by Tom Bower
David Dein attracted respect but also wariness. Even among that select clan, the ambition and outspokenness of the suave vice-chairman of Arsenal were exceptional. His acknowledged passion for his club – he was the architect of Arsenal’s success and a modernizing influence on English football – was said by his critics to equal his passion for himself. Few doubted that his ultimate target was to become the chairman of the Football Association. Opinion about the likelihood of his success was divided, but rivals hinted at his weakened personal finances and the strain of his relationships with other Arsenal directors. Twice he had been embarrassed by Bates during those meetings: first, for his forlorn attempt between 1991 and 1992 to forge an alliance with ITV rather than the more profitable Sky; and second, after other Arsenal directors were revealed as secretly negotiating to buy Wembley stadium for the club while the FA was simultaneously committing itself to a redevelopment scheme. Dein asserted complete ignorance about these negotiations. Gleefully, Bates trumpeted Dein’s distress; although in retaliation Bates was reminded about the £105,000 fine imposed in January 1991 on Chelsea by the Football League for irregular payments to players.
These personality clashes amused Peter Ridsdale, the dedicated chairman of Leeds since 1997. The profile of the amiable former human resources director, and managing director of Top Man, carefully nurtured as everyone’s friend, especially among his team’s supporters, was overshadowed by the violence among his players and their fans. The club had also borrowed £60 million from Lazards to buy players and win the championship. The unkind among his peers recited Ridsdale’s alleged rhetoric: ‘I don’t know whether to stand for election as the chairman of the FA or for the House of Commons.’ His support for Bates, and against Dein, especially for the reconstruction of Wembley, placed him as a trusted insider, and another favourite to chair the FA.
Regardless of those differences, the three – Dein, Bates and Ridsdale – were united in public to protect their mutual interests. Disciplinary proceedings against Premier League clubs were avoided and any mention of irregularities was smothered. The three felt they could rely on Rick Parry of Liverpool not to protest. The respected former chief executive of the Premier League was accustomed to backstabbing among the twenty chairmen and admired the rough-edged, swashbuckling style of the old guard still lusting for success. Reluctant to perform as a main player, Parry was pleased to praise Bates’s altruism for saving Chelsea and the commitment of Doug Ellis of Aston Villa to the game.
‘Deadly’ Doug Ellis, seated between Dein and Bates, was the unfashionable face of the Premier League. ‘I’m a frustrated footballer who had to buy a football club,’ he said about Aston Villa, where the game was first played in 1874 to keep workers warm. With the millions he had earned from nineteen businesses including hotels, holiday tours, telephones, a brewery, house building and land speculation, Ellis indulged his vanity. His bright-red Rolls Royce, registration number AV1, was parked prominently by the stadium and, on match days, whenever he raised his eyes from the pitch, he gazed at the gigantic red letters on the roof of the new stand opposite spelling ‘The Doug Ellis Stand’. ‘They insisted on the name,’ explained the chairman about his fellow directors, although over the years he had repeated, ‘The best committee is one person.’
A less pleasing sight for the chairman on match days was the substitutes sitting idly on benches, each earning over £20,000 per week. ‘My God,’ he cursed, calculating their cost at £20 million, contributing to the club’s pretax losses of £400,000 in 2002, a distressing reversal from £22 million profits in 1998. His rivals, Ellis believed, would be crippled by their loans to buy players. Those who dreamt of profits from football relying on the crude arithmetic that a 42,000 crowd on match days produced an income of £540,000 were misled. A good result on the pitch spawned an illusion of financial success. Success in the Premier League cost a fortune, Ellis calculated, and the debts were suicidal. ‘I never borrow money which I can’t afford to pay back,’ he preached. The consequence was a team which never won trophies, unfilled seats in the stadium and the hostility of Villa’s supporters towards the chairman’s financial prudence. ‘I’ll not call them yobbos,’ Ellis told critics. ‘They are my customers. But my duty is to look after the shareholders’ interests.’ The major shareholder was Ellis himself, who had bought a 47 per cent stake in Aston Villa in 1982 for £425,000 and kept 33 per cent of the shares on flotation in 1997, valuing his stake at the time at £42 million. By the end of 2002, his shares were worth £4.3 million.
