by Sugar, Alan
I just listened and waited until he finished, then calmly told him we certainly were going to pursue it. Here’s a little tip I’ve learned when it comes to negotiation: the art of silence. Imagine the exchange of words I’ve just described. After I said we were going to pursue it, I just went silent. A silence like this can feel like ages when, in fact, it’s just a few seconds and it forces the other person to continue the conversation. This always works.
Normally, the other person will say, ‘Hello, hello, are you still there?’
All you need to do is say, ‘Yes, I’m still here.’
In the end, he stopped waffling and asked if there was any way we could settle this matter rather than get involved in more court action.
All I wanted was the money released. I told him I’d noticed in Seagate’s annual accounts – made public in keeping with American Stock Exchange rules – that they had declared a provision of $160m for the Amstrad litigation issue. I pointed out that this was $10m more than the amount in escrow and I put it to him that the $10m was to deal with further legal costs coming from arguing the appeal and the punitive damages case. He didn’t comment.
I then told him I had a great idea – if he would agree to pay the $150m and drop the appeal, and we dropped our punitive damages action, then he would be able to release the $10m they had set aside back into their accounts, thus boosting their next financial year’s profits. He went silent and told me he’d get back to me. Seagate was suffering a downturn in their business and I had clearly touched a nerve. The guy called me back a few hours later, agreeing to my idea.
Once the cash was released, in accordance with the scheme of arrangement, it was distributed to all the Old Amstrad shareholders. I recall a newspaper commenting that most shareholders had taken this litigation entitlement note with a pinch of salt, thinking they’d never get any money out of it – yet here they were sharing a windfall of $150m.
*
Despite the fact that Claude Littner and Daniel were doing a very good job on the day-to-day running of Tottenham Hotspur, the club still rested on my shoulders with regard to providing finances for the manager to put together a team.
After beating up the FA and getting Spurs back into the FA Cup, we went on a great run. In fact, we did so well that we got to the semi-finals, against Everton, which was to be played at Leeds United’s Elland Road ground. I flew up to Leeds in a private plane with Simon and some of the directors. Funnily enough, the minibus taking us from the airport to Elland Road had ‘Kelly’s Minibus Hire’ painted on the side! Considering that Graham Kelly was the person who’d given us so much aggravation, I thought that if we ended up winning today, a photo of us being taken to the ground in this minibus would go down a treat with the media. Someone there had a camera and took a picture of us standing with Kelly’s minibus.
Gerry Francis had not been able to train with the players all week, as his son was in hospital and Gerry had spent a lot of time with him, but he managed to come to the semi-final, as his son had started to recover.
At Elland Road, they’d built a new section to their stadium, a massive East stand which held about the same amount of people as the other three sides. The FA had allocated this stand to Tottenham fans. From an acoustics point of view, since the other three sides were full of Everton fans, it sounded as if Everton were at home and we were plonked in an away stand. It all seemed a bit unfair.
Darren Anderton, labelled ‘Sicknote’ by the fans because he was hardly ever available to play for us, was still complaining that there was something wrong with him. He was finally persuaded to go out and play – with a big bandage around his knee!
We lost the game, but the 4–1 score didn’t tell the true story. We were 2–1 down with ten minutes to go, but in trying to press for an equaliser, we left ourselves open at the back and Everton scored twice.
The private plane flew us back to Heathrow, where Simon and I caught the Concorde to New York to connect down to Florida to join Ann. As Simon reminds me, I never spoke a word to him for the entire flight. Our dream of winning the trophy that year was over and I was gutted with the result. We’d gone through so much to get back in the Cup, only to be scuppered by a series of disasters, such as Gerry not being available to train the team all week, the unfair stand allocation at Elland Road and a few stupid mistakes on the pitch.
Despite finishing seventh in the league that year – clearly nowhere near the relegation zone – Popescu decided he no longer wanted to play for Tottenham. At the last game of the season, he told all the players he was leaving and simply walked out!
