by Alex Fynn
When it came to contracts, Graham’s toughness as a negotiator was soon established. A young Martin Keown was one stubborn individual who met his match when he held out for better terms and found himself sold to Aston Villa. Graham later showed the folly of his intransigence by re-signing Keown in 1992 on terms that made the disparity in their 1986 dealings look paltry, although it did establish a precedent. Striker Alan Smith, who Graham recruited from Leicester in 1987, recalls Graham’s negotiating technique, “He liked to keep a ceiling on things which he didn’t like to go over. He’d say, ‘Tony Adams is on that so I’m not giving you any more.’” The bottom line though was that Graham felt he should be the top earner as he had the ultimate responsibility. “He always wanted to be on more money than the players and so as long as he was, he would be happy,” says Smith. From the receiving end, Paul Merson described the manager’s way of working: “It was pointless having an agent. He used to come in and say ‘Right, this is what you’re getting, here’s your new contract. If you don’t like it, see you later.’”
But it was not only the players who were affected by Graham’s methods. David Dein, despite his power at the club, was still starry-eyed, delighted to be working alongside a former hero. In his twenties he had supported the side that won the 1970 Fairs Cup followed by the domestic league and cup double in 1971, of which George Graham was an integral part. But although he had helped to bring Graham back home, Dein increasingly found himself marginalised in the day-to-day dealings with the players that he had previously enjoyed, as Graham took it upon himself to deal with the contract negotiations and transfers, aided by coaching staff such as Steve Burtenshaw and Theo Foley who loyally backed up his every move. Dein reluctantly accepted the change, admitting, “I pride myself on being a good negotiator, but George has got me knocked into a cocked hat.” His admiration for Graham was such that it may have impaired his judgement. When Graham called, Dein – according to colleagues – invariably responded, sometimes putting aside commercial decisions in order to involve himself with the playing side. Dein’s willingness to help, however, did not endear him to Graham, who remains dismissive about the alliance between Wenger and Dein which he intimates allowed Dein “to play with his toys” in a manner you can be sure he would never have stood for.
An incident in February 1988 after Graham had been in the manager’s seat for less than two years, pointed up the reality of the relationship. At the end of a press conference to promote the forthcoming friendly between Arsenal and the French national team, a friend of David Dein’s and a director of the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency who had produced a radio campaign to promote the match on Arsenal’s behalf, asked for a lift back into the West End. “Certainly,” replied Dein “but I am taking George”, who was just chatting to some journalists on the other side of the room. After a few minutes chit chat, Dein’s friend said, “Come on David, let’s go”. “I can’t interrupt him,” said Dein. “Of course you can,” said his friend. “You want to go. I want to go. He’s only talking to some hacks. Tell him we’re going.” Dein demurred. “Ok then, I’m going to”, said his friend.
So the man from Saatchi & Saatchi walked over to Graham and said, “Apologies for interrupting Mr Graham, but it’s time to go and your chauffeur is getting impatient.” Whereupon Graham looked over at Dein and then without a word to either proceeded to turn his back on both Dein and the interloper to resume his conversation. How long Graham kept the vice-chairman kicking his heels is not known as Dein’s friend left immediately to make his own way back to his office.
It was a stance Graham could get away with as long as he was successful, the one thing David Dein prioritised above anything else, even his personal pride. “Every time I get up in the morning and look in the mirror to shave,” he said, “I see implanted on my forehead the words ‘Get a winning team’.”
By the end of the 1980s, Arsenal had many more options, with a flair midfield including home-grown players such as Paul Davis, David Rocastle and Michael Thomas augmented by solidity at the back. Using his knowledge of the lower divisions from his days at Millwall, Graham had been able to pick up some bargain buys that would serve the club well for years to come: Lee Dixon, Steve Bould and Nigel Winterburn, although the latter had been promoted with Wimbledon so had some top-flight experience. Arsenal’s first-team squad was a step up for all of them. Even better, the mix of home-grown and cheap purchases did not command superstar wages, allowing the manager to run a tight ship. In a sense, though, Graham was making a rod for his own back, as the board, seeing what could be achieved on a modest budget, sometimes refused to provide funds when he did want to make a noteworthy signing, such as Tony Cottee from West Ham. This concept of aiming for success on the cheap resounds at the club to this day, in spite of all that has changed. It is to Graham’s enormous credit then that in 1989 he wrested the league title from Liverpool.
