Broken Dreams Read online

  To Alexander and Oliver,

  and to the memory of

  George G. Bower

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  1 THE SOLITARY INVESTIGATOR

  2 THE HERO: TERRY VENABLES

  3 THE RELUCTANT INVESTIGATORS

  4 THE CHAIRMAN: KEN BATES

  5 THE PASSING PURIST: ALASTAIR CAMPBELL

  6 EL TEL: PART II

  7 FIASCOS AND DISILLUSIONMENT

  8 THE FA: MASTERS OF DELUSION

  9 THE MANAGER: HARRY REDKNAPP

  10 THE AGENT: DENNIS ROACH

  11 TURMOIL AND TRASH

  12 ‘THE DREAM-MAKER’: DAVID DEIN

  13 ANATOMY OF DREAMS

  POSTSCRIPT

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Index

  1

  INTRODUCTION

  A Snapshot on 13 March 2002

  In the uneven light, the complacency was suffocating. Football’s apparatchiks were celebrating a funeral. On 13 March 2002 at West Ham’s new stadium in east London, a hundred people witnessed the entombment of a valiant campaign for honesty in English football.

  They were gathered for the launch of the Independent Football Commission, originally proposed to combat corruption in English football. On a raised dais in the middle of a long reception room beamed Professor Derek Fraser, the new Commission’s chairman. Fraser’s principal qualification seemed to be his obscurity. Until his appointment, the historian and vice-chancellor of the University of Teeside was unknown in public life beyond three inconsequential committees in Middlesbrough. In the distant past, Fraser had occasionally bought a ticket to watch football matches from the terraces. Chairmanship of the Independent Football Commission promised him enhanced status, association with a collection of marginal Westminster personalities and a guaranteed seat in every stadium across England and Wales.

  During his introduction Professor Fraser did not minimize his impotence. He explained that the Commission could advise but not impose its opinions. ‘I think the IFC can work,’ said Fraser, emphasizing the word ‘think’, and continued, ‘I can’t promise it will work.’ His own priority was to examine ticketing and merchandising – ‘issues at the heart of football’, he said – although he lacked any significant experience of investigation or regulation. Football fans would dispute his priorities. Many active supporters were irritated by individual clubs exploiting their life-long support, but the majority were more troubled by the developing financial crisis that endangered their club’s survival. That peril was being aggravated by the drain of money towards spiralling wages, foreign clubs and unscrupulous agents. Fraser appeared oblivious to the fears of insolvency and widespread suspicions of dishonesty. ‘I’m unaware of any corruption in football,’ he announced, ‘but there was a lecture at my university about corruption in public life. I was surprised about it.’

  In the audience, Richard Scudamore, the pugnacious chief executive of the Premier League since October 1999, smiled with satisfaction. Over the previous three years, Scudamore, a former executive at Yellow Pages, and paid a salary of £653,495 by the Premier League, had opposed a proposal by the Labour government to create an effective regulator empowered to investigate any wrongdoing and enforce probity in football. That afternoon he chortled, ‘I got what I wanted.’ In his emphatic manner Scudamore insisted, ‘There’s no corruption in football.’ The promoters of football’s new gospel, especially the twenty chairmen of the Premier League clubs, habitually sneered at the orthodox fans who challenged those profiting from the game’s glamour and passion. Football was no longer ‘a working man’s game’ but an entertainment business. The Premier League had wilfully challenged and minimized the authority of the Football Association. Regulation was disliked by the mavericks, tycoons and opportunists attracted to football. United by their egoism and passion, they were accustomed to and even relished the harshness of their game, as shown by the selection of players and their violent clashes on the pitch. In summary, they disliked controls. ‘Football is not a business but a sport dependent on excitement and speculation,’ explained Scudamore breathlessly. ‘The game’s finances have always been precarious. Clubs have always spent more than they earned. Teams have always been on the verge of bankruptcy. And there’ll always be rich men ready to pour more money into clubs just to be part of the game.’

