by Tom Bower
The pressure coincided with renewed debate that the sons of Alex Ferguson, Freddy Shepherd, David Dein and Sam Allardyce were not only agents but had also traded in some capacity with their father’s clubs. To clean up the business, the FA introduced new rules in January 2006 to improve the compliance unit, albeit one to which no investigators with experience in the police or Inland Revenue were appointed. Scudamore also moved fast. Under his guidance, the Premier League changed its rule books to forbid an agent receiving payment by more than one party. The end of dual representation meant that either the club or the player would pay the agent’s fee. The Premier League agreed with the FA that foreign agents would need to register with the FA before operating in England.
Those rules were no longer sufficient. In Italy, the Serie A league was exposed in May 2006 as riddled with match-fixing, not least by bribing referees. The expulsions from the league of major Italian clubs was far more ferocious than the FA would contemplate or impose. However, the threat to English football was obvious. The increasing foreign ownership of Premier League clubs by billionaires concerned to maximise profits rather than care for their local communities aroused fears that the Premier League would become infected by dishonesty. Scudamore was under pressure to prove the league’s honesty. To the club managers he admitted, ‘This is getting silly. There’s no proof and I don’t believe there have been bungs. But we can’t ignore the noise.’
On 3 March 2006, he appointed Lord Stevens, the 65-year-old former chief of Scotland Yard, to investigate wrongdoing during transfers. Although Stevens was a director of six companies, a newspaper columnist and entering the third year of an investigation to determine the circumstances of Princess Diana’s death in Paris, the respected former police commissioner had assured Scudamore that Quest, his investigation agency, had sufficient resources to examine the background to 362 transfer contracts completed in the previous two years. ‘I want a yes or no,’ Scudamore told the investigator.
By investigating transfers just in the previous two years, Stevens seemed disingenuous. In normal policing, Stevens would surely have targeted suspected agents and suspicious transactions to establish whether dishonesty existed within football. Instead, the chosen method was a blunted search for corruption without any certainty that any evidence or witnesses could necessarily be found within those parameters. The self-limitation no doubt was welcome to those in the FA who did not wish to travel too far back into football’s murky history.
Before Stevens reported, BBC TV’s Panorama programme broadcast a special report on 19 September 2006 alleging corruption in the Premier League. In particular, Panorama alleged that the son of Sam Allardyce took money for arranging transfers to Bolton, his father’s club. The programme failed to establish that the father knew of his son’s activities. Nevertheless, the assertion by Charles Collymore, an agent, in the same programme that he knew of ‘six to eight’ managers willing to take bungs on transfers, was sufficient to reinvigorate the demand for the Premier League to remove any possible corruption. (Collymore himself would be charged for touting Enoch Showunmi, playing for Luton, to Milwall without Luton’s knowledge.)
Inevitably, football’s aristocrats denounced Panorama’s allegations as exaggerated and sniffed that the Allardyce story was, if such thin evidence were to be believed, an isolated incident. In the past, Panorama’s allegations would have prompted the Football Association and the government to huff and puff about their desire for investigations and action against corruption but do nothing. That option was excluded by the continuing Stevens inquiry and a new sense of despondency within the football community. Although one billion watched the Premier League on television, England had been ignominiously trounced in the 2006 World Cup. The FA and Eriksson were blamed. The manager’s immediate resignation was a relief but painful. Until the end of his contract in 2008, he would be paid £13,000 per day by the FA, declining during 2007 to £6,000 a day. Finding a replacement highlighted the FA’s unresolved problems. David Dein urged that the FA hire Luiz Felipe Scolari, the Brazilian manager of Portugal’s national team. Barwick’s efforts in spring 2006 provoked an embarrassing snub. Many suspected that Dein’s encouragement was intended to divert interest from Arsene Wenger, Arsenal’s manager. Once again, Dein was criticised for an apparent conflict of interest between his club and the FA, and he was defeated in the ensuing election as the Premier League’s representative on the FA’s board.
