by Sugar, Alan
It wasn’t just affairs at the club that caused me aggravation as Spurs’ chairman – the Premier League could be a real drain on my time. I got heavily involved in one particular row, thanks to my relationship with Sam Chisholm. Sam had called me back in October 1997 to tell me he was stepping down as CEO at BSkyB, saying it was due to health reasons, but from his manner I could tell there was more to it than that. I suspected (but never had it confirmed) that Rupert and he were no longer seeing eye-to-eye. Sam told me he was going to remain in England, do some pottering around, maybe take up some small advisory roles, and I took the opportunity of inviting him to join the board of Spurs. At the time, there was a lot of talk in the industry that the sale of TV rights might one day revert to the clubs alone, so with his wealth of knowledge in the TV industry, it looked like a smart move.
Earlier that year, Rick Parry had advised the Premier League that he wished to step down to take up a lucrative job as CEO of Liverpool FC. Barrister Peter Leaver would be appointed CEO of the Premier League, as Rick’s replacement.
The most important topic at most Premier League meetings was always the sale of the TV rights. At one such meeting, shortly after Peter’s appointment, he asked me in open forum whether I’d mind if the league seconded the services of Sam Chisholm as a consultant, to advise on the next round of TV negotiations. If Sam accepted, he’d have to resign from the board of Spurs, as there’d be a conflict of interests. I agreed that it was fine with me and Sam duly resigned from the Spurs board. Together with one of his old colleagues from BSkyB, David Chance, Sam met with Peter Leaver and the then chairman of the Premier League, Sir John Quinton, to discuss the appointment.
The next thing I knew, around March 1998, I was called by David Dein of Arsenal, who was ranting and raving that Leaver and Quinton had done a crazy deal with Chisholm and Chance. He asked me if I knew anything about the details. I told him I didn’t have a clue, but reminded him that all the club chairmen had agreed it was a good idea for Chisholm to be appointed. Dein said he knew that, but his ranting was in relation to the financial arrangements which had been agreed. He couldn’t tell me what he had learned, as this would be a breach of confidentiality – apparently, Leaver had insisted that each club chairman had to sign a confidentiality agreement before they could see the terms of the contract with Chisholm and Chance.
Dein informed me that an emergency meeting had been called for all the club chairmen to discuss the contract and I should get down there immediately. When I arrived at the Premier League’s HQ, I was greeted by a secretary, who invited me to sign a confidentiality agreement before she handed over the Chisholm and Chance contract. I waited with bated breath, expecting to get a half-inch thick document. Instead, she shoved a single sheet of paper across the desk.
‘What’s this?’ I asked.
‘That’s it ’, she replied.
‘This is it? This is the contract – a single sheet of paper?’
I could not believe my eyes when I read it. I’d expected to see that a sensible deal had been done with Sam – maybe £200,000 plus some reasonable bonus as and when he pulled off the next deal. Instead, I saw that Chisholm and Chance had the potential of earning up to £50m each for the right deal! No wonder David Dein was ranting; this was outrageous.
Needless to say, the meeting was really heated, with a tirade of abuse hurled across the boardroom at the irresponsible manner in which Leaver and Quinton had conducted the negotiations. It got so heated that at one point one of the chairmen called a halt and suggested that Leaver and Quinton leave the room. Everyone was so shell-shocked over this arrangement that not much sense was spoken at that meeting, save that it was agreed the league would instruct its lawyers to advise them on what actions could be taken to nullify this crazy deal.
There followed a series of emergency meetings, where the club chairmen were given advice from attending lawyers and a barrister. At one of these meetings, I aired my view that we were well and truly stuffed. I explained that in the past one of my Amstrad executives had made a poor arrangement with a third party and, having clapped eyes on it, I’d tried to have it reversed, only to find that under law we didn’t have a leg to stand on. With this precedent in mind, I explained that in the case of the league we had even greater problems, as this wasn’t some simple executive who’d made the deal with Chisholm and Chance; it was the bloody CEO and chairman!
I must have come across as a bighead, as I was kind of ignored and shouted down. Sam Hammam of Wimbledon and Freddie Fletcher of Newcastle told me that we should leave it to the lawyers. I told them that the lawyers, with all due respect, would just run us up big bills and end up at the same conclusion. I had taken the precaution of looking up the Amstrad case and was able to quote the relevant section in open forum, but the highflying barrister politely said he was encouraged by what he’d heard from Sir John Quinton and Peter Leaver on this matter and, while he would take into account the precedent I’d quoted, he still wanted to explore other avenues. I told him he should be mindful of not running us up a large bill, which went down like a lead balloon with him and his instructing lawyer sidekicks.
As a realistic person, I knew we had no alternative but to try to do a deal with Sam to get out of this stupid arrangement, but no one was listening.
The club chairmen passed a vote of no confidence in respect of Peter Leaver, resulting in him and Sir John resigning from their posts. There was also talk amongst some of the chairmen that we should take legal action against the pair of them for the irresponsible manner in which they’d handled this deal. Once again, as devil’s advocate, I piped up, saying that this was a waste of time. It would cost a fortune to fight in court and in the end we would get lumbered with another bill. And even if we won, they could not afford to pay the likely damages, let alone our legal expenses.