  The swirl of money from the Sky television bonanza had transformed English football. Premier League clubs employed some of the world’s greatest players and their matches ranked among the best for any audience. Bravado mesmerized the English game. The slaughter at the Hillsborough and Heysel stadiums had been overshadowed by the new profiteering, attracting the incompetent and the dishonest. Old fans were appalled by the new culture. In the opinion of Scudamore’s paymasters, however, any investigation of football’s money trail was undesirable, unless compelling reasons arose.

  On the platform, Richard Scudamore’s triumphalism was endorsed by Adam Crozier, the chief executive of the FA. The image-conscious former advertising salesman, bearing a striking resemblance to Peter Mandelson, had once acknowledged the cancer of corruption in football. At a Lancing College old boys’ dinner in March 2001, Crozier had identified specific transfers of foreign players, suggesting that millions of pounds had disappeared in ‘bungs’ – secret payments by agents to managers of clubs. Crozier’s indiscretion had caused uproar among members of the FA. He had chosen never to repeat the truth publicly, preferring to categorize his revelation as ‘tongue in cheek’. Thereafter, the aspiring modernizer emphasized the success of football’s ‘wide and extensive regulation’. At the launch of the Commission, Crozier praised the FA’s imposition of ‘best financial practice’ on clubs, and spoke about the importance of ‘accountability and transparency’. In self-justification he added, ‘We, the FA, are the regulator.’ If Crozier’s self-praise was accurate, and football was well regulated by his staff, then the creation of the new Commission was unnecessary, but Crozier felt compelled to utter an admission. ‘I can see that a lot in the running of football has not been right,’ he conceded, and that justified the Commission’s purpose to ‘change football’s culture, how it is managed and developed’. This was a marketing man lacking passionate affection for football or the confrontational manner to take on the combative chairmen of the Premier League clubs. He glanced nervously at Richard Caborn, the bearded minister of sport, sharing the platform.

  The junior minister had discredited himself shortly after his appointment in June 2001 by revealing on radio his ignorance about sport. Creating the Commission had been delayed by two years, admitted Caborn apologetically, appealing to his audience to ignore ‘earlier mistakes’. The word ‘mistakes’ was a guarded reference to the dispute during 1999 between those proposing the regulator – including Downing Street and members of the Labour government’s ‘Football Task Force’ – and the Premier League and Football Association. The scars and anger had not disappeared. Caborn’s endorsement of the Commission as ‘the last piece of the jigsaw to be put into reality’ rang hollow for those disappointed by the creation of a feckless committee rather than the establishment of an independent regulator. His speech also highlighted the irony of celebrating the victory of Richard Scudamore creating a toothless regulator at West Ham’s stadium; an irony to which Professor Fraser and Richard Caborn were oblivious.

  One year earlier, Harry Redknapp, West Ham’s robust manager, had been dismissed. During seven turbulent years, Redknapp had bought and sold 134 players, an extraordinary number for any club. His hyperactivity had alarmed Terry Brown, West Ham’s taciturn chairman. ‘What is Harry up to?’ Brown had occasionally asked Peter Storrie, the club’s managing director. Storrie reassured Brown that there was no evidence of any disho
nesty by Redknapp, just unease about his close relationships with agents and his own advice, ‘You should make the bucks while you can.’ Terry Brown’s worries caused little concern to Richard Scudamore. The financial mysteries bedevilling the Premier League, the fatal imbalance between the clubs’ precarious solvency and the multimillion pound earnings of their celebrity stars evoked limited distress. Football, like show business, in Scudamore’s opinion, did not warrant the same intrusive supervision as imposed upon banks, Lloyds insurance and international corporations in the City of London. Passing football’s ‘fit and proper test’, Scudamore believed, should not depend upon the financial record of football’s executives but on the criterion of all sports: survival of the fittest, threatening the weakest with extinction.

