Be Careful What You Wish For (11 page)

I had arrived on my first day at 8.30 a.m. to familiarise myself with my newly owned surroundings and eager-to-impress workforce.

At 9.30 my staff trickled in an hour later than I had expected, not quite the start I was anticipating. Within hours I realised there
was
a vast difference between my version of hard work and professionalism and that of the incumbent staff.

And a warm welcome wasn’t exactly awaiting me online either. I made the mistake of logging onto one of the fans’ websites only to read, ‘Let’s give Jordan a chance until he makes his first mistake. Then we can hammer him.’ Bloody charming, I thought.

At lunchtime I walked out of the office I was using, which was considerably smaller than the one Phil Alexander the CEO was occupying, and found the office virtually deserted. I asked my inimitable PA Sara Warren where everyone was and she said they had all gone to lunch at the pub over the road.

I immediately marched over there and told them I wanted them back in the office now. When they returned I made it simple: ‘You don’t all piss off to lunch at the same time, and from now on no more drinking at lunchtime.’ The second point went down like a lead balloon. These people needed a major wake-up call.

This football club was in a shambolic state from top to bottom.

With a few exceptions, the commercial staff I inherited were an unmotivated and unenergetic bunch nobody else wanted and who were cheap enough for the administrators to keep on.

All manner of wonders that I had been unable to uncover in the limited time I had to do due diligence were becoming apparent. It was dawning on me that my typically cavalier approach to the gamble of buying the club might just take a big bite out of my not-so-clever arse.

During his ownership, Ron Noades had raised £6.5 million from advance season ticket sales to build a new stand. Unfortunately those long-term season ticket sales were now impacting on one of my biggest income streams, meaning in effect in a perverse way I was picking up the tab, without the benefit of the £6.5
million!
The spend on the stand I was told was £3 million but it was a shell, all fur coat and no knickers, and one on which the manufacturers had refused to give a warranty because someone hadn’t paid the final instalment of money he owed them. That can’t be right! I mean, £6.5 million had been raised to build it and only £3 million had been spent. So where was the rest of the money? As I gazed out on to the football ground, I reasoned that the £3.5 million must be bound up in the facilities somewhere. But where?

The stadium was in an absolute state of disrepair. Virtually everywhere you looked it was almost coming down and the lounges were like the inside of an Indian restaurant that hadn’t been redecorated since the seventies. The training ground, if you can call it that, was a series of paddy fields located in the grounds of a sports club. So clearly the excess money hadn’t been invested there; no one had invested in the facilities for twenty years. I had an inkling of where the money had gone, and it was nowhere near Selhurst Park.

The state of disrepair was typified by some news I received less than a week after I had bought the club. The roof on the Arthur Waite stand, which had been there since the sixties, was unsafe. Given that it was predominantly the away supporters’ stand, my initial response was ‘And?’ but joking aside, I had a obligation to fix that roof. The safety council for the Football League told me I had three weeks to do it or close the stand for the season.

So I brought in my brother Dominic, and £200,000 and an age later, that stand had a new roof for the new season. Quite why it had taken forty years for anyone to provide one and quite why I had it dumped on my lap a week after buying the club I don’t know – oh yes, I do: the administrators didn’t have the money to do it; Goldberg barely had a chance to get an office before losing
Palace
; and Noades … do I really need to spell out why he may not have fixed the roof?

After my first few hours of pleasure at the stadium I was off to meet the fans’ hero and irrepressible football manager, Steve Coppell, who, it turned out, was bloody difficult to communicate with. As I said earlier his demeanour was sullen whether unhappy or exhilarated. And the group of players I inherited, and I use the word ‘group’ very loosely, seemed totally uninterested. Even the training and playing kit was falling apart and we were tied into a deal with a second-rate manufacturer of cheesecloth-like kits for another twelve months.

The new season opened in just over a month and I had the bare bones of a team, facilities that were falling apart and no commercial activity, Palace had no shirt sponsor, ground advertising, executive box sales or significant season ticket receipts, it had bare minimum training facilities and not even travel arrangements or plans for the imminently approaching season. It frankly had a piss-poor attitude that reverberated throughout the entire business.

This was all to change within four short weeks; with a complete dose of Jordan focus and finances all of the above were rectified. All executive boxes and advertising boards were sold. For the first time in two years we secured shirt sponsorship – a major brand in Churchill Insurance – and a busy industrious environment was created. Of course all this was with an incessant background hum of ‘it can’t be done’ or ‘it’s not done that way’. I don’t think so, was my attitude. To me it was simple: sell these things or get new jobs. I impressed upon Phil Alexander that we were now not in administration and he was accountable to me and his staff would deliver – and despite themselves they did.

The two major but very different and distinct parts of the
business
that make up a football club are the commercial operation and the playing side – the youth set-up was a third part that considered itself a different business. I felt that each part of the club had significant importance and I would set about treating all facets the same, whether it be a steward on match day or a multi-million-pound centre forward.

The team were heading off to China for a pre-season tour, paid for by Dalian Shied, a Chinese team. Palace had purchased the national captain from them two years beforehand. The tour made no commercial sense – it was a legacy of Mark ‘Head in the Clouds’ Goldberg’s time – but the club was committed. I had neither the time nor the inclination to fly to China, so I decided to stay back and set up my stall for running this new business.

Peter Morley, the chairman through administration, came in to see me. Peter was a charming man, with an austere demeanour. He was small in build and imperious in an unassuming way. He had been involved with Palace for a long time. His wife, Paula, who had a fearsome reputation, had been Noades’s secretary when he owned the club. Peter also had the impressive background of having been a main board director at Tesco’s.

For some reason Peter had taken a dim view of me, and once in my new office he wasted no time letting me know his opinion. ‘Young man, you may think you are special, but I have met many people like you and you are not special.’

