by Tom Bower
The sale caused despondency at West Ham. Without Ferdinand, the team began to slide in the Premier League. Attention was focused on Redknapp. Compared to the cool, professional foreign managers in the competing Premier League teams, Redknapp’s volatile temper – smashing bottles and throwing trays of food – matched his self-description: ‘In life, I like people to know exactly what I think. I’m an easy-going bloke. But give me a shove in the wrong direction and I have a wicked temper.’ Redknapp believed that football was a sport where money bought success: ‘If you’ve got the dough, you’ve got more of a chance to be the “best” manager.’ Money was especially important in Redknapp’s life; he was openly dissatisfied with his annual salary of over £1 million. His income was less than that of the foreign coaches employed by British clubs and did not match the phenomenal increase enjoyed by his players. His plight, he complained, was nothing less than ‘criminal . . . Us bosses could not book a ticket on the gravy train. Suddenly I found I was getting less than my most ordinary player and that can’t be right . . . Surely my pay should be on a par with my top players.’
Redknapp’s dissatisfaction irritated Terry Brown; and arguing with Redknapp was unpleasant. ‘His moods go down-up-down, so gloomy,’ complained a West Ham director. Redknapp was ‘up’ when West Ham was winning and was buoyant when spending money. Defeats pushed him angrily ‘down’ and then he blamed West Ham’s finances. Terry Brown, Redknapp complained, failed to provide sufficient money to get eleven talented players on the field. In response, the chairman was puzzled by his manager’s attitude towards his players’ fitness.
In 1999, Redknapp had ridiculed a journalist’s description of West Ham players drinking until 4 a.m. on the day of a match. ‘I tell you it is absolute rubbish,’ scoffed Redknapp, insisting that he forbade alcohol on the coach or in the players’ bar on match days. ‘That sort of thing does not happen.’ Shortly before, however, Redknapp had attacked foreign players in England for undermining the team spirit by refusing to drink. As a player, he admitted, his life revolved around drinking and gambling. ‘You could say our motto was “Win or lose, always on the booze.”’ Redknapp appeared to endorse the light-hearted threat by Peter Reid, the moody manager of Sunderland, to drop any player who was unwilling to become ‘legless’. The drinking at West Ham had not enhanced the team’s performance. At the end of a brutal humiliation by Swansea, Redknapp admitted his confusion: ‘It was one of those days. I can’t really explain it. We’re short of a few faces and we were all over the show. I tried to fit square pegs in round holes and it didn’t work.’ His endorsement of drinking had annoyed Ragnvald Soma, the Norwegian player, who complained that some players turned up for training at West Ham smelling of alcohol. ‘They don’t drink at West Ham,’ countered Redknapp. ‘The players’ bar is completely alcohol free and has been since I’ve been here – I stopped that years ago.’ Soma nevertheless signed for West Ham on 17 January 2001 for £800,000.
Redknapp’s inconsistencies about drunken footballers reflected an ambivalence towards the truth. Lying, he believed, was justified to protect his team and his personal interests. Sometimes it seemed that the facts took second place. In October 1998, Duncan Ferguson, a 27-year-old forward, was sent to prison for three months after maliciously biting a player. Redknapp commented, ‘I don’t think Ferguson should have gone to prison for that.’ In the same week, John Hartson, a forward for West Ham, was convicted in Swansea for kicking flower baskets around a shopping centre and boasting how he ‘“lamped” geezers who wound me up in pubs’. Redknapp appeared to be outraged by the player’s punishment. ‘I think the world of John Hartson,’ he said. In the same month, he defended Hartson’s aggressive kick of Eyal Berkovic, an Israeli midfielder, in the face. When his denials were challenged, Redknapp dismissed the attack, ‘it was nothing’. Eventually, asked to justify the violence, Redknapp admitted ‘what [Hartson] did was totally out of order, absolutely terrible’. Redknapp’s reluctant admission prompted the demand for Hartson’s instant dismissal. Redknapp’s response exquisitely extolled football’s morality, ‘No one is going to sack a £10 million footballer are they? He would go for free to another club.’ Redknapp’s indiscretion provoked no criticism, at least not from the FA. Hartson’s agent, Jonathan Barnett, offered newspapers an exclusive interview with his client for £20,000, while Glenn Hoddle commented, ‘there is no longer any shame for being sent off while representing your country’.
