Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish has been recruited as one of the dragons for the next series of BBC’s business reality show, Dragons’ Den.
Tabling a move: Steve Parish
Parish and former banker Jenny Campbell will be the new faces for the show’s 15th series. They replace Nick Jenkins and Sarah Willingham.
Programmes featuring the Palace chief will first air later this year as he joins Peter Jones, Deborah Meaden and Touker Suleyman.
Parish left school at 18 and worked in the computer graphics industry before going on to become the CEO of ad agency Tag Worldwide.
“I’m thrilled to become a dragon and really excited to meet the entrepreneurs in this series, see what ideas they bring to the den and how I might be able to help them grow,” said Parish, who in 2010 saved Palace from going out of business. Since then, he has helped steer the club into the Premier League.
Parish is not the first football chairman to feature on Dragons’ Den. He’s not even the first chairman of a south London football club to be on the programme’s panel of entrepreneurs: Theo Paphitis brought a whole new meaning to the programme’s producers’ expression “in the Den” from the second series of the show in 2005 until 2012, during the time he was chairman of Millwall.
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