Broken Dreams

by Tom Bower

  In his further quest for evidence, Bean resisted visiting Belgrade. The directors of the Yugoslav club had signed a letter to the FA asserting that Red Star had not paid Roach. Since the club was also the political and military authority for football in Yugoslavia, Bean decided that the capital was ‘too dodgy’ for an independent investigation. Failing to unearth the conclusive evidence frustrated the investigator, but there was no echo of that sentiment at White Hart Lane. Bean was told by Tottenham’s new directors that the ‘rumour machine’ of foreign witnesses lacked credibility. The notion that football was a ‘rogues’ business’ was dismissed. ‘Does football pass the smell test?’ Levy asked rhetorically. ‘I’ve never come across corruption during the actual game in England.’ In the past, Levy conceded, some agents and managers had ‘played at the edges’ and there was ‘no doubt there are dishonest agents in England’, but dishonesty had become recently harder under the FA’s new rules. Nevertheless, to ensure probity, Levy introduced an ‘aggressive’ new contract for agents retained by Tottenham. They were to undertake not to accept payments from any other party. That contract was in force when Roach embarked on his next mission for the club.

  The painful departure of Sol Campbell, Tottenham’s outstanding defender, prompted a frantic search for a replacement. A candidate, José Antonio Chamot, was suggested by Roach and Hoddle endorsed his agent’s recommendation. Chamot was a 32-year-old Argentinian contracted for one more year at AC Milan. Roach told Levy in July 2001 that, after discussion with Antonio Braida and Adriano Galliano at Milan, Chamot would cost £1.5 million, and Roberto Settembrini, the player’s agent, would expect $300,000. Roach was retained as a consultant by Tottenham for £200,000 to represent the club in the transfer negotiations.

  The gossip about Roach’s imminent arrival in Milan was picked up by Vincenzo Morabito, his erstwhile partner. Morabito had been involved with the transfer of Chamot himself, except on very different terms. Since arguing with Roach, Morabito had forged a close relationship with Jon and Phil Smith of First Artist. Together they had offered Chamot to Colin Hutchinson, the managing director of Chelsea. Morabito’s terms reflected his instructions from Milan: Chamot, he was told by the club, was a free transfer but would expect a substantial salary. Hutchinson nevertheless rejected the offer. Disappointed, Morabito searched for other clubs and then heard of Roach’s involvement and the £1.5 million transfer fee demanded from Tottenham. Jon Smith telephoned Daniel Levy. ‘Chamot,’ said Smith, ‘is a free transfer. Milan will ignore the remaining one year of his contract.’

  Daniel Levy was puzzled. Roach had personally reported that the price was £1.5 million and that had been confirmed in a letter. After Jon Smith’s telephone call Levy challenged Roach. ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Roach. ‘He’s just trying to get into my deal.’ Levy was confused and told Hoddle, ‘I think we should let Jon Smith negotiate.’ ‘Absolutely,’ replied Hoddle.

  On 18 July 2001, John Alexander, Tottenham’s secretary, was dispatched to Milan with Jon Smith. To their surprise, Roach was still in the city negotiating Chamot’s transfer. After easing Roach out, Jon Smith negotiated and signed the contract for the free transfer for a commission to be paid by Tottenham of £150,000. The final version of the deal on 19 July 2001 demonstrated the vicissitudes of the business: two agents could offer a different deal for the same player. Roberto Settembrini, the player’s agent in the Roach deal, had disappeared from Milan, leaving a puzzling fax (from Roach terminating their negotiations) in his room at the Excelsior Hotel. More bizarre, in the contract negotiated by Jon Smith with AC Milan on 19 July, Claudio Vigorelli, an Italian agent, was named as Chamot’s representative rather than Roberto Settembrini. However, after some discussion, Vigorelli’s name had been crossed out. In its place, Jon Smith was included as the ‘player’s agent’. That presented another puzzle. Jon Smith had been sent to Milan to represent Tottenham, not the player. Nevertheless, on behalf of the club and the player, Smith agreed that Tottenham would pay Chamot $1.5 million per annum for a two year contract and provide four return business-class tickets to Buenos Aires and a ‘suitable’ car. Resolving those irregularities became irrelevant after Chamot’s medical examination in London pronounced that the player was unfit. The directors of AC Milan, Levy was told, had not disclosed that their player was receiving injections for an injured ankle. The transfer was cancelled. To nearly everyone’s bewilderment, Chamot returned to Milan and continued to play for the club before joining the Argentinian squad in the World Cup.

