WHEN Burnley embarked on a 19-game winless run shortly after Brendan Flood joined the board at Turf Moor, the Clarets director could have been forgiven for wondering what exactly he had signed up for.

Between the start of December 2006 and the end of March 2007 Burnley didn’t a win a single game under Steve Cotterill. There was little sign of the joy to come for Flood, his fellow directors or the fans.

The 56-year-old has seen the highs and lows during his tenure at the club, from that dire run in his early months in the boardroom to the success being enjoyed now under the guidance of Sean Dyche.

Like his other board members Flood is a Claret first and foremost, making Burnley a rare breed in the Premier League as a club run by local businessmen done good.

That has led to speculation recently that Burnley could be ripe for a takeover, but Rossendale-born Flood insists keeping the unique ‘identity’ in place has to take priority if a potential buyer ever comes calling with significant interest.

“The temptation for owners to sell to international buyers is significant now,” said Flood.

“In some respects the game is demanding that owners recapitalise and bring in people who are much wealthier than them in order to compete at the highest levels.

“By doing that you give up some of your control and your identity, but you stay competitive.

“I think it’s important that if that ever was an opportunity at Burnley we’d do it while maintaining our identity.

“We’ll be trying to reinvest in the club as much as we can to make it more successful.”

Success has certainly been plentiful in recent years, with the appointment of Dyche in October 2012 the catalyst for reviving Burnley’s fortunes.

After an unexpected promotion to the Premier League in 2014, the Clarets returned last season and stayed up, with Dyche now leading his side to seventh with eight games of 2017/18 to go.

The 46-year-old signed a new four-and-a-half year contract in January, potentially taking his Turf tenure to just short of a decade.

“Sean is fully Burnley-fied now,” said Flood. “We said to him the other day with his four-and-a-half-year contract he could be at the club for 10 years, he could have a formal stamp as a fan, if you’ve done 10 years at the club you’re a fan.

“He’s earned all the praise and all the plaudits he gets, he’s been consistently successful, he cares a lot, you can see that in the boardroom as well as on the touchline.

“He’s a good fit for the club, he communicates well up and down. All the players respect his leadership and enjoy his company.

“We’re lucky. We’ve just got to keep showing that we want to move forward as a club and I’m sure Sean will want to be part of that journey.

“I’ve been on the board since 2006, I like to think it’s a golden era. At the beginning of my time as a director in the first 19 games we didn’t get a win, so I thought I’d signed up to the worst idea ever.

“Thankfully things change. Within two years of that we managed to get to Premier League.”

Aside from Burnley, Flood’s other major passion now is UCFB, the world’s first sports university which began with a campus at Turf Moor in 2011.

It’s rise since then has been rapid. UCFB now has campuses at Wembley and the Etihad, as well as a partnership with Real Madrid.

“I’m hugely proud,” said Flood, chairman of UCFB. “I remember dwelling upon the risk of starting in Burnley. 

“People knock us at Burnley, everything is harder because it’s a smaller population. Running a football club is harder, running any business is harder. You don’t have a huge market.

“We started to create more of a student economy in Burnley and that grew modestly over the first three years.

“Then we opened at Wembley, then we opened at the Etihad, now we have a post-graduate academy at Real Madrid.

“It’s amazing what little seeds can run to. We’ve got huge engagement now, with political figures, previous footballers from around the north west.”

Asked if he was surprised at the rise of UCFB, Flood added: “If I’m honest yes. Over a 20 or 30 year journey you think we might be able to grow our students numbers to maybe 10,000.

“That would have been enough for me, working on that plan. I think we’re now at around 2,000 students and what we’d like to do is create an international campus network, with my connections to Orlando City Soccer Club (a club he co-founded) and my eldest son has a business in New York, we’re hoping to open something in Orlando and New York in the next two years.”

But the ambitions don’t stop there. Flood wants UCFB to become the ‘Havard of sport’, with sites around the globe.

“In the next 10 years I’d hope that we have a campus on every continent,” he said. “My vision is that we can have 15,000 students across the world all working in football business and sport and we become the Harvard of sport. 

“That would be a dream come true - apart from Burnley winning the Premier League.”