by Tom Bower
Terry Venables had considered several offers after resigning as England’s coach. Martin Gregory, the owner of Portsmouth, had been particularly energetic in his pursuit of Venables. The club was immersed in debt and in despair Gregory, whose inherited fortune originated from Blue Star garages, ranked among the many convinced about Venables’s ability to perform miracles. To secure him, Gregory had even conceded that Venables could also continue to coach Australia’s national team on the other side of the world, an appointment he had taken after resigning as England manager. He ignored the cynics’ warnings that Venables would only remain until a better offer arrived.
Three thousand Portsmouth fans greeted El Tel as a messiah to rekindle Fratton Park’s glory days and restore the spirit of a club heading towards oblivion. ‘I could be here one year or ten years, who knows?’ Venables announced in the stadium on 11 August 1996. ‘It’s a statement of intent. I’m fully committed to Portsmouth.’ Venables was masterful in the art of conveying his sincerity and in promoting the propaganda of his unrivalled abilities. Standing alongside the Lord Mayor of Portsmouth, Venables promised the crowd to build a new stand, a new ground and a bright future. Any doubters were reassured by Venables’s purchase in February 1997 of 51 per cent of the club for £1. ‘Fucking amazing,’ swooned Venables to Ashby about Gregory’s acceptance of a pittance for the shares. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ said Martin Gregory welcoming Venables’s appointment as chairman, ‘it’s the best news I’ve had in a long time. We stand on the threshold of exciting times and with Terry at the helm I’m convinced that we can finally fulfil Pompey’s potential.’
Despite the club’s perilous finances, Venables began a spree of transfers which did not always appear to benefit Portsmouth. Relying on three trusted friends, Ted Buxton, his favourite scout, and the agents Eric ‘Monster’ Hall and Tommy Lawrence, Venables approved the purchase of John Aloisi, an Australian striker, from Italy and Matthias Svensson, a striker playing for IF Elfsborg of Sweden.
Ted Buxton had ‘spotted’ Svensson, an ‘ideal player’, in November 1996. Elfsborg’s transfer price was £75,000. With Venables’s approval Tommy Lawrence was asked to finalize Svensson’s transfer. ‘Lots of whoopsies in this,’ Lawrence told Ashby. The financial transaction was unusual; under Lawrence’s direction, the transfer fee was not to be paid directly by Portsmouth to Elfsborg but to Stephen Carter, a lawyer in Dulwich employed by Lawrence. There was another peculiarity. Kjell Hallen, Elfsborg’s vice-chairman, was told by Lawrence that he should invoice Stephen Carter for £200,000, and once the money was received Hallen should return £125,000 back to Carter. The solicitor subsequently concluded that the £125,000 would be Lawrence’s profit. ‘I think this was an attempt to derive as much from the transaction as possible,’ agreed Carter.
In correspondence with the Swedish club, Paul Weld, Portsmouth’s secretary, confirmed on 18 November 1996 that he would transfer £200,000 for the player. Three days later, Carter received the details of Elfsborg’s bank account. Over the following days, however, the directors of the Swedish club became nervous; the complications were causing overwhelming anxiety. By 2 December, Kjell Hallen decided to halt the charade. ‘It’s too much [sic] people involved in this transfer,’ Hallen told Weld in a fax. Hallen wanted a direct transfer of £75,000 from Portsmouth and no opaqueness. The enrichment of Lawrence by the Swedes was terminated. Nevertheless, Venables ordered Ashby, ‘Pay Lawrence £20,000 for his services’. Buxton was also paid a fee by Portsmouth. Ashby was vexed. During his two years at Tottenham, Ashby had been introduced to football’s devious practices. He had seen the unusual commissions lubricating the transfers of Gascoigne and Sheringham. At Portsmouth, in Venables’s absence, Ashby was no longer an active observer but at the centre of Venables’s bid to become rich. Ashby had just negotiated a £200,000 loan to Portsmouth from a local supporter and disliked the diversion of so much money to Lawrence and probably others. Ashby’s stance caused a strain in his relationship with Venables. In his memoirs, Eric Hall would claim that Ashby had demanded a bribe to facilitate the deal and was upset not to receive any money. Unsurprisingly, Ashby uttered a similar allegation against others. Suspicion and self-enrichment at football’s expense surrounded Venables.