Ellis had a strange affection for Bates. ‘His ego gets in the way of his club,’ mused Ellis. ‘He’s a man who believes in his own eternity and suffers from self-inflicted love bites.’ Ellis had never forgotten Bates’s gripe after chartering his yacht in the Mediterranean. ‘The cook was no good,’ Bates complained on his return. Bates was similarly carping about Ellis: he was old, offered nothing for the future, he was surrounded by no talent and his team attracted poor crowds.
As the founding chief executive of the Premier League, Rick Parry, a sober accountant, had witnessed the influence of the new millions paid by television upon his nineteen colleagues. Greed, egoism and rivalry had contaminated their relationships. At the outset, he had been staggered. ‘It’s a nightmare. Horrific,’ he complained to a friend. ‘They’re knifing each other. Practically hitting each other. They even send me newspaper cuttings to support their allegations of wrongdoing.’ The roots of their hostility were traced back to David Dein’s coup in 1988 in forging a deal on behalf of the First Division with ITV. In 1992, the supporters of ITV’s bid opposed any proposal by Sky’s supporters, and vice-versa. ‘I can’t get a two-thirds majority for anything,’ Parry had confessed. The crunch was the proposal that the Premier League should accept the sponsorship of Carling beer. Automatically, seven supporters of ITV’s bid voted against. ‘That’s it,’ hollered Ron Noades, the combative chairman of Crystal Palace. ‘I’m fed up with all of this. It’s a complete shambles. I’m off.’ To the astonishment of David Dein, Noades stomped out of the room and was followed by twelve other chairmen. Parry gazed at the remaining six. Dein looked sheepish. ‘I think the meeting’s come to an end,’ said Parry teasingly. ‘There’s no quorum,’ agreed Sir John Quinton, the chairman, ‘so that’s the end.’ Dein, a man with a carefully cultivated reputation, blushed. Erasing the memory of that embarrassment had been Parry’s task while touring the country to negotiate a permanent truce. Even so, the mood was changing. The unexpected value of Sky’s bid would transform their clubs. Continuing the arguments would impede their opportunity to maximize profits. So the seven capitulated and outright warfare ceased.
Eight years later, managing the permanent rivalry at the quarterly meetings was the responsibility of Dave Richards, the former chairman of Sheffield Wednesday. Moderate and shy of the media, Richards was tolerated as chairman because, unlike Sir John Quinton, his predecessor, he understood the business idiosyncrasies of the clubs. In the football world Richards was still considered to be financially savvy although his company, Three Star Engineering, had slid towards insolvency. In 1997, he sold 36 per cent of Sheffield Wednesday for £15.6 million to Charterhouse, a merchant bank, who expected to take a profit after the club reached the top of the Premier League. Instead, the club was relegated to the First Division and the bank was marooned with huge debts. Charterhouse would sell its interest in 2000 for £2 million. Richards’s appointment as chairman, with the support of Ken Bates, was not applauded by Joe Ashton, the local Sheffield MP: ‘It’s like the captain of the Titanic being appointed First Lord of the Admiralty.’
Even among their peers in the conference room, more than half of the chairmen, titans in their home towns, were too nervous to speak. Freddie Shepherd of Newcastle was silent; Bill Kenwright of Everton, hailed as a ‘lovely man’ but deemed to be ‘out of his depth’, paying excessive wages and transfer fees on the orders of his executives, sat passively; and Terry Brown, the solid chairman of West Ham, watched with disdain t
he clash of vanities. Daniel Levy, the Cambridge-educated chairman of Tottenham, observed the propriety of a newcomer, listening to a group of men who shared basic courtesies but wilfully abandoned loyalties to score an advantage.
Between the clamorous and the silent were the tolerated minnows. Rupert Lowe, the decent chairman of Southampton, won some kudos for realism. ‘We’ve bobbed and diced with death for twenty-three years,’ he conceded, but he was scathing about those espousing the ‘That’s the way we’ve always done it’ mentality. Opposite Lowe was Richard Murray, the sensible saviour of Charlton Athletic. For ten years Murray had toiled, watching two-thirds of his financial investment disappear. ‘Football is a charity not a business,’ he lamented. Only Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United, exploiting global brands, could be certain of profits. Murray’s consolation was to participate in the world’s richest football game while dismissing, like the other chairmen, any notion of distributing their new wealth around the remaining clubs of the Football League.