Part of the reason that Arsenal pipped Liverpool to the title in 1989 was an event that had huge ramifications for the future of the game in England. The Hillsborough disaster that saw 96 Liverpool fans crushed to death on the occasion of an FA Cup semi-final postponed Liverpool’s fixtures three weeks, with the club’s players attending numerous funerals. When football resumed, the team went on an unbeaten run – including the FA Cup Final against Everton six days before facing Arsenal at Anfield in the (delayed) final league match of the season. Whether or not the players were drained from their experiences is difficult to say, but with the visitors requiring a 2–0 victory to win the title, Liverpool seemed to play within themselves, and ultimately conceded the League Championship trophy to George Graham’s team through goals by Alan Smith and, sensationally in the last minute, Michael Thomas.
The only Arsenal matches David Dein voluntarily doesn’t attend are those that occur during his annual winter break overseas “to recharge my batteries”. In the 1980s he often stayed at his wife Barbara’s family home in Florida. A keen student of American sport, he would go to see NFL games whenever possible and it was here that he first became aware of the importance and potential of the corporate market. Closer to home, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur and Aston Villa had paved the way in showing how executive boxes could not only produce a healthy new revenue stream but in so doing subsidise ticket prices in other areas of the ground. All very well in theory, but in practice the cost of a seat at Tottenham has always been amongst the most expensive in the top division.
Magnificent a stadium as Highbury was, hemmed in by the gardens and houses backing onto the stands, the possibilities for expansion were restricted. Additionally, the art deco facade of the East Stand was a listed building. There could have been re-construction, but it would have been a difficult task to find accommodation for boxes without alienating many of the die-hard season ticket holders. Instrumental in putting a roof on the Clock End and 53 executive boxes above it in January 1989, had Dein known what would happen later that season – namely the Hillsborough disaster and in the wake of it the Taylor Report advocating making stadiums all-seater – he might have instead considered a double-decker stand with seats above and below the executive boxes, or at least filled in the corners.
In theory, to maximise potential earnings executive boxes should have the best views in the stadium. Of course the Clock End boxholders could watch the game from a good height and get some perspective on the play, but they were still behind a goal. In an attempt to make good this deficiency, corporate packages that included seats in the West Upper were offered. Clients would dine in the Clock End complex of which the hospitality boxes were just one part. Behind the new boxes and out of sight of the pitch were an indoor five-a-side hall, a suite which was used as a pre-match restaurant and doubled up as the players’ bar after the game, as well as administrative offices.
The new Clock End was officially unveiled before the Arsenal v Tottenham match, three months before Hillsborough. Once completed, the only real change that could be made was the conversion of the terracing into
ad hoc seating to comply with the new legislation. There was no room to place further seating above the boxes, thereby capping Arsenal’s capacity, an insoluble problem that eventually led to the abandonment of Highbury when, with more foresight, it could have accommodated a significantly larger number than the 38,500 who were ultimately able to fit in. Of more pressing concern was the fact that Arsenal were falling behind other clubs with lower attendances whose stadium improvements, especially for the corporate customer, produced a much higher per capita income than Highbury.
After making a disappointing defence of their title, Arsenal were not widely tipped to win anything in 1990/91. Yet after an amazing ride that saw them come from eight points behind Liverpool, they won the championship by a street. If two points had not been deducted for their part in a scuffle against Manchester United they would have been nine points clear at the finish, reflecting then Crystal Palace manager Steve Coppell’s view that “in terms of coaching, discipline and organisation, they are the best team in the First Division”. Although they registered an impressive 74 goals, it was the solidity of the backline that was most remarkable, conceding a meagre 18 times over the course of the campaign and losing only once. Despite the frustrated expectations of the previous season – after the leading the table at Christmas, they ultimately finished fourth – Graham had by and large retained faith in the existing squad, merely strengthening it with the addition of Anders Limpar, Andy Linighan and David Seaman, later augmented by further products of the youth team factory, such as Kevin Campbell and David Hillier. (Of the 16 players who won Championship medals in 1990/91, no fewer than half had emerged from the youth team, a staggering accomplishment unmatched since the days of Matt Busby at Manchester United more than 30 years before.) How times have changed – plus ça change, plus c’est la difference, as Arsène Wenger might comment.
