Mark Attanasio is now the driving force behind a new direction at Norwich City, after the boardroom baton was passed from former majority shareholders Delia Smith and Michael Wynn Jones.

That was visibly illustrated at the club’s latest annual meeting, with Attanasio on the top table but no Smith and Wynn Jones, who recently stepped down to become honorary life presidents.

A perfect moment for Attanasio to reflect on a process years in the making, and a look to the future.

The past

We first bought Michael Foulger's shares. Michael could have gone and tried to sell his shares to the highest price he could get.

Instead, they hired a banker who conducted or interviewed at least four of us, four groups, and at the first meeting I was on a video call with the entire executive staff, including Stuart Webber, and there was a lot of questions, a long discussion.

A 30-minute Zoom call went to, like, almost an hour and a half, maybe longer, and our vision hit. The banker came back to us and said, ‘Well, they really like you, will you do it?’ We spent three months doing our diligence, because you want to be good to your word.

You don't want to say, ‘I'll do it, and then back out’ and, by the way, we lost when I came to see the first match against Tottenham (May 2022). We lost 5-0 and I still decided to do it. That was a tough game. The first half was 2-0 and you think, ‘Hey, this team's pretty good’. Then the other side decided to try a little bit.

The future, and your stated five year timescale to reach the Premier League

To be clear, that's saying we know this is our responsibility, and we have a plan. We have the executive talent. We believe we can build the academy talent, because you're going to need a young player pipeline to be part of this, and I know we have the money, but sports is dynamic. It's not static.

I talk to Ben (Knapper) twice a week, and then when we came this week, my son Mike and I spent two hours with the assistant coaches and got to know all of them really well, and Ben and Neil (Adams) were part of it, and then we spent another 90 minutes with them alone, then in the board meeting on Wednesday, I'd say Ben's presentation was over an hour, and I'm otherwise talking to him twice a week, because it takes a while to process all this.

If we have to make a quick decision, it seems like in these transfer windows, for example, even though they're months in advance, and there for weeks at a time, you have to make quick decisions. We'll be ready to make a quick decision if we need to do it.

I would say in both sports, in 20 years, there have been probably hundreds of decisions, and maybe we haven't supported under 10 of them, and it's because the decision wasn't matching up with what the stated plan was.

Ben is as disciplined as anybody, so I don't think he's going to veer from his plan, but if he does, and he has a good reason to, then as an owner you can set a tone, and provide resources, and then you need to provide a path for people to succeed.

Whether it's the sporting side or the business side. If they want to do something, you have to help them do it and make sure you have to ask intelligent questions, but I'm not going to replace my judgment for Ben Knapper’s.

If he's got an idea that's out of the box for this transfer window, and it's a little different than we've talked about, and he's committed to, we're going to support him.

Sporting director Ben Knapper has the freedom to drive his strategy at Norwich City (Image: Adam Harvey/Newsquest)

The challenges

We're going to stick with it, and you know, we need to be patient. My son Mike cautioned me that is not out of a lack of confidence, but you have to be realistic about what it's going to take, and to be realistic about not straying from what you think is right in the bigger picture. The goal is to get to the Premier League, and then ultimately, to stay there.

If I draw a parallel with what we have done in baseball it took only three or four years to get to play-off contention, but it took 12 years to be sustainably always in there. You have to get yourself ready for that. And it's not so much to not get disappointed, but to not stray from what your programme is.

There's already clubs in the Premier League that do what we're trying to do, so we just have to do it as well, and we have to hope that some of them will stray generally and we will be ready to barge through that door.

In my money management business, we've done the same thing for 34 years, and now this will jinx that by saying this, to almost never make a bad loan in a very highly risky business with almost $50 billion to invest, because we do the same thing, and we don't stray. Of course, we adapted it over time.

We now focus more on free cash flow and non asset rich companies, but we stick to what we know. That's why we have Richard Ressler joining as a director. I never went into real estate. We know how to make investments in corporations. He knows how to develop and manage real estate. He's got tens of billions of dollars in his firm and so if we're looking at figuring out how we can develop Carrow Road then we need a person like Richard.

He came out and spent two days here talking to the people inside the club and looking at the stadium. He's the expert in that, not me, but we're going to bring expert advice to what we do here, and stick to our discipline and what our plan is.

Long-serving former majority shareholders and directors Delia Smith and Michael Wynn Jones were absent for the first time in nearly three decades at the midweek annual meeting (Image: Adam Harvey/Newsquest)