Redknapp’s attitude towards the finances of a football team was shaped during his management of Bournemouth, a troubled Third Division club. Appointed as manager in October 1983, Redknapp assiduously toured the country, watching endless football matches to identify good, inexpensive players. By 1987, his new team had defeated Manchester United and had won promotion to the Second Division for the first time. Redknapp acted as a big fish in a small pond with a personality to silence doubters. The king’s demands were never to be resisted.
Ambitious for success, the club allowed Harry Redknapp to trade players despite the debt increasing between July 1987 and June 1992 from £150,000 towards £2.6 million. In 1990, despite Redknapp’s expenditure, including generous contracts with the players, the club was relegated to the Third Division. The club’s debt was destined to increase to £4.4 million.
In 1992, the club’s financial troubles compelled another change of ownership. Redknapp resigned. The ‘worries and stress’ of managing a club, Redknapp complained, prompted his resignation, but he boasted that during his six years, the club had earned £848,000 in profits by his transfers. ‘I could spot a player,’ he wrote, which proved ‘I had a big future in this management game.’ That was not the legacy which Roy Pack, Bournemouth’s subsequent financial adviser, recognized in 1997. Pack, a former Arsenal and Portsmouth player who became a corporate strategic planner, could only spot horrendous debts. Redknapp had increased the club’s costs but not its income. The small profit on his transfers had been swamped by the players’ annual wages, which had risen about fivefold to around £1 million. ‘Harry made his demands and he got them,’ Pack told the News of the World. ‘There was a degree of irresponsibility in his actions. It has developed into the mess we are now desperately trying to resolve. What has happened is almost unbelievable and in a business sense it is ludicrous.’
Redknapp was infuriated by Pack’s criticism, which he dismissed as inaccurate. ‘Why did you say that?’ Redknapp screamed down the telephone. ‘I thought we were friends.’ Pack laughed. ‘I’m a barrow boy. You’re a barrow boy,’ he replied. Redknapp escaped any blame for Bournemouth’s plight. He arrived as an assistant manager at West Ham without a blemish on his reputation. Trading players remained his vision of management.
‘There’s no spark,’ Harry Redknapp told his wife about the West Ham team in 1992. Relegated twice in three years, the players were morose. ‘The squad is hopeless,’ he despaired. Two years later, in August 1994, Billy Bonds, the manager, resigned after a strange succession of events and Redknapp was appointed as his successor. As he was a devotee of the Hammers, no one could doubt Redknapp’s sincerity. ‘Losing means a very bad Saturday night,’ he wrote. ‘It is like a personal injury, like something has gone badly wrong in your life. Bad results slaughter me. They gut me.’ He envisaged himself as the club’s saviour and began a buying spree of foreign players. By August 1996, although he professed that football was essentially an English game, he had paid £4 million for eleven foreign players, the largest collection in Britain at the time. Even for a frequent visitor to the horse track for whom ‘betting plays a large part in my life’ the purchase of foreign players was hazardous. Watching videos or one match was a poor substitute for consistent reports on the grapevine about British players.
There were several expensive mistakes. In 1996, Redknapp bought Florin Raducioiu, a Romanian, from Espanyol for £2.4 million. ‘I followed his career for years before I signed him,’ Redknapp said, ‘so I know what he can do.’ The agent was Dennis Roach. A few weeks after a
rriving, Raducioiu was shopping in Harvey Nichols rather than boarding the team bus for Stockport for a match. Redknapp admitted, ‘ . . . his displays were worth about two bob’. Raducioiu was resold after six appearances for £1.6 million. Redknapp also admitted that his purchase of Marco Boogers was ‘disappointing’ because ‘his attitude stank’; and buying Ilie Dumitrescu from Tottenham proved to be forlorn. ‘I have to buy at the cheap end of the market,’ explained Redknapp. ‘I was buying second-hand players with no MOTs.’
