceded by an on-pitch DJ and light show.

Wolves are one of English football’s proud old teams and it’s good to have them around. We have beef: our 1972 double died at Molineux, two days after the FA Cup final, a game later mired in unfounded allegations of bribery; but Derek Dougan, who scored in the game and was as Wolves as they come, stood up for Leeds when Billy Bremner successfully took the Sunday People to court. 1998’s FA Cup quarter-final was an ugly game, Keith Curle trying to strangle Jimmy-Floyd Hasselbaink, Kevin Muscat throwing mud at him while he took a penalty. A vital promotion match at Molineux in 1990 was a low point for David Batty, who sprinted off the pitch because, well, he’d shit himself. But there are things about them to like: the cool nickname, the futuristic badge, Steve Bull playing for England but never playing in the top division. Their stadium has a weird name and their kit doesn’t look like anyone else’s. All good. They meet most people’s definition of a proper old club.

That’s in England, though. I’ve been interested in how Wolves are seen in the rest of the world, and how Fosun wants them to be seen, ever since I came across this gallery of photos from the Shanghai launch of the ‘high-end Wolves fashion line’, designed by Christelle Koche, in 2019. The line was for sale in twenty boutique stores in China, and the launch featured a big neon Wolves badge in front of the ‘famous Pudong skyline’; John Ruddy filming interviews and Nuno Espirito Santo looking on in shorts; stern catwalk models wearing long complicated coats adorned with Wolves logos, over a full kit, carrying a ball in a net-bag; and a live performance by Chinese rock band Miserable Faith of their song, Wolves Ay We. The song had been out for a year before the fashion show, apparently getting 500,000 listens in its first day on the Chinese equivalent of Spotify. “We are big English football fans and first started following Wolves in 2016 when we were touring in the UK as part of our 100 Cities Tour,” said singer Gao Hu. “We were attracted by the colours and the name and had the opportunity to visit Molineux Stadium when we passed through Wolverhampton. Since then we have kept in touch with the team through Weibo.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEAEWgB0tg8

This is the other Wolves. A high-end fashion and esports brand with a megastore in Shanghai and chart-topping rock songs in China. In England, they’re just Wolves, that team, from Wolverhampton. But in China, according to this interview with Russell Jones, Wolves’ general manager for marketing and commercial growth, the team’s exploits in the Premier League are almost secondary:

“We now have over 500,000 followers of our Wolves esports social channels in China – many of these followers will have no idea that we are a football club in the UK!

“In China we have professional esports teams in Identity V, PUBG, Pop Kart Racing and FIFA Online 4. Many of our players are huge stars with significant social media followings in their own right. These teams live in two Wolves branded gaming houses based in Shanghai and Guangzhou and millions of fans tune in to watch our teams compete every day on Chinese streaming platforms like DouYu and Huya.”

Wolves took over the Honor of Kings world champions in late 2021, but their website reports recent disappointments as they were knocked out in a play-off by rivals eStarPro, meaning no repeat claim of a £2.4m winner’s prize. Wolves also have two professional FIFA players in Brazil, and Jones says, “we commercialise this activity through dedicated partners and also e-commerce streams of players wearing our esports fashionwear on platforms like WeChat and Douyin (Chinese equivalent of TikTok)”.

Mexico is another important ‘market’, this time helped by the actual football team signing Raul Jimenez:

“We see Wolves as a sports and entertainment brand with a number of key pillars. Football is the most important pillar. The reach of the Premier League and recruitment of world class international players means that entering new markets is relatively easy. For example, the recruitment of Raul Jimenez has opened-up the Mexican market. Fun marketing initiatives in-market with partners like Club America (Raul’s first club), WWF Mexico (campaign to save the endangered Mexican Wolf), WWE Mexico (with wrestler Sin Cara), Avery Denison, adidas and a series of influencers and media partners have helped us amass over 1.5 million Mexican followers. We now have five times more followers in Mexico than the UK!”

This is why Wolves had a green third kit, to match Mexico’s national team colours — “A nice example of how you can work with a partner (adidas in this case) to commercialise a new fanbase in a sensitive yet targeted way” — followed by a third kit Portugal cosplay in honour of Rúben Neves, João Moutinho, Diogo Jota and the seven other Portuguese players in the first team squad, not to mention the manager.

So much, so modern football. But it’s interesting because, well, it’s Wolves, and there has been a growing feeling at Molineux that the Premier League team is having to compete for its owner’s attention. Fosun sold an undisclosed minority stake to Chicago-based Peak6 last October, formally establishing Fosun Sports as a new subsidiary, built as much on Fosun and Peak6’s shared investments in esports team Evil Geniuses as on the Wanderers. This followed a frustrating summer transfer window for Wolves fans, since tempered by new manager Bruno Lage inspiring their ageing squad to the edge of European qualification, as it became clear Fosun’s big spending on players was being replaced by ‘sustainability’. Fosun did, in their last accounting period, write off a £126.5m debt Wolves owed to them; but, alarmed by the pandemic, they’ve also put redeveloping Molineux above its current 32,000 capacity on hold.

The instructions to Lage were to get the team playing more attractive football without much more outlay. Club sources indicated to The Athletic that because of the huge investment needed to build a team that can consistently break into the Premier League top six, more strategic importance was being placed on a growing a strong club brand in worldwide markets, where people don’t care how the original team is doing, or even have to know it exists. What has more bang-for-buck potential for Fosun Sports: rebuilding the Steve Bull Stand to get more people in to watch Wolves play Crystal Palace, or finding a replacement for Zak ‘TriToN’ Gavrilenko in the Rocket League team, with more mass-market appeal, who can pull fans into the relocated Shanghai Wolves megastore, now based in the same Bund Financial Centre ‘night-mart’ as one of the city’s biggest cinemas? Meanwhile, one Wolves blog wondered about the value for the club of trumpeting social media interactions on its esports tweets, when a considerable proportion of the ‘engagement’ is from legacy fans calling the gamers ‘virgins’.

The tension of two Wolves is interesting as Leeds United’s owners cross their fingers and hope Jesse Marsch can complete their two season plan of keeping the team in the Premier League so they can start working on whatever comes next. “I start to play when I go up,” Andrea Radrizzani told TalkSport’s Jim White in May 2019, ahead of our promotion season. “At the moment I’m just observing football.” Part of the crux of his complaints about Wolves, and the EFL in general, were that restrictions on spending made it hard to invest and profit, unless you were willing to break the rules. He couldn’t get involved the way he wanted to. A risk averse start to life in a pandemic Premier League has also kept Radrizzani’s urge to play in check. But Leeds United’s parent company Aser Ventures has been quietly building a portfolio of eSports teams, new-media channels and NFT plays — Shinobi Sports, Team Whistle, Creed Media, Da Chain. The Leeds Fury gaming community launched last month, while a trailer of coming attractions from Aser’s Neo Studios includes what looks like a behind the scenes documentary titled ‘The Academy: Leeds United’.

Answering ‘What are Wolves?’ depends on whether you’re looking at that six-sided wolf face logo in Wolverhampton, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro or Mexico City, whether it’s being worn by centre-back Conor Coady or Identity V gamer He Tianshun, aka 487. And each perspective leads back to something a mid-table Premier League club can be doing while it can’t afford to compete with the top six. How a half-million strong following in China for a combined eSports and fashion brand, only dimly aware of the football club founded in 1877, fits in with the world of big money transfers and European qualification that Wolverhampton’s legacy fans understand, feels like a big social experiment Wolves are leading on while others watch, itching to play. ⬢