Popescu had turned into a great player. A lot of people were writing about him in the media and Gerry really admired his defensive skills. Behind the scenes, however, his agent had set up a deal for him to join Barcelona. What Popescu had forgotten when he arrogantly walked out was that he would not be able to play for anybody, as he was contracted to Tottenham. Eventually, I was contacted by the chief executive officer of Barcelona, asking me to negotiate a transfer for Popescu. It was clear the player was not going to stay with us, so I accepted a fee of £4m, which was some kind of consolation, as we’d only paid £2.7m for him at the start of the season.
Klinsmann was also making noises about wanting to leave, invoking the clause in his contract that stated he could leave at the end of the first season. I reminded him and his agent, Andy Gross, that the clause was meant as a get-out if we got relegated. Regrettably, in the euphoria of signing him and having taken Klinsmann and Gross at their word, I didn’t articulate the point about relegation in the contract. Nevertheless, I was angry with Klinsmann and Gross and said they were reneging on a gentlemen’s agreement. Gross kept referring to the strict letter of the contract; he said they were not reneging and that Klinsmann was entitled to go. His year at Tottenham had been a great advertisement for him, as he’d played brilliantly and was loved by all the fans. Now he had re-established himself as a top-class striker, he was head-hunted by Bayern Munich’s Franz Beckenbauer. Reluctantly, I had to let him go and Bayern paid us the agreed contractual compensation.
There are some stupid things I did in my football days – maybe it was something to do with my short temper. When Klinsmann left, I made lots of complaints to the FA about the approaches made by Bayern Munich and what the clause in his contract implied, but it all fell on deaf ears.
Klinsmann told the media he had enjoyed his year at Tottenham and that he wanted to personally thank the chairman, Alan Sugar, for letting him go to Bayern Munich and that he would give me a signed shirt. The BBC wanted to interview me about this incident because they knew I was very angry. The interviewer came to my office in Brentwood and brought up the Klinsmann departure, telling me he thought it was a nice touch that Klinsmann had given me a signed shirt. I don’t know to this day whether he was deliberately winding me up but, on camera, I got up, grabbed the shirt (which was in my office), screwed it up and threw it at him, saying he could go and clean his car with it as far as I was concerned. Not one of the moments I’m proud of.
That incident, of course, was manna from heaven for the media. Next day, the Sun ran a double-page spread and a little competition offering the Klinsmann shirt I’d chucked at the BBC reporter as the prize. I guess my over-reaction was a result of real frustration, as Klinsmann was not only a good player, but was expert at manipulating the media. Daniel and I experienced how he would turn on the charm when a camera was there, but off-camera he could be more difficult. I felt that the charm he could turn on at the flick of a switch made him seem a little sly, and in fact on one of our trips on the boat, Daniel and I jokingly made up some new lyrics to the famous Dad’s Army song.
Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Klinsmann,
When you smile upon our screens?
Fans think you’re great and you’re such a lovely guy,
But, off the camera, you’re really a bit sly.
So who do you think you are kidding, Mr Klinsmann,
When you smile upon
our screens?
We now needed to recruit some more players and, to add insult to injury, Nick Barmby, who had signed a new contract with us earlier in the season, also declared he wanted to go to Middlesbrough. Things were crumbling around Gerry – he’d lost Klinsmann and Popescu, Sicknote was never available to play and now Barmby wanted to leave. Gerry didn’t want to let him go, but the player wanted away. I put a £6m price tag on him, which in those days was a record fee. Bryan Robson, Middlesbrough’s manager, protested that this was outrageous and I was standing in the player’s way, stopping him from progressing in his career.
I told him I didn’t give a shit about the player’s career because Barmby didn’t give a shit about us. The player had signed a deal with us no more than a year earlier and now wanted to leave. I told Robson that if he wanted the player, then that was the price.