After two years of Redknapp’s management West Ham’s record worsened. Defeat followed defeat in 1997. In the stadium, the fans chanted ‘What a load of rubbish’ and ‘Redknapp out’. Outside the stadium, Terry Brown and the other directors were violently attacked, forcing Brown and his wife to flee on foot to the local Underground station to avoid injury. ‘Without doubt this has been my worst season as a manager,’ confessed Redknapp. ‘I don’t know where the next goal is coming from.’ To placate the fans and avoid relegation, Brown advanced money to buy new players, although the manager’s hyperactive trading of players was puzzling. Twelve out of nineteen players photographed for the previous year’s official calendar had been transferred. The purchase of Gary Charles, a defender, for £1.2 million from Benfica was one of many mysteries. After just four games, Redknapp abandoned his latest acquisition. ‘Is he no good?’ Brown asked. ‘What do you expect for £1.2 million?’ replied Redknapp, adding rhetorically, ‘What do you expect for nothing?’ ‘Well, why buy him, then?’ asked Brown. ‘We’re paying him £1 million a year in wages.’ The manager’s response was pert: ‘Yeah, but they’re all getting it.’
Brown was paralysed by that irrefutable snub. Challenging team managers, as all club chairmen knew, was perilous. They were either to be wholly trusted or fired. Since almost every manager would eventually be fired, the sacking culture encouraged Redknapp to spend. Without a normal market rate to fix a player’s true value, any valuation between nil and £5 million depended on how much Terry Brown, a property developer who paid £2 million for a controlling stake in West Ham, was willing to spend.
Redknapp’s remedy for the absence of unlimited millions was his pride in spotting a young player of quality he could nurture. Three outstanding players enhanced that reputation: Rio Ferdinand, Joe Cole and Frank Lampard. West Ham’s loan of Gary Charles to Birmingham only eleven months after his purchase and the other disappointments diminished that renown. The stark variations in his performance baffled the club’s directors. And his close relationship with a handful of agents was particularly mysterious. Ignorant of foreign languages, Redknapp relied on agents, in particular Dennis Roach and Willie McKay, whom he described as ‘my representative in France’. Redknapp appeared to encourage those agents to use the club’s training ground as their base, chatting to players about transfer fees and wages in other clubs. In turn, those agents regarded Redknapp as an ideal manager. Willie McKay was seen hosting Redknapp in Scalinos and other expensive Italian restaurants in London, not least to celebrate the transfer of Marc-Vivien Foe, a Cameroonian midfielder. Dennis Roach was equally close. ‘I don’t know how an agent can be dishonest,’ Redknapp exclaimed when challenged about that relationship. The FA’s allegations against Roach for taking money from both sides in a transfer did not disturb Redknapp. ‘It’s not a big deal if an agent earns from both sides,’ he explained. ‘If you want a player, it doesn’t matter what happens to the money. All that matters is I think the deal is good value for the money.’ The value for money in Redknapp’s deals was occasionally questionable. Peter Storrie, the club’s managing director, explained Redknapp’s relationship with agents to Terry Brown. ‘Harry likes the turnover of players because he always wants to freshen up the dressing room.’ ‘But does Harry take money?’ Brown asked Storrie. ‘Absolutely not,’ Storrie replied. Reassured, Brown refrained from mentioning his irritation that he was personally earning the money for someone else to waste.
The question about Redknapp’s financial ethics was provoked by his attitude towards football’s worst cases of corruption: the allegations against Terry Venables for dishonesty, and George Graham and Brian Clough for accepting ‘bungs’ from agents for transfers. In Redknapp’s opinion, their denials of wrongdoing were unquestionably true. Despite their long friendship and the notoriety of Venables’s admission of dishonesty to the DTI, Redknapp professed complete ignorance ‘about Terry’s business’. Redknapp’s opinion about Brian Clough’s dishonesty at Nottingham Forest was conditioned by the disgraced manager’s adamant denials and Redknapp’s mistaken assumption that the FA had failed to prove any transgression. ‘What did he do wrong?’ asked Redknapp, adding, ‘Brian Clough never confessed. Cloughie was totally innocent. He was a hero for the absolutely incredible thing of winning the European Cup.’ By contrast, George Graham’s admission to taking ‘bungs’ from an agent proved that the manager was ‘greedy’ and ‘stupid to risk everything’. ‘Honesty, morality, decency,’ Redknapp proudly announced, was his mantra. Like most of England’s football professionals, Redknapp had not read the Reid report about ‘bungs’.
