by John Crace
Except Redknapp had everything to do with Bournemouth’s financial woes as the straightforward profit and loss account on the buying and selling of players only ever tells half the story. It’s the wage bill that tells the other half and Bournemouth’s was out of control. ‘Harry was brilliant at persuading footballers who might not normally have considered dropping down to the Third Division – Paul Miller, Kevin Bond, Jimmy Case and the like – to come and play for him at Bournemouth,’ says Pete Johnson. ‘Part of the persuasion was pure charm; Harry would make them feel special, as if moving to Bournemouth would showcase their talent and make them a target for the big clubs within a year. The other part was money. Harry would offer them salaries that were far higher than other clubs in the division were paying. By the end of the 1992 season, the wage bill was running an unsustainable 100 per cent of the club’s turnover.’
You could argue this was a case of ‘chairman beware’. It’s the manager’s job to get in the best players he can and, if the chairman is stupid enough to sign off unaffordable salaries, then it’s his and the club’s lookout. Nothing to do with me, guv. But even if you go with this line of argument, it doesn’t say much for Redknapp’s sense of financial awareness or responsibility, because another important part of a manager’s job is to build a team for the mid- and the long-term future, to preserve the club for the fans and the community. Walking blindly into a situation where a club would either require a massive injection of capital or fire-sell its best assets to survive is folly. If Redknapp didn’t know that the club was nearing financial breaking point, he ought to have made it his business to find out; and if he did know but didn’t think it was in some way his responsibility, then he lacked judgement.
Whichever it was, Redknapp doesn’t seem to have been willing to work out a solution with the club. When Hayward wanted more say in the day-to-day running of the club, Redknapp got the hump. His role was being compromised. If Redknapp had just walked away at that point, then the Bournemouth fans might have waved him off and wished him well.
‘Whatever his down sides, he had been a good manager,’ says Glenn Rodgers. ‘He’d given us some great times and, even though the club was in a financial mess, no one really blamed him for it – though looking back at how he’s managed other clubs since, maybe we should have. It was the fact he insisted on taking £100,000 in compensation with him. He might have been legally owed the money, but it just felt as if all those times he had gone on about how much he loved the club and how Bournemouth meant everything to him had just been bullshit really. The bottom line was that what really came first for Harry was Harry. He didn’t mind if the club went to the wall so long as he got the money he was owed. We appreciated he might have gripes with the chairman and the board, but taking the money was a classless slap in the face for the fans.’
Redknapp didn’t see it that way. He felt he had given the club eight years’ loyal service, adding he had turned down approaches from West Ham, Aston Villa and Stoke to manage them, though just how advanced these conversations had ever become was not made clear. He had also made the club money on transfer deals and said he’d opted not to take a salary for four months to help the club’s cash flow, which rather suggested he did know precisely how precarious Bournemouth’s finances really were. But he took the £100,000 pay-off anyway.
‘If those cynical fans still believe I shouldn’t have been paid that hundred grand,’ he said, ‘then I give you the name of Jamie Redknapp, signed for nothing and sold for £350,000 with another £350,000 eventually reaching the club after Jamie had made so many appearances for Liverpool. A man’s entitled to £100,000 if a club gets £700,000 for his own kid.’
Jamie’s transfer to Liverpool did work to Bournemouth’s advantage, but it wasn’t entirely through the altruism that Redknapp chose to portray. Even as a young kid, Jamie had shown exceptional football talent and Harry had never hidden the fact that he regarded his son’s career as his own special, long-term project, and it’s become another landmark of the Redknapp legend that he used to tell Sandra he was taking Jamie to school when he was actually driving him to extra football coaching.
By the age of fourteen, Jamie was considered to be one of the best prospects in the county – so much so that the local FA had to step in to limit the number of games he could play to make sure he didn’t get injured, as on some weekends he was in demand to play for his school, the Bournemouth youth side and the Dorset county side. ‘He was remarkable,’ says Pete Johnson. ‘He would join the Bournemouth first team for a training exercise where everyone would get points for which part of the goal target they hit – the corners being worth the most – and he regularly came out as one of the best. Even the pros were impressed.’