After a lot of argy-bargy, I ended up doing the deal for £6m with Steve Gibson, the chairman of Middlesbrough and a very nice fellow. Barmby’s transfer made the headlines in the next day’s newspapers because of the record fee. It was particularly noteworthy because Tottenham had only paid something like £100,000 to Hull when we bought him as a youth player, a fact that got a lot of admiration from my fellow Premier League chairmen, but obviously didn’t go down well with the fans.
Gerry had identified a young striker at Crystal Palace he liked the look of – Chris Armstrong. David Hyams, the corporate lawyer at Amstrad, was a mad Palace fan and we were always ribbing each other over our respective clubs. It so happened that Chris Armstrong and his agent came to negotiate a contract with me at Amstrad’s Brentwood headquarters. Having signed him for Tottenham, I called David Hyams in his second-floor office and asked him to come up to the tenth floor, as I had some serious news for him that would affect him personally.
He must have wondered what I was going on about. You can imagine his face when he came into my office and saw his hero, Chris Armstrong, sitting there. I said to David, ‘This chap has just signed for Spurs and I thought you’d be delighted to be the first to hear it.’
He was as sick as a parrot. ‘Thank you very much, Alan, very funny. Very, very funny.’ He turned around and walked out of the room.
My actions the previous season to shore up the team with the acquisitions of Klinsmann, Popescu and Dumitrescu had been rather a bold move for a British club. While there were some foreign players in the UK before this point, the arrival of this trio started an influx. So much so that when Klinsmann and Popescu left, I was contacted by loads of foreign agents to see if we were interested in replacements. I didn’t know half of the players being offered to me. I’d just tell Gerry that so-and-so had been on the phone and offered me a Carlos Kickaball mark-2.
I got a call from a fellow who said he represented Dennis Bergkamp, who apparently was a Tottenham fan and had all the old Spurs players plastered on his bedroom wall when he was a kid. I’ve lost count of the number times an agent has spun this line to me!
Gerry hadn’t really caught on that I wasn’t your typical club chairman. They say every football fan is a manager – well, some chairmen are glorified fans with power who want to be involved in player selection. Old-fashioned managers like Gerry saw this as the most heinous of crimes, and I agree. However, Gerry misinterpreted my frequent reports about the calls I was getting as me interfering and insisting we buy this player or that player. So when I told him someone had called me about Dennis Bergkamp, he exploded. ‘Look, I am the fucking manager, right? And I pick the fucking players, not you.’
‘What are you going on about, Gerry?’
‘I pick the players, right? I’m not interested in all these players you keep coming up with. It’s my job to decide on players.’
‘Yes, I know that. I’m not saying we should buy them, I just tell you when people have been on the phone. I am just passing information on to you to see if you are interested or not – that’s normal, right? What’s wrong with that? Do you want me to ignore these calls? I haven’t got a fucking clue who Dennis Bergkamp is – he could be Denis Thatcher as far as I’m concerned.’ I don’t think Gerry had been spoken to this way by past chairmen. He could see I was angry.
‘Oh, okay then, when you put it that way, I suppose you’re right. Anyway, Bergkamp is not a striker; he’s more of a midfield player.’
‘Fine, well, we’ll leave it at that then. I’m just passing on the information – you do what you want with it. If you want to pursue any of the leads I give you, it’s completely up to you.’
When it comes to managers, no one, let alone the chairman, should suggest players to them. It’s what I call the ‘not invented here’ syndrome. I’ve seen this many a time in business, when the person in charge belligerently rejects ideas they see as an encroachment on their seniority. If I told a manager I could get hold of Zidane, Kaka and Ronaldo for a hundred grand each, I’d see the suggestion rejected with a weak excuse. I learned quickly, both in football and in business, that the art of overcoming this is to put things in such a way that it looks like the idea has come from the person who’s supposed to be in charge. On the rare occasions I was contacted by an agent about a player who David Pleat or I felt was a good buy, I adopted this tactic, telling the agent, ‘Call the manager directly and don’t mention that you’ve spoken to me.’ If it did go somewhere, then when the manager informed me, I would feign surprise and say, ‘That’s a good idea.’