Then came the hammer-blow. At another meeting, the barrister advised that Sir John had rethought his position and was now prepared to give evidence to the lawyers engaged by Sam. Both Sir John and Peter Leaver were adamant they had acted in good faith and their reputation was now at stake – which is why it must have suited Sir John to assist Sam’s lawyers and endorse their argument that the deal was valid. To top it all, the barrister started quoting the section of the law that I had brought up a week or so earlier, as if he had discovered it there and then!
I couldn’t hold back. ‘Hold up a minute. With respect to your thousand-pound-per-hour advice, you are now telling us what I said two weeks ago! Are you saying we have no case now?’
‘Well, I am not saying you have no case,’ he replied, ‘but it has now become complicated by Sir John’s position and I would suggest that before you embark upon what could be a very costly court case, you might wish to see if you can settle with Mr Chisholm and Mr Chance.’
I glared across the table at Freddie Fletcher, who had been the most vociferous over keeping the lawyer engaged on this matter. I screwed up a piece of A4 paper into a ball and threw it at him, and then I did the same to Sam Hammam.
I blurted out, ‘Sorry, can I ask the league’s secretary what we are paying the lawyers and how much is on the clock? I want it to go on record. I also want to enquire if my comments of two weeks ago were minuted.’ The whole outing cost the league the thick end of £200,000. There was a stunned silence, then some sheepish muttering. The legal team left the meeting, never to be seen again.
I know that I may come across as a know-it-all bighead who thinks he’s always right – all I can say is that the above is an accurate record of events. Believe me, if you were able to talk to any of the chairmen present at that time, they would endorse every single word.
Dave Richards, ex-chairman of Sheffield Wednesday, was appointed as the new chairman of the Premier League in March 1999. He was tasked, among other things, with sorting out this mess and finding a new CEO. The league appointed a working party to assist him, of which I was a member. To cut a long story, as I was perceived to be a close associate of Sam, it boiled down t
o me to try to make him see sense and do a reasonable deal. I had countless meetings with Sam and countless phone calls with Dave Richards.
The aggravation we had in the chairmen’s meetings was indescribable as we tried to get everyone to allow Dave a clear remit to come up with an amount to attempt settlement. At one particular meeting, they wanted to vote on a number. Again, I interjected and explained that we couldn’t come up with a number in open forum or indicate a guideline for Dave, as this would leak out, and if it did, there would be no negotiation – you can’t negotiate with a party when they know what your limits are. This time they agreed to leave it to Dave.
In the end, he did a deal and paid the pair of them off. I can’t say how much they got – that was confidential – but I can say it was a lot less than we’d have had to pay them if the contract was played out.
*
I was so heavily engrossed with the football rubbish, I only half listened to one of my Amstrad people, David Hennell, when he tried to convince me to invest our money in an internet service or start up our own. One day, he took me to meet a bunch of nerds located on the top floor of an old building in Soho. The room was full of computer racks – I was looking at an internet service provider (ISP) in its earliest form. David had asked Bill Poel to try to explain to me what all this internet service provider stuff was all about, but I didn’t really grasp it. It sounded like a bit of a pipe dream to me, with a lot of heavy investment in equipment. Quite honestly, it passed me by.
History tells us that companies like Demon and Freeserve started in the same humble way as the bunch of people I saw in Soho. I am not saying that if I’d listened intently we would have been another AOL, but I am sure that if I hadn’t been deflected by football, I’d have concentrated a bit more. Who knows? I might have started an ISP business and been able to sell it on, just as Dixons did when they sold Freeserve to the French ISP Wanadoo.
However, I couldn’t miss the fact that by 1998–9, the use of email was becoming increasingly popular. Most large companies were using it to communicate, but it wasn’t so popular yet with the public – people were frightened off due to technophobia. Bob Watkins and I debated the possibility of creating and selling a special telephone that would enable consumers to send and receive emails. We knew of arrangements that could be made, using British Telecom as a mail server, whereby the phone could make a dial-up connection to the internet and send and receive email messages. The idea was that the process would be so easy that all the rocket science that went on to achieve this functionality would be completely hidden from the user – it would all happen automatically behind the scenes. I liked the idea of this phone and believed it would appeal to the man in the street who wanted to venture into the world of email.
The other interesting aspect was the business model. Every time an email call was made, we could earn some money by using a special tariff connection. Moreover, as the phone would have a large screen, we could target adverts to consumers at home. It sounded like an exciting project – very futuristic and twenty-first century. Because of my standing as a successful businessman and chairman of a high-profile football club, I got an audience with the top people at British Telecom to see if we could strike a deal with them with regard to this idea.
To be honest, during that period, you felt you were being left out or had missed a trick if you didn’t have something to do with the internet. Dot-com companies were springing up all over the place and a new breed of young people were coming up with internet ideas, creating ‘websites’ and promoting various services. Any Hooray Henry with a navy blazer, open-collared white shirt and a pair of jeans – armed with a bottle of Evian and a PowerPoint spreadsheet on an Apple laptop – could walk into a bank and, as long as ‘dot com’ was part of his new company’s name, he could walk out with five million quid’s worth of venture funding. It was that crazy.