Compromised as second choice, Steve McClaren’s appointment as England’s manager was further tainted by his decision to recruit Terry Venables as his assistant. The return of Venables to English football despite his turbulent record was a sad indictment of the game’s stunted development and highlighted the mistaken rush to appoint Barwick as the chief executive. Football’s lack of convincing leadership was symbolised by Wembley’s fate. The stadium was incomplete and, without further payments, would never open. Reluctantly, the FA agreed in October 2006 to pay Multiplex an extra £35 million to complete the stadium for use in 2007. The FA’s total expenditure was £827 million, although the actual cost was £975 million, the difference being Multiplex’s loss.
The gloom and drift exposed English football’s vulnerability. Bereft of leadership and the imposition of credible values by the FA, many owners of Premier League clubs succumbed to financial pressures and welcomed offers from foreign buyers. In summer 2006, Doug Ellis sold Aston Villa to Randy Lerner, an American, for £62.7 million plus £12.1 million of debts. Shares in Everton were bought by Robert Earl, an American, and the take-over was expected to be completed once its directors had stopped squabbling. The Moore family, the principal shareholders of Liverpool, had long searched for a buyer, and finally began negotiations with the Maktoums of Dubai before opting for a higher American offer of £470 million from George Gillett and Tom Hicks. The prospect of the Premier League being controlled by non-Britons and foreign-registered companies was becoming a reality and even welcomed by Scudamore as ‘irresistible’. Football’s fate was acknowledged in silence by the FA. Money rather than loyalty to English football was the criteria for the purchases. Those Premier League clubs not owned by billionaires feared for their ability to compete. On the pitch, the new owners would unbalance the league, and socially, they seemed uninterested in personal involvement with their local communities or in meeting their rivals during the matches. The old camaraderie on match days, already ignored by Abramovich, Fayed and the Glazers, was certain to be copied by other foreign owners. That indifference to the game’s social infrastructure was reflected by Scudamore’s cool uninterest to vigorously investigate the background of the new foreign owners. His reliance on the DTI, a hapless government department, and the Premier League’s rule book barring a directorship to anyone with a criminal conviction as not ‘fit and proper’, to guarantee that the foreign owners would not malignly influence the English sport, showed limited concern about the future character of the league. The bid in summer 2006 to buy West Ham should have alerted Scudamore to the perils of apathy.
West Ham, founded in 1895 as the Thames ironworks team, had returned to the Premier League in 2005 but Terry Brown feared continuing as chairman. Antagonistic fans, he believed, threatened to be violent and the club’s other major shareholders could be tempted by offers to sell their shares. The club’s future in the Premier League, Brown assessed, was precarious if new players were not purchased and that expense was the privilege of billionaires. The club’s revival had owed much to the generous sale of key players by Pini Zahavi with Abramovich’s support. During summer 2006, Brown was asked by Zahavi whether the club, which miraculously had come close to winning the FA Cup, was for sale. ‘Yes, for £75 million,’ replied Brown after calculating that the £6 million profit earned by the club in the last season, the promise of an additional £10 million income from Sky in 2007 and the opportunity to develop Upton Park for housing, worth £95 million if the club took over the proposed Olympic stadium, was a good investment for a rich speculator. Zahavi had alre
ady identified a purchaser. The front man would be Kia Joorabchian, an Anglo-Iranian, but the finance would ostensibly be provided by an Israeli property investor. Beyond the Israeli was Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch who had fled Putin’s Russia and was living under protection in London. Berezovsky was in partnership with Badri Patarkastasishvili, a prominent Georgian businessman. Both Berezovsky and Patarkastasishvili were football fans. Zahavi’s misfortune was Joorabchian’s commercial record in Brazil, which was deemed to be unattractive by the British media. His more important problem was that the Russians’ interest evaporated and the Israeli investor, on the eve of a floatation, became uncertain about spending £80 million as well as