Redknapp’s views were, arguably, commonplace among the football fraternity. Infringements of society’s customary code were tolerated so long as the teams were victorious. But the aftermath of Rio Ferdinand’s sale and West Ham’s deteriorating performance had strained Redknapp’s relationship with Terry Brown. ‘He’s not a proper coach,’ Brown complained to his fellow directors, irritated by his manager’s indiscipline. Redknapp’s demands for money and the gossip about the Ferdinand deal itself were disquieting. ‘I’m an accountant,’ Brown said to Redknapp, ‘and I’m very suspicious of everyone in football.’ Among football executives, Brown knew, there were no friends, merely rivals and employees back-stabbing to a greater or lesser degree. His unease was understood by Redknapp. ‘Eventually,’ admitted the manager, ‘everyone gets the sack, that is obvious in this game.’ At Upton Park, Westminster and the FA’s new headquarters in Soho Square the battle for football’s honesty was approaching a new climax. The target was the agents, accused of unscrupulousness and the sleuth hunting the suspected villains was the FA’s compliance officer.
10
THE AGENT: DENNIS ROACH
Graham Bean was the symbol and substance of the FA’s self-regulation. Two years after his appointment, the Premier League chairmen described their compliance officer as ‘a disappointment’. Choosing a policeman, lamented David Davies on behalf of the FA, had suggested that the FA was ‘a police force with considerable resources and that the game will be cleared up in five seconds’. In public football’s regulator mournfully regretted that too much had been expected too quickly; among themselves senior FA officials admitted their reluctance to become involved in more than nominal regulation. Bean’s enthusiasm had become embarrassing for them.
The detective constable was unaware of any hostility; rather, he was proud of several successes. First, he had exposed a tickets scam organized at Wembley stadium for the Worthington Cup Final in 1999 between Leicester City and Tottenham. Each player had been allocated twenty complimentary tickets and could buy a further seventy-five tickets. Some players had ‘recklessly’ resold their tickets to Tottenham supporters. Bean had traced the source of each ticket and the offending players had been fined by the FA.
In a second success at Chesterfield, Bean had unexpectedly arrived at the ground and found evidence of the club under-reporting gate receipts to pay the players unregistered cash bonuses. To his disappointment, the FA had only fined the club £20,000 and deducted nine points, but the leniency of the punishment had not detracted from his achievement.
His third success had been the investigation of fraud at Hull. Nick Buchanan, the chairman of Hull, had urged Bean, ‘Perhaps you should spend less time here?’ But Bean had persisted once he heard about the involvement of Stephen Hinchcliffe, a controversial businessman, in the club’s purchase. ‘Either you want the job done or you don’t,’ Bean had challenged Nic Coward, his
superior. ‘The club seems to be riddled with corruption.’ Within two years of Tom Belton brokering the club’s sale, its debt had grown from £100,000 to £2 million. Coward had relented. Six directors had been questioned by the police for using the club for their financial benefit, taking unauthorized expenses and loans, but no action was taken.
Those successes had been tempered by the atmosphere in the FA’s headquarters. Like other traditional employees, Bean sensed discrimination against those working for the pure love of the game. While Bean’s annual salary was stuck at £43,000, young marketing girls recruited by Paul Barber, formerly employed by Barclays Bank, earned double. Those young women were travelling across the world, often on first-class tickets, enjoying the privileges denied to the older employees. The FA had become swamped by the Saatchi culture, turning football into showbiz. Running costs had doubled from £43 million a year to over £90 million. Grudgingly, Bean agreed with Ken Bates that the new faces in the Soho headquarters were more like ‘television presenters, beansuit manufacturers and advertising executives’ than seasoned football aficionados. While the impression of Adam Crozier’s revolution transforming the FA from an edifice steeped in tradition and blazers into a swish corporate brand was accurate, the casualty was the enforcement of regulations to save football’s soul. The ultimate battle would be to defeat the dictatorship of the Premier League chairmen: their self-interest threatened the entire sport. Before undertaking that contest – the litmus test of the FA’s authority – Bean sensed there should be moves to root out chicanery among the agents.