by Tom Bower
Irving Scholar, the seller, was departing reluctantly. Magnetized by football like so many of his breed, Scholar was an eccentric whose chairmanship of the football club had become notably unimpressive. In Venables’s opinion the property developer, living as a tax exile in Monaco, had failed to understand that football belonged to the fans not the shareholders. As one of the club’s business managers, Scholar had also failed. Tottenham’s debts to the Midland Bank were £11 million and, to Scholar’s embarrassment, the bank had appointed David Buchler, an insolvency expert, to the board after the stock exchange suspended the company’s shares.
Requiring help to fund the club’s debts, Scholar had searched for saviours, finally choosing Robert Maxwell. On the night Scholar was due to sell the club to Sugar and Venables, Robert Maxwell attempted to frustrate the deal. ‘Oi, you,’ Sugar screamed down the telephone at Maxwell in front of a room full of bankers and lawyers summoned to complete his purchase, ‘this is my fucking deal. What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Eh?’ Sugar had paused for Maxwell’s reply. ‘Don’t even think about lousing up my fucking deal, or me and you will fall out in a fucking big way.’ Sentiment never encroached on Sugar’s business dealings. By nature he kept his distance, disdaining any attempt to glad-hand or indulge in frivolities. For him there was more than a football club at stake. He had been enticed into the deal by Rupert Murdoch, who was anxious to sabotage Maxwell’s bid. Murdoch feared that if Maxwell owned Tottenham the new Premier League would sell their television rights to ITV and not to Sky. Sugar would favour Sky’s bid because he would be contracted to manufacture the broadcaster’s satellite dishes. Accordingly, after trashing Maxwell, Sugar had an incentive to cajole the professionals in the room into completing the sale to the ‘dream-team’.
Sugar appeared to be Venables’s ideal partner. Both were rough diamonds from the east of London and both appreciated money. To Venables’s misfortune, his new partner was infinitely more successful in accumulating the riches that remained the footballer’s dream. To Venables’s good fortune, Sugar had said nothing in the bank when the football manager had failed to produce his down payment of £750,000 for the shares. Without a blink, Sugar’s brief telephone call had conjured the required money and Venables’s ambition had materialized.
No one suspected Venables’s plight as he boldly signed the formal document pledging that £2.25 million, out of a total of £3 million, for his purchase of Tottenham shares was ‘from his own resources’. His dearth of money was unknown to Alan Sugar and his bankers. Despite the millions of pounds Venables had earned over the previous fifteen years, excelling as a footballer and manager of four clubs, including Barcelona, he had invested badly and spent freely. To buy the shares Venables had secretly borrowed £2,150,000 from Norfina, a fringe bank, and £250,000 was advanced from Yawetz, another lender. The loans were negotiated by Eddie Ashby, a businessman Venables had appointed as his adviser and manager. Ashby, an apparently innocuous businessman, understood Venables’s weakness. ‘Venables didn’t need help,’ Ashby would later explain, ‘he needed protection from himself and those around him.’ Like Sugar and Scholar, Venables was immune to any self-doubt. The football manager with a low attention span believed that he knew as much about money as football but was nevertheless grateful for Ashby’s assistance. ‘There is no doubt that the Venables–Sugar takeover of Tottenham,’ said Ashby, ‘would not have happened without me. I knew that I had saved Tottenham.’ But the subsequent judgement by DTI investigators would be that Venables was the least naive person in that room and that he had preferred to indulge in a ‘charade’ and ‘a piece of window dressing designed to deceive’.
Terry Venables’s dream was to build a successful club. Alan Sugar’s dream was to earn profits and glory. Venables regarded his arrangement with Sugar as remarkably convenient. Accustomed to docile chairmen willing to pay out millions of pounds without expecting any influence over its expenditure, Venables hoped that Sugar would adopt the chairman’s traditional role, as an invisible presence while the management of the team was entrusted to the chief executive. Sugar’s unusually benign tone misled Venables to assume his right to spend Sugar’s money without question. ‘Just sit in the corner and shut up while I stand amid adoring crowds,’ was Sugar’s subsequent interpretation of Venables’s attitude. While Venables trained the team and enjoyed himself, his commercial duties as chief executive of the club were given over to Eddie Ashby. In Ashby’s recollection, Venables’s reason for delegating these duties was explicit: ‘I ain’t got a fuckin’ clue where to start. It’s running the fuckin’ business side that’s scaring the shit out of me.’ Ashby’s version was never contested: ‘I acted as Terry’s alter ego for everything except football.’