Thus Graham was able to devise a playing strategy based on consistency in both selection and performance. “The beauty about being consistent,” he reflected, “is that even when you have achieved it, the desire for it has still got to be there. There are not many footballers who have achieved that year in year out. We’ve done it over the year. Now we have to do it over the years.” But it was not to be, and after two titles in three years the level of consistency, and with it league success, dropped sharply away.
As one Dein favourite, Anders Limpar, fell from grace, another emerged to replace him. (The portents were not propitious when Graham told Limpar that his lack of goals “has got nothing to do with your physical make-up, it’s your mental make-up. You’ve got to put yourself in goal scoring positions” – a harsh criticism for a midfield player who scored 11 goals from 34 appearances in 1990/91.) A long-time admirer of Ian Wright, Dein held Crystal Palace’s Chairman, Ron Noades, to his promise of first refusal if the south London club ever considered cashing in on their prime asset and thus paved the way for the player to cross town early in the 1991/92 season despite the manager already being able to field Alan Smith, Kevin Campbell, Paul Merson and Limpar in the same line-up.
The ensuing campaign was a watershed in Graham’s tenure. Wright was ineligible to play in the European Cup due to the timing of his transfer, and a naive Arsenal side were taught a lesson by Sven Göran-Eriksson’s Benfica at Highbury that resulted in their elimination from the competition in the club’s first appearance since their debut campaign in 1971/72. Graham took on board what he had witnessed and prioritised muscle and brawn. “I love one-nil wins,” he admitted to Tottenham director Douglas Alexiou.
Defending with determination and limited in ambition whilst lacking their hitherto exemplary consistency meant that, whilst never challenging in the league, Arsenal usually rose to the big occasion and became very difficult to beat in cup ties, with long balls to the lightning-fast Ian Wright often the most favoured tactic. Michael Thomas and David Rocastle were sold in the summers of 1991 and 1992 respect ively, whilst Paul Davis also became surplus to requirements. Creativity had slipped down to the bottom of Graham’s list of priorities for good. The flirtation was over. He was no longer prepared to pander to creative players; his ungenerous treatment of David Ginola at Tottenham a few years later was no surprise to any Limpar fan. What Graham wanted above all was work rate and he now preferred the likes of David Hillier and Danish import John Jensen as his central midfield, stolid rather than solid, with little flair and even fewer goals. Paul Merson summarised his attitude to his team as a case of “if you weren’t working hard, you weren’t playing” and thus creative players became something of a luxury, an irony for a manager nicknamed ‘Stroller’ in his playing days. It was a return to the time of ‘boring, boring Arsenal’, which first emerged during Billy Wright’s uninspiring spell a quarter of a century before (though for Arsenal’s critics they would have felt the tag most apt for the 1970/71 team who, in their view, won the title in a manner completely devoid of style). And yet under Graham it was tolerated because of the cups that were won. An FA and League Cup double in 1993 was followed by a European Cup Winners’ Cup triumph a year later, but the never-say-die resilience in the knockout competitions could not sustain the week-in, week-out demands of the league and Arsenal never seriously competed again for the title under Graham after 1991. He was now the authoritarian who failed to get the best out of his players on a habitual basis. Alan Smith reflected, “He was the horrible boss who made us do horrible things but there was certainly respect there. It was only really towards the end when we’d been together too long, he was growing frustrated and we’d heard it all before, that it became really tiresome. But I would say that from 1987 till ‘92 it was hard work but enjoyable as we had our fair share of laughs in training.”
