Along Newmarket’s Bury Road, the des-res address for racing’s biggest players, curtains twitch as an upwardly mobile new neighbour moves in.
Kia Joorabchian, the famous footballing dealmaker shaking up a new sport, arrived on Monday with the latest in a series of power moves against the old world order. “Freemason Lodge is going to be very important for us,” Joorabchian explains of his purchase, the former stables of Sir Michael Stoute, the late Queen’s favourite trainer, for a seven-figure sum.
Throughout an extraordinary spending spree, Joorabchian’s Amo Racing team has not been hanging around. “You can’t just sit lingering,” he says after completing “stage one” of his moving in process at the yard. He snapped up Freemason Lodge, which once was home to the great Shergar, just before Christmas but extensive renovations are already complete after round-the-clock efforts.
No time for waiting because Joorabchian sees this as an acquisition as significant for his racing ambitions as the Carlos Tevez deal was for him in football. “It is something that is iconic, and it’s something that is very important for us to make sure we get right,” he says. Freemason Lodge is the bricks-and-mortar base as his team build towards the racing skies. “It’s not difficult to see that, if you really want to crack on and extend yourself in this sport, you’ve got to go to the next level.”
There has been breathless transformation at Amo Racing over the past 18 months. Rapid growth, changes in trainers and various venue moves have made Joorabchian a talking point among the traditionalists. But with his wealth of experience in the cut-throat world of football, Joorabchian, opening up in a rare newspaper interview, is unperturbed: “I come from a different industry, and my own sporting industry does not allow me to sit down and just keep quiet.”
His new status-symbol racing base on Bury Road is surrounded by giants of the game: Godolphin Stables and Moulton Paddocks, home to the Godolphin racing operation; Clarehaven Stables, where John and Thady Gosden are based; and Carlburg Stables, home to Roger Varian.
Illustrious new surroundings are all part of a “pedigree, pedigree, pedigree” philosophy, he explains. Partnerships with the likes of Sheikh Joaan Al Thani and Anthony Ramsden and an apparent alliance with billionaire Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis allow Joorabchian to snap up foals, yearlings and mares at auctions in Britain and the United States on an unprecedented scale.
“For us to go and compete in the Champions League, we had no choice,” he says. “We had to compete with these guys. We have to make a move, and it’s either really make a move or stop. We moved and changed strategy this year, and we went pedigree, pedigree, pedigree.”
Joorabchian had already sent shockwaves through the bloodstock industry in the autumn with a £24 million splurge alongside partners on yearlings at the Tattersalls October Book 1 Sale. He outspent Coolmore and even UAE-backed Godolphin, snapping up 25 horses via various partnerships and investors. “God, I hope we haven’t bought a dud,” he joked at the time. There has also been a multi-million-pound spend at the Tattersalls December Foal Sale, not least on a Frankel own sister to 2,000 Guineas winner Chaldean for 2,500,000gns.
Forest owner Marinakis attends auctions
An unrivalled contacts book full of potential sporting backers has helped no end. Among those at his side at the auctions has been Marinakis. Last summer, the pair stood together at the Goffs London Sale in Kensington Palace Gardens as Joorabchian’s extraordinary £7.8 million bid failed to land Sparkling Plenty, winner of the Prix de Diane. The Greek shipping magnate was back alongside his friend at Tattersalls in the autumn, although the Forest owner played down suggestions of any significant involvement. “No, I’m just here to enjoy the day,” he said.
Industry insiders say it is a mutually beneficial relationship across sports between the two, who are both in the ascendancy with their projects in recent months. Within weeks of the pair being seen together at Newmarket, it emerged Arsenal’s sporting director Edu, one of Joorabchian’s first clients after coming through the youth system at Corinthians in São Paulo, was set to switch to the City Ground. It was a major coup for Forest, who are flying high in the Premier League.
Joorabchian, however, speaks only in general terms about Marinakis’s involvement in racing. Talking to Telegraph Sport on the phone from Florida while waiting to play padel with his family, he says: “Of course, Marinakis’s involvement in the industry is just a boost, because he’s someone new in the industry. The more new people we can bring in, the better it is, because the more the industry is going to propel. It can only be good when you keep injecting new blood and money into it.”
Other partners are more forthcoming in expressing delight to be teaming up with Joorabchian and a growing superpower. Al Shaqab bought 10 choice lots in partnership with him at Tattersalls, with the Qatari group’s racing manager Mohamed Al Mansour seeing the link-up as a “win-win for both sides”. “Kia is a very good person and has been a friend to Al Shaqab in recent times,” he told the Racing Post.
Joorabchian, in turn, describes their link-up as “very exciting”. “It’s given us a lot more power to purchase some really top-quality horses and compete at the top level together,” he said. Another partnership exists with Ramsden and Valmont. “That’s been quite exciting too, because Anthony’s very much involved with the horses,” says Joorabchian. “He’s always been a great lover of the game.”
