by Sugar, Alan
I had never met Glenn Hoddle or spoken to him personally, but as a so-called loyal Tottenham man through and through, his comments to the media about Sheringham’s departure were not helpful. He gave an interview saying that this was a bad time to disrupt poor Teddy with uncertainty over his club future. He said he needed him fully focused, with a clear head, to do a good job for England. On top of this, Hoddle was waffling on about his concerns over Darren Anderton being fit to play for England.
It got to the stage where I made contact with Hoddle at the FA to ask why he was poking his nose into our club’s affairs. We had struggled to get Anderton fit after his numerous injuries, as of course it was in our interest to do, and I was wound up by Hoddle’s public comments. Effectively, he was suggesting that we didn’t know what we were doing.
When I spoke to him, it was clear that he had a dialogue going with Anderton. Hoddle told me that Spurs’ training and physio regime was treating Anderton incorrectly. He’d heard that at our traditional pre-season training session, Gerry had taken the players for a run through Epping Forest to get them psyched up. Hoddle commented, ‘This is all wrong, Alan – you made Darren run up hills over rough ground.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
‘What?! What did you say? Oh dear, the poor diddums professional footballer was being asked to run! Are you bleedin’ joking, Glenn, or what? Are you taking the piss?’
‘No, Alan, I’m not. I’ve spoken to Darren and he wants to see Eileen Drewery. She’s done wonders for other players and I hope you don’t object.’
I didn’t have a clue who Eileen Drewery was. My immediate assumption was that she was some doctor or expert in sports injuries. I also didn’t know that Anderton was seeing her already, in his own time.
I met with Gerry and our club physio Tony and told them about my conversation with Hoddle. I asked Tony about this woman and expected to hear about the special medical techniques she employed. Imagine my shock to hear she was simply a faith healer who asked the player to lie on a bed while she hovered her hands over the offending injury.
‘So that’s it?’ I exclaimed. Anderton lies on a bed while Eileen waves her hands over him, telling him to have “positive thoughts”? I don’t believe it – he’s lying there thinking of England while schmock-me is paying him twenty grand a week! Are you fucking joking or what?’
It was amazing how Anderton always seemed to manage to turn up and play for England, but when he returned to Tottenham he claimed his injury had come back again. I could not understand how Gerry was able to stand by and let this go on, but it seems you can’t argue with someone who says they have pain.
It seemed to me that some players just did what they wanted, when it suited them.
*
During the close season, I bought Les Ferdinand, a player Gerry wanted, having known him from his QPR days. I also bought David Ginola, who turned out to be one of the greatest players ever to perform at White Hart Lane. I’d been negotiating with Newcastle for over a week over Les Ferdinand and Ginola and had struck a deal for Ferdinand when, in a pre-season match, their main striker, Alan Shearer, suffered a serious injury (which ended up keeping him out of football for nearly two years). Freddie Fletcher, Newcastle’s commercial manager, tried to renege on the deal so as to keep Ferdinand, but they had signed a contract. I told them they had to stick to it otherwise there would be problems with the league, to whom I most certainly would have complained.
Once again, I was on my boat when we signed Ginola. He called me and asked where I was located in the South of France. He was coming from the St Tropez area and my boat was positioned near Monaco. In his typical, flamboyant style, he got a friend of his to hire a very fast speed boat – a Cigarette – and came all the way from St Tropez to Monaco to meet me at the harbour at Villefrance. His agent met up with us on the boat and we discussed the terms of the contract and agreed to sign him there and then. Ginola was a revelation for Spurs – I would say he had more impact on the team than Klinsmann did. He really gave the fans a great lift.
