by Tom Bower
The reality of English football in early 1999 was unedifying: the national sport was uncertain whether the business was in the midst of a revolution or gripped by paralysis. Geoff Thompson, appointed as the FA’s temporary chairman, was an invisible 54-year-old small-club bureaucrat who epitomized the macabre quip that English football was managed either by the inmates of death row or by worthy, well-preserved flannels. The FA’s plight worsened on 6 February after Glenn Hoddle, the coach of the England team, was forced to resign for espousing the notion that the disabled were being punished for sins committed in a former life. The FA appeared to be rudderless and seemed unfocused in regulating the game and its opaque finances.
Chaos in the FA coincided with the climax of a bitter feud in the Premier League revolving around Peter Leaver and Sir John Quinton, the chairman. Without informing the Premier League’s members, Leaver had concluded a consultancy contract with Sam Chisholm after his resignation from BSkyB. In return for advice about the future of the Premier League’s contractual relationships with television, Chisholm would be paid between £50 million and £60 million. On reading Chisholm’s contract, Peter Ridsdale, the chairman of Leeds, exploded. Leaver was ordered to terminate the agreement. Chisholm’s compensation was £10 million – ‘for doing nothing’, as Ridsdale deplored. After completing the settlement, Leaver and Quinton were asked to resign on 11 March 1999 for acting without authority. ‘I was pleased to get out,’ said Leaver, ‘because a few of the Premier League chairmen were hypocrites who were never straight in their dealings.’ Few football chairmen had kind words for Leaver, who departed presenting himself as the disgusted eyewitness of alleged transgressions involving unpaid taxes, unauthorized loans and a file of unusual contracts between the Premier League and sponsors.
The swirl of huge income from Sky seemingly masked any rancour and turmoil; an image was sustained of an energetic enterprise, regardless of the chaos. In 1999, twenty-one Premier League and Football League clubs were listed on various stock exchanges. The first flotation, in 1983, had been Tottenham’s to pay off debts of £5.5 million incurred in rebuilding their stadium. During the 1990s other major clubs followed, unleashing unexpected new investment. Sky bought a 9.9 per cent interest in Chelsea for £39.4 million, valuing the club at £404 million, and there were similar stakes in Leeds, Manchester City and Sunderland. Sky’s 6 per cent stake in Manchester United at 230 pence per share valued the club at about £600 million. Sky’s investments prompted rival bids to counter Murdoch’s influence. ITV bought a 5 per cent stake in Arsenal for £47 million and a 10 per cent stake in Liverpool for £20 million. A third investor, NTL, a cable company, invested £26 million in Aston Villa, (although for less than the flotation price in May 1997 of £11 a share), undisclosed millions in Middlesbrough for a 5.5 per cent stake, £11.5 million in Leicester City, and about £14 million in Newcastle for a 9.9 per cent stake, plus a loan of £25 million for five years.
The escalating wealth fortified football’s status among sceptical ministers. Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell had not revised their criticism of four years earlier, but the government’s support of the bid for the World Cup necessitated New Labour reconciling itself with the representatives of the national sport. Like the Dome in Greenwich, the stadium at Wembley would be a towering monument to New Labour’s philosophy in the new millennium. There appeared to be good political reasons for the government to embrace the Football Association with enthusiasm.
On 15 March 1999, Wembley National Stadium Ltd (WNSL), a subsidiary of the FA, bought the old stadium and a 24-acre site from Wembley plc, a publicly quoted property company, for £103 million. Unusually, the contract stipulated that 7 acres of additional land around the stadium would be returned without compensation to the vendors if the redevelopment of the stadium had not started by the end of 2002. That commercial aberration reflected the FA’s inflated valuation of the land. The site had been privately valued for the FA at £64.5 million. Three years later, the same land would be valued at £30 million. Those who replaced the ‘amateur’ Graham Kelly had paid the additional £35 million (or £73 million) for ‘good will’.
Three months after the purchase, Wembley National Stadium Ltd, under Ken Bates’s chairmanship, was running two separate tendering processes on substantially different terms for the same construction contract. The process was subsequently criticized by a parliamentary committee for being ‘contrary to best industry practice’ caused by ‘possible conflicts of interest’. Even the FA subsequently admitted, ‘we did not have a completely transparent process’. There was also an absence of harmony.