  This philosophy ignored football’s status as the national sport, central to England’s way of life and a microcosm of the nation’s successes and failures. That football should be free of any suggestion of corruption and conflicts of interest was considered to be essential by outsiders who cast doubt over the game’s probity. Those doubts were rejected by football’s owners, managers and administrators. In their frantic bid to prosper, football’s participants had been preoccupied by the events on the pitch, scornful about any debates concerning the morality of their methods in achieving that success. The romance conjured up about ‘the beautiful game’ by the book Fever Pitch escalated the passions and softened the doubts among football’s new middle-class fans and the media. Even those club owners and executives who harboured suspicions about dishonesty in rival clubs, and occasionally feared duplicity by their own managers, preferred to overlook the financial chicanery surrounding the trade in players. Obtaining incriminating evidence about questionable relationships between managers and the players’ agents was difficult even if the suspicions of wrongdoing were compelling.

  Duplicity in the smaller clubs was serious but the scandals unearthed during the previous decade at Tottenham, Arsenal and Nottingham Forest had become notorious. The legacy was ceaseless gossip made far worse after Sky television paid £1.3 billion in 2001 for the exclusive rights over three years to the Premier League’s matches. The new fortune had flowed swiftly through the clubs to footballers and their agents, often abroad. All were enriching themselves by charging millions of pounds to organize and approve the transfers of players. The more disreputable agents were suspected to be secretly paying club managers a portion of their commissions as bribes for buying their players. Dishonest managers, some club chairmen were convinced, were even purchasing unqualified players just to receive the secret payments, or ‘bungs’, from the agents. The trade in people was diverting precious money out of English football, especially from the clubs struggling in the lower divisions. England’s football, the purists complained, was being strangled by greed.

  Football’s tacit endorsement of sleaze is emblazoned on the stadium at Nottingham Forest’s ground. Huge red letters on the roof pronounce ‘The Brian Clough Stand’. Brian Clough, the club’s famous former manager, was condemned in 1998 for his dishonesty but he remained a hero for his team’s victories in Europe. Financial irregularities off the pitch were deemed by Clough’s many admirers to be irrelevant. The remedy proposed by the critics was an independent regulator but the reaction by football’s executives to accountability was emphatic. ‘Get rid of any idea of an independent regulator,’ David Dein, the successful vice-chairman of Arsenal and aspirant to become the chairman of the Football Association, had told Richard Scudamore.

  Dein’s gospel of non-interference mirrored that of the old guard in the City of London during the 1980s. Just as the unscrupulousness of a minority threatened football, the City of London’s reputation and fortunes had been harmed by similar behaviour. Self-regulation, the City of London players had repeatedly preached, was essential for their continued prosperity. But successive scandals, destroying the credibility and value of traditional City institutions, demolished the resistance to independent regulation. Numerous greedy, incompetent, blinkered English players in the City were ousted, casualties of their own self-interest. Many of England’s prestigious financial institutions vanished without a trace. Their successors were dynamic and efficient, but mostly foreign-owned. Richard Scudamore, David Dein and others in the Premier League denied that the same fate threatened English football. Stubbornly, the sport’s scions preached that the problems of football’s ethics and morality would be resolved by those involved in the game. It was different from the City, they argued; their sport was not a business but an infatuation. Yet their self-interest was short-sighted.

  In public, the clubs’ directors took a sentimental view of football’s survival and spoke of old values, but at the same time they swaggered like modern business tycoons, preoccupied by money and promoting superstars. The message was confusing. Emotion had not been the sentiment displayed by Richard Scudamore’s members during the flotation of their clubs on London’s stock exchange during the 1990s, or in their quest for £1 billion of loans. Football, the chairmen had boasted to the bankers, was a mature, money-making machine. Then, deluded by their self-promotion, the clubs’ chairmen had recklessly wasted their millions.

  In 1992, there were eleven foreign players employed by English clubs. In 1999, there were over 200 foreign players and, out of the £150 million spent on players during that summer, £125 million was earned by overseas clubs. The money was lost to British football. In 2002, nearly half the 896 players registered by Premier League clubs were not British, despite the lower wages which British players expected. Managers, owing no life-long loyalty to the clubs’ chairmen, and knowing that managers were rarely fired for spending too much money, had been buying in a bid for glory. The wages paid by clubs were exceeding their income. Some chairmen, employing players on contracts beyond the expiry of the Sky agreement and struggling to repay loans, feared their finances were unsustainable. Only the sale of players could cover their trading losses. Vulnerable chairmen turned to Richard Scudamore to judge the odds in their gamble with financial reality. ‘We can stay bullish,’ said Scudamore. ‘We’ve got a good product.’