One funny incident that occurred during Gerry’s reign was an attempt to buy the player Emmanuel Petit to shore up our midfield. Gerry had been following the progress of Petit when he played for Monaco and decided he was a target for the club, so Claude and Daniel agreed to meet with Petit and Gerry at White Hart Lane to discuss the virtues of him joining Tottenham. Gerry and Daniel spoke about the usual sort of things: what players we had, where Petit would fit in and where we were going as a club. Claude, however, wanted to assure him that home life in England would be great and asked what Petit’s girlfriend’s interests were. Petit said she was ‘a dancer’. What sticks in my mind was the report back from Daniel who told me that Claude, who was bending over backwards to try to make Petit feel comfortable, said we could arrange dancing lessons for his girlfriend. Apparently, Gerry gave Claude a strange look – I wonder why!
There was a twist to this story. Petit thanked us very much indeed for our discussions and said he would make a decision within the next day. He asked if we’d kindly call a taxi for him. We imagined that he was going back to his hotel, but it turned out that the taxi we’d arranged and paid for took him straight to the home of Arsenal chairman David Dein. There he met Arsène Wenger, and the rest is history. Emmanuel Petit signed for Arsenal and turned out to be a great player.
Piers Morgan, one-time editor of the Daily Mirror and mad Arsenal fan, thought this was hilarious. He must have told the story at least 10,000 times and has the habit, after becoming inebriated, of repeating it six or seven times on the trot. So much so that even Arsenal fans tell him to shut up.
The 1996–7 season didn’t go very well for Gerry. At one stage, around late September 1997, he came to me saying he’d reached the end of the road and couldn’t do much more for the team. He felt he’d lost the support of the dressing room. He said that despite the investments I’d made and the support I’d given him to try to build a squad, it was clear it just wasn’t happening on the pitch. He wanted to throw in the towel and resign.
I asked him to stay and go back to doing what he was good at – motivating the players and getting them back on track. I still had confidence in him. Also, it would be hard for me to find a replacement mid-season. Gerry agreed to stay on, but a month later one could see we were going nowhere. He came to me again, asking me to accept his resignation.
I have to say that, as far as managers go, Gerry was a gentleman. Normally, managers are signed up on big contracts and despite the fact that poor performances on the pitch are usually down to them, they sit it out until they’re sacked, in order to claim substantial compensation. In Gerry’s case, there was never a suggestion that he wanted any money for leaving. In fact, I remember him telling me he was grateful for the support I’d tried to give him – in particular for purchasing players such as Ferdinand, Ginola and others. He said he couldn’t have asked for any more support from his chairman. Regretfully, I had to let him go.
It popped back into my mind that prior to appointing Gerry, I’d been thinking about this director of football and coach system, which was the way many famous continental clubs were managed. I asked David Pleat to again consider the position of director of football and this time he agreed and joined the board. He also held the fort with the team while we tried to recruit a new manager.
Unfortunately David wasn’t very forceful when it came to getting his point over at the right time. Unlike me, he had a tremendous wealth of knowledge about football and I wish that in his position as director of football at Tottenham – with this idiot Alan Sugar not knowing what to do about managers – he’d been more assertive in telling me what to do, as well as talking me out of other people’s ideas, usually agents trying to line their pockets.
During our search for a manager, a lot of names were thrown at me. Even David Dein, who was quite friendly with me socially, told me at one Premier League meeting that he knew he shouldn’t be helping Tottenham out, but was aware we were in a dire situa
tion. He was sympathetic about all this stick I was getting when a lot of Tottenham’s problems had nothing to do with me and he told me that Bobby Robson was free to leave his job in Spain. Andy Gross, Klinsmann’s agent, suggested Leo Beenhakker and another guy by the name of Christian Gross, who was doing a fantastic job in the Swiss league at the club Grasshoppers. There was also lots of advice coming from so-called experts Tony Berry and Douglas Alexiou.
So there were many names flying around, but at this stage of the season, most of them were employed and were certainly not going to be prised away from their jobs to come and join what was considered an ailing club.
The media was having fun rubbing it in. They implied that the team was going nowhere and that the culture of the club came from its chairman, Alan Sugar, who had no ambition whatsoever and was only interested in money.