Ken Bates had become antagonistic towards the condition of the Lottery grant requiring the construction of an athletics track around the football pitch. ‘I’m not prepared to sacrifice the interests of football who will finance the stadium,’ Bates told Derek Casey of Sport England. To build a new stadium, complained Bates, with a permanent athletics track placing football fans too far from the pitch was ‘madness’. Wembley would suffer the same fate as the redundant Olympic stadiums in Barcelona and Sydney. Casey was sympathetic to those wanting a replica of the Stade de France in Paris, the location of the World Cup in 1998. Retractable seats allowed the French stadium to be easily converted to serve football and athletics. But the French government had contributed nearly £500 million towards the stadium’s cost of £670 million and guaranteed an annual subsidy. Britain’s Lottery had given the FA only £120 million and Wembley was to be thereafter self-financing.
Casey’s niggling pressure enraged Bates. The FA’s agreement with Sport England for a national stadium, he fumed, was ‘a total recipe for disaster’. While football and rugby would guarantee twenty fixtures every year, athletics could guarantee none. Only three athletics events, including the Olympics, ever attracted more than 5,000 spectators and, realistically, there was only one foreseeable event, the World Athletics Championship, planned for London in 2005, which would use Wembley. Bates’s assessment was confirmed by David Moorcroft, the chief executive of UK Athletics. Their compromise, to avoid an uneconomic white elephant, was a stadium which was built for football but could be converted for athletics. Casey surrendered and agreed with Bates; their plan required the endorsement of Chris Smith.
During April 1999, Rod Sheard, the architect of Sydney’s Olympic stadium, had unveiled a revolutionary solution for accommodating the two sports. Within a perfect stadium for football, a massive concrete platform, sufficient to take the weight of 140,000 people, could be installed across the pitch for a world athletics competition. The only disadvantage was the installation and dismantling of the platform. The combined transformations would take about one year, cost £23 million and reduce the number of seats from 90,000 to 73,000.
Instinctively, Chris Smith disliked the platform. After a second presentation in mid-July 1999, he again complained, ‘It’s Heath-Robinson.’ Troubled by the installation, he envisaged a platform raised on hydraulic rams. ‘Wembley’s not a West End theatre,’ scoffed a Wembley executive. ‘We’re talking about acres of thick concrete 20 feet above the ground. Hydraulic rams would cost up to £100 million, and you don’t know in years’ time if they’d be still working, if you even ever need them. There’s no value for money.’ Smith was unconvinced. He wanted the Stade de France, even though his government was unwilling to match the French government’s subsidy. ‘I’m not satisfied,’ he insisted, unpersuaded that a similar platform in Monte Carlo’s stadium had proved successful. Smith wanted hydraulic rams. ‘You’ve got a closed mind,’ he complained to the architects. ‘These are not difficulties.’
The real difficulty was the government’s relationship with football. Smith was a member of a secret government Wembley monitoring group which included representatives of football but excluded the administrators of athletics. While Smith would publicly say, ‘Wembley was never a government project. It was an FA project,’ he sought, on the government’s behalf, overall control to advance football’s interest. To his misfortune, Robi
n Young and his other departmental officials were bereft of a strategy and appeared to be uncertain about the commercial and technical requirements for a stadium. While the minister grappled for answers, his advisers remained silent, disdainful of the pressing deadline to reveal the new stadium to the public.
The politician’s interference had become intolerable for Ken Bates. Without any expertise, he cursed, Chris Smith believed he knew better than the professionals. ‘Shall we cancel the public launch of the stadium?’ Bob Stubbs, Wembley’s frustrated chief executive, asked Smith. Floundering but fearful of annoying Downing Street’s ambition to host the World Cup in 2006, Smith emphatically rejected the suggestion. ‘Absolutely not,’ the minister replied. The demand for a stadium similar to the Stade de France was abandoned and Smith’s reservations appeared to have been unequivocally resolved. Pleasing the football lobby was imperative. ‘I was caught up by the momentum,’ Smith explained, ‘of beating Germany to stage the World Cup. Everyone thought it was urgent.’
On 29 July 1999, beaming with satisfaction, Chris Smith hosted the launch party in Wembley, unveiling Ken Bates’s singular version of a national stadium for football and athletics. Among Smith’s audience in the dilapidated old stadium were the contented representatives of football’s establishment. ‘The new stadium,’ enthused Smith, ‘is stunning and a magnificent venue for athletics.’ In the same week as England’s bid to host the 2006 football World Cup intensified, Smith seized the opportunity to associate himself with Tony Blair’s passion for the prize, which would climax in Wembley. The new stadium symbolized New Labour’s embrace of the national game and Smith, normally uninterested in sport, understood the political advantage of gluing himself to Downing Street’s ‘football mania’.
