What You See is What You Get

by Sugar, Alan

  Wrong. We were beaten 3–1. After the match, I was gutted we were out of the cup. As I left the ground, I looked across at Graham and shook my head. He knew I was angry at our defeat. I saw him scuttling away with a bunch of his cronies. Fulham’s ground was close to London’s King’s Road, where all the flash restaurants were, and he was off to dinner with his wife and his friends, including Jeff Powell of the Daily Mail.

  The following day the most disgusting article, written by Jeff Powell, was published in the Daily Mail. The outrageous headline read, ‘Why miserly Sugar must come out of his counting house and give George the money.’ The article accused me of never investing in the club. What’s more, the loss at Fulham was not the fault of football genius Graham; no, it was my fault because of lack of investment.

  I went berserk. I rushed down to the training ground where Graham was in a meeting with some of his staff. I burst through the door and told them to get out. Graham looked at me and said, ‘Chairman, we’re having an important meeting about tactics.’

  I told him I didn’t give fuck about tactics and to get them out now. They all jumped up and scurried out. I slammed the article down on the desk in front of Graham and said, ‘This is what your mate has written. Did you tell him to write this when you went out to dinner with him?’

  Graham said, ‘No, Chairman. This is a surprise to me – I haven’t seen it. I’ve been working all morning, I haven’t even looked at the papers. I don’t know what it’s all about – what does it say?’

  ‘You know exactly what it bloody says. It’s your friend Jeff Powell protecting your arse. Now, here’s a fucking message from me to you to give to him. My lawyers are going to be on to the Daily Mail today. If he doesn’t retract what he says in the paper, I’m taking him to court. And here’s the bad news, George: you are going to be called as a witness, simple as that. I will drag you into the witness box, because this is a piece of shit. I’ve had enough stick now from people. And by the way, I’ve had enough of you telling everyone in press conferences you need six more players.’

  Graham could see I was really angry. He reiterated that the article had nothing to do with him.

  Now, I want to explain why I reacted so strongly to these types of articles by some of the sports journalists. I’d learned to take the rough with the smooth when it came to the press – it comes with the territory when you put yourself in a goldfish bowl as a high-profile businessman. The financial media bigged me up when I was on the way up in the mid-eighties, then they slagged me off when things started to go wrong. This is par for the course. I think it fair to say that the treatment I received from the UK financial media was ‘reasonable and correct reporting’ and I never engaged in any arguments or litigation with the UK media over any criticism of me to do with business.

  With football, however, it was a different matter. I think one has to look at the quality of some of the football journalists writing for the tabloid newspapers to understand why. Basically, they are glorified fans, in awe of people like Terry Venables, George Graham and Brian Clough. In the eyes of these hacks, the chairmen and directors of football clubs are the devils, while the players and managers are the angels.

  Before I alienate the whole of the sports-reporting industry, I will make the point that in some of the serious newspapers there are some great journalists who are balanced and honest – Neil Harman, Patrick Collins and Oliver Holt, for example, and to a certain extent Brian Woolnough. On the other hand, if Harry Harris didn’t like somebody, he would criticise them. Fortunately, he trusted me and was very supportive. So much so that sometimes it was a bit cringey and in fact he got himself in bad odour with his contemporaries for being so supportive of this ogre Sugar in the days of the Venables altercations.

  I can take fair reporting, but unlike many other chairmen, I wasn’t prepared to put up with lies printed about me in the football media. I had taken legal action against newspapers on many occasions. Most never reached court and were settled with damages paid to me and an apology printed in the paper. The system was unfair in that they’d write an article about me which was a pack of lies and it would appear as a back-page headline or a double-page spread, but the apology would be no bigger than a postage stamp, lost in the body of the paper.

  During the years I was involved in football, over £800,000 was paid to me in damages, all of which was donated to Great Ormond Street Hospital. The people at Great Ormond Street still joke with me that sadly they haven’t seen me being slagged off in the papers lately, a shame as they were looking forward to another donation.

