How reading the Guardian led to a million-pound move for Cornish Pirates

Article about second-tier rugby club last December piqued interest of American private equity firm

“I think my family already thought I was crazy so this is nothing new,” says Kenn Moritz from his home office in faraway Pittsburgh. The Moritz family may have a point. Given all those baseball, football, ice hockey and basketball franchises in the United States, why opt instead to invest in a second-tier English rugby club in Cornwall that almost folded less than two years ago?

The catalyst turns out, ahem, to have been your correspondent’s article about the Cornish Pirates in the Guardian last December. Moritz was sitting where he is now, trawling through his trusted worldwide news sources when he stumbled across the Pirates’ quest for fresh investment. Somewhere inside him a light flicked on. “Without that article I wouldn’t have called,” says Moritz, the president of the private equity firm Stonewood Capital. “It gave me an insight into what was going on in English rugby and piqued my interest.”