To be asked to quote for a new MX TriMensio artificial football pitch for a very well known professional football club, was as you could expect, very different from the normal assets that we are asked to fund. The pitch supplier was a fully FIFA Preferred Producer and installer based in The Netherlands.
The key obstacles to quite a complex deal were, the supplier was based in Europe, stage payments required, and the asset, well was certainly not on most funders approved lists!! To make it harder for us, Oak were told to keep our eye firmly on the ball when it came to quoting, as we were told the club’s existing funder and bank had already quoted.
After carefully thought and discussions with one of our main UK funders, and further meetings with the football club, an innovative solution was offered to the club, who found our proposal the most structured and competitive.
As you know, football is a game of two halves, and if you thought the hard part was done, well think again, documentation was prepared to cover all importation, and key stage payments to the supplier as the pitch was being prepared, installed and laid, all within a very tight time frame before the season started and FIFA to approve the installation! It is safe to say that we ran our socks off !!
As you can see , we can fund almost anything, and anywhere, from football pitches to equipment in the North Sea , and everything in between!
So if you watch football on TV, you could well be seeing a pitch that Oak helped fund. You could say we earnt our three points!!