Jeff Shi admits Fosun aren’t ‘on the same page’ as some Wolverhampton Wanderers supporters about the club’s ambitions. Wolves fans have grown frustrated with the owners’ reluctance to invest heavily in the playing squad over the past two years. The club made a small profit in the 2021 summer transfer window and only added one signing of note, Portuguese winger Chiquinho, in January. The departure of talisman Ruben Neves also seems inevitable after the club failed to secure European football. And Shi accepts there is now a disconnect between Fosun and a section of Wolves’ support. In the latest Ask Wolves edition,
Jeff Shi said: “There are a lot of supporters now around the world, so if we are talking about some supporters on social media here, for Wolves, the first-team, I think maybe not totally on the same page, I can admit that. But if we are talking about all the fanbase around the world, so for example, some fans from America, some fans from China, some fans more interested in Esports rather than football, some maybe are just new fans to Wolves, so I think more or less, for the majority, we are on the same page because most of them hope we have a bright future and they know where we are and they know we’re always challenging hard. But for maybe a small portion of the fanbase, maybe because they hope we can do better than now on the pitch, maybe sometimes we feel it’s out of our reach, but it’s still a good thing because they are inspiring us to do better and better and I always welcome different views and to tell us some different angles, then we can think whether we are doing right or not. I’m not expecting every fan to be on the same page as us, but I think for the general direction, most of the fans will agree we’re on the right track.”
The club has successfully branched out into Esports and entered the music world last year by launching Wolves Records. The Wolves brand has seen a new fanbase developed.
Jeff Shi added: “They are more and more important. “First, it’s like a family, you want more and more fans joining the family, and also with a bigger fanbase you have a much bigger power commercially to attract partners, sponsors, even sell more merchandise around the world, and it will help us to have a much better commercial power to compete with the top six. Otherwise, if you only leverage the maybe 200,000 fans here in Wolverhampton, I think it’s no use because you cannot compete with maybe 100 million fans for Man United, so it’s very important to have the attraction, to attract all the eyeballs around the world and make our fanbase much bigger than the local area, then we have the chance to be a global powerhouse, then it’s the starting point to be a worldwide club.”