Ken Bates was ebullient. Unanimously, everyone praised his ability to produce a realistic design, although the cost had doubled from £136 million to £240 million and risen again to a tentatively fixed-price contract of £334 million. The additional cost was Bates’s scheme to construct an all-year business centre rather than a mere facility for twenty fixtures every year. In his replica of Chelsea Village, Bates reasoned that Wembley’s profits depended upon corporate hospitality. Since Derek Casey insisted on 75,000 tickets for the public, which would produce no profits, Bates added 15,000 corporate seats, including over 100 corporate boxes, to generate Wembley’s income. His blueprint was swelled by a Hilton hotel, offices and a banqueting suite for 5,000. The business plan had been endorsed by the FA, Sport England, Deloitte Touche, the accountants, Investec, the merchant bank, and, most importantly, by Chris Smith at the public launch. That morning, few doubted football’s victory, especially those complaining of defeat.
Unseen but standing close to Smith at the meeting was Simon Clegg, the chief executive of the British Olympic Association. Clegg was cursing and inclined to undermine the politician’s optimism. Minutes after the launch Clegg ensnared Philippa Drew, the senior civil servant accompanying Smith, and vented his spleen. ‘It’s outrageous,’ fumed Clegg. ‘Wembley has been hijacked by football. It’s meant to be a national stadium, fit for Olympic athletics. But it’s too small for the Games. We’ve been ignored.’
At the very moment that Smith and all the leaders of Britain’s sports organizations lionized Wembley’s new stadium as the ideal venue if the Olympics were ever held in London, Clegg set about sabotaging that conviction. ‘Britain will never get the Olympics,’ he raged. ‘That’s ludicrous,’ replied Drew, who had recently transferred to the DCMS from the Prisons’ Department at the Home Office. On her return to Whitehall that afternoon, Drew, acting on Kate Hoey’s instructions, blithely began to overturn the solemn prediction by Tony Banks, the sports minister: ‘Wembley is a project that we simply cannot allow to go wrong.’
On that same day, in a gesture towards the government’s commitment to football, Tony Banks had resigned to become Britain’s ambassador to win the World Cup in 2006. ‘After a few months as minister,’ Banks explained, ‘I knew I wanted to give it up. I didn’t like it. Alec McGivan was distressed, so I agreed to ask Blair if I could be the special envoy for the World Cup.’ The new stadium would be the showpiece for that championship.
Kate Hoey, Tony Banks’s critic, was appointed the junior minister in his place. Twenty-four hours after the ceremony at Wembley, Hoey had completed reading through the departmental files, noting especially Clegg’s protests since 1998 about the lack of consultation. Athletics, she believed, had been ‘marginalized’ because ‘everyone had fallen under the spell of the World Cup’. The proposed stadium, she concluded, had become ‘a stitch-up by football’. The major culprits, she opined, were Ken Bates, the officials within her own department and football’s greed.
Kate Hoey possessed no technical qualifications or specialist advisers to challenge the reconstruction plan proposed by the Australian architects. Guided, as she admitted, by ‘instinct’, she condemned the concrete platform as ‘a complete and utter nonsense. No other country had done it that way.’ In her opinion, the platform undermined the ‘legacy value’ of a national stadium for athletics and was ‘a waste of money’. By 21 September 1999, her antagonism towards Bates had solidified. Invited for discussions to her office, Bates refused and sent Bob Stubbs. In Bates’s opinion, Kate Hoey had discredited herself by saying soon after her appointment that Wembley’s twin towers would have to be incorporated in the new design – at a cost of an extra £40 million. To the businessman, the minister appeared to shoot from the lip without justifying her government’s interference. ‘I don’t like incompetent women,’ said Bates. ‘I don’t like bullies,’ replied Kate Hoey.
‘Why aren’t we building a Stade de France?’ Kate Hoey asked Bob Stubbs. ‘Football wouldn’t have it,’ replied Stubbs with stark honesty. That confirmed Kate Hoey’s anger. ‘I want a national stadium with a legacy,’ she said, ignoring the absence of government subsidies and the redundant stadiums in Barcelona and Sydney. Kate Hoey’s next question was self-revelatory. ‘What influence do I have over this?’ ‘We have £120 million from the Lottery,’ replied Stubbs, ‘and as long as we stick to the conditions, you have none.’ ‘You’re saying you can do what you want?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I’m not having that,’ said Kate Hoey, resenting her impotence and offended that a businessman would decide the use of Lottery money.
