The club was down on its luck, having recently been relegated to the fifth tier of English football, its main sponsor a local funeral home. The stadium that housed it, opened during the Great War, was old and tiny, with a broken scoreboard. It didn’t take long for Peter B. Freund to fall in love.



“In many senses, you need to be a bit mad,” said the New York-based investor during a recent interview. “But everything just seemed right.”



Unlike so many of his compatriots who have bought into English football in recent years, Freund is a million miles away from dining at the Premier League’s top table. He’s not even mixing with any of England’s top four professional divisions.



No, the owner of the USL’s new team in Memphis and three minor league baseball teams, and a minority shareholder in the New York Yankees, is the proud owner of Dagenham and Redbridge.



Who?



The Daggers are an East London...