As the players were securing their second title under Graham, the board made plans for a new North Bank stand to comply with the Taylor Report. The notion of simply placing seats on the existing terracing (the plan for the Clock End) was rejected in favour of a two-tier stand that would cost a then phenomenal £22.5 million. The plans were unveiled just as Arsenal were in the process of winning their 1991 title, a time when (with standing capacity reduced post-Hillsborough as a temporary safety measure before stadiums could be converted) the season’s concluding home fixtures were all-ticket affairs, as opposed to the customary practice of queuing up and paying on the day. The club announced that season tickets for the new all-seater stand could only be purchased if fans were willing to pay either £1,500 or £1,100 for an ‘Arsenal Bond’. In theory it was an imaginative way of raising the finance and was underwritten by the Royal Bank of Scotland. And yet it created a furore. Fans were used to paying £5 a match for a place on the terracing and so understandably there was a huge resentment that the only way they could remain on the North Bank was by paying over £1,000 for the right to buy a season ticket. It was bad enough that they no longer had the right to stand, but this was adding insult to injury.
As the public face of the scheme David Dein copped most of the flak, and there was a lot of it flying around. The fanzine 1–0 Down, 2–1 Up even went as far as proposing that bricks from the North Stand should be thrown through the window of Dein’s Bentley, a move that resulted in someone doing just that when he parked near a Greek restaurant in Bounds Green. Unsurprisingly this led to the threat of legal action against the fanzine and an out-of-court settlement and a subsequent front-cover apology in what 1-0 Down termed a ‘libel special’ issue.
Given that the corporate boxes in the Clock End had proved popular, and with Dein’s sense of ambition for the club, it was something of a mystery as to why boxes were not integrated into the new stand. At least their exclusion did not mean a reduction in the potential capacity, the structure creating 12,500 places in comparison to the mere 6,000 that would be provided by the Clock End, which simply had seats grafted onto the terracing the following season, despite the numerous restricted sightlines it produced. However, many of the bonds were not sold, leaving the Royal Bank of Scotland to pick up a large portion of the building costs. Pri
ce rises for the new bondholders’ season tickets were pegged to the rate of inflation for ten years, though, and as the price of admission rose by leaps and bounds in the decade to 2003 those who did buy a bond turned out to have landed a bargain. When Arsenal were at last able to charge the market price, the cost of a bondholder’s season ticket was tripled at the first opportunity.
Still, Arsenal’s big move forward at the dawn of a new era was only a new stand. Having dethroned Liverpool, into the vacuum stepped Manchester United, showing all the other clubs a clean pair of heels as they quickly demonstrated that having the best team facilitated their ascent to the status of the biggest, the richest and the most profitable club in the world. Their success on the field provided the foundations for a commercial empire the like of which the world of football had never known before. And where Manchester United went, others were quick to try to follow. But Arsenal lagged behind, seemingly ill at ease in this new commercial milieu. They appeared to know their price but not their true value. And in charge of commercial matters with very little marketing experience, David Dein exemplified this attitude. As a successful salesman by day and card player and gambler by night, he had innate confidence in his own ability to strike the best deal. And he was invariably successful – up to a point.
Anxious to maintain control and to show the board good returns as a result of his own efforts, he found delegation a difficult art. Although he has denied this, he also did not easily accept the advice readily forthcoming from friends and associates alike. So when handling Arsenal’s European competitions broadcasting rights (at this time there was no collective selling and the clubs managed their own rights), he favoured a tendering process, going with the highest bidder on the assumption he was getting the best market value. If he had worked with a rights specialist, the club in all likelihood would have secured a better deal but then he wouldn’t have appeared as the rights expert to a board who didn’t have a deep knowledge of the subject. But to be fair to Dein, he traded on Arsenal’s status as a desirable addition to any sports agency’s portfolio of clients. Indeed so keen were the German agency UFA to represent Arsenal that they guaranteed them the huge sum for the time of £1 million for their broadcasting rights in the 1991/92 European Cup. This backfired spectacularly for UFA when the English champions lost to Benfica in the second-round, and it was obliged to hand over a seven-figure rights fee for a pair of relatively low-profile ties.