Compared with the bizarre range of rough diamonds and nouveaux riches attracted to football, Eddie Ashby appeared excessively conventional. He had earned some wealth in his twenties as a contractor jointly providing cleaning services with Michael Ashcroft, later rewarded with a peerage by the Conservative party. Their relationship ended in acrimony. More recently Ashby had been the director of forty-three companies which were either in receivership, in liquidation or struck off. To some it appeared that he had assiduously sought to avoid the attention of the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise. On 18 June 1991, just as Ashby assumed the title ‘personal assistant to the Chief Executive Officer of Tottenham’ and delighted about ‘a dream come true’, he was declared bankrupt. Venables’s general manager was forbidden by law to undertake any duties controlling any company, and especially Tottenham, a public company. ‘I’m a bankrupt,’ Ashby told Venables, fearing immediate dismissal. ‘This bankruptcy thing, it ain’t a problem,’ replied Venables, apparently fearless about that. Ashby assumed that Venables was unwilling to abandon his co-conspirator in his lies about the finance for his Tottenham shares. To avoid benefiting his creditors, Ashby’s salary and expenses were paid to a company owned by his wife and son.
Terry Venables had always been reluctant to allow the normal rules to interfere with his ambitions or habits, not least after attaining his new status. Any consultations, he assumed, especially about the expenditure of money, were unnecessary. Alan Sugar became aware of his partner’s caprice while on holiday in Sardinia. Tottenham announced the purchase of Gordon Durie, a Scottish forward, for £2.4 million. Sugar exploded in anger. Not only did he expect to be consulted about expenditure, but Venables had recklessly broken the pledge to the club’s bank not to increase the company’s debts. ‘I’m in charge of money,’ Sugar screamed. ‘What’s going on?’ In Venables’s life, irate chairmen were unexceptional and easily ignored, but Sugar appeared to be more obsessed with money than most. The clash of two men, both criticized as ‘control freaks’, was a pertinent omen. Venables’s calculated indifference was brutal: ‘Are we a fucking success if we make £5 million and get relegated or are we a success if we win the League and lose fucking money?’ Their differences were irreconcilable. Venables wanted money to buy players while Sugar wanted money as a profit on his investment. The contest was between Sugar, the abrasive but disciplined businessman, and Venables, the winsome chancer. The rift conditioned their individual reactions to the unexpected disclosures about the mismanagement of Tottenham’s finances.
The keeper of the secrets was Peter Barnes, the club secretary. Soon after the sale, in July 1991, Barnes handed an internal file to Eddie Ashby containing some unconventional contracts concluded during the years before Sugar’s arrival. ‘This has got all the secret deals in it,’ was Ashby’s colourful version of his conversation with Barnes. The secrets concerned payments to players and agents.
One series of secret payments had been made to Ossie Ardiles, a formidable Argentinian midfielder. ‘This reeks of commercial immorality and impropriety,’ asserted Jonathan Crystal, a barrister, a director of Tottenham and a friend of Venables. ‘The situation . . . is disgraceful. There has been a consistent pattern of improper arrangements and schemes designed to pay money to
Mr Ardiles without any regard for the tax consequences or the regulations of the Football League.’ Other unannounced arrangements highlighted in the file were ‘loans’ approved by Tottenham’s management to Paul Gascoigne and Chris Waddle, both star footballers, for house purchases and a BMW car for Gascoigne’s father, which were not declared to the Inland Revenue.
