Ownership update | Christmas 2025

Swansea City owners Brett Cravatt and Jason Cohen provide an update to supporters as 2025 draws to a close, and wish everyone in the Jack Army a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Dear Jack Army,

A very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all, and we hope you, your families and friends all have an enjoyable festive period.

As 2025 draws to a close, we feel it is important to fully update you on where we are currently as a club, and to share with you our hopes for the future under our new head coach, Vitor Matos.

We and a number of members of our ownership group were thrilled to be in attendance at last Friday’s game against Wrexham, and it is a night that will live long in the memory.

Celebrating a hard-fought last-gasp win at a sold-out Swansea.com Stadium with players, fans and staff was a wonderful feeling, and one we all hope to have much more of as we move forward.

I am sure many of you will have seen that Martha Stewart was among those in attendance. Martha is a close friend of Snoop Dogg and she came to the Wrexham game as our guest.

But we are delighted to confirm Martha, who has built a long and successful career as America’s leading homemaking and lifestyle expert, has followed Snoop and Luka Modric in becoming a minority owner of our football club.

We are very excited to welcome Martha on board, and we know experiencing Friday night’s game in-person has only increased her own enthusiasm and anticipation for being part of Swansea City.

Snoop, of course, was watching our dramatic victory at the Cosm venue in Los Angeles.

Cosm provides an immersive viewing experience for supporters, and made those in attendance feel like they were in the Swansea.com Stadium with the rest of us cheering on the team.

The screening of the fixture – which was also shown in Cosm’s Dallas location – underlines the increased exposure and increased visibility we have as a club following the additions of Snoop and Luka to our ownership group. 

That victory over Wrexham was a third win in our last four Championship games, and underlines the signs of progress we have seen since Vitor was appointed at the end of November.

While we have challenging fixtures ahead over a busy period, we believe this can be the start of a climb up the Championship table.

It goes without saying that we are disappointed to find ourselves sitting in the lower reaches of the Championship table with half of the season gone.

In the build-up to the season we were clear in our aims to improve on our 11th-placed finish from the 2024-25 campaign, and to this point there is no denying we have fallen below our own expectations. 

However, there is still a lot of football to be played and while we share your frustrations, we have no doubt that if we all pull together we will be able to move up the table. 

With that in mind, we are very excited to have Vitor on board, and we are confident he will bring the improvement and clear identity we all want to see from the team moving forward. He is showing signs of doing that already.

We believe he possesses all the required qualities to lead Swansea City, after coming through a recruitment process that saw us assess nearly 100 different potential candidates before narrowing the field down to a small final number of coaches who we had the opportunity to speak to and hear their vision for our team and club.

Vitor’s presentation was excellent and, while naturally much of it focused on the product he wants to deliver on the field, it also spoke of wanting to build a culture where we all feel we are part of the team, are part of something that we feel represents the club’s values and is bigger than any one person.

The immediate impact he made at Maritimo, reviving the mood and fortunes of a club that had experienced relegation, was highly impressive, and is backed up by their performance metrics that show a team that had become considerably more aggressive, and effective in both boxes.

Vitor has also experienced working at some of the game’s biggest clubs, including a trophy-laden stint as a trusted lieutenant of Jurgen Klopp and Pep Lijnders at Liverpool. 

This is an appointment we believe will improve us for the long term, hence why we have agreed a contract through to 2029. We want to build something sustainable at Swansea, and we are confident Vitor can help us do that and we will give him every support as he gets down to work during a very busy period.

We recognise it will take time for him to fully implement his ideas and way of playing, and we are confident that the recent completion of his backroom staff will further aid Vitor in this process.

We understand that the time it took to complete these appointments became a talking point, but ultimately, as we knew at the outset, we were bound by regulations and legislation that every business and organisation is required to go through. Put simply, you cannot work for Swansea City without the required clearances and documentation, which we now have.

So we warmly welcome Ryan Maye, Toze Mendes and Goncalo Ricca to the club, with Diogo Mendeiros to also join us in the coming weeks.

We also want to place on record how incredibly grateful we are to Joe Allen, Leon Britton, Martyn Margetson and Kris O’Leary for their support and assistance during this period, and we are delighted that Joe and Leon will be remaining as part of our staff moving forward.

We also appreciate that the January transfer window is approaching and this will always be a time where there is increased scrutiny and speculation regarding the make-up of squads around the country.

Given the high turnover of players in our squad over the 2025 summer window, and Vitor’s track record of developing and improving young players, we do not expect the January window to be a particularly busy one for Swansea City.

We will, of course, always be looking for ways to strengthen the squad and if we believe those opportunities are available and would represent good deals for the club then we will look to capitalise, but given the size of the squad we have already, it’s likely January will be relatively quiet.

Vitor’s arrival of course came in the wake of Alan Sheehan’s departure. We want to place on record our deep thanks and appreciation for the work Alan did for Swansea City; including twice leading the team through challenging periods as interim head coach, winning five games in a row during an outstanding sequence of results.

No-one could question the work Alan and his staff put into their roles. They worked tirelessly but, ultimately, when we assessed results and performances they were not where we expected them to be and we had to take a difficult decision. We wish Alan, Darren O’Dea and Richard Stearman well for the future, and have no doubt they have successful coaching careers ahead of them.

We also want to take this opportunity to pass on our sincerest condolences to Marko Stamenic and his family following the tragic passing of his father. Marko is a an incredibly humble and personable young man, and we are all here to support him at what has been an extremely difficult time.

Off the pitch we have been excited to see our new sports bar ‘The Swansea Jack’ open and being enjoyed by supporters (and owners alike).

A lot of effort has gone into trying to ensure this is a venue where supporters can feel like they have a home away from home, surrounded by stories and images of our club’s great history and heritage.

I am sure you will agree that the design and layout look fantastic, and we were pleased to be able join a number of supporters for a pint of ‘Golden Boy’ and ‘Drop it like it’s Hops’ when we were in Swansea for the Wrexham game. The new beers are now also on sale at the Swansea.com Stadium.

We are also pleased to be able to cover the cost of coach travel for supporters wishing to attend our Boxing Day game at Coventry City.

We know that Boxing Day is an eagerly-anticipated part of the football calendar, and we are all very much aware of the sacrifices – financial and otherwise - you all make to cheer on our club. 

We were incredibly disappointed with the ticket pricing for this fixture, and we have made our views known to Coventry in an attempt to agree an amicable solution.

We did not want anyone to miss out on the game and we hope that covering the cost of the journey will allow as many members of the Jack Army as possible to be in attendance at the CBS Arena.

We are deeply grateful for your continued support and we again wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and look forward to what we hope will be a positive new year for everyone connected with Swansea City.

Brett and Jason.