  Investors disagreed. During 2001 football clubs’ share prices collapsed. The clubs had become financial pygmies. The national sport revealed its dependence on external funding, private and governmental. Few protested that public money was supporting the country’s richest sport, although football’s commercial naivety threatened self-destruction. Like the City of London, the clubs could contemplate consolidation to avoid poverty, disintegration and disaster, but in the process the harmonious equality of England’s football tradition would disappear. While the Premier League clubs could prosper, the gulf between the giants and the rest would ruin football and an inherent quality of English culture. That scenario was refuted by Richard Scudamore and his principal supporters in the Premier League. The extinction of football clubs, unlike England’s former major industries – coal, shipbuilding, heavy machinery and electronics – was impossible, Scudamore argued, thanks to the wallets of publicity-seeking millionaires eager to replace a sinking chairman.

  Becoming the owner of a Premier League club was the dream of countless businessmen eager to emerge from obscurity to mix with celebrities and enjoy the spotlight. The lure attracting aspiring chairmen was the eruption of roars of excitement in their own stadiums. Sitting in the centre of the front row, their self-importance was fed by the idea that they could grant the wishes of the fans. Even so, their pleasure was often offset by the pain of threats and abuse from fans whose lives were dedicated to their clubs. Any failure to deliver an optimistic prediction threatened a chairman’s reputation. To avoid that fate, they bowed to irrational pressure that the club’s money should never be conserved but spent on new players. The reality of the business of football was spending at whatever cost to sustain popularity among those besotted by the game, to avoid the risk of losing a reputation.

  Public humiliation troubled the twenty chairmen of the Premier League clubs. Embarrassment wa
s familiar in their trade. Players were debunked by their managers; managers, fearing dismissal, were chastened by the clubs’ chairmen; and the chairmen were abused by shareholders and disgruntled fans, especially those executives vaingloriously seeking applause by appearing on the pitch. Those emotions were evident at the Premier League’s regular meetings held every three months, either at the League’s headquarters near Hyde Park or at the Landmark Hotel, near Marylebone in central London.

  To suggest equality, the chairmen sat in the alphabetical order of their clubs, but in their medieval court there was no sense of democracy. The Big Five – Rick Parry of Liverpool, Peter Kenyon of Manchester United, Peter Ridsdale of Leeds, David Dein of Arsenal and Ken Bates of Chelsea – were tenacious combatants, often trying to price the other fifteen chairmen out of the market. In their battle to win the championships, the Big Five’s expenditure depressed their smaller neighbours and enhanced their self-esteem, which was also regularly massaged by their appearance on the back pages of the tabloid newspapers, and by their salaries. Ridsdale earned £645,000 per annum, Kenyon £563,000, Parry £457,000, Dein about £500,000, while Ken Bates’s complete income remained a mystery. Their new fame, spread beyond their small fiefdoms, encouraged cynicism, not least among themselves. Amusingly, the same men who constantly discussed and determined the fate and public reputations of professional footballers, displayed extreme sensitivity about the public portrayal of their own status.

  Ken Bates and David Dein epitomized the exceptional vanities. The bearded chairman of Chelsea, having completed the reconstruction of his stadium within the aspiring Chelsea Village complex, was convinced that his team would win immortal glory. Few among his peers shared that optimism, not least because his abrasive manner weakened his credibility. Although Bates often spoke sense and won applause – ‘Oh Peter, why don’t you piss off out of the Premier League,’ he memorably cursed Peter Kenyon for advocating a European super league – his vulgarity and tiresome pontification about every subject undermined his audience’s trust. The frequent banter between Bates and David Dein provided hilarity but little sense. Whatever Dein said always sparked a venomous tease from Bates, whom he taunted as ‘an evil man with too much influence’.