On top of this, the New Amstrad shares were starting to rise, for no reason other than we were in the technology business. We hadn’t done anything – there were no massive profits. It just goes to show how stupid the stock market can be. Looking back to the days when I’d tried to privatise Old Amstrad – when we really did have substantial assets and cash – the share price had lingered around 23p. Yet here we were a few years later, seeing New Amstrad’s share price creeping up and up for no reason at all.
No one could understand it. I remember being away in Spain in November 1999 and Simon was calling me virtually every day. ‘Dad, I don’t know what’s going on – the share price is one pound fifty.’
Half an hour later, he’d call me back. ‘It’s crazy – the share price is two pounds.’
An hour later: ‘I really have no idea what’s happening – the shares have hit three quid.’
This went on for a couple of days, until the share price reached a ridiculous level of nearly £4. It actually put a market capitalisation on New Amstrad of over £300m and there was absolutely no rhyme or reason for it.
That November trip to Spain is imprinted on my mind because when we got home to England, I received a very official-looking letter the following Monday. It was from the Queen’s equerries, informing me that I was being proposed for a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours List. What a fantastic surprise!
I was kind of aware this might happen someday, as I was somebody who’d received so much publicity as a businessman in the eighties. I had constantly been involved in backing various government initiatives and in 1997 had engaged in a round-the-country Enterprise Tour at the request of Gordon Brown, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer. This involved visiting virtually every university in the land and speaking to students by way of Q&A sessions. I can’t remember how many of these things I did, but I must have spoken to thousands of students during that period. In fact, these days, in other seminars I conduct, members of the audience often say they were at one of my Q&A sessions when they were students. I spoke at the Oxford Union three times and at the Cambridge Union twice. Therefore, I imagined that the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had put my name forward for a knighthood based upon this work, as well as my contribution to the computer industry. I was to learn later that it was to celebrate, at the end of a millennium, exceptional entrepreneurs who had grown over the past decades. Richard Branson was also awarded a knighthood.
I showed the letter to Ann, who was very excited. I told her we had to keep the thing very quiet – she mustn’t tell anyone. The letter stated it was merely to advise me that my name had been put forward for the honour. It invited me to write back and officially accept, but added that even if I did, the knighthood might not be conferred, hence the warning that we should keep the news to ourselves. As you can imagine, Ann and I were frustrated that we couldn’t tell people. Obviously we did share the news with the kids and I couldn’t resist, when I went into work the next day, popping into Bob Watkins’ office and telling him too. As someone who had been with me for over twenty years, I knew he’d be very pleased for me.
On 5 December 1999 we had another great thing to celebrate when my son Daniel got married to Michaela. His father-in-law laid on a great wedding in one of the London hotels and, of course, we invited all our family and friends. By then, Simon had had another son, Matthew, and both he and Nathan were page boys at Daniel’s wedding. It was a great day and I was bursting to tell Derek, Daphne and Shirley, as well as Johnnie and Mark Simons, about the knighthood. I pulled them to one side during the evening and spilled the beans. They were all so very excited.
Daniel and Michaela went to South Africa on their honeymoon, then faced a long flight halfway round the world to get to our home in Florida to join the rest of the family to see in the new millennium. You can imagine how jet-lagged they both would be. Certainly, Simon and I could imagine it . . .
I have to admit to having what some might say is a twisted sense of humour, which Simon also seems to share. We had bought the grandkids an electric dancing model of Father Christmas, one of those things you plug in and it plays a Christm
as song and kind of sways from side to side in a dancing action. The kids were fascinated by it. Now Simon and I cooked up a devilish plot. We bought a mains timer switch and connected it to the Father Christmas and a table lamp. We placed the Father Christmas under the lampshade and put them both on a small table in Daniel and Michaela’s bedroom. Then we set the timer switch for 3 a.m.
After their epic flight, they arrived at the house totally shattered at around midday. They fought to stay awake, to try to get back into a conventional sleep pattern. When they went upstairs to unpack, Michaela commented how nice the Father Christmas looked in their room. It was hard to keep a straight face, as we all anticipated the timer kicking in at three in the morning, with the light coming on, the music blaring out and Father Christmas dancing.
The next morning, we were all waiting to hear from them. When they came down, they didn’t say a word, but after a bit of prompting, they told us how they’d nearly jumped out of their skins and didn’t know what had hit them. They got the joke in the end and we had a good laugh. The thought of it still makes Simon and me chuckle, imagining their faces when the light came on and Santa let rip.
It wasn’t until 1 January 2000 that everyone and his brother knew I’d been awarded a knighthood. It was obviously a very exciting day and I received lots of congratulatory telegrams and telephone calls. My brother and sisters, though they already knew about it, were particularly delighted to see it confirmed. Their little brother Alan, from the council flat in Clapton, was going to be a knight. I remember reflecting on what my mother and father might have said – it would have been a marvellous thing for them to have seen.