The file also contained records of unusual payments to agents. In an informal arrangement, Tottenham had paid £25,000 to Eric ‘Monster’ Hall, a former music business hustler who had spotted the potential wealth in football transfers. ‘I’m not a one-man-band,’ puffed the extravagant cigar smoker, ‘I’m a one-man-orchestra.’ Those payments breached the FA’s rules prohibiting agents receiving any money for transfers. Until 1995, the FA had forbidden players to be represented by agents. Tottenham’s unauthorized relationship with Hall had encouraged a culture of impropriety in the club.
The serious revelation in the secretary’s file was the apparent financial loss to other football clubs in the sale of three players – Paul Allen, Mitchell Thomas and Bobby Mimms – to Tottenham. In common with other football clubs, Tottenham had persuaded the players to transfer to White Hart Lane by secretly offering money or cars. Under FA rules, all those payments were to be recorded on the printed contracts. Tottenham had failed in several transfers to fulfil that obligation. This uncomplicated deception influenced the permanent tribunal established by the FA to fix fair prices for the players’ transfers. The tribunal’s decision was determined by the amount of the player’s wages that would be paid by the buying club. Tottenham’s habit had been to present to the tribunal a contract showing a false, lower income. The false contract reduced the transfer fee which the selling clubs would receive from Tottenham. The players did not suffer; under the valid but secret contract, the players were guaranteed ‘loans’ in excess of £400,000 and tax-free payments which would not be repaid. Luton FC had lost £200,000 in the sale of Mitchell Thomas, while West Ham had lost £250,000 in the sale of Paul Allen. Both players were represented by Eric Hall.
Eric Hall’s relationship with Tottenham was remarkably close. A majority of the club’s players were represented by the agent on a handshake. The absence of written agreements was not a sign of trust but rather to avoid providing any incriminating evidence for the FA. Hall epitomized the proactive agent, acting often in his own interest. With some aggression, he used his inside knowledge and influence to stir up deals, instigating transfers by inserting stories into newspapers. ‘Eric’s a deal maker,’ Venables told Sugar without revealing that his friend had been allowed to issue false invoices to Tottenham to conceal his activities, encouraging conflicts of interest to flourish. In the negotiation of a new contract for Justin Edinburgh with Tottenham, Hall demanded £5,000 from both Tottenham and Edinburgh. The player claimed to have paid his fee in cash from his hospital bed after a visit by Hall, although the agent denied the allegation.
After reading the file, Eddie Ashby self-interestedly concluded, ‘This is the way some football clubs are run. You can’t survive unless you fiddle.’ Tottenham’s conduct, although contravening the FA’s regulations, had not been unusual among English football clubs. After all, Venables had received £50,000 just for signing his contract.
Hiding money offshore and paying cash from wodges of banknotes pulled from his trousers, Venables epitomized the football aficionado. The source of Venables’s wodge was a mystery even for Ashby, although he suspected that it came from Venables’s father, a publican in Chingford. ‘Untangling Terry’s wealth,’ said Ashby, ‘would be a mammoth task.’ In the chaos he discovered unpaid taxes, unpaid domestic bills, and Venables professing ignorance about his own assets and loans. The chaos was reflected in Venables’s lifestyle; the new chief executive of a public company shunned any desk, preferring to spend his time at the training ground, in hotel lobbies, or at Scribes, a drinking club.
Scribes in Kensington satisfied Venables’s lust for occupying the centre of attention. His parties attracted on one spectacular night Bill Wyman, Adam Faith, Kenny Lynch, Dennis Wise, Vinnie Jones, Denis Law and Paul Gascoigne, all gyrating on a wooden dance floor taken without payment from White Hart Lane. In the background sat ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, the retired murderer, surrounded by journalists prepared to sing their host’s praises in return for access to personalities and exclusive stories. Few were aware that under Venables’s management the club had lost over £100,000 and, unable to pay its debts or honour its cheques, had received writs, summonses and judgements from its creditors. ‘We were stretching it out as long as we could,’ admitted Venables, who used his creditors’ money to pay himself £32,000 and finance his entertainment. For the enjoyment of that rollercoaster Venables thanked Ashby. ‘What you did with Scribes was brilliant,’ Venables told Ashby, who agreed to manage Scribes and Tottenham even though he was a bankrupt. This was against the law and unsuspected by Alan Sugar on his arrival at White Hart Lane on 21 June 1991 for the first board meeting. At the top of the agenda was the sale of Paul Gascoigne to Lazio of Italy. The sale of the club’s best player had been reluctantly agreed by Irving Scholar to repay the club’s debts.
