by Alex Fynn
In charge of the belated launch and development of the first Arsenal shop of any real substance at Finsbury Park station, Dein didn’t make full use of the retail experience of a long-time friend who ran a well-known men’s outfitter. “He doesn’t readily take advice though he thinks he does,” said his friend more in sorrow than in anger, feeling he could have done more to help Dein smooth out the inevitable wrinkles of a new retail business.
In the 1980s, neighbours Tottenham had rebuilt their East and West Stands, of which their corporate boxes were an integral part. It made Arsenal’s decision not to incorporate them in the redeveloped North Bank look all the more bizarre. If over 100 boxes could be filled at White Hart Lane surely there should have been no problem in matching that at Highbury, a venue closer to the city, offering a greater number of event-like fixtures, based on the comparative success and the aggressive marketing of the Premier League. The new North Bank stand might have been an impressive structure compared with the bland ones being erected elsewhere but it was not even maximising its season-ticket revenue, as prices of the bondholder’s seats were – allowing for inflation – held down for a decade whilst giving no opportunity to milk what would become a hungry hospitality market in the years that followed. It was no surprise then that as late as 1997 – five years into the life of the Premier League – Arsenal’s turnover was smaller than Tottenham’s, lagged behind that of Liverpool and Newcastle, and was less than a third of that of Manchester United. It was taking much longer than Dein envisaged when he was one of the prime agitators of the breakaway league for Arsenal to sit in their (in his view) rightful place at the top of the pile.
In the mid 1980s, Dein had supported Irving Scholar’s advocacy which brought about the reduction in the size of the First Division to 20 clubs, the introduction of play-offs and most significantly the abolition of gate sharing, which meant the big pay days for smaller clubs became a thing of the past. By the time the FA’s endorsement allowed the old First Division to break away and to create the Premier League it was back to 22 clubs, much to Dein’s distaste. Only Arsenal, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur voted against the increase. But the die was cast.
As his implacable adversary Chelsea chairman Ken Bates put it, “David Dein was so over the moon at getting his little Premier League, he couldn’t understand why Ken Bates was so supportive. We got a few things in there . . . he’s only now beginning to realise what hit him.” And enshrined in the constitution was one club one vote, which led irrevocably to the award of the live television contract for the new league to BSkyB, Rupert Murdoch’s television arm having gathered in BSB to become the only satellite option for football. As Bates explained, “The clubs did the Sky deal [the vote was 14–6 with, amazingly, two abstentions] because we were deter mined to smash the Big Five dominance and we were determined to get a fair share of the money . . . if the ITV deal had gone ahead, the Big Five clubs would have been perpetuated.” Outmanoeuvred, David Dein was mortified at the turn of events: “It will be seen as a black day for football . . . it was like amateur night . . . the way it was presented, the way it was negotiated beforehand and the way it was subsequently implemented . . . how can you create heroes on a minority channel?”
Further, as one of the chosen few who had previously received preferential treatment from ITV, Arsenal were not – despite all the hype of the new deal – materially better off. Compared to their sizeable share of the £18 million at stake for the last year of the ITV contract, the more democratic allocation of broadcasting funds for the member clubs of the new league (50% equally divided, 25% according to television appearances of which there was a minimum number for every club and 25% according to the position in the final table) allocated little more to Arsenal. The £35.5 million first year’s payment by Sky only made a significant difference to the smaller clubs outside the Big Five, of which Everton and Tottenham were soon reduced to the ranks by their lack of playing success. So much for the reputed sum of £304 million, which was based on including an estimate of overseas rights sales that were never realised. The actual sum paid by BSkyB for its five-year contract was just under £200 million.
In effect, the Big Five self-imposed money-making restrictions on themselves – at least in terms of the huge slice of the domestic television revenue pie – when they proposed the formation of the Premier League. From their position as one of the top dogs, Arsenal for the moment were back in the pack, with the objective of ensuring that they couldn’t be outflanked again.