David Sheepshanks, an Old Etonian and the erratic chairman of Ipswich, recently promoted to the Premier League, sought to spearhead greater modernization. In 1999 he hired Lord Bell, the publicist, to promote his bid to succeed Keith Wiseman as chairman of the FA. Bitter that the Premier League had preferred to support Geoff Thompson’s candidacy, Sheepshanks sought to recover from his defeat by campaigning to replace either Ellis or Bates on the FA’s board in 2002. ‘A man with a huge ego who should think about his own club,’ murmured Ellis about Sheepshanks, the sage bemused by the conceit of a self-publicist. ‘To have an ego in football without the gravitas is dangerous. He sets himself up as a champion of all clubs, but here it’s dog-eats-dog.’
None of the club chairmen was prepared to allow outside monitoring of finances. Nearly all opposed the idea of signing undertakings that their directors had not made secret payments to agents or players. ‘There’s overwhelming opposition to regulation,’ admitted David Davies, an executive on the FA. Few chairmen cared to trust the FA.
At the end of every meeting, the twenty representatives departed to continue their fight among themselves. Football, they were content to reassert, remained a law unto itself – even in the event of financial catastrophe or intolerable dishonesty.
1
THE SOLITARY INVESTIGATOR
The investigator was frustrated. Four years after his appointment as football’s ‘sleaze-buster’, Graham Bean was unloved and faintly ridiculed. Malpractice and even allegations of corruption were rife in the Premier League, but the tycoons owning and controlling the game appeared unconcerned by the defiance of the rules and regulations.
Graham Bean’s appointment in November 1998 by the FA as football’s ‘compliance officer’ had been dismissed as tokenism by most of the twenty chairmen of the Premier League, who ranked among the world’s richest football owners. The notion of a 37-year-old detective constable from Yorkshire singlehandedly eradicating corruption in the national sport, they scoffed, was fatuous. His nomination served only to placate public opinion and the Labour government. To many of those self-important tycoons, revelling in power and publicity, the ‘sleaze-buster’s’ anticipated failure was reassuring. As far as they were concerned, interference in their business was unwelcome.
By chance Bean had heard the telephone ring at his home, a terraced house in Cudworth, near Barnsley, at 9.30 a.m. as he passed on his patrol around the village. After eighteen years as a policeman – smashing violent gangs and securing dozens of convictions – Bean had welcomed the news as a stepping stone to something better. Fortunately his credentials had appealed to the FA. The detective was the representative of the Football Supporters Association and was participating in the Labour government’s Football Task Force. On the morning of his appointment, the passionate football fan was proud about the FA’s courage and honesty. As the regulator of the sport’s integrity in the country’s 43,000 clubs, the organization was empowered to supervise the game’s finances, protect clubs from property developers stripping out the assets and root out corruption. ‘FIFA don’t have someone like me,’ he noted about football’s international governing authority, ‘because they’re so corrupt.’
Four years later, Bean had become disillusioned with the FA and with the chairmen of the football clubs, especially those in the Premier League. ‘English football is bent,’ the ‘sleaze-buster’ confided to friends. Bungs, bribes, frauds and a flood of cash had besmirched his beloved sport. Corruption, he concluded, was endemic. His task, he lamented, was physically impossible for one man. He had visited every club to discover and appoint a single informant but under pressure from the clubs’ chairmen, the FA was ‘backing down too quickly’ after his reports of irregularities. The FA’s priorities, he believed, were ‘wrong’.