Apparently unconcerned about the club’s finances, Venables bought four more Australian players – Robbie Enes, Hamilton Thorp, Craig Foster, Paul Harries – although they would be frequently absent, at his own request, to play for Australia. Venables’s critics, however, were silenced by his sale in 1997 of Lee Bradbury, a striker, to Manchester City for £3 million, a colossal sum for a questionable talent. After the sale, Venables billed Portsmouth £300,000 for his services agreed under his contract, a healthy bonus to the £300,000 he earned from promotional contracts with Admiral, a clothing manufacturer.
Venables was squeezing a dry carcass. Building work for the new stadium was threatened by the failure to pay the contractors; suppliers were complaining that their bills were unpaid; the players worried that there was no money for their wages; and fewer supporters were watching matches. In April 1997, creditors’ writs and court judgements began arriving at the ground. ‘Our position isn’t a nice one,’ sighed Paul Weld. Insuperable financial problems easily disillusioned Venables. A football club without money was unable to satisfy his ambitions.
The embarrassments at Portsmouth were aggravated on 23 October 1997. Eddie Ashby was convicted at Knightsbridge Crown Court of breaching the bankruptcy laws and, to his surprise, he was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment. During his first weeks at Wormwood Scrubs and Stamford Hill prisons, he believed that his wife would receive a regular income from Venables, not least from a 15 per cent stake in a major project.
In 1996, Ashby had arranged the purchase on Venables’s behalf of a twenty-bedroom hotel and 300 acres of land in Mas de Panorama near Alicante in Spain. Arranged to avoid taxation, the plan was to convert the property into a football academy. Ashby transferred £550,000 to Venables Holdings, an English company. Next, he asked Alan Chick, an offshore facilitator in Guernsey who was also caring for the private trust of Geoffrey Robinson, the discredited paymaster general in the Labour government, to establish Oakcliffe Holdings. On Venables’s behalf, the new offshore company bought the Mastapo complex for £750,000. Ashby was a partner in that transaction until his conviction.
Standing on the court steps in Knightsbridge minutes after Ashby was taken to a prison cell, the football coach disowned his loyal assistant. ‘I knew nothing about his bankruptcy,’ Venables declared. Few were convinced, but Venables had his own problems. He had lost heavily in the libel action arising from his autobiography. The case, brought by Alan Sugar, had cost the publishers £101,000 in damages, plus costs of £1.5 million. During the hearings Venables had been declared to be discredited by two judges. Venables’s own fate had become perilous.
On 2 December 1997, Portsmouth’s new but uncompleted stadium was opened at Fratton Park but, after two games, was closed for safety reasons. Three days later, Venables awarded himself £150,000 as a performance payment, sold his shares back to Gregory and resigned from the near-insolvent club. For his original £1 investment Venables had earned in two years over £550,000, but some players complained of remaining unpaid. Among the aggrieved was Paul Walsh, an injured striker expecting £500,000 from the club on an insurance claim. To Walsh’s anger, the club had allowed his compensation to disappear into a ‘black hole’. Months after Venables had left the club with his own pay-off, Walsh was still struggling to recover the money paid to the club by the insurance company.
Early the following year, in January 1998, Venables appeared in court to face nineteen charges of serious misconduct under the Company Directors’ Disqualification Act 1986. Specifically, in his purchase of Tottenham, Venables was accused of including false information in the ‘offer document’ and perpetrating ‘an undisclosed and sham loan’. The DTI investigation of Edennote, Venables’s private company, reported that the football mana
ger had produced untruthful financial accounts. Edennote’s ‘long running insolvency’, the inspectors reported, was ‘characterized by dealings and transactions of obvious impropriety’. Ashby, his co-conspirator, was accused of unlawfully signing cheques and negotiating with banks on Venables’s behalf. Venables was accused of being ‘non-cooperative’ with the official receiver and the Inland Revenue. He pleaded guilty to the nineteen offences. He was fined £500,000 and disqualified from acting as a company director until 2005.
Venables’s admission of guilt surprised Graham Kelly. In the wake of successive scandals at Doncaster, Chester, Brighton and Portsmouth football clubs, the FA’s chief executive promised in May 1998 to enforce ‘the highest standard of administrative behaviour’ in football clubs, but there was little evidence of purposeful interest.
The convictions of Ashby and Venables satisfied Alan Sugar. He and his staff had provided information and some affidavits to the DTI to prove the dishonesty. Football’s realities, however, influenced Sugar’s opinion. In his eagerness to enhance the value of Tottenham – worth about £74 million in 1998 – his attitude towards the game’s morality became tempered.
