Donald Trump’s former lawyer Joe Tacopina is leading a consortium that wants to buy English League Two side Tranmere Rovers and replicate Wrexham’s star-fuelled climb up the table.
The 58-year-old New Yorker has been in talks with Tranmere’s owners for at least six months and his proposed takeover is now only waiting for regulatory approval from the English Football League (EFL).
Based on the west bank of the River Mersey across from Liverpool in the north-west of England and currently playing in England’s fourth division, Tranmere have been owned by former Football Association chief executive Mark Palios and his wife Nicola, a lawyer, since 2014.
Tacopina has become famous in the United States for defending a string of celebrity clients, including the late Michael Jackson, former New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez and rapper A$AP Rocky, as well as being a regular commentator on legal matters on American television.
Tacopina quit Trump’s legal team in January but had previously worked on the cases involving the payment of hush money to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels and a civil suit brought by author E. Jean Carroll related to accusations of rape. Tacopina, a former prosecutor, has also defended Donald Trump Jr’s fiancee Kimberly Guilfoyle, now a key fundraiser for the former president who is running again as the Republican nominee.
But as well as his combative legal work in American courtrooms, Tacopina is well known in Italy for owning football teams. In 2011, he was part of the U.S. group that bought Roma, before selling up and moving on to Bologna in 2014. He sold them a year later and bought Venezia, before buying his fourth Italian team, SPAL, in 2021.
The Ferrara-based side, who were in Serie A in 2020, were relegated to Italy’s third tier last season and had to start the current campaign on minus three points for missing two tax payments earlier this year. The Italian football authorities also gave Tacopina a three-month ban for the late payments.
This punishment is almost certainly one of the reasons why his group’s Tranmere takeover has not yet been approved by the EFL. When asked for an update on the approval process by The Athletic, Tacopina and the EFL declined to comment but indicated that talks were ongoing. A Tranmere spokesperson said: “We don’t comment on rumours.”
Tacopina’s interest in Tranmere first came to light when fans of the Merseyside club spotted him at a League Two game in April.
Supporters then noticed that he had registered a company called Tac 1884 UK Limited in early May. He is the only director of the firm, which says its business is the “activities of sport clubs”, and its owner. Its address is the Norwich headquarters of sports law specialists Mills & Reeve, and 1884 is the year Tranmere were founded.
Also in May, an American investment firm called Blue Bird Mutual published an Instagram post that said it was now a minority investor in SPAL and Tranmere, although the post was later deleted.
These clues were reported by local media outlet The Post in July but no national or international outlet followed the story up, perhaps because it seemed so far-fetched. But further clues appeared on LinkedIn in recent months.
According to two posts from Florida-based firm Altivest Capital in April, it has been looking for partners to join it on an “exciting journey into the heart of European sports… led by Joe Tacopina, a renowned figure in European soccer and one of the world’s best criminal defense attorneys”. Altivest said it had secured a 50 per cent stake in SPAL and a 47.5 per cent stake in Tranmere for a total of $31million (£23.3m at current rates).
Last week, the firm posted a new opportunity for investors to own a stake in a European club and “Europe’s first sport city, nestled in the heart of one of the UK’s iconic soccer cities”. Tranmere Rovers have been in the market for a new home for several years, and have been linked with several former docklands sites in the area.
The club have developed a reputation for being one of the best-run clubs in the lower divisions in terms of financial sustainability and community engagement, but they have not been able to restore the club to its 1990s heydays, when they spent a decade in the Championship, including three straight visits to the play-offs.
Since then, however, they have yo-yoed between the divisions, even dipping into the fifth-tier National League in 2015. There were back-to-back promotions under the current ownership in 2018 and 2019 but they slipped back to League Two in 2020, albeit in unfortunate circumstances as they were relegated on a points-per-game basis when Covid-19 cut the season short.
Tacopina’s plan is to harness the power of his celebrity contacts to propel Tranmere, and SPAL, up their respective pyramids, with a new home for Tranmere as a longer-term goal. If the deal goes through, as all parties hope it does, a “Welcome to Wrexham”-style documentary is also likely.
(Top photo: Tranmere’s Prenton Park in August 2024 in Birkenhead, England. Lewis Storey/Getty Images)
