OVER a 40 minute Zoom call from Atlanta Adam Webb’s energy and enthusiasm for the job of rebuilding St Johnstone is reassuring.
In September, weeks after he purchased the club, the 54-year-old temporarily stepped back from the chair to undergo invasive treatment for cancer of the neck and the head.
Far from adding to his health issues, a futile battle to prevent relegation from the SPFL Premiership proved a useful and welcome distraction. Watching football helped to take his mind off chemotherapy, radiation and the efforts to save his life.
“You don’t know how something like that is going to affect you,’ he tells Herald Sport now.
“You might think, ‘that’s gonna happen and I’m just going to forget all about football.’
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“Luckily, St Johnstone actually proved a great distraction from my health problem.
“I was dealing with that for six months or thereabouts. I was aware of the cancer in the summer but I didn’t start treatment until September and received a cancer free scan in late January.
“I ratcheted back my involvement in the day to day operations of the club, just because I worried that would caused anxiety or hurt my sleep and be counter productive to my health.
“But I watched all the games and that was a great distraction in-fact. It was something to take my mind off things and get passionate about even though, unfortunately, we were not winning most of our games.
“I’m sure that did cause some anxiety from time to time but on the whole you have to accept that, when you have this level of involvement in a football club, you can’t turn it off. And, what’s more, you don’t want to turn it off.”
A lawyer to trade Webb is one of the growing number of American investors exerting a growing influence on Scottish football.
Aberdeen, Dundee, Dundee United, Hibernian and Livingston have all accepted sizeable financial assistance from the United States.
And St Johnstone’s chairman expects the arrival of Andrew Cavenagh and the investment arm of the San Francisco 49ers at Rangers to take the Americanisation of the Scottish game to a whole new level.
Projected to rejuvenate commercial revenue off the pitch while targeting a sustained challenge to Celtic on it, the full impact of the 49ers group on one of the nation’s sporting institutions will be determined over time.
A global sporting franchise, Webb believes the influence of vice-chairman Paraag Marathe and the 49ers on the fabric of the Scottish game to be significant. His only regret is that the financial spin-offs for St Johnstone will be less than they would have been had the Perth club avoided relegation and retained place in the top flight.
“I think change is inevitably going to happen because people like the 49ers take things to a whole different level,’ the Saints chairman told Herald Sport.
“They have huge marketing departments behind them and people they can call upon to come in and do more global branding and be tied in with more incredible events.
“Then you have Bill Foley and his operation, which not only has Bournemouth but also a very successful hockey club in the United States.
“So I think that a growing influence is going to happen and it’s probably going to be unavoidable because of those massive international multi-club owning entities which are now involved.”
While there is no good season for a club to be relegated, St Johnstone’s drop through the trap door is poorly timed. Manager Simo Valakari has just spent three days with Webb in Atlanta plotting a reset of the squad and operations, with cost economies on the horizon to offset an anticipated annual loss of up to £2million.
Prepared to absorb the losses in the short term Webb wants to trim the waste to avoid creating a black hole and plans to ‘think outside of the box’ in a quest to get the club back to the top flight in a sustainable and challenging condition. Buoyed by the arrival of more American investment in the national game the Saints owner is enthused by the job ahead.
“I think it’s a great challenge. We have to do a lot of things differently, so it really is a reset, a refresh.
“However you want to characterise it we have to tighten our belt because revenues are going to be way down.
“TV revenue, UEFA solidarity revenue, FIFA revenue, league revenue. That’s all way down, so we have to tighten the belt and look at all the expenditure.
“We have to come up with new sources of revenue and excitement and we have some things in that area.
“We have added a digital scoreboard, we have added sideline LED panels, we have started a matchday fan-zone.
“If we have our way we will eventually be selling beer in our fan zone before every home game.
“We’ll have more hospitality areas that can do more to upsell and get people to spend more time and more money at McDiarmid Park.
“So we are doing all that we can do, but I think that it’s gonna happen across Scotland.
“And I think the reason it’s gonna happen is because you now have these really well established global sporting brands coming into the SPFL now and I think that’s going to lift us all.
“I’m not intimidated by it. Okay, I am intimidated by it, but I’m not scared.
‘The big picture is that it’s a net positive. Even though the task of competing with these teams and these brands is intimidating it’s still going to be a rising tide that is going to lift all boats.”
Facing their first season without Premiership football in 16 years St Johnstone are evaluating what comes next.
Plans for the future revolve around a quick return to the top flight, with manager Simo Valakari set to play a central role. July 12 and the first Premier Sports Cup tie – away to newly promoted East Kilbride – is already marked in the chairman’s diary.
“Simo was just here in Atlanta. He spent three nights in Atlanta with his wife.
“And so we had a lot of meetings here and he is a unique element of Scottish football, to my way of thinking.
“I haven’t seen anyone else like him in the game. He is open, transparent, fun loving, energetic and knows his football.
“He had a great playing career and a great coaching career. We haven’t seen the benefits yet at St Johnstone but nearly everyone I speak with is confident that Simo is the right man for the job.
“And so, even though we got relegated, there were no calls for him to go. I didn’t see any calls for Simo to get sacked and even if there had been we wouldn’t have sacked him anyway because I feel like you have to give a gaffer a chance to put their own squad around them.’
Webb returns to Scotland on July 11, when he will have dinner with his predecessor Geoff Brown, St Johnstone’s irascible custodian for three decades. Describing Brown as a ‘legend’ the American still marvels at the way he ran the club as a sustainable entity for so long.
“I think we have been public that we will have a nearly £2million revenue shortfall,’ he admits.
“Obviously we are making some cuts and trimming and belt tightening to hopefully avoid losing as much as £2million.
“But we will have a substantial loss this season and if we go back up we will the belt tightened and we will have a new streamlined operation."