Since Venables’s departure, Tottenham had declined successively under two managers, Ossie Ardiles and Christian Gross. Sugar was visibly desperate to find a cure. As the directors pondered how to save their club, they searched for a candidate with a proven record. Only one name was deemed to be suitable: George Graham, the disgraced manager employed by Leeds. Graham, Sugar agreed, would be ideal, not least because he would want his revenge against Arsenal. In the discussion among Tottenham’s directors, Graham’s dishonesty and the ‘bung’ were barely mentioned. Soon after Venables’s conviction, Graham was approached on Sugar’s behalf and he agreed to a four year contract, to start on 1 October 1998.
By any reckoning, the appointment of George Graham by Alan Sugar was a defining moment in English football. Not because of the outcry that the appointment provoked, but by the complete absence of any controversy or condemnation. Graham Kelly’s passivity was unexceptional. Sugar’s endorsement of a dishonest man did not surprise Kelly. George Graham’s one year ban, believed Kelly, was ‘a quite substantial punishment which had passed slowly’. Although Sugar had complained four years earlier about Kelly’s preference to avoid the consequences of a serious probe of Venables’s activities and concluded that the FA was ‘a toothless tiger, without any real controls over the clubs and players’, he appeared to have adapted himself to life and survival in football’s jungle. He was not surprised when, that same year, Terry Venables re-emerged yet again at another Premier League club. In February 1998, Venables was invited to save Crystal Palace, a loved but unglamorous south London club, from relegation.
In 1990 Crystal Palace had reached the FA Cup Final but during the following years slid towards the bottom of the top flight. Disenchanted by football, Ron Noades, the club’s enigmatic chairman, had welcomed the approach in 1997 by Mark Goldberg, the 34-year-old owner of a computer servicing company in Bromley which he valued at about £100 million. Like so many self-made millionaires whose fortunes had been earned by brashness – Goldberg’s trick was to wave wads of cash in front of his salesmen – the effervescent tycoon had originally dreamt of scoring goals for Crystal Palace. Instead he offered to buy the club and create a team able to defeat Manchester United. ‘As a Palace fan,’ said the man aspiring to copy Ken Bates, ‘I’ve suffered a lot of frustration over the years.’ Swayed by Noades’s description of life as a club owner – ‘It’s great. I went to lunches in Downing Street with kings and ambassadors’ – Goldberg dreamt of clutching a glass of champagne in the directors’ box and gazing at the crowds roaring below the giant red letters embossed on the new ‘Mark Goldberg Stand’.
In self-promotion Goldberg pledged unlimited money for the club’s benefit, although his business record was not pristine. In the early 1990s two of his companies had been declared bankrupt and during his campaign to sell hospitality trips to the 1998 World Cup, he had wrongly claimed to enjoy the endorsement of Alex Ferguson. But his motives were unambiguous. ‘In business,’ Goldberg pouted, ‘I’ve never wanted to be second, only number one.’ Within five years he expected his investment in Crystal Palace would be worth £100 million. Ron Noades understood Goldberg’s self-delusion. ‘Everyone thinks he can run a football club,’ Noades told Goldberg, ‘but it’s the most difficult business in the world.’ In his dismissive manner, Goldberg spoke of the dividends he would earn from the profits. ‘I have never earned a dividend from Crystal Palace,’ Noades told him, ‘except when I wound up the old club. There’s no profits in football.’ Like so many star-struck businessmen intent on jettisoning their anonymity at any price, Goldberg fantasized about fulfilling his dream.
Goldberg’s bid to Ron Noades on 12 November 1997 was characteristic. Although Crystal Palace was at the bottom of the Premier League, he offered to pay £30.1 million for the club. ‘Stupid,’ concluded Noades. The bid was £12 million over Noades’s own valuation and, not surprisingly, he accepted the offer in February 1998. The money was to be transferred in three stages over one year while Noades remained as the club’s chairman.
In March 1998, Goldberg sought to renegotiate the agreement. Crystal Palace was on the brink of relegation and the high purchase price had deterred any City support. Goldberg sold a stake in his computer business for £23.75 million and agreed that, until he paid the full amount, Noades should retain the freehold of the club’s property, including the stadium. ‘It’s a stupid deal,’ Noades told Goldberg. ‘You’re paying too much.’