  Vincenzo Morabito was not slow to whisper his concerns about Roach and no one was more interested than Graham Bean. At first it seemed to Bean that Roach might have been hoping to share the £1.5 million fee with Milan, a conflict of interest because Roach had been retained by Tottenham. But the investigator discovered a conflict of evidence which appeared to exonerate Roach. Contrary to Morabito’s evidence, Antonio Braida at Milan told Bean that Chamot was not free. Milan had originally expected a transfer fee. The contradiction with the contract negotiated by Jon Smith in Milan on 19 July for a free transfer was baffling. ‘Braida’s provided an explanation for Roach,’ thought Bean. The inconsistencies shocked Daniel Levy. His latest conversation with Roach was not pleasant. ‘These agents are nightmares,’ Levy told his colleagues. ‘Although,’ he added swiftly, ‘rumours don’t prove anything.’ Unaccountable and unprincipled, the agents might be the most influential group in football, he realized, but were also potential rogues with no ‘set criteria’ and the potential to destabilize the business. Since the evidence against Roach did not stack up, Levy was uninterested in seeking any further explanation. Pursuing the matter was pointless. Glenn Hoddle was crucial to ENIC’s successful ownership of the club and he was certain about Hoddle’s integrity. If Roach was not playing straight, Levy reasoned, Hoddle would have terminated their twenty year friendship. Accordingly, he refrained from discussing the debacle with his coach.

  There was also good reason to question the motivation of Jon Smith and Vincenzo Morabito in provoking suspicions about Dennis Roach. Both agents cast Roach as a ‘dinosaur’ to be slayed in the new saga, ‘Agent Wars’. Smith was ambitious to inherit Roach’s favoured relationship with Tottenham and was encouraged by a morsel proffered by Levy. To replace Sol Campbell, Hoddle wanted to buy Dean Richards, an uncapped defender at Southampton. Still smarting from Hoddle’s desertion, Rupert Lowe refused to take Daniel Levy’s telephone call. Levy’s solution was to hire Jon Smith. By chance, the agent encountered Lowe at Brighton Football Club on the night of 11 September 2001. As the tragic events in New York unfolded, the two men discussed business. ‘He’s not leaving,’ scowled Lowe. Shortly after, Lowe complained to Dave Richards, the chairman of the Premier League, that his player was being destabilized by Tottenham. Lowe’s obstinacy was profitable. Since Hoddle insisted on the player, Levy was obliged to pay Lowe’s price for Richards, £8.1 million. The inflated fee was to be paid in one instalment. Lowe was chortling. Jon Smith received £300,000 in commission. Daniel Levy had discovered that the controls exercised by a chairman of a football club over his business’s expenditure were limited.

  The aftertaste for Roach was intended to be hurtful. Graham Bean, dedicated to unravelling the truth, was convinced that the evidence of the two foreign transfers combined with the previous two English deals would aggravate Roach’s situation. On 27 July 2001, the FA formally charged Roach, alleging his receipt of double payments for the transfers of Wanchope and Ferguson. The announcement was intended to herald another major scandal similar to the Clough and Graham ‘bungs’ inquiry.

  Roach was defiant. After thirty years wheeling and dealing, he would not succumb to the FA’s hapless bureaucrats. His fortune had financed the creation of InterNetClub, an internet operation managed by his son, Nick, alias ‘Little Roach’, providing subscribers with information about every football player in the world. His self-confidence was reinforced by the FA’s decision on 12 April 2001 to subscribe to InterNetClub. The FA�
�s commitment to invest £4 million a year for five years was extraordinary, not least because it was approved by Nic Coward, the FA’s lawyer, responsible for the investigation of Dennis Roach. The agent was unabashed that the FA soon discovered that the system failed to perform and, despite extra costs, the FA lacked any recourse against the Roaches. Hilariously, Roach felt, the same association was also levelling serious charges against himself. Regardless of their lawyers’ opinions, he was certain of finding loopholes and mistakes. Firstly, the FA’s allegations about his receipt of double payments for the transfers of Wanchope and Ferguson were untrue because he never received the money; secondly, the FA’s regulations about agents had not existed when the transfers occurred; and thirdly, the FA lacked any jurisdiction over agents registered by FIFA. In October 2001, in response to the FA’s charge, he applied to the High Court to declare that the FA was acting unlawfully.

