Mike Harris: My first offer to buy Shrewsbury Town was for £10million
Mike Harris claims a 'misunderstanding' led to his initial £10million offer for Shrewsbury Town being rejected.
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The New Saints owner has held a long-term interest in purchasing Salop, with his latest offer for the club submitted earlier this month and swiftly rejected.
Shrewsbury have dismissed the latest offer as a 'publicity exercise' and accused Harris of reneging on previous agreements.
But Harris believes a first offer of £10m, with a further £2m to be invested immediately into the club - which he claims was made 18 months ago - could have been struck at the time.
He said: “It was around that figure I offered the very first time - he wanted a bit more than that, but I’m sure that would have been a price we could have done.
“But as time went by, I think he misunderstood my first bid, which I’m pleased he did because I would have been sitting on a pig in a poke.
“It would have probably been one of the worst investments I ever made.”
Harris said his first offer was for £10m, with a further £2m invested; the second for £5m, with a further £4m invested; and now the latest offer of £4m, with a further £3.5m put into the club.
Each have decreased due to Shrewsbury's slide down the EFL and a reduction in payments from the central fund. Football finance expert Kieran Maguire previously put the cost of Salop’s relegation to League Two at around £1m.
Harris has overseen TNS’s domination of the Welsh domestic football scene, with the Saints going on to become the first Welsh league club to qualify for a European competition when they reached the league phase of the 2024/25 Uefa Conference League.
He has also recently been the subject of a documentary - The New Saints - Road to Europe: The Mike Harris Story - which has been released to rent and buy through Amazon Prime.
However, Harris is keen to extend his football club ownership into the England leagues - with Shrewsbury top of his list due its location and his emotional ties to the club, having watched Town at Gay Meadow with his grandad in the 1960s.
He said: “Crewe would have been a bit further away, Cheltenham would have been a bit further away, so Shrewsbury makes the ideal location and Shrewsbury as a football town has a long and rich history and I have to give Roland his credit, the club itself is in an OK place.
“There’s other football clubs out there in far worse financial condition than Shrewsbury Town.”
Wycherley, who has owned Shrewsbury since 1996, revealed in an interview in October that he had stumped up £3.4m of his own money over the previous two years to keep the club afloat.
Harris insisted any offer made to Wycherley “more than covered him for what he has put in” and believes the Shrewsbury owner is holding out for an offer that is unlikely to arrive.
He added: “If somebody was to close Shrewsbury Town down and say ‘we’ll sell this as a piece of land’, you’re probably talking of something that is worth more.
“But that’s for a piece of land to build another Sainsbury’s on or a housing estate, that’s not a trading football club.”
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