Goldberg was not listening. Yearning for fame, he had turned to Terry Venables, the architect of Crystal Palace’s ‘Golden Years’ in the late 1970s, with an offer of the managership to save the club from relegation. ‘I have studied Terry’s history quite carefully,’ explained Goldberg, ‘and I am convinced that I can work with him.’ This was just after Venables’s disqualification from acting as a director until 2005. Goldberg was undeterred, despite Venables’s initial reluctance.
Goldberg’s offer to Venables proved to be irresistible. After pocketing £135,000 simply for opening negotiations, he secured a five year contract worth £3.5 million, a house worth £650,000, a tax-free cash payment of £750,000 and share options valued at £2 million. Goldberg’s trust in Venables was complete: ‘We’re like brothers almost. We respect each other. Totally. Terry Venables is the master of all masters. He is the authority on football.’ Noades cautioned Goldberg: ‘Venables’s problem is that he comes with an entourage and that will be expensive.’ Convinced he could tame Venables, Goldberg paid Noades £80,000 to relinquish his chairmanship and depart.
Venables showed little sympathy for Goldberg’s financial plight. He began buying thirteen new players, some in peculiar circumstances. Among the first was David Amsalem, a 27-year-old Israeli left back. Venables had been offered the player by Barry Silkman, an amiable agent based in north London, acting for Pinhas ‘Pini’ Zahavi, a shrewd Israeli agent. ‘Look at the videos,’ Venables told John Griffin, the club’s trusted scout. ‘He’s no good in defence,’ Griffin reported. ‘Could I train him?’ asked Venables. ‘Yes,’ replied Griffin, ‘but he’s too old to become a good defender.’ Nevertheless, Venables bought Amsalem for £850,000, notionally from his club, Maccabi Nevealon, but in reality from a consortium. Ron Noades was baffled by the transfer. ‘He’s worth at most £250,000,’ he told Goldberg. ‘I gave you his recent medical to show his real value. Get out of it.’ Goldberg was deaf: ‘I know what you’re talking about but I’ll go ahead.’ The purchase proved worse than Noades predicted. Amsalem was a disappointment and the fate of his transfer fee was puzzling. Maccabi Nevealon claimed not to have received the first instalment of £266,666 from Goldberg and finally complained that less than £100,000 was ever received from the club’s owner. Amsalem would be resold to another Israeli club for £25,000.
At the end of the 1997–98 season, Crystal Palace was relegated from t
he Premier League. Goldberg’s gamble on Venables had failed. Although £6 million were added to the losses, Venables’s buying continued, ostensibly to prevent the club’s slide towards the bottom of the First Division. His purchase of two Chinese players, Fan Zhiyi and Sun Jihai, for £1 million aroused particular speculation. Venables had relied upon the recommendation of Ted Buxton, his favourite scout, that the two Chinese were ideal for Crystal Palace. In reality, neither player proved to be suitable and the Chinese authorities complained about receiving only £600,000. The fate of the remaining £400,000 of the club’s payment was never resolved. Both transfers would be investigated, but no action was taken. Venables also decided to rely on Lee Bradbury, the striker he had recently transferred from Portsmouth to Manchester City for £3 million and who was swiftly rejected by the club. In October 1998, Goldberg agreed to pay £1.5 million for the player. One year later, Bradbury was resold for £300,000.
Graham Kelly did not consider investigating the unusual transactions at Crystal Palace, even after the circumstances surrounding the transfer of Walter del Rio, an Argentinian midfielder, to Crystal Palace had been revealed. Walter del Rio had been offered to Crystal Palace by Jon Smith, the ambitious joint owner with his brother Phil of First Artist, a football agency. Jon Smith, born in 1952 in Barnet, was a former pop promoter in Los Angeles who had never played football but recognized the potential wealth of the football business. ‘Everyone wants to put their nose in the trough,’ he said, unashamed about his motive, ‘and the trough is enormous.’ Premier League clubs, Smith knew, were paying millions of pounds every year in agent fees. The chairmen of Britain’s football clubs, he believed, would have reason to fear the increasing power of agents.
The outset of Jon Smith’s career as a football agent in the late 1980s had coincided with the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. Whole teams of east European players were offered for sale to west European clubs, either for the east European club’s survival or for private profit. One obstacle to employing the players in Britain was the European Union’s law that players should be EU nationals or entitled by birth to EU passports. For those players who were ineligible, unscrupulous agents in southern Europe used forged documents to invent Greek or Italian grandparents or great-grandparents. With those ‘great-grandparents’, east European players applied for Greek or Italian nationality and became eligible for employment by EU clubs.