Jamie made his debut for Bournemouth as a sixteen-year-old in 1990 and, at the beginning of the 1990/91 season, was loaned out to Spurs. He was recalled to the club before Christmas and the following January was sold to Liverpool for £350,000, making him one of the most expensive seventeen-year-olds in English football at the time. Pete Johnson had been on the wrong end of Redknapp’s tongue for suggesting it was a big move, but he wasn’t the only one to be surprised by the deal. ‘As far as I remember,’ says one Spurs insider, ‘the reason Jamie was recalled to Bournemouth from us is that he was feeling homesick. So it did come as rather a shock to see he’d gone to Liverpool just a few months later. I guess he’d got over his homesickness by then!’
The lasting impression of Jamie’s transfer to Liverpool is that it has Harry’s fingerprints all over it. Harry and the then Liverpool manager, Kenny Dalglish, had been friends since the Scottish striker had had a brief trial spell at West Ham in the late 1960s before signing for Celtic, and both Harry and Sandra had been to stay with Dalglish the year before Jamie joined Liverpool. ‘I think he was a little bit too young to leave home then,’ Dalglish told Liverpool TV in 2011, ‘and his mum didn’t want to let go of him. The meeting that we had at West Ham all those years ago wouldn’t have done any harm with that. The fact that it was Liverpool that Jamie was coming to, a club Harry has a great deal of respect for, wouldn’t have done any harm either. He’s a good guy and there is a bit of a friendship there.’
There was nothing coincidental or fortuitous about Jamie’s move; it was the maturation of the long-term investment that Harry had made in his son’s career ever since he’d given him his first coaching lesson. The transfer may have been good for Bournemouth, but it would never have taken place if it hadn’t suited the plans of the Redknapp family as a whole. So to cite his son’s move as a symbol of everything Redknapp had done for the club and a justification for taking the £100,000 is – not to put too fine a point on it – disingenuous.
This, then, makes the reason for Redknapp taking the money all the more fascinating. Calling him greedy is just too glib. As Redknapp said at his trial, he had refused the offer of the payout he was due when he left Portsmouth for the first time, suggesting the club donate the money to a youth charity. This wasn’t the action of an inherently greedy man who would satisfy his selfish aims regardless of circumstance. Neither does the suggestion that he took the money because it was a matter of principle really stack up; he had been owed the Portsmouth money and he had been owed the four months’ wages he had declined, which was hardly the act of a man who insists that every last contractual obligation has to be paid in blood. Indeed, four or five years later, when he was settled at West Ham, Redknapp made an interest-free loan to Bournemouth to help them through another financial crisis. Again, this isn’t the action of someone who is by nature greedy, rather it’s the action of someone big-hearted – albeit, possibly, a big-hearted person who wasn’t entirely comfortable with how he had behaved when he left the club, but was still living in the area and wanted to make some kind of amends.
The only thing that does make sense is that Redknapp must have felt that he actually needed the £100,000 severance payment. He could make do without four months’ wages when he still had the guarantee of a job an
d the promise of a regular salary in the future but, when the plug was pulled, he felt insecure. Like most of us, Redknapp appears to be happiest making the big gestures when life is sweet – or sweet enough – but when the pressure is on, self-interest kicks in.
Remember what it was like in the early 1990s. Property and share prices had crashed in the late 1980s and were still struggling to recover. If Redknapp’s investment portfolio, such as it was, was in good shape it would have been a miracle. Remember also that Redknapp was probably not quite so confident about the future as his happy-go-lucky public persona might have suggested. He might have hoped – or indeed been promised – that his old friend, Billy Bonds, would come running to his rescue to offer him the job of assistant manager at West Ham, but he couldn’t be sure. People make a lot of promises in football and not all of them come true.