Daniel and I flew to Zurich to meet Christian Gross and we ended up agreeing to sign him, along with fitness coach Fritz Schmidt, who was an integral part of Gross’s training plans. We explained to Christian Gross and Andy Gross, who was also Christian’s agent, that we would hold a press conference at White Hart Lane and we gave Christian specific instructions to turn up at a certain time at this hotel in Waltham Abbey, whereupon Daniel would escort him to the ground in an orderly fashion.
Unfortunately, the press had already made up their minds about Christian Gross, as the appointment had been leaked to the media beforehand. The tone had been set by ex-Tottenham player turned football pundit Alan Mullery, who at the time was dragged out by the media whenever a comment was needed about the affairs of Tottenham Hotspur. They had obviously caught him very early in the morning when they asked if he had any comment on Spurs’ new managerial appointment, Christian Gross.
‘Christian who?’ was Mullery’s answer. Cannon-fodder for the media.
‘CHRISTIAN WHO?’ was the headline the next day. The great Spurs expert Alan Mullery had spoken.
Regrettably, this ‘Christian who?’ thing seemed to permeate down to the players, some of whom were not blessed with too many brain cells and tended to follow the lead of the sports journalists in the tabloids. In simple terms, players have admiration for a manager if they know what he’s achieved. However, if a manager comes in whom they have no knowledge of, irrespective of what his achievements might be, then as far as they’re concerned, he’s no good. The day Gross turned up at White Hart Lane, some of the Tottenham players simply disregarded him, thinking he was a waste of space. To be fair to the sensible and intelligent players, they did give him an opportunity.
The press conference was a total farce. We were all assembled and I was waiting for Daniel to tell me where Christian Gross and Andy Gross were. Daniel phoned to say he was still waiting for them at the hotel in Waltham Abbey, but there was no sign of them. A minute later, the receptionist at White Hart Lane called me to tell me that a Mr Christian Gross and another chap had arrived. I was very confused. We rushed him up to an anteroom next door to where the press were gathered and I asked what the hell he was doing. Why hadn’t he gone to the hotel as we’d agreed? I couldn’t quite grasp the answer he babbled to me. The person he’d brought with him – some sort of PR guru – said there had been a misunderstanding.
Finally, we entered the press conference and Gross took his seat next to me. I introduced him and advised the room that Schmidt would be his number two and that David Pleat would be director of football. The floor was then open for questions.
The first question to Gross came from a journalist, along the lines of, ‘What do you think of the current squad at Tottenham? Will you be adding any more players and if so, who will be your targets?’
Gross totally ignored the question and from his top pocket pulled out a tube ticket and declared, ‘This is my Underground ticket. I came like the normal people come to the football club. I travelled like the normal people on the Underground. That is how I came to Tottenham.’
We were flabbergasted at his opening statement. This little speech was the brainchild of his PR guru and it had taken us all by surprise. The press managed to get pictures of me looking at Gross with a stunned face. What with Mullery’s ‘Christian who?’ comment and this pathetic PR attempt, I knew from that moment that Gross was dead meat.
Christian was a very nice fellow. He tried to implement professional ways at the club, but basically some of the players were taking the piss out of him. They didn’t perform on the pitch and his first home game ended in a horrific defeat to Chelsea. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was as if some of the players wanted him to fail.
He lasted about nine months. It really was an untenable situation and eventually I had to let him go. David Pleat again took over the managerial reins temporarily and did quite a good job while we searched for a permanent manager.
During my time at Spurs, I had started off with Terry Venables, then employed Ossie Ardiles, Gerry Francis and now Christian Gross. We had spent an enormous amount of the club’s money trying to accommodate all these managers’ requests and still we were getting nowhere. And I was getting a load of stick from the fans, mostly fuelled by the media.
George Graham, God’s other gift to football, who’d successfully managed Arsenal for many years and won a lot of trophies, was a name that kept coming up for the position. I realised that appointing him might be seen as a smack in the face for Spurs fans, but I really must have been losing my marbles by then, because I considered it!
17
‘Sugar Out!’