CHAPTER TWO
TWO STEPS BACK AND ONE FORWARD
Arsenal fans might not give much thought to the dissolution of Yugoslavia that led to the war in the Balkans which claimed so many lives. But the conflict led to a sporting embargo and the football team being unceremoniously booted out of Euro 92 at the eleventh hour and replaced by Denmark. If Yugoslavia had participated, the sequence of events that led to Arsène Wenger’s arrival and Arsenal’s graduation to the status of one of the most popular and richest clubs in the world might never have happened. For without having seen him fire the Danes to an unexpected triumph in the tournament, it is highly unlikely George Graham would have purchased John Jensen, who inadvertently proved to be his nemesis. The Danish midfielder symbolised how the master had lost his touch in two ways. It was not only his lack of style as a central midfield player compared to his predecessors such as Thomas, Davis and Rocastle, the priority being winning the ball rather than how to use it once in possession. More pointedly, the negotiations surrounding his transfer ultimately led to Graham’s dismissal in disgrace.
George Graham’s downfall could not happen today. No longer do managers control the transfer and contract negotiations: after Graham’s departure, David Dein (and subsequently Ken Friar) would undertake this duty on behalf of the club. When Dein first arrived at Arsenal, he may well have harboured ambitions in this area, but his involvement on the football side was curtailed by Graham, determined to be master of all he surveyed. Sadly, the situation created opportunities for abuse: the ‘brown envelope’ or ‘bung’ culture, whereby the practice of managers receiving under-the-table payments as a cut of a transfer fee provided by a player and/or a selling club’s agent was all too prevalent. However, only Brian Clough and his Nottingham Forest aides were put in the dock alongside Graham as sacrificial scapegoats. (Moreover, any verdict against Clough was academic as he was already retired.)
Graham, who received a payment of £285,000 when Jensen was signed for £1.57 million from Brondby in July 1992 (and a further payment of £140,000 when he later bought Pål Lydersen) was brought to book not by the naive football authorities but by the Inland Revenue, concerned by the untaxed earnings of the Arsenal manager. They were alerted after the story first broke late in 1994 when Simon Greenberg, then a Mail on Sunday journalist and more recently Chelsea’s Director of Communications, was tipped off about the discrepancy between the figure that Brondby received for Jensen and the amount paid by Arsenal. The deal was set up by Norwegian agent Rune Hauge. Graham later recalled, “The meeting [with Hauge] was all very normal but the money came as a shock. I thought ‘Jesus, what a Christmas present. Fantastic.’ The ridiculous thing is that it wouldn’t have changed my life. I was on a good salary, but greed got the better of me. I’m as weak as the next man when it comes to temptation.”
There was a sense that the easy money would not be so readily available in the future and that Graham’s exposure had spoilt the clandestine arrangements practised by so many of his fellow managers. One of them pointedly remarked, “We all like a drink from time to time but the trouble with George was he wanted the whole bloody brewery.”
After the story came out, Graham was doomed, although he did hang on to his job for a few weeks. The fact that he had won three cups over the past two seasons doubtless prolonged his stay of execution. However, with the poor quality of the football on offer and the Highbury public enduring a fourth consecutive league campaign without having a shot at the title, the termin
al rot had set in.
It is debatable whether Graham was acting in the best interests of the club when these transfers were made. Certainly Pål Lydersen never looked good enough to be a Premier League player, making a limited number of first-team appearances, none notable for anything other than his mediocrity. Still, some argued that he didn’t stand out that much from many of his colleagues. Names such as David Hillier, Steve Morrow, Eddie McGoldrick, Ian Selley and Jimmy Carter are recalled by the fans as indicative of a slump in Arsenal’s fortunes, although some of them did play a part in the cup successes of the time.