In May 1992, Redknapp was forty-five years old and hadn’t exactly taken the football world by storm. He’d done relatively well at Bournemouth and had acquired a reputation both for lively one-liners in press conferences and as a manager whose teams played decent football and could pull off the odd remarkable result. But Bournemouth were pretty much in the same position in the Third Division as they had been when he had taken over. Redknapp had got them promoted and he had got them relegated, and they were now in a much worse financial state. This wasn’t a CV to set the hearts of potential employers racing, and it must have occurred to Redknapp that it was just possible his time in football – the one thing he loved doing above all else – was coming to an end. The prospect of driving a yellow cab around Bournemouth must have been even less enticing than it had been ten years previously.
And that’s almost certainly why he took the £100,000.
4
England Expects
February 2012
In the week following Spurs’ 5-0 victory over Newcastle, football’s aristocracy queued up to pay homage to the England manager in waiting, who had gone to Dubai for four days’ R&R with his wife to unwind from the stress of the trial. ‘There’s only one candidate in my mind . . . and a lot of people’s minds,’ said Mark Hughes, manager of QPR. ‘They will get the man they want in the end.’
‘Harry has the experience, the knowledge and also the support of 90 per cent of the people in England because he is the one,’ said Paolo Di Canio, who had played under Redknapp at West Ham and was now proving himself a more than capable manager at Swindon.
‘If Redknapp decides to stay and they give me a call, I wouldn’t be available,’ said Alan Pardew, Newcastle’s manager and one of the few others notionally in the frame for the England job. ‘Six or seven years down the line, maybe I would be. I think Harry is the right age and has the right experience.’
The West Ham manager Sam Allardyce was similarly unequivocal. ‘It’s obvious. He hasn’t just been talked about now, he’s been talked about since he started to become successful at Tottenham. It’s not unusual that Harry is the number-one choice in the country.’
Most emphatic of all in his endorsement was Sir Alex Ferguson, the most successful club manager in English football history. ‘There’s no doubt Harry is the best man,’ he said. ‘He’s got the experience and that’s important. He’s got the personality, the knowledge of the game, and he’s changed the fortunes of every club he’s been at. It’s the right choice.’
It had all the feel of a political party’s leadership election, with the grandees having checked which way the wind was blowing and making sure their nomination for the clear front-runner was duly heard and noted. Even Gary Lineker, the BBC Match of the Day presenter, who usually grabbed the opportunity to sit on the fence on any given issue, came out in support of Redknapp. Get your favours in early; that way, there’s a greater chance of them being returned some time later. If anyone had any doubts about Redknapp, they were keeping them to themselves. After all, why risk making a potentially extremely powerful enemy?
England international footballers were also rushing to get their congratulations in first. England striker Wayne Rooney tweeted, ‘Got to be English to replace him [Capello]. Harry Redknapp for me.’ The Manchester United defender, Rio Ferdinand, was quick to agree. ‘Everyone wants Harry to be the next England manager,’ he said – a tweet he would have some cause to regret several months down the line. And just to prove he had no hard feelings at being left on the substitute’s bench by Redknapp for much of the season, Spurs striker Jermain Defoe also joined in the Redknapp love-in – although some people might have detected the faintest evidence of gritted teeth.
Redknapp took it all in his stride on his return from Dubai. There had been no official confirmation of the FA’s thinking – or even any sign it was ‘thinking’ at all, although that in itself was not unusual – about whether a shortlist had been drawn up for the England job or if a time frame for the appointment had been decided. Redknapp abhors a vacuum and he happily filled in the blanks with the confidence of a gambling man who could spot an odds-on favourite when he saw one. No diplomatic silences for him.
First, he insisted he was committed to staying at Tottenham until the end of the season and urged the FA to delay making any announcement until the end of May. ‘I wouldn’t want the players to think, “Is he going . . . is he staying?” I’ve got to be here until the end of the season, whatever happens. I owe that to Tottenham,’ he said, apparently unaware of, or different to, the fact that just by making that statement he had guaranteed his players would spend the rest of the season thinking, ‘So he’s going then.’