Arise, Sir Alan – The Nightmare Is Over
1998–2001
It was a sign of how desperate I was to bring success to Tottenham that I signed George Graham at the end of September 1998. Why did I do it? Well, Tony Berry and Martin Peters, an ex-Spurs player and board member, had insisted he was the only one with the credentials to do the job. David Pleat had kind of whispered the idea of Martin O’Neill, but he hadn’t put his point across strongly enough. In hindsight, O’Neill was someone we should have pursued most vigorously.
Graham was manager of Leeds United at the time, though he still had a house in north London. From what I’d heard, he was interested in working down here, as travelling up to Leeds each day for training was not really his cup of tea.
David Pleat and Berry warned me that if I did appoint George Graham, it would open a can of worms. Not only would I get a load of stick from the media, simply because Graham was considered the arch-enemy, but also he’d been involved in an alleged bribe scandal when he was Arsenal manger – in cahoots with the agent Rune Hauge – and was eventually dismissed by Arsenal and fined by the FA. I took that onboard, but at the same time, everybody was singing his praises as being in the same league as Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger.
My line was, if he’s a true professional, given the players and the backing we have at this club, theoretically he should be able to bring us success and trophies. It seemed the players would at last have someone who commanded the utmost respect in footballing terms, on the basis that he’d achieved so much – as I’ve said, this is the criterion upon which a player decides in his mind whether he’s prepared to put himself out and play really hard for his club. I also cited the fact that in business the CEO of an arch-competitor is often head-hunted. Giving the job to George Graham was no different to me head-hunting a bloke from IBM to run my computer business. And while the fans were divided initially and some saw him as the arch-enemy, the rest respected him as a good coach and accepted him on the basis that he would do for Spurs what he did for Arsenal.
During his stint at the club, under my chairmanship, Graham spent a hell of a lot of money on players, but didn’t actually do much on the pitch, though we did win the Worthington Cup, thanks to an Allan Nielsen header against Leicester at Wembley.
Graham’s contract was geared towards personal achievement – he would get bonuses if, for example, we ended up fifth in the league or did well in one of the cups. A big bonus would be payable if he won the Premier League but, acco
rding to Graham, that was a pipe dream with the team he had.
The day after we won the Worthington Cup, he phoned the finance director of the club, demanding his bonus payment. The finance director then called me, nervously asking what he should do. Under normal circumstances, bonuses like this would be paid out at the end of the season, in a couple of months’ time.
Everyone was kind of frightened to talk to Graham. He was an unapproachable person who had a certain air of authority about him. No one was prepared to question him or say anything that might go against his principles.
I called Graham and asked what he thought he was doing phoning up the finance director and intimidating him the day after we’d won the cup. I told him he was being ridiculous and that it was an insult to me and the club to be asking for his money straightaway. I said it was clear in his contact that all payments would be made at the end of the season. It was then that I realised Graham actually had no bottle. This must have been the first time someone had raised their voice and stood up to him.
‘No, no, Mr Chairman,’ he said hastily. ‘You’ve got it wrong, you’ve got it all wrong. I was just phoning John to ask him what the bonus figure will be. Of course I know it’s not payable till the end of the season. You’ve misunderstood what’s gone on – I don’t think John explained it to you properly. I’m sorry if you feel this way, but I was just enquiring about the amount. I only wanted to check what was coming.’
For the first time, I saw that if you questioned Graham and put pressure on him, he wasn’t the tough guy he made himself out to be. I tried my best to maintain a professional relationship with Graham and bit my tongue for a long while. Certainly, he wasn’t the type of person I would socialise with. He was there to do a job and that was it. He, like Venables, had a load of arselickers in the media. As far as they were concerned, Graham could do no wrong. So much so that the media had had the audacity to make Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein the villain when the board had no choice but to dismiss Graham for taking dodgy payments which effectively came out of the Arsenal bank account! How dare David Dein dismiss him for turning Arsenal over? This is the type of problem you have with the football media – they pervert the minds of the fans.