  The Daily Mail’s in-house lawyer, who had dealt with Alan Watts from Herbert Smith a number of times before on defamation matters, was quite a sensible person. He knew, from the letters Herbert Smith had sent, that Powell was dead in the water. Under normal circumstances, I’m sure he would have agreed to pay some damages and print the usual postage-stamp apology. The Daily Mail had coughed up loads of money in the past to compensate for the lies they’d printed about me. These disputes never got as far as court and it wouldn’t have surprised me if this time, once again, another piece of medical equipment was going to be winging its way to Great Ormond Street.

  However, on this occasion, we received a letter from the Daily Mail saying they would not be offering an apology or paying any damages and that Jeff Powell stood by his words and would be defending the case. Powell had obviously persuaded his bosses that this matter should be fought, regardless of their lawyer’s advice. Powell reckoned I was the kind of person who would threaten to take legal action but would fold before it got to court, because I wouldn’t want to stand up and be a witness.

  The case took about fifteen months to get to trial. Meanwhile, Graham was shitting himself. He’d never been called to court to be a witness before. I told him I wanted him to provide a witness statement and if he didn’t, we’d have to subpoena him. I explained that all he had to put in his witness statement were the facts: that during his management of Tottenham he had purchased more players than he’d ever purchased in his whole managerial career and that he’d spent more money at Tottenham than he’d ever spent at any of the previous clubs he’d managed. He couldn’t deny these facts, as they were on the record. Therefore, having taken separate advice from his lawyer, he grudgingly completed his witness statement and signed it.

  I guess my wildcat decision to appoint Graham as manager was, to a certain extent, acceptable to the fans, as long as results were coming in. The fans could no longer argue about money, as even the biggest thicko could see that a fortune had been spent since Graham had come in, but he turned out to be useless as far as management was concerned. Fans could now see beyond his so-called reputation, but his pals in the media would never blame Spurs’ poor performances on him. Instead, when the results weren’t good, there was a groundswell of criticism of me. The emphasis changed from me being the horrible man who wouldn’t invest any money in the club, to me being the horrible man who’d brought George Graham to the club and ruined it.

  After one particularly dismal performance under Graham’s management – a cup tie against Birmingham (again a lower-league team), when we got slaughtered 3–1 at home – the fans were frustrated and started chanting for my head. Ann was sitting next to me while the crowd were screaming, ‘Sugar out! Sugar out! Sugar out!’ This wasn’t the first time they’d chanted this, but on this occasion the whole stadium seemed to erupt; it was really frightening.

  Karren Brady, Birmingham’s managing director, spoke to me after the match, saying how disgusted she was at the way the fans were treating me. She went to the trouble of writing an article in the Sun the next day, saying how unreasonable the fans were and how they’d forgotten all I’d done for the club. It was nice of her – she was genuinely upset at what she saw and felt very sorry for Ann too – but her words in the Sun fell upon deaf ears, as one would expect.

  The company Enic, headed by Daniel Levy, had been in touch with me months earlier to ask if I would sell my sharehol
ding in Spurs. I knew Daniel personally – he was the son of some people who lived in Chigwell and we’d seen him and his brothers grow up. Enic was partly owned by him, but the majority owner was billionaire Joe Lewis, who was originally from England but was now stationed in the Bahamas. Enic had acquired a financial interest in several football clubs throughout Europe, including Poland, Greece and the Czech Republic, as well as Glasgow Rangers. They planned to gain shareholdings in a lot of football clubs, to accomplish a kind of universal marketing and merchandising strategy. I’d rejected their approaches in the past, but this outburst at the Birmingham game was the last straw as far I was concerned. Daniel and Ann had been telling me for ages that I was banging my head against a wall trying to do my best for the club, when instead of thanks, all I got was more and more stick. They were right. Perhaps I was stupid to stay as long as I did.

