Billionaire Nassef Sawiris wins apology from Jamie Carragher

Egyptian billionaire Nassef Sawiris, the chairman and co-owner of English Premier League club Aston Villa, has won an apology from television pundit Jamie Carragher, less than a day after he said the club would take the former Liverpool defender to court over insults made on a podcast.

“I’d like to apologise to Aston Villa, the owners & their fans,” Carragher wrote on X on Saturday, Oct. 31. “My language this week was clumsy & wrong. I can assure Villa fans it was tongue in cheek but I can understand it’s not come across that way, so apologies.” He signed off with “Good luck today UTV!”, short for “Up the Villa,” ahead of the club’s home Premier League game against Fulham.

The apology came less than 15 hours after Villa posted a three-sentence statement on its social media accounts at 10:16 p.m. on Friday, signed by Sawiris as chairman. “Aston Villa will initiate legal action against Jamie Carragher for his unacceptable insults about the Club and its fans,” it said. “Aston Villa will not allow anyone to stop our ascension in English and European football.”

The statement did not say what form the legal action would take, which remarks it was aimed at or where a claim would be filed. Villa had not said by Saturday evening whether it would accept the apology and drop the matter.

What Carragher said

Carragher, 48, is an analyst for Sky Sports in the U.K. and CBS in the U.S. He played more than 700 games for Liverpool and also represented England. He made the remarks on Stick to Football, a podcast produced by The Overlap, while the panel discussed pressure on Manchester United head coach Michael Carrick and whether Villa manager Unai Emery might be tempted to move to Old Trafford.

He praised Emery. “I think Unai Emery is unbelievable with what he does year after year,” he said. He then argued that clubs sit in a pecking order. “There is a chain in football, whether you like it or not,” he said, pointing to Real Madrid taking Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United, and said Emery would surely want “that opportunity to manage a giant again.”

He went on to tell Villa supporters to “shut the f*** up,” adding: “Aston Villa will never be Manchester United.”

Before Saturday’s apology, Carragher had played the comments down. He wrote on X that “it was a joke after the stick Villa fans have given me over saying Emery may fancy joining Man Utd.” On The Overlap, he said he ended up swearing at Villa fans, “which maybe I shouldn’t have done but it was all in jest.”

The chairman’s statement split Villa’s own fan base. Some supporters backed Sawiris, while others called it an overreaction to a pundit’s opinion.

Villa’s rise under Sawiris

The row comes during Villa’s most successful period in four decades. Emery, the Spanish coach who took over in November 2022 with the team 16th in the league and close to the relegation places, led Villa to a fourth-place finish and a return to the Champions League. He then won the Europa League with the club this year, Villa’s first major European trophy in more than 40 years and his fifth Europa League title as a manager. His contract runs to June 2029.

Sawiris and American investor Wes Edens, co-founder of investment firm Fortress Investment Group, bought control of Villa in 2018, when the Birmingham club was in the second tier of English football and in financial trouble. They hold the club through V Sports, a holding company that has since bought stakes in other clubs, including a 46% stake in Portugal’s Vitoria de Guimaraes.

The two men have spent heavily to bring Villa back to the top of the English game, and Sawiris has taken on the Premier League before. In 2024, he said Villa was considering legal action against the league over its profitability and sustainability rules, which limit how much clubs can lose.

Egypt’s richest man

Sawiris, a member of one of Egypt’s best-known business families, is worth about $10 billion, making him the richest person in Egypt and one of the wealthiest people in Africa. His fortune rests on stakes in OCI, the fertilizer and chemicals group he built, Orascom Construction, the engineering and building company founded by his father, Onsi Sawiris, and German sportswear maker Adidas.

He is one of the largest shareholders in Adidas, where he has sat on the supervisory board since 2016. He became chairman of that board in May, succeeding Thomas Rabe.

This year Sawiris has been working to fold OCI into Orascom Construction to create a larger infrastructure and investment group based in Abu Dhabi. In June, his investment vehicle NNS made a cash offer of 4.10 euros a share for the OCI shares it did not already own.