Some blamed in particular Nic Coward, the FA’s secretary, for failing to enforce the rules. The 34-year-old grey-haired lawyer trained at Freshfields, a major solicitors’ partnership in the City, was unaccustomed to complicated investigations and to any distasteful repercussions. Some criticized Coward’s lack of leadership, his preference for rugby rather than football, and his inclination to mask problems. To some occupants of the FA’s new headquarters in Soho Square, Bean’s exposure of twelve months of corruption at Hull and Chesterfield football clubs in 2000 had elicited few congratulations. Even the imprisonment in 1999 of Ken Richardson, the owner of Doncaster Rovers, for conspiring to burn down the stadium of the 120-year-old club had not aroused the FA to impose any fine, not least because the process would have publicized the decision in 1984 to ban Richardson for twenty-five years from horse racing. Some FA officials sensed Coward’s lack of support and a nervous antagonism towards Bean’s investigations. The evidence was Coward’s attitude after the criticism of Paul Scally, the chairman of Gillingham FC. Scally had been criticized for allegedly betting on football games and the club was under investigation for alleged financial irregularities. Eventually Coward acted against Gillingham although his hesitation could be criticized as apparent indifference. ‘What’s happening?’ asked Bean some months later. ‘I know I’ve got a decision to make on Gillingham,’ replied Coward. As the official responsible for the FA’s regulations, Coward was criticized as a reluctant enforcer who vocally rejected any responsibility for vetting. Eventually, Scally paid, but Coward’s apparent hesitation reflected the indifference among the FA’s senior personalities.
Bean was the sole guardian against that indifference but the twenty chief executives attending the quarterly meeting of the Premier League at the Landmark Hotel on 12 December 2001 were scathing about him. ‘A lone police constable isn’t going to solve anything,’ Rick Parry had told his competitors. ‘What hope has he got?’ agreed another of football’s warlords. ‘Just another sergeant,’ said David Sheepshanks dismissively about ‘Constable Bean’. ‘A bloody compliance officer pursuing newspaper tips,’ scoffed Ken Bates with his customary venom. The abrasive property developer had protested to the FA about Bean, even mentioning court action to avoid Bean’s intrusion. Some chairmen appeared to approve the dictum ‘First you get on, then you get rich, then you get honest’.
Their contempt towards Graham Bean mirrored their irritation towards the agents who represented their employees. Control of the agents – condemned as rogues – was a familiar topic among the chairmen, despite their disagreement about retaliation. ‘I don’t want any controls over agents,’ said Bates. Although they may have had mixed feelings towards Ken Bates, many chairmen shared his resentment towards any interference in their negotiations to sign players. In their view, so long as the buyer and seller were satisfied, financial chicanery was irrelevant.
That detachment towards uncontrolled agents troubled David Dein. He suggested a code of conduct, insisting that agents were paid over the length of a player’s contract to discourage any incentive to move players constantly and earn extra commissions. ‘Crap,’ snarled Ken Bates. As usual, the discussion ended in stalemate, although eventually Bates and th
e FA accepted Dein’s idea. It would have marginal influence. Their paperless business, brokered in secretive conversations between men committed to discretion, was impenetrable to outsiders. In many cases the financial arrangements between the clubs and agents were unverifiable. Payments were occasionally either deposited in anonymous offshore companies established to conceal the identity of the beneficiaries, or given in cash. In this atmosphere, there was little sympathy for Graham Bean.
Richard Murray, a representative of the less wealthy clubs, ranked among Bean’s few supporters. ‘There are some dubious people involved in management and agencies,’ he said, ‘and we need to do something.’ Corruption, Murray thought, helped the bigger clubs at the expense of the smaller clubs. With less money, some minor clubs would disappear and honest people would be deterred from involvement. The rebuttal was swift. ‘As long as they don’t stand on my toes,’ snapped a voice down the table, ‘I don’t care. I won’t go out of my way to investigate.’
There was an uncomfortable silence until Rupert Lowe suggested that agents’ fees should be controlled through the PAYE income tax system. Lowe, who had angrily spurned the offer of money by an agent during a train journey to Lille, was supported by David Sheepshanks. The Old Etonian’s refusal earlier that year to pay agents had proved harmful: agents, Sheepshanks discovered, had refused to offer his club any players. Reluctantly, he had agreed to pay 5 per cent commission, but he wanted the Premier League clubs to agree that all payments should be declared. The silent expressions of rejection by Parry, Bates, Dein and Martin Edwards and Peter Kenyon of Manchester United terminated the debate. Richard Scudamore, deftly presenting himself as all things to all men, understood the Big Five’s requirement to dictate the outcome of critical issues. Little had changed since Peter Leaver QC, his predecessor, had concluded, ‘the clubs whinge about agents all the time but don’t want to do anything. They don’t even want to register their fees.’