Searching for allies, Kate Hoey alighted on Simon Clegg of the British Olympic Association. Three weeks later, on 13 October 1999, the two were closeted in her office. Both had similar ambitions: Clegg wanted an Olympic stadium and Kate Hoey wanted a Stade de France or a dedicated athletics stadium. Both dismissed the arguments that such stadiums were financially unsustainable. To succeed, they united to destabilize Ken Bates, who by then had antagonized both. ‘Clegg’s chasing a dream,’ scoffed Bates. ‘He hasn’t got a pot to piss in.’
Ken Bates had been emboldened by a meeting of the FA council on 8 September 1999. The agenda listed ‘Wembley’ as an item for decision. The single word embraced the FA’s largest investment, posing a serious risk of the FA’s bankruptcy and the destruction of English football if the development was mismanaged. For months, Peter Middleton, the chairman of the Football League and a banker who had resigned as a director from Bates’s Chelsea Village board, had urged caution. The reconstruction of Wembley, Middleton believed, would automatically transform the FA into a property company and the organization lacked the necessary expertise. Any project, he reasoned, that was to be financed by debt rather than equity was certain to be more expensive. That afternoon, Middleton again cautioned his fellow members. ‘There will be an insufficient revenue stream,’ he predicted. ‘Wembley cannot be rebuilt on that basis.’ The bland faces prevented him continuing to warn, ‘Wembley is a monument for Ken and he can’t succeed. We need more information.’ His audience was not interested, their minds were elsewhere. Football, not finance, was their passion and they were all glancing at their watches. Thirty-five minutes had been allocated for the entire meeting. Each man was calculatin
g the departure time to reach the airport to catch a plane for Warsaw. No one wanted to miss England’s match against Poland. Everyone was impressed that Ken Bates had improved the seating, décor and food at the old Wembley stadium; there was no reason for further discussion. Bates’s management was reconfirmed. But Bates’s opponents in Whitehall were not so easily deflected.
Simon Clegg and Kate Hoey executed their coup on 19 October 1999. Everyone associated with Wembley’s reconstruction was invited to a meeting in the basement of Sport England’s headquarters near Euston station. Before the meeting, Clegg had persuaded Kate Hoey that once the proposed platform for athletics was inserted into the stadium, the view of many spectators would be obstructed. Enthusiastically, Kate Hoey adopted the ‘sight line’ obstacle to undermine Wembley’s suitability. Blithely, she ignored the architect’s computer models, which dismissed Clegg’s criticism as bogus. At worst, the models showed, 2,000 spectators would not see one runner on an outside track for one second. ‘The architects are bound to say that,’ smiled the junior minister. Clegg persuaded Kate Hoey to seek an independent review of the architects’ plans by the consultants, Ellerbe Becket. Subsequently, Chris Smith would deny ‘there was collusion between Clegg and Hoey’, although he agreed, ‘Clegg found a more sympathetic ear with Kate Hoey than from Tony Banks.’
The spleen of Kate Hoey and Clegg was directed at Derek Casey, Sport England’s chief executive. ‘Casey has failed to produce a strategy,’ complained Clegg. ‘He has been ineffectual. He has given in to the interests of football and he has failed to safeguard the Olympic dimension.’ In Kate Hoey’s opinion, Casey had been ‘browbeaten’ by Bates, a ‘domineering’ businessman who had ‘taken complete control and wasn’t listening to anybody’. She did not disagree with the condemnation by the representatives of athletics of Casey as a leading ‘villain’, ‘a control freak’, an ‘oily politician brilliant at survival’, and an ‘excessively cautious bureaucrat’. Casey would robustly reject those criticisms, saying that ‘Clegg was happy’ until suborned by Kate Hoey. Even David Moorcroft, representing UK Athletics, had supported the FA’s proposals until July, when he unexpectedly switched to Kate Hoey’s camp mouthing the expensive mantra, ‘I want a legacy.’ Kate Hoey’s coup was to persuade everyone, including Casey, to commission Ellerbe Becket to investigate Bates’s scheme. Four weeks later, Kate Hoey claimed her second victory.