swallowing £23 million of debt, and assuming responsibility for contingencies worth £13.6 million. As Zahavi’s proposal floundered, Brown seized an opportunity suggested by David Dein after a match at the new Emirates stadium. ‘You should meet Eggert Magnusson,’ said Dein, referring to an Icelandic football manager closely linked to UEFA and financed by Bjorgolfur Gudmundssona, a dollar billionaire owning a big portfolio of companies bought with loans arranged by off-shore hedge funds. ‘Tell him he can have the club if he comes up with £85 million and no arguments,’ replied Brown. In the following hours, Brown regretted that Zahavi would be unsuccessful and that Keith Harris, the banker, would be involved in any deal. But there was no alternative when Dein telephoned that night confirming the Icelanders’ commitment. The sale was completed on 21 November 2006. Terry Brown earned about £34 million for his shares, £10 million more than he had anticipated, and a good return for his original investment of £2 million. The first casualty was Alan Pardew, the coach, criticised for arrogance and dismissed in a struggle to avoid the club’s relegation. The second casualty was the club’s relationship with the community. Magnusson showed no interest in personally continuing Brown’s support for local charities. The third casualty was the Premier League’s vetting system. There were good reasons to consider just how Iceland, a previously poor country, had suddenly spawned a fortune to invest in British assets. But Scudamore’s headquarters did not check how Bjorgolfur Gudmundssona had accumulated his money. Scudamore’s protection of the clubs and their executives appeared to influence even Lord Stevens.
At the end of September 2006, Stevens reported to Scudamore that his inquiry was incomplete. After six months, at a cost of £625,000, thirty-nine transfers, he said, required further investigation, not least because only 65 out of 150 agents had responded to his inquiries and he had been denied access to some foreign bank accounts. With the help of the FA’s power to request information at the risk of bringing a charge of ‘misconduct’ if an agent refused access, Stevens secured Scudamore’s agreement on 2 October to extend his inquiry by two months for an additional fee of £200,000. His principal areas of investigation were reported to include Bolton, Portsmouth, Manchester United, Middlesbrough and Newcastle. ‘If we can’t expose it,’ said Stevens, ‘I don’t know who can.’
Football had reached another watershed. Stevens represented an opportunity to sanitise the commercial game just as the game’s administrators appeared to be paralysed by the challenges. Fourteen months after Burns submitted his report, the FA councillors remained divided about its acceptance and frustrated by their inability to influence the Premier League’s fate. Everyone could identify the problems but seemed united only by their disagreement about the solutions. Few were impressed by Barwick’s lack of commitment to confront the opponents of Burns’s recommendations. Similarly, they were irritated by Thompson’s appearance of self-doubt and Caborn’s apparent failure to master the detail of the proposals. Many ignored that Burns’s scheme for an independent chairman was not a desire to replace the kindly and non-confrontational incumbents of the past with a professional executive but, more importantly, to remove the conflicts of interest.
The opponents to reform were led by Ray Kiddell, the self-appointed protector of the amateur and national game. Kiddell opposed the wider representation of players and supporters on the FA council, the reduction of conflicts of interest in disciplinary hearings, and more influence of the professional game on the administration of international contests and the FA Cup. Kiddell and others disliked Burns’s idea of separating the competing sides into two sub-boards representing the national and the professional game. Kiddell’s opposition annoyed Caborn. The politician wanted reforms. By threatening to withhold a government grant of £20 million if the reforms were not approved, he persuaded Barwick and Thompson to galvanise the FA councillors to abandon their opposition. After a cliff-hanger battle, on 27 October 2006, the councillors first rejected outright the recommendations but then, individually, accepted each of the sixteen proposals by the smallest margins. The council’s approval was only the start. The national members would need to be persuaded to vote in favour in spring 2007. Winning their support would depend upon Barwick’s and Thompson’s advocacy during a national tour. The deadline would be repeatedly postponed.