Redknapp then went on to talk through the complications arising from England’s participation in Euro 2012 in Poland and the Ukraine that summer. Initially, he appeared to have ruled out one suggestion that had been floated of the FA making a short-term appointment just for the tournament. ‘If somebody takes it to the end of the Euros and it does not go well, where do you go then? Back to your club with your tail between your legs? I think it’s a job that somebody has to do full-time. You have got to make a decision on somebody and give it to them.’ Redknapp then raised the possibility of his becoming the England manager on a part-time, job-share basis for the duration of the Euros in the event that the FA wanted to delay making a permanent appointment until afterwards.
As with most of Redknapp’s streams of consciousness, his was a decidedly disjointed narrative. Indeed, it left things even more vague and unsettled than if he had said nothing. He’d be staying at Spurs . . . he wouldn’t be staying at Spurs; he’d accept the England job . . . but only on a full-time basis; he’d manage England for the Euros . . . he wouldn’t manage England for the Euros; he’d consider a part-time job . . . he wouldn’t consider a part-time job.
To add to the sense of the surreal, Redknapp was highlighting precisely the issues you would have expected a spokesman for the FA to be raising; and in the FA’s silence, it was hard not to assume that Redknapp had become the de facto voice of the FA, that what he was saying had their approval.
Redknapp might have been a bit demob happy following his acquittal, but he was no mug. If he’d thought he was stepping out of line and jeopardizing his chances of getting the England job, he’d probably have shut up sharpish. It’s stretching things to imagine Redknapp’s press interviews had been Machiavellian brinkmanship to force the FA into giving him the job before they were ready, so the only logical conclusion was that, while no official approaches to Redknapp had been made, the unofficial channels were taking care of business to the satisfaction of both parties.
That’s certainly the way the football press seemed to read the situation. There were a few highly speculative reports that the FA were considering Barcelona’s Pep Guardiola and Real Madrid’s José Mourinho – they should have been so lucky – but the overwhelming consensus was that the next manager had to be English. And, when the names of Roy Hodgson, Sam Allardyce and Alan Pardew – all of whom were more-than-competent club managers but hardly men who gave the impression they could inspire a team to take on the Spanish or the German
s – were offered as possibilities, that manager had to be Harry Redknapp.
Many papers went so far as to report confidently that the FA were prepared to wait until the end of the season before making an approach for Redknapp. The only uncertainty was the exact amount of compensation the Spurs chairman, Daniel Levy, would be able to extract from the FA for allowing Redknapp to break his contract. Spurs had paid Portsmouth £5 million to secure Redknapp’s services in 2008 and the club would definitely want that back, and Levy would almost certainly demand every penny of the fifteen months left on Redknapp’s Spurs contract, so a figure of £8–£10 million seemed likely. A significant amount of money, but not one that anybody suggested might be a deal breaker.
What nobody gave any real thought to was whether Redknapp actually wanted the job. After the trial had finished, Redknapp had made a lot of the right noises: ‘Who wouldn’t want to be England manager if everyone thinks you can do a good job?’ But he had also raised one very obvious drawback. ‘Everyone who’s had the job has been slaughtered at some stage, haven’t they? Terry [Venables] is the only one since Alf [Ramsey] who hasn’t had any grief. We’ve seen Ron Greenwood, a great manager of mine at West Ham, and Bobby Robson, a fantastic football man, get terrible stick as England manager.’ He might just as well have added Kevin Keegan, Steve McClaren, Glenn Hoddle and Graham Taylor to that list.
Neither was he under any illusions about the difficulties that lay in wait after Euro 2012. ‘Going to the next World Cup in Brazil [in 2014] isn’t going to be easy, is it? Not even for Spain, as good as the reigning world champions are,’ he added. ‘If one of the South American teams doesn’t win that World Cup, it would be a shock, wouldn’t it? Even so, you look at all that, then realize that someone has to manage England. As an eternal optimist, why wouldn’t you think, “I can do that”?’