  I contacted Daniel Levy and we struck a deal. He had already acquired some shares in Tottenham and didn’t want to hold more than 29.9 per cent or he’d be forced to make an offer for the whole club. He bought enough shares from me to take him to just under this figure, paying me £21.9m and leaving me with a 13 per cent shareholding in Spurs.

  There were quite a few twists and turns between the lawyers, the Premier League and the Stock Exchange, but eventually the deal was done. Daniel Levy took over control of the board at Tottenham and I duly resigned. It was kind of a relief to have the whole thing taken off my shoulders, though I was going to continue to be a regular visitor to the Spurs boardroom on match days. I still am.

  Coinciding with the sale of Tottenham to Enic in February 2001, the court case against the Daily Mail had started. The build-up to the case had seen a really nasty legal battle, with the Daily Mail’s lawyers pulling all kinds of stunts and demanding lots of information on me and my companies; really trying to create a lot of trouble. I devoted a great deal of my time assisting Herbert Smith in preparing for this trial – a lot of research needed to be done and we had to be on the ball. Whatever crap they threw at us, we batted back to them immediately. Ultimately, they failed in their efforts to make me back down and call off the trial. It was a horrible period, made worse by the stories running in the tabloids about the upcoming case, but finally we were at court.

  On the first day, as my barrister started to read out the accusations made by Jeff Powell against me, a very strange thing happened. I must have been at one of the lowest ebbs in my life – exhausted from fire-fighting the football situation and hyped up from preparing myself for this court case – and I suddenly burst out sobbing! I don’t know to this day what came over me. I had never cried like that before, not since I was a kid. I imagine I must have looked like I was having a nervous breakdown.

  Ann and Nick Hewer, who were in court with me, were stunned. I had to get up and walk out of the courtroom for a few minutes. As the opening of the case continued, inexplicably, I continued to cry at various intervals – I couldn’t stop myself. Ann was asking me what was wrong, trying to calm me down and supplying me with tissues out of her handbag.

  Eventually, it was time for me to be called to the stand. The Daily Mail had employed some smart-arse barrister, whose second-in-command was a female barrister who’d once done some work for me on Venables matters. I pointed out to Alan Watts that this didn’t seem right. We’d tried to get certain barristers to work for us and they’d told us that they were unable to do so because they’d worked for the Daily Mail. So how was this woman, who was privy to lots of information about Tottenham and me from the Venables days, allowed to take up the job as number two in this case? In truth, it was something Alan Watts had overlooked. He kind of waffled, saying there wasn’t much we could do about it now.

  I must have been in the witness box for two days. This barrister threw every bit of rubbish at me he could find but, in between my crying fits, I was giving him back more than he was giving me, in some cases making him look a real fool when he got his facts wrong. Although the back of the courtroom was full of tabloid journalists, not one positive thing I said was reported – the ‘facts’ in the next day’s papers were always manipulated. Only Harry Harris from the Daily Mirror gave an accurate account of what was actually said.

  There were a couple of highlights, I recall. The barrister questioned me about the previous season, saying that Tottenham had romanced with relegation and barely scraped through. I pointed out to him that we’d finished fourteenth in the league, which could hardly be described as ‘just scraping through. Despite that, he kept repeating, ‘You just scraped through.’

  In the end, I turned to the judge and said, ‘Your Honour, the jury needs to be given a little maths lesson. This gentleman has repeated six times, to the best of my knowledge, that we “just scraped through”, so with your permission, may I demonstrate that he is wrong?’

  The judge nodded.

  I lifted my hand up and, using my little finger as if to recite, ‘This little piggy went to market,’ I said, ‘Do you see this?’ waggling my little finger. ‘This is twentieth position in the league and you get relegated.’ Then using the next finger, ‘And this one is nineteenth position in the league and you also get relegated. And this next finger is eighteenth and you still get relegated. Now, above eighteenth is seventeenth and you don’t get relegated. And above that is sixteenth and you certainly don’t get relegated, followed by fifteenth where there’s no chance of being relegated. And finally we get to fourteenth which is a mile away from being relegated.’ This lightened up the courtroom and the barrister was made to look a double-barrelled schmock.