Laughing, I said, ‘Peter, I want to build a club we can all be proud of and I would really like your help with that.’

That stopped him dead in his tracks. I think he expected some cocky response and I deliberately didn’t give him that. I knew he wanted to go to China, so I asked him would he please go for me. He sniffed at it and said if it would help the club then he would of course consider it. Peter and I over the years developed a very
good
friendship. He became one of my biggest supporters and I was always grateful for his wise words. In fact, I wasted no time in making him the club president.

Before they departed, Steve Coppell and I had a number of conversations about the playing squad and his coaching staff. Clearly they both needed investment, but Steve was not the easiest man to talk to. We attacked his coaching requirements first.

He needed a new first-team coach so, feeling like some eager-to-please new pupil, I asked who he wanted. That was Bobby Houghton, a well-respected coach who was working abroad with Malmo. I took Steve at face value and asked how much he would want. Steve came back with ‘Two hundred grand a year.’

Coppell was on £125,000. I was confused – was that the right money for his assistant? Apparently not! In fact, the right money was £50–60,000. I sighed inwardly. ‘So why did you suggest him then?’

‘Because you asked me who I wanted,’ Coppell replied.

‘So what do you want me to do then?’ I persisted.

‘Nothing, as Houghton wouldn’t come anyway.’

I looked at Steve Coppell, bemused by this totally pointless conversation. Was he being clever with me?

After that enlightening chat, we moved on to players. He liked two boys at Arsenal on the periphery of their first team, Tommy Black and Julian Gray, ideally both but certainly Black. I promised to look at buying them, asked for a steer on the price and got a big fat helpful ‘No idea!’

I wished him a successful trip to China, thinking it was an appropriate place for him after the Chinese torture of a conversation I had just had with him.

I immediately arranged to meet David Dein, the Arsenal vice-chairman, at their London Colney training ground. Dein greeted
me
with manager Arsène Wenger, and I think this was designed to impress me, but frankly I have never been over-impressed with anyone and I certainly was not happy to have to put blue bags over my feet to see Arsenal’s ‘wonderful’ training ground.

I listened to David Dein do his best Fagin impression of wanting to help, as he put it, any new boys coming into football. Almost straight away I worked out that you didn’t want Dein to do you any favours – he would sell you a player with a real foot and a wooden leg if he could. We got down to business and after much haggling Dein did me one of his wonderful ‘favours’ of selling me two young players for £500,000 each.

I had just spent a million pounds on two players who had no first-team experience on someone else’s say-so. I knew we should have got more information on the boys but I wanted to show Coppell I had faith in him. Quite why, I’m not sure, but that’s the thing about not knowing your business or people within it, you do things differently and learn the hard way.

Signing these two players was my first experience of dealing with agents and I wanted to make sure from the get-go that agents knew I was not an idiot who would pay them for doing absolutely nothing. The two agents in question became well known to me over the years: Tony Finnigan for Julian Gray and David Manassi for Tommy Black, and these first negotiations were terse to say the least.

Let me tell you how signing a player works, so you can see the absurdity of the situation.

You agree a fee with the selling club for the player. Ironically, that’s the easy part. You are then contacted by the player’s agent, who arranges to come and see you and negotiate a deal for his client. In principle, this is fine and for young boys early on in their careers pragmatic advice from an agent is perhaps appropriate; grown
men
later in their careers should be man enough to negotiate their own deal and I always had a big regard for players who did that. Players always knew exactly what they wanted, more often than not all agents achieved was a feeling of bad will and additional fees.

Upon meeting, the agent’s aim is to achieve the optimum amount of money he can get for his client and of course there is always going to be a difference of opinion on that subject as you negotiate.

The key factor for them is the player’s basic wage, his ‘guarantee’, but once that is achieved suddenly everything else becomes just as important.

Firstly you have sign-on fees, a golden hello every year for the player agreeing to be paid a basic wage. Then there are appearance bonuses for the player turning up – but isn’t that the very thing his basic wage and sign-on covers? Then you have goal bonuses for forwards – but hang on, surely that is what you pay them a weekly wage for? You also have the same for clean sheets for goalkeepers. The list goes on.

Agents ideally like to write in staged increases so if you sign a four-year contract with a player they want a pay rise every year irrespective of performance and, if they can, a pay rise after a certain number of games. Then there are loyalty bonuses, typically paid annually, which are for the monumental thing of the player turning up for a year, and on top of that they want win bonuses. Win bonuses? The fact that we are paying a basic wage, sign-on money, appearance money, etc., etc., on the expectation of them securing wins seems to be lost in all of this.

But that’s not all. Irrespective of where the player lives, you pay a relocation fee of about £10,000, then their medical insurance, and 90 per cent of the time all of these costs are greater than you want to pay.

With a straight face, the agent then tells you that he has worked
for
you, and it is hardly fair for the player to bear the costs of his fees. So after you pick yourself up off the floor you have this to consider.

Someone who is purporting to work for you, who has got a deal for his client that is worse for you than you could have got yourself, is now demanding to be paid or he would be unable to recommend this deal to his real client – who is not, of course, paying him, that is your job. Confused? Clear as mud, isn’t it!

How this business had got like this was beyond me. Greed, I suppose. The alternative is to not sign the player, but then you are in a public domain situation and the rules are different. Managers, supporters and results put pressure on you and in the end you have to bite down.

I soon developed a reputation as someone who didn’t pay fees to agents, which had good and bad ramifications. Over the years the controls and regulations over agents have changed, but they still get their money come what may. For the record, I would always be perfectly happy to pay agents who clearly work for me, and I did on many occasions.

The team arrived back from China. Coppell appeared to be pleased about signing Gray and Black, although he could have been unhappy, I couldn’t really tell!