*
In the 1995–6 season, Chris Armstrong had a moderate impact, but regrettably he suffered a bad ankle injury which kept him out for quite a long time. Gerry’s team performed reasonably and we finished mid-table, as we did the following season.
I’m fast-tracking the football story for two reasons. Firstly, it’s painful to recall all the events which effectively turned out to be a waste of my time, and secondly, to tell the whole story would need a book of its own.
At the end of the 1996–7 season, we lost the last game to Coventry at home. Gerry Francis told me after the match that Teddy Sheringham wanted to have a discussion with us both. If there was one criticism of Gerry, it would be this: he should never have allowed me to discuss football matters with players like Sheringham.
We all met in Claude Littner’s office after the game. Sheringham, who still had two years to run on his old contract, demanded I tell him which players we were going to bring in next season, so he could decide whether or not he wished to remain at the club – this despite the fact that he was in contract and couldn’t walk out! His attitude wound me up. I told him it was none of his business, save to say there was a budget for players and the manager would decide which ones he wanted to buy. I was certainly not prepared to discuss target players with him.
Sheringham said, ‘That’s not good enough.’
I lost my temper with him and told him, ‘If that’s not good enough, you can go. Clear off – get yourself a contract somewhere else.’ I walked out.
When I got home that evening, Gerry called me and said, ‘Teddy doesn’t really want to go; it’s just his immature manner. He thought that was the way he needed to talk to you. He just put himself over badly. He’s a good lad really – he doesn’t even use an agent.’
I told him that Sheringham had been hostile to me since I’d sacked Venables and, unlike the other players, I’d never had any dialogue with him. He had distanced himself from me. I continued, ‘Gerry, the manner in which he has spoken to me, the chairman and owner, is disgraceful. If he wants to stay at this club, he should call first to apologise, then to see if we can discuss a contract. I certainly won’t be calling him.’
Gerry should never have allowed this situation to arise – he should have dealt with the player via the club secretary, not put me a position where a player was arrogantly demanding things from me. It would be a dangerous situation indeed if I were ever to be dictated to by a player.
Sheringham called me at my office. He didn’t apologise, he just announced himself. I said, ‘I don’t want to mess about. Let’s
cut straight to the point and get this contract over and done with quickly.’
In short, Sheringham wanted £1m a year and a five-year contract. Gerry told me to sign him for three years only because of his age (he was thirty-one at the time). Statistically, based on other players of his age, it was unlikely he’d be good enough in three years’ time to perform at the highest level, so Gerry’s decision was a reasonable one to make at the time.
Sheringham, however, was adamant he was not signing unless he had a five-year deal. Again, he stated this in a very arrogant manner. Looking back, I think he was trying to be some sort of tough guy, imagining that’s the way you deal in business. I think he’d picked up his negotiating skills watching Del Boy on TV. It went down like a lead balloon.
I told him it was impossible for us to sign him for five years and suggested that he take my word for it that if after three years he was still playing well, we would certainly extend his contract.
He refused, but I told him to go away and think about it and call me back later. His attitude was disgusting in that he was dogmatic in his insistence on five years, and made it clear it was non-negotiable. He eventually called me back to say he’d decided he wasn’t going to sign for us because we wouldn’t give him the contract he wanted. I told him maybe we could agree to four years, but he insisted on five years and told me to take it or leave it. I had to say I’d leave it. I finished by telling him that if he sent me a letter requesting a transfer, I would let him go.
Sheringham went off to join the England squad under the management of Glenn Hoddle and during the close season I sold him to Manchester United for the same amount of money we’d paid Nottingham Forest several years earlier.
The irony was that Sheringham went on to play for a good few years afterwards, both for Manchester United and England. He kept himself very fit and had we given him the five-year contract, he could have played for Tottenham right through. But, as I’ve said, I was guided by Gerry Francis, who quite rightly assumed that three years was prudent at the time, given Sheringham’s age.