Alan Smith remembers the team going off the boil as Graham seemed to lose his touch, with talk in the dressing room rife. “We just thought ‘this isn’t happening’. We were used to top-class players at the club and this was turgid stuff.” The tactics were pretty basic, described by Smith as “Wrighty, a big character, shouting for the ball and the players would hit him. It was not a creative midfield. Wrighty would get a goal and we would defend our lead. It made us a one-dimensional team.” Smith recalls his time partnering Wright as “the worst of my career, although it was not his fault. But if he didn’t score, invariably we didn’t, which detracted from our threat. We didn’t play with any width so I wasn’t getting too many crosses.” It was ironic that during this time, having for the most part sidelined Anders Limpar, Graham was offered Russian international winger Andrei Kanchelskis, but felt he was not what Arsenal required and allowed Manchester United to sign him. It was further evidence of a manager who had lost his way as Graham’s reject gave Alex Ferguson a potent threat, in tandem with Ryan Giggs, from each flank. Smith would have loved such service, remembering, “My confidence dropped and I was at a really low ebb and that went on and on for about three years. It was totally unenjoyable and I felt like I needed to move. George would not let me go as he hadn’t got a replacement.”
Smith now admits that the players got wind of the bung that led to Graham’s downfall before the story became public knowledge: “We thought, he’s buying players like Pål Lydersen because he’s getting knockbacks for it. We’d heard a whisper a few months before. One of the lads had said they’d heard it on good authority, the rumours persisted and we began to believe them. His sacking was a shock when it came, but by that stage we half sensed something was going to happen. As we weren’t championship contenders, it made it easier for the board.”
After the Premier League found Graham guilty of taking a bung from Rune Hauge (whose licence to practice as an agent was later withdrawn by FIFA) with the euphemism “Mr Graham did not act in the best interests of the club”, Arsenal finally dispensed with his services in February 1995 and shortly after he was banned from working in football by the FA for two years. Of course, he subsequently returned to manage Leeds and, of all clubs, Tottenham. It still seems remarkable that Alan Sugar could have hired a man who, three years before his appointment as Tottenham manager, had written in his autobiography, “I will always have Arsenal’s red blood running through my veins.” Still, Sugar lived to regret it and after a parting of the ways in 2001, he commented, “In my time at Tottenham I made a lot of mistakes, the biggest was possibly employing him.”
A stronger Arsenal board would have dismissed the manager as soon as he admitted the transgression and returned the money, which ultimately had come out of the club’s coffers as part of the transfer fees theoretically paid to the selling clubs, when in fact they went into the agent’s pocket. The directors left themselves open to a charge that they might have been prepared to forgive and forget by the fact that they allowed the manager to spend £6 million on three players (John Hartson, Chris Kiwomya and Glenn Helder) just days before his dismissal, none of whom subsequently remained at the club long enough to see out their contracts. After years of relative financial conservatism, the profligacy was akin to the last days of the Roman Empire, blowing the finances as the club’s reputation went up in smoke. Glenn Helder actually played his debut match hours after Graham’s sacking, having been signed only seven days before. Did the board really want to sack Graham, or did they do so because of the external pressure?
Meanwhile, across the Channel, after rejecting Bayern Munich, preferring to see out the last year of his contract with Monaco, a certain young coach was summarily fired after an inauspicious start to the 1994/95 French season. With Arsenal in turmoil during the last weeks of the George Graham era, at David Dein’s insistence Peter Hill-Wood took Arsène Wenger to lunch at his favourite restaurant – Ziani’s – a stone’s throw from his Chelsea home. But with Dr Jozef Venglos the only foreign coach in the Premier League hardly presenting a good advertisement for imported expertise – he lasted less than a year before suffering the fate of the majority of Doug Ellis’s hirelings – the general atmosphere in football boardrooms was not exactly liberal and Arsenal decided to make an appointment closer to home.
“I think at that moment we were nervous of hiring a foreign manager,” recalls Hill-Wood. So Graham’s right-hand man Stewart Houston took the reins on a caretaker basis for the remainder of the campaign. The team flirted with relegation – it must have taken the players time to adjust to the fact that ‘the Coneman’ (their derisory nickname for Houston stemming from his job of putting out the cones before training sessions) was now their boss – before putting a couple of key wins together over the Easter period to ease the pressure. This allowed them to concentrate on their ultimately unsuccessful defence of the Cup Winners’ Cup, when they lost the final to Real Zaragoza in extra time. Houston was retained on the staff when the apparently safe pair of hands of Bruce Rioch were hired in preference to Wenger. And there was a whiff of revolution in the air that summer as two genuine superstars were acquired from Italy.
