Cherries’ £6m link with Hibernian turns sour as Bournemouth chief Foley sells his 25 per cent stake back to Gordon family

WHEN your personal wealth is estimated in billions of dollars rather than mere millions, it can be assumed that you know how to differentiate the blunt end from the sharp end.

Bill Foley’s life story suggests he’s forgotten more about business and sport than most of us will ever know, but that’s not to say that the Bournemouth owner grasps absolutely everything.

Twenty-one months after his Black Knight Group paid £6 million for a stake in Hibs, a line has finally been drawn under a somewhat bizarre episode.

Foley owned a quarter of the Leith club during that time. That allowed him to have a couple of votes in the boardroom in Black Knight president Tim Bezbatchenko and fellow representative Ryan Caswell.

But theirs was never going to be the loudest. That still belonged to the Gordon family.

They retained a majority stake. That gave them the right to do as they saw fit. Foley and his cohorts must have known this much; Unless you own the club, you don’t get to dictate its policy.

You can only imagine how the Gordons would have felt when Foley went public with his misgivings about the appointments of head coach David Gray and sporting director Malky Mackay last year.

The fact that both men subsequently justified the faith shown in them with a third-place finish in the Premiership is actually beside the point.

What gave Black Knight the impression that they would be handpicking individuals for such key positions? When you stump up enough cash to have a controlling interest, the clue is normally in the title.

Given how long Hibs and Black Knight negotiated prior to the deal being struck at the beginning of 2024 and the bureaucratic hoops they both had to jump through, it seems strange that the terms of the agreement left any gray areas.

Did Foley think the Easter Road club were going to be a in fact feeder club to Bournemouth?

This was certainly not how it was presented at the time. Remember then chief executive Ben Kensell’s vision of the future?

All that stuff about being part of a ‘multi-club network’, giving Hibs ‘loads of opportunities around best practice sharing, player trading within the network’ to give the club ‘an edge in Scottish football’ doesn’t half sound like a load of old stone now.

Hibs got third place last season despite the investment from Foley’s company. Not because of it.

Emiliano Marcondes and Nathan Moriah-Welsh moved from Bournemouth to Easter Road yet that was the extent of it.

If it hadn’t been for a trip by the Hibs’ squad to the Cherries’ training ground last summer, you would have been forgiven for forgetting that the tie-up even existed.

Not that Hibs are any worse off as a result of this. Gray’s men are again sitting snugly in third place without so much as a thought being given to a wealthy club on England’s south coast. Foley got his money back plus some spare change. There are other investors out there. No real harm done.

After a marriage of convenience, the divorce was amicable. Given that the billionaire never once set foot inside Easter Road, exactly what attracted him to Hibs in the first place remains a mystery.