Audacious deals with the help of high-power alliances is how it has always been for Joorabchian, the Tehran-born British-Canadian who first came to prominence in 1999 when he joined forces with a business partner to buy an 85 per cent stake in the Moscow newspaper Kommersant. He later sold it to a business group that exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky had an interest in.
Joorabchian has always insisted this was the only time he had even done business with Vladimir Putin’s sworn enemy, who was found dead in 2013 with a scarf tied around his neck in the bathroom of his luxury mansion in Ascot.
Joorabchian would make his biggest waves after taking his first steps into sport, initially via Media Sport Investment in 2004, when he signed a 10-year deal with Corinthians to provide £18 million investment in return for 51 per cent of future profits. Clients of his global football management company, Sports Invest UK, included ex-Argentina forward Tevez and former Brazil midfielders Philippe Coutinho and Willian.
The £142 million deal he brokered for Coutinho’s switch from Liverpool to Barcelona was a British record and had a seismic impact on the trajectory of both clubs. “We’ve done incredibly big deals, and we’ve done average deals, but they’ve all been very special,” says Joorabchian.
The second love since childhood has been racing. Horse ownership began in 2003 and he enjoyed a first winner as a joint-owner with the Jamie Osborne-trained Persian Rock at Windsor in 2004. “Everybody has their sport and mine is football, but racing is very much there now,” he explains. “As time has gone on, we’ve evolved.”
In 2018, the same year as the Coutinho deal, Joorabchian decided to increase his involvement in the sport through Amo Racing. Success proved hard to come by before he started cranking up investment from 2021. With 200-plus domestic runners on the Flat for the last four years, Amo’s best campaign was in 2023, with 58 domestic winners in the firm’s sole name.
Bucanero Fuerte was a Group 1 winner for Amo Racing in the Phoenix Stakes at the Curragh, but it is King Of Steel who has really ignited Joorabchian’s appetite for more. The colt finished second in the Derby, won the King Edward VII Stakes at Royal Ascot and landed the Champion Stakes under Frankie Dettori on the rider’s final day in Britain. “King Of Steel was huge for us,” he explains. “That day, British Champions Day 2023, was one of the greatest racing days of my life. It triggered me to want more. It’s a shame he got injured. We were really looking forward to a very good season with him.”
Operating in football’s ruthless world has emboldened Joorabchian to make big calls. “There’s this myth that we’re harsh, but we haven’t been harsh,” says Joorabchian. “We’ve never really fallen out with any trainer. We’ve had our differences. We’ve maybe stopped with one or two trainers but jockeys have always been the same. David [Egan] is now our jockey this year.”
Rossa Ryan and Kevin Stott previously had stints as Amo Racing’s retained rider, but Joorabchian said: “There’s a lot of rumours but we’ve never sacked any jockey.”
He says, however, that “I’m not going to be that person, ever” to stay silent when he is not happy with a situation, “because I come from a different industry, and my own sporting industry does not allow me to sit down and just keep quiet.
“Some of the trainers will have a hard time with that. Of course they will. Some of them won’t. But I’m always going to speak my mind. I’m always gonna say what I think.”
Joorabchian says he has learnt “to trust my gut more”. “It was my gut that got me [here],” he says. “Last year I didn’t really go with my gut. There is this thing everyone talks about in terms of racing etiquette and how racing should be done, and how we should all be behaving. In football, we have a totally different scenario. If something isn’t working, a manager gets sacked or there’s a change. Maybe a sporting director changes. There’s always change if something isn’t right. It’s almost demanded.”
Such demands meant major changes for Freemason Lodge and a potential stud farm to be purchased in the next year to confirm “we’ve gone to a different level”. He has “ripped everything apart” at Freemason Lodge. “Sir Michael had been there for a long time, and he has done a wonderful job in that yard,” says Joorabchian. “But it was dated and needed a full facelift.”
Doors, surfaces, the lads’ flats and creating a spa area next to the swimming pools have been completed in the last couple of weeks. “We put in a brand new surface from the United States,” he explains. “We’re using different technology.”
Business is also getting too serious to involve any footballer clients. Racehorses have previously been owned with Coutinho, Neto and Andreas Pereira. However, priorities have changed. “We haven’t had very big success with those guys although they have been extremely fun,” he says.
“At this moment in time, we don’t have them with us because we are just in a very big growth moment and it would not be fair to involve them right now ... maybe deeper down, when we get to a different level, and we start breeding, and we start getting some good yearlings, then we can can bring them back in.”
Other footballing owners – such as Manchester City’s Sheikh Mansour – are also now investing in racing, but Joorabchian warns switching lanes has its difficulties. “You don’t just arrive at racing and then all of a sudden start winning Group Ones or Royal Ascot races,” he says. “You might buy yourself into a Royal Ascot winner, but that’s not gonna last very long.”
However, having quickly whipped Freemason Lodge into shape, Joorabchian believes he is the best bet to challenge racing’s hegemony over the coming years.
