The £200m West Brom gamble that failed to pay off for Guochuan Lai

The club’s controlling shareholder was approached by a US investor prepared to pay £200million – roughly the same as the Chinese businessman had paid Jeremy Peace 12 months previously – for his 88 per cent stake.

Lai rejected the offer out of hand.

“My information is there was an enquiry,” explained Baggies chairman John Williams when news of the bid emerged. “Our majority shareholder made it clear he wanted to retain control of the club and continue his plans for its ongoing development.”

As he now finally prepares to depart The Hawthorns some six-and-a-half years later, it is difficult to believe Lai does not reflect on that moment and wince.

The amount he will now personally receive as a result of Shilen Patel’s takeover will be less than a 10th of that offered in 2017, with the bulk of the £60m package the Florida entrepreneur has put together for his shareholding instead used to pay off the club’s debts totalling £40m.

While such figures lay bare the mismanagement which has characterised Lai’s reign, his reasons for dismissing the 2017 takeover approach perfectly highlights the naivety of a businessman who never seemed to understand the world he had bought into.

Lai’s belief, relayed by club sources at the time, was that within three or four years his shareholding would be worth almost double the £200m offered. In his mind, the Baggies were a savvy mid-term investment, the model of a mid-ranking Premier League club which would require relatively little input on his part before being sold on for substantial profit a few years later.

His arrival did not herald a revolution at The Hawthorns. The message from China in the early months of Lai’s tenure was for the club to simply continue as before. He didn’t arrive with a vision, seemingly of the belief the one he inherited would suffice.

The trouble was in 2016 the Baggies were no longer the model club Lai believed them to be. Sporting director Dan Ashworth was four years departed, while the team which Tony Pulis had built – the head coach having been drafted in to save the club from possible relegation in early 2015 – was reaching the end of its cycle.

In 2017, the first full summer window of Lai’s reign, the Baggies embarked on a major and ill-fated spending spree, which included the £15m signing of winger Oliver Burke and the expensive loan of midfielder Grzegorz Krychowiak from Paris Saint-Germain.

“We threw everything at it, yet a team just never emerged,” a senior club official would later lament.

When Albion were relegated at the end of the 2017/18, Lai’s Plan A was out of the window. In the five-and-a-half years since, it became clear Plan B never really existed.

Bar the odd highlight, the Baggies have been a club lacking direction from the top, locked in a cycle of short-term fixes required because of continued errors.

Lai, either unwilling or unable to invest any of his own cash, has remained remote but not entirely hands-off and his own interjections have been among the most glaring errors, the decision to ignore the advice of chief executive Mark Jenkins and appoint Darren Moore over Dean Smith one of several sliding doors moments.

Those who have met Lai during his rare visits to The Hawthorns describe him as polite and personable. There is often an insistence his actions were always well intended.

His decision to loan £5m from the club in 2021 to aid another of his businesses, seriously damages that argument. If taking the money was bad enough, the failure to ever pay it back eroded any remaining faith among supporters.

Football clubs should never be used as a bank. In his final act, selling up to Patel, the hope is Lai has found a successor who understand their workings and the game far better than he ever did.