Six years ago, before Declan Kelly went into business with Tom Brady and Serena Williams and Ronan O’Gara and David Beckham and Gary Neville, before his takeover of Salford City, and before his soaring business career was temporarily derailed by scandal, he was part of Tipperary’s secret sauce.
After the final whistle in the 2019 All-Ireland hurling final Kelly materialised on the touchline in Croke Park, sporting an access-all-areas pink wristband, and a versatile sports coat and chinos, apt for a cocktail evening in the Hamptons or midtown Manhattan.
Sponsors are not usually part of the post-match, on-field hootenanny, although JP McManus is another recent exception. In this case, Kelly and the Tipp manager Liam Sheedy were childhood friends.
Growing up in Portroe in North Tipperary, Sheedy and Kelly were part of a thriving Scór scene, the GAA’s cultural championships. Portroe had a tribal following on the village hall circuit and Sheedy and Kelly were a pair of fiery set dancers.
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At the time of the 2019 All-Ireland Kelly was chairman and chief executive of Teneo, a global consultancy and communications firm he had founded at the beginning of the decade. He would have had the wherewithal to sponsor Tipperary long before then, but the timing of his intervention didn’t need to be decoded: Sheedy had returned for a second spell as Tipp manager and Kelly swept in as his wing man.
Between the sponsorship deal and ancillary fundraising, it was estimated that anything up to €350,000 had been generated for the team during the season, and once the All-Ireland was won the harvest continued.
On a parallel track, Kelly was an active supporter of the Gaelic Players Association (GPA) from its inception and for many years played a pivotal role in their New York fundraising.
Kelly’s links to the GAA, though, are easily traced to his roots. How he came to build business connections with Brady, Williams, Beckham, Neville, O’Gara and others is a longer and more complex story.
Until now, sport had not been his business, though he drifted in and out of that world. In his early life as a business reporter, Kelly moonlighted as a hurling columnist in the Cork Examiner, as it was called then. The column bristled with inflammatory opinions that, from time to time, landed the Examiner in bad odour with the Cork county board.
One memorable column, calling for Canon Michael O’Brien to be removed as Cork hurling manager in the early 1990s, ran under the pithy headline Fire The Canon. In the offices of the county board no marks were awarded for cute wordplay.
Kelly left journalism in the mid-1990s to make his fortune, and for the next 25 years, his success was extraordinary. He set up a public relations company with Jackie Gallagher, another former reporter, which they built up and sold for more than €8 million. He was later involved in a management buyout in which Kelly and his partners acquired the business for €40 million before later selling it on for about seven times that amount.
By the early 2000s he was spending more and more time in New York and in 2007 he was introduced to Hillary Clinton at an event hosted by the journalist and publisher Niall O’Dowd. A year later, when she made her first run for the White House, Kelly was one of her most prolific fundraisers, generating up to $3 million for her campaign.
It started a relationship with the Clintons that blossomed over the next three or four years. When Hillary Clinton was made secretary of state in the Barack Obama administration, she appointed Kelly as her economic envoy to Northern Ireland. Over time, though, tensions arose, and the relationship cooled. In March 2012 Bill Clinton resigned his seat on Teneo’s advisory board.
The company continued to grow, regardless. In June 2019, three months before Tipp won the All-Ireland with Teneo’s name on their shirts, they sold a majority stake to a private equity group for more than $350 million, which, according to the Wall Street Journal, put the company’s worth at about $725 million.
Two years later, though, the sky fell in. In a report by the Financial Times Kelly was accused of “inappropriate behaviour” while in a “drunken” state at a charity event. After a few days of irresistible pressure, he resigned from Teneo.
In a statement full of contrition Kelly acknowledged that he “behaved inappropriately towards some men and women at the event,” and that he had apologised to those he had offended. The statement also said that Kelly “was committed to sobriety” and was receiving treatment.
People wondered how Kelly could recover from such reputational damage. The people who knew him best didn’t wonder so much. Within months he founded Consello, an advisory and investing platform and among his original partners were former executives of Uber and Qualcomm.
Then, in April 2022, they were joined by Tom Brady, the greatest quarterback in the history of the NFL. It was yet another demonstration of Kelly’s extraordinary talent for networking and renewal.
Over the last three years, Consello has acquired the services of blue-chip names from the wide world of sport: Williams, O’Gara, Neville, the two-time NBA winner Pau Gasol, the former Ryder Cup captain Paul McGinley.
The relationship with Neville catalysed Kelly’s latest project. At the beginning of the month Kelly, Neville and David Beckham took ownership of Salford City, the League Two side that was famously owned by Manchester United’s Class of ’92. Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Philip Neville owned 60 per cent of the club, but they have been bought out. Kelly is now co-chair of the club along with leading UK financier Lord Mervyn Davies.
Another Wrexham? Since the Welsh club’s Hollywood takeover by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, Wrexham have secured three successive promotions and have landed in the Championship with their gaze fixed on the Premier League. On their return to the EFL, in League Two, they generated astonishing revenues of nearly €32 million.
With Kelly, Salford are about to launch their own moon shot. This is not “a vanity project”, he said. Whatever people thought about him, he has always meant business. The next chapter will be fascinating.
