Born on September 5, 1938, in Gospić, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Mandarić grew up in Novi Sad before leaving Eastern Europe for the United States, where he built his fortune in the technology industry. Football, though, remained close to him, and as his business career prospered, he began to invest in clubs across Europe. His reputation was not of the absentee investor but of the restless owner who paced directors’ boxes, impatient, involved, sometimes volatile, but always committed. His philosophy, he often said, was that football was not about money but about people and belonging.
That belief took physical form when he arrived at Portsmouth in 1999, with the club staring into the financial abyss. In four years he turned a debt-ridden side into a Premier League team, hiring Harry Redknapp, building a competitive squad, and in 2003 celebrating a First Division title that still stands as one of the most cherished achievements in the club’s history. For Portsmouth fans, his name was synonymous with salvation, and for Mandarić himself, Fratton Park became something of a shrine. Years later, he would confess that selling the club was his greatest regret, a decision that haunted him because Portsmouth, he said, had given him his favourite season in football.
His next adventure, at Leicester City, carried the same ambition but more turbulence. In 2007 he bought the club, only to preside over their relegation to League One, the lowest point in their modern history. Yet his pattern repeated itself: under Nigel Pearson, Leicester clawed their way back up, stabilised in the Championship, and eventually became an attractive proposition for the Srivaddhanaprabha family, who bought the club in 2010 and led it to a Premier League title six years later. Mandarić was not there for the glory, but his role in handing the club over in healthier condition than he had found it is part of that story. He was not universally popular in Leicester, but even his critics accepted that he kept the club afloat when collapse was a genuine threat.
At Sheffield Wednesday, where he took control in late 2010, the story was again one of rescue. Facing administration and debts over £20 million, the club needed intervention, and Mandarić provided it. He steadied finances, oversaw promotion to the Championship, and eventually sold to Dejphon Chansiri in 2015. The period was not gilded, but it was stabilising, and Wednesday supporters today speak of him as a necessary, if imperfect, custodian.
Mandarić’s career was not without controversy. In 2007 he was arrested as part of a high-profile tax investigation concerning his time at Portsmouth, though he was later acquitted. He developed a reputation for hiring and firing managers quickly, for changing course abruptly, and for making decisions that sometimes seemed impulsive. But he never denied his flaws and often admitted to mistakes, which only deepened the portrait of a man who could be both ruthless and romantic, sharp businessman and sentimental supporter.
Even in his later years, he never truly left the game. In 2024, he returned to his roots in Serbia, joining FK Vojvodina, his boyhood club in Novi Sad, as vice president. It was a symbolic homecoming, the kind of full-circle story that felt inevitable for someone whose life had been so bound to football’s cycles of collapse and renewal.
Milan Mandarić once said that football was the greatest passion of his life. In truth, his passion was not for the trophies he never won but for the act of keeping clubs alive, for the stubborn belief that history and belonging were worth saving even when balance sheets said otherwise. His legacy, imperfect but undeniable, is that of a man who arrived when others walked away, who gave clubs the time and space to keep writing their own histories, and who, in doing so, wrote himself into English football’s story.
0 Comments