Unlike his predecessor, Bruce Rioch was only too willing to delegate to Dein and give him carte blanche when it came to handling transfer negotiations. Even though he had been kept at arm’s length by Graham, Dein had capably demonstrated what he could do when the opportunity arose. One of his greatest coups had been the signing of Ian Wright in 1991. Dein later recalled the circumstances surrounding the move. “George Graham had identified Crystal Palace strikers Ian Wright and/or Mark Bright as being potential signings. At that time, I was speaking regularly with club chairmen, including Ron Noades from Palace. It was natural to speak about players. I was on the phone to Ron and asked him to tell me about Ian Wright and Mark Bright. Would he sell either of them? He said he was a ‘reluctant seller’, and that it would take a lot of money to prise one or the other away. I asked him what he called a lot of money, so he said, ‘Like £2 million for Mark Bright’, and that he wouldn’t take ‘less then £2.5 million for Ian Wright’. I asked him if that meant he would sell Ian Wright for £2.5 million. He said, ‘I suppose, if it was offered it, I’d have to take it.’ So I said to him, ‘Ron, I’m offering you £2.5 million for Ian Wright’. The phone went quiet. He said, ‘Are you serious?’ I said, ‘Yes, I’m offering £2.5 million. You said you’d sell him for that, you are a man of your word, I’m offering you two and a half million.’ And to his credit, he stuck by his word. He said, ‘You’ve got yourself a deal’. And Ian Wright was at Highbury that afternoon for a medical. George Graham was having – of all things – a golf day with the press. I rang through to him on the course, and said, ‘I’ve got good news for you: we’ve just signed Ian Wright.’ And so George announced it to the press when he finished his golf.”
“Ian Wright was almost unique,” Dein later reflected. “When he came in, and Ken Friar was doing the paperwork, he said, ‘Where do I sign?’ We said, ‘But what about your terms?’ He said, ‘Where do I sign?’ He was not interested at all in salary or bonuses, just ‘Where do I sign?’ And that spoke volumes to me.” By then, Dein certainly had enough experience to label the incident as atypical. But as the vice-chairman took on greater responsibility for transfers and wage negotiations, things would be different from the days when Graham would lay down the law on deals with his ‘take it or leave
it’ approach.
The mid-1990s were a free-wheeling time with opportunistic agents and sports lawyers anxious to strike a deal at a time when exclusive representation and honouring contracts were figments of many a chairman’s imagination. At home in the boardrooms of the leading Italian clubs, in the summer of 1995 Dein became aware that Internazionale were prepared to offload Dutch striker Dennis Bergkamp. Although sports lawyer and Arsenal season-ticket holder Mel Goldberg is convinced to this day he has a claim to an introduction fee, Dein felt free to deal directly with the Italians rather than go through another party because of his club’s policy of only dealing with agents as players’ representatives.
With club secretary Ken Friar, he flew to Milan and returned with the signature of, for the first time in Arsenal’s history, a true international superstar. (Sale time in Italy obviously appealed to him as a short while later, after spending four seasons in Serie A, David Platt was signed from Sampdoria.) For once price was no obstacle: £7.5 million for Bergkamp and £4.75 million for Platt, obliterating the previous record outlay of £2.5 million for Ian Wright.
Bergkamp arrived in June 1995 aged 26, thus becoming one of the first stars to come to England with his best years still ahead of him. “I can think of no other top European club that has kept this prize [signing a world class player] from its supporters for so long,” reflected author and Arsenal fan Nick Hornby, “which is why it had become ever more difficult to describe Arsenal as a top European club.” No longer. “I think Arsenal took on a new aura when Dennis Bergkamp arrived,” said Arsène Wenger’s goalkeeping coach and former Arsenal double winner Bob Wilson. “I love the guy. I love what he has brought to the club. His stature in terms of having him at Arsenal and seeing that he likes England, likes Arsenal, has brought other players to the club.”