  Four weeks later Nic Coward realized the weakness of the FA’s position. As Roach contended, the FA lacked the authority to discipline agents and the regulator’s sole sanction was to compile a report for FIFA. Fifteen months after starting the investigation, Coward told Graham Bean, ‘There are problems about getting Roach.’ The FA’s lawyers began preparing to withdraw their complaint; the only recourse was to send the dossier to Gianpaolo Monteneri, FIFA’s director of legal services. Roach was ecstatic. Days earlier, Monteneri had spoken warmly about Roach at a seminar in London; and FIFA, plagued by allegations of Sepp Blatter’s corruption, would, he hoped, be disinclined to pursue him. His consolation was brief. The real threat to his business was posed by his rivals.

  During his career, Dennis Roach had made many enemies, few worse than Vincenzo Morabito, who was still outraged by Roach’s refusal to share commissions. Those disputes had not damaged Morabito’s business success. On the contrary, his football agency, FIMO, went from strength to strength. ‘Globally, Vincenzo’s the biggest agent,’ enthused Jon Smith, the chief executive of First Artist, an exaggeration but nevertheless important for Smith’s plans to become the chairman of Europe’s biggest football agency, at Roach’s expense.

  In December 2001, Smith’s search for a foreign partner to transform First Artist into a global agency ended. Vincenzo Morabito, boasting relationships in Italy, Spain and Scandinavia matched Smith’s requirements. First Artist paid £15 million for FIMO to become its equal partner in a public company quoted on the AIM stock exchange. Morabito received £6.7 million in cash, deposited in his Swiss bank account. Combined, Smith and Morabito claimed to represent over 400 players. ‘We’re now the biggest management agency in Europe,’ said Smith, ‘the engine room of the biggest market in football, which is the biggest sporting industry in the world and also the biggest entertainment industry on God’s planet.’ In June 2001, the company’s turnover was just £1.8 million with profits of £700,000. The projected pre-tax profit within one year, for the company capitalized at £19.3 million, was £2.6 million. Jon Smith anticipated that First Artist could be worth £40 million by the end of 2002 and £100 million one year later. On flotation in December 2001 shares in the company rose from 33 pence to 71.5 pence. ‘The bubble hasn’t burst,’ said Smith in December 2001. ‘Football is healthier than it has ever been.’ Smith’s ambitions depended upon acceptance of his credibility. In his telephone calls to the chairmen of Leeds, Charlton, Chelsea and other Premier League clubs, he asked, ‘Can we help you in any way?’ Repeating his mantra that First Artist had become ‘the world’s biggest football agency’, he mentioned offices in eight countries and that he represented 120 players in Britain. Size, he preached, was all-important. ‘We manage the heroes of the zeros,’ he gushed about the high-income players his agency represented. ‘First Artist is the biggest on the planet,’ he repeated. ‘We agents will control football.’

  To suggest a huge business, the prospectus of First Artist paraded its involvement in hundreds of deals involving dozens of players every year. But only a handful of players were named and the prospectus omitted the truism that once a player had signed a four year contract, the opportunity to generate more business was limited. First Artist could only neutralize the hazard of ‘no deal, no income’ by forging close relationships with the chairmen of Premier League clubs. Expanding their business in that direction depended upon eliminating other mavericks, the one-man agencies who, Smith hoped, would be squeezed into oblivion by the new regulations. In particular, Smith anticipated the obliteration of Barry ‘Silky’ Silkman, an amiable former footballer for Crystal Palace, a friend of Terry Venables and Harry Redknapp, and an unsuccessful greyhound trainer living in Barnet. ‘Silky’, mischievously personified by his critics as an experienced agent knowledgeable about managers and rivals involved in the old ‘bung’ culture, irritated Smith. Silkman was certainly vulnerable. Squeezed between the agents in Europe enjoying close relations with foreign clubs and the publicly quoted English agencies, Silkman was financially endangered – relying on an unusual number of transfers to Cambridge United – and occasionally powerless.