Dismay with the FA’s truculence characterised Lord Stevens’s final report, presented to a cramped press conference on 20 December 2006. Despite the extra time, Stevens had failed to establish a criminal link between any agent and a club official. His single achievement, after scrutinising 362 transfers, was to ask for more time to investigate the last seventeen transfers involving eight agents, mostly based abroad, who had refused to co-operate with his investigation. He added that information about some suspicious transactions had been passed to the ‘relevant’ authorities, but did not publicly specify if that was the Inland Revenue or police. His most important admission was that he had cleared all the Premier League clubs and their executives of any criminality. However, he criticised some clubs for brazenly flouting existing rules and failing to maintain proper accounting records, an irritation for Scudamore’s paymasters. To divert attention from his failure to identify a single ‘bung’, Stevens offered thirty-nine recommendations to improve the FA’s compliance unit and prevent dishonesty. The key recommendations were to remove conflicts of interest, either by forbidding members of a family to trade with the club managed by another family member, or allowing agents to represent more than one party. The most critical proposal was for the FA to accept an annual independent audit of a professionally staffed and adequately financed compliance unit. External supervision of the FA’s regulatory tasks was, as Stevens knew, unacceptable to Barwick. Similarly, Stevens knew, most of his recommendations had already been accepted by the FA and were due to be implemented during 2007. To Barwick, Stevens appeared to have performed precisely as Scudamore intended.
The former police chief had confirmed Scudamore’s piety that no executive involved in the Premier League was known to be involved in bungs, there was no systemic culture of corruption, and that the problem was the FA’s failure to properly supervise a handful of agents. Criticising the FA added fuel to Scudamore’s strategy to undermine the regulator’s influence over the Premier League. The scenario of the Premier League untainted by bungs pleased Scudamore. The only snag was a late question to Stevens: ‘Are people making money crookedly from the game?’ he was asked. After brief reflection, Stevens answered, ‘In relation to some of the activity, yes.’ Without losing complete credibility, he could hardly reply, ‘No’, but his answer only further undermined those seeking confidence in football’s probity. Despite all his resources, he had not conclusively discovered any dishonesty and no one believed that could be true. Despite itself, English football remained tainted by suspicion, was leaderless and vulnerable to foreign predators. That was not a prescription for a healthy game. In the normal course of football history, it was only a matter of time before the dream was again tarnished by a nightmare.
Corrosion occurs gradually, and invariably those profiting from vested interests ignore damaging flaws until it is too late. Those earning huge sums from British football have shown neither incentive nor responsibility to abandon their self-interests. The managers, club owners and officials attached to the FA and the P
remier League have, over the past years, behaved with remarkable short-sightedness. Amazed by the huge sums paid by television companies for the rights to Premier League matches, there has been widespread unwillingness among football’s leaders to consider the effect of the growing reliance on foreign investors, the financial gap between the league’s dominant four clubs and those below, the inability of English clubs to train sufficient numbers of world-class players, and the endemic corruption in the transfer of players. The growing absence of spectators from the less glamorous clubs, unable to pay the entrance fee, confirms the growing disenchantment among the rank and file. Football’s aristocrats remain untroubled by those murmurs of dissent. Invigorated by the unceasing global reach of their sport, they care little about football’s historic roots. Immunised by a sense of well-being, there is little desire to grapple with the endemic corruption within the transfer market, nor to begin investigating whether bungs have also infected the growing practice of clubs taking players on loan. Remarkably, nothing changes. Unwilling to respect any leadership, the game’s fate relies on fragmented, tribal and narrowly focused men of sometimes limited ability. Silenced by the barons, the British fans have meekly accepted the propaganda that the Premier League is the world’s best which, while true, also explains the poor performance of England’s team. The increasing reliance on foreign owners will erode the national team’s prospects and simultaneously eat into the health of the English clubs. Following the path of so many treasured British industries and institutions, football could be a victim of its own success unless credible and trusted leaders emerge to protect its basic values.