  When you break for lunch while you’re still giving evidence, the law states you must not talk to your lawyers, which was rather frustrating. The Daily Mail’s legal team were carefully monitoring me as I walked out of the courtroom, making sure I didn’t talk to Alan Watts or make any eye contact with the jury. I felt they would pull any stroke possible to try to get a mistrial, so we religiously stuck to the rules. I waited for Alan Watts and my barrister to leave the area, then I walked out alone.

  Being in the witness box for a whole day, certain things come to mind and you suddenly remember something which might be helpful to the case. I remembered something Powell had once written about me, but had no idea how to get hold of it. It played on my mind. There was no Google around in those days, so at 6 a.m. the next morning, I called Piers Morgan. I considered him an associate now that I was writing for his newspaper and I knew, as editor of a national paper, that he’d be on call 24/7. He answered his mobile immediately. I apologised for waking him up and explained that I was engrossed in this court case and needed his help. Could his people search the Daily Mirror’s database and find Powell’s article for me?

  Piers asked, Are you okay, mate?’ having heard about my crying fits in court. ‘It seems you’re having a tough time.’

  ‘Yeah, no problem, just very frustrated. If you can find this stuff, it would be a great help.’

  ‘Okay, leave it with me. I’ll call you back.’

  About fifteen minutes later, he called me back to say his people had located the article and he would fax it to me. He had done me a great favour, as the article showed something that would make Powell look like he’d not been right in his witness statement.

  ‘Brilliant, Piers. That’s a great help. I really appreciate it.’ This article would come in handy when my barrister got to cross-examine Powell.

  The whole of the Daily Mail’s case against me was that I didn’t spend enough money and was not supportive of the club. To bolster this argument in court that day, the barrister started bringing up matters to do with Blackburn Rovers FC and referred to a glowing chairman’s statement which said how wonderful Jack Walker the chairman was, and how he’d supported the club so well financially, how when he took over he managed to put together a team that once won the Premier League. I pointed out that chairmen’s statements are designed to give a report to the shareholders. The fact that Mr Walker owned 99 per cent of the shares and therefore owned
the football club meant he was talking to himself! The courtroom burst into laughter – even the judge couldn’t hold back and I heard him stifle a laugh.

  Confident that I was in command of the facts, I began to enjoy myself. I felt the barrister had been poorly prepared by his instructing solicitors. Clearly they had not accounted for my attention to detail.

  On another occasion, when cross-examining me, he said, ‘Are you aware, Sir Alan, that Mr Powell was once consulted by Margaret Thatcher over the Hillsborough tragedy as part of a team set up following the disaster? Are you also aware that Mr Powell has won numerous awards for writing and is a well-respected journalist?’

  I replied, Are you expecting me and the jury to believe that Mr Powell had a one-to-one conversation with Margaret Thatcher over the Hillsborough disaster? Could you clarify to me whether this was a one-to-one thing? Could you consult and take instructions from your client and ask for clarification as to whether he was seconded to 10 Downing Street by Mrs Thatcher to sit across the table from her and discuss the tragedy, or was he just invited to one of those bashes that are held at Downing Street where two hundred people turn up? Can we get clarification on that?’

  He was stuck at that question, so I pushed him again. ‘Well? Was he one-to-one? Will you please tell the jury if he was consulted one-to-one by Margaret Thatcher – yes or no?’

  ‘Sir Alan, I’m the one asking the questions here, not you.’

  ‘Don’t try pulling that stunt on me – “I am the one asking the questions here not you” – you just told me that Jeff Powell was consulted by Margaret Thatcher over the Hillsborough disaster. I am asking a fair question which I’m sure the jury will be asking too. Was he consulted one-to-one or was he just there as part of some gathering of people from the football industry?’