Negotiating the sale had been assigned by Scholar to Dennis Roach, a north London agent who would be closely involved with Tottenham for over thirty years, and with many other major British clubs, in an extraordinary career which established him as football’s principal agent.
Adroitly, Roach, alias ‘The Cockroach’, a former minor football player, had become expert at inserting himself into the trade of players between clubs. Transfers often depended upon his paid participation, and his notoriety appeared to encourage Roach’s sense of invincibility. He knew the football regulators in Britain were ineffective and compromised; their officials were answerable to the same club owners who traded with him and tolerated the conflicts of interest and cash-payment culture. In the intensifying search by managers for foreign players, many relied upon Roach despite his astronomic fees and a reputation splattered by controversy and enmity.
Dennis Roach was part of the so-called ‘St Albans mafia’, an unusual group of football enthusiasts – including Tony Berry of Blue Arrow, a recruitment company, and a director of Tottenham – who grew up as wartime children around the north-western fringes of London. Like many working-class boys, Roach sought his escape from poverty through football, although he was unblessed with the necessary ability to become a top player. He was born on 3 April 1940 in Bushey; Roach’s father, Frederick, was a council employee. After an enjoyable but academically disappointing passage through a local grammar school, he played as a professional for Bedford, Hillingdon and Barnet. Roach would mention that his signing-on fee to Bedford as an apprentice paid for his wedding, but Roach was twenty-eight years old when he married Janet Lovegrove, a hairdresser, in a Catholic church on 5 June 1968, long after his football career ended, partly due to an injury. That slight mistake was not an aberration; in later years, Roach presented colourful stories about his career. The varying accounts were constructed on one truth: football was his passion but money was even more important.
In parallel to his frustrated football career, Roach was selling fitted kitchens and carpets with his brother from a shop in north London. His good fortune during that period was to establish a relationship with a Saudi businessman who in turn secured a contract to provide carpets ‘for six hundred houses in Saudi Arabia’. Although in later years Roach did not protest when reports described his customer as ‘a Saudi prince’, in reality the sale was to Saudi Airlines.
His second piece of good fortune was to meet, on a Portuguese beach in 1972, Johan Cruyff, the outstanding Dutch forward. To the famed international footballer, Roach resembled an Irish wide-boy, speaking eloquently, intently and with humour – the qualities which encouraged many to invite the agent, frequently described as ‘my best friend’, to be the guest speaker at weddings and birthday parties. Roach decided to attach himself to Cruyff and break into the football business. Unlike the carpet
trade, trading footballers would be lucrative and fun and, with no risk of unsaleable stock, there were limited overheads. Few players, Roach recognized, were able to exploit their commercial value in negotiations with the clubs’ owners and most were naive about finance. They would tolerate agents’ fees so long as there was no cost for themselves. Another attraction was that little in the business was recorded on paper, creating possibilities to avoid taxation.
Dennis Roach’s version of what followed is impressive. Cruyff, says Roach, hired him to act as his personal agent. Efficiently, says Roach, he negotiated an agreement with Nabisco for Cruyff to promote Shredded Wheat and, impressed by that success, Cruyff arranged Roach’s appointment as the Dutch national team’s media manager during the 1974 World Cup in West Germany.
That version is partially inaccurate. In reality, Roach attached himself to Cruyff as a groupie, at first in hotel lobbies, and later at parties. He negotiated Cruyff’s commercial contracts but admits that his services to the Dutch national team were unpaid: ‘I paid for my own hotel room and got money from the television networks for arranging interviews with Cruyff and the other star players.’ Two years later, Roach was described in an English newspaper as Cruyff’s agent.