  In October 2000, Silkman had opened negotiations with Freddie Shepherd for the transfer of Clarence Acuna, a Chilean midfielder, to Newcastle United, expecting a commission of £1 million for the introductions. Unannounced, Silky was cut out of the deal. Shepherd dispatched his own representative to Chile and refused to pay the agent any fee. For months Silkman had contemplated suing Shepherd but feared that Shepherd or his competitors would encourage an investigation by Graham Bean, similar to Roach’s. ‘I hear that you’re investigating me,’ Silkman said, entering Bean’s office at the FA’s headquarters in London. ‘You’d better stop or else.’ ‘Or else what?’ snorted Bean. ‘Get out of my office, into the lift and fuck off out of the building. I’ve taken on bigger men than you. I wasn’t investigating you but I am now.’ Bean was joking but in truth he could only challenge the small agents. Those agents operating abroad, like Carlos Gustavo Mascardi, Pinhas ‘Pini’ Zahavi and the two English agents, Willie McKay and Mike Morris based in Monaco, were beyond his control. Similarly, First Artist and the other publicly quoted agencies were also immune. But there was a convergence of interest between Bean and Jon Smith towards Dennis Roach.

  Jon Smith and Vincenzo Morabito had embarrassed Roach over the transfers of Goran Bunjevcevic and José Antonio Chamot to Tottenham. They chortled about the accumulated damage inflicted on his reputation by Graham Bean’s investigation, which restricted the agent’s opportunities. Smith’s ambition was to inherit Roach’s privileged access to Tottenham. ‘I’ll help you rebuild Spurs,’ Jon Smith promised Daniel Levy. In early June 2002, Morabito found a third possibility to fluster the older rival.

  Roach had negotiated on Tottenham’s behalf the purchase of Milenko Acimovic, a Slovenian midfielder playing for Red Star Belgrade, for £500,000. With some zest, Morabito had delved and reported that Acimovic had been available on a free transfer. Jon Smith telephoned Daniel Levy, the club chairman, to relay their hopefully disturbing revelation that the payment of £500,000 was unnecessary. Levy was surprised. ‘I was told that the money was needed to repay Acimovic’s debts to the club,’ Levy told Smith. From Roach, Levy heard another version. ‘The player’s contract,’ the agent said, ‘would expire on 30 June and he would have been snapped up before the expiry if Tottenham didn’t pay.’ The Slovenian newspapers reported a third account: they quoted Srecko Katanec, the Slovenian national coach, telling Acimovic that the £500,000 had been pocketed by a foreigner. The truth was irrelevant to Levy who needed to reinforce his team. ‘The agents can sort it out between themselves,’ he smiled. To maintain the club’s financial stability, he was limiting the money available to rebuild his ageing squad, and Acimovic was cheap. The value of a player was the amount the club felt inclined to spend if the agent could deliver the player. As a last resort – concerned about possible dishonesty – Levy unexpectedly pulled Acimovic to the side just before the contract was signed. ‘Where’s the money going?’ he asked. Acimovic’s reply was reassuring: ‘
To the club.’ Whether the player was telling the truth or not was irrelevant. Acimovic was the choice of Glenn Hoddle, and the coach trusted Dennis Roach.

  Dennis Roach understood the ultimate consequences of Jon Smith’s tactics. In Smith’s contest to become a giant, his methods to extinguish Roach’s livelihood were brutal. ‘Big Cockroach’ was being cast as an unfavoured matchmaker. Disdainful of Roach’s history as a master among agents in football’s cut-throat world, the newcomers were treating the pathfinder as a dinosaur. Roach felt the squeeze. Just as the influence of agents over the future of English football was increasing. His younger competitors were forging relationships with club executives which were denied to himself. Compounding his predicament, the young footballers were becoming increasingly fickle and greedy. In their lust for the new millions, the players’ loyalties were evaporating, and they criticized his failure to offer the twenty-four-hour mollycoddling housing-to-haircuts service provided by his rivals. Poignantly, Roach’s aspiring heirs remained, like himself, outsiders. None were invited for social or professional reasons to the FA’s glass edifice in Soho. The revolution transforming agents into decisive brokers disgusted the panjandrums, but the FA’s executives were powerless eyewitnesses of the competition among the agents.

  Rather than deal with some of the problems that Bean had unearthed, Adam Crozier decided to demote or even sideline his investigator. In May 2002, Bean discovered that his job was to be advertised. His replacement had been identified – Steve Barrow, an insurance regulator without much experience in football, was to become Bean’s superior, although he was expected to adopt a low profile. ‘The market will decide what happens to clubs,’ ordained Nic Coward. And the same arrangement, Coward implied, would banish unwelcome agents.

  Dennis Roach began searching for a lucrative exit, just as others of his generation were similarly cast as dinosaurs.