Be Careful What You Wish For (22 page)

And agents? They pay nothing. I believed there should be a levy put on agents’ fees that goes back into the football family, albeit a very dysfunctional one.

To my mind, on the whole most agents were little better than skin traders and it was incumbent on the football authorities to control this unnecessary evil that, in my view, served no greater good.

The Football League started to introduce regulations where clubs had to declare if an agent had been involved in a deal in a bid to eliminate the threat of agents getting paid by both the buying and selling clubs. Putting out strong guidelines was perhaps in no small way down to me regaling the media with my views on agents at every opportunity.

Back to the season in hand. The cash flow forecast for 2003–04 predictably did not make good reading for me. It showed I needed to put £9.5 million into the club just to stand still. This didn’t influence my decision to appoint Kember, but it did get me
focused
on stopping paying both big transfer fees and big wages for players.

Portsmouth had been promoted the previous season without paying big transfer fees and I figured that if we got it right we could replicate that.

I reshaped the management structure and brought in a new finance director to try and enhance the financial side of the business.

I also needed someone to assume control of the club on a day-to-day basis as I was based in Spain, fighting court cases and looking at other business projects.

The decision was between my brother Dominic and Phil Alexander, chief executive in title as a result of his fortuitous rise during administration. He was not a CEO in outlook or deliverability; he was a sales director.

So I decided to make Dominic vice-chairman so Phil didn’t lose face by being stripped of his title.

I didn’t appoint my brother out of nepotism but because he was the best person for the job. Dominic paid attention to detail and over the three years he had been at Palace had changed large aspects of the on-the-ground operation, eliminating all manner of abuse and upping standards across the business.

But Alexander and Dominic’s relationship was far from harmonious. Dominic had scant tolerance for Alexander’s lack-of-detail approach and Alexander resented reporting to him.

There were numerous explosive confrontations as Alexander resisted controls being put on him. I could see Alexander’s strong points, even if Dominic couldn’t. I wanted him focused on generating income and having grown tired of the arduous task of dealing with agents I put Phil in charge of transfers and sales, working to guidelines set by me.

Soon we saw the departure of Wimbledon from Selhurst Park and ultimately from football.

They went into administration in June 2003 and then controversially re-emerged as the MK Dons.

I was sad to see Charles Koppel, the Wimbledon chairman, a personal friend and close ally against all football bullshit, suffer such awful abuse from his own supporters.

The Wimbledon fans expected to get promoted or have success on crowds of 4,000 or less. Who was supposed to pay for that? The death threats and verbal abuse Charles suffered because he was proposing to move them to Milton Keynes to make them viable was unforgivable.

Wimbledon’s unfortunate demise had an unexpected benefit for us. At Kember’s request we took Neil Shipperley, a former Palace striker, on a free transfer from the administrators in lieu of charges they had to pay us for being a tenant.

One of the summer’s biggest announcements in football was the news that a certain Roman Abramovich had bought Chelsea and was to unleash spending power the like of which football had never witnessed before.

We had arranged a pre-season game against them before his arrival and therefore were the first English team to play the newly assembled Abramovich-fuelled Chelsea.

Trevor Birch, the chief executive of Chelsea who had been instrumental in bringing Abramovich in, allowed us to keep the entire gate receipts rather than the customary 50/50 split, which was a rare act of generosity in football.

In and around the time I was appointing Steve Kember, I received a phone call from Tony Adams, the ex-Arsenal and England captain, who wanted to become Palace’s new manager. It was a very strange
phone
call, as Tony seemed to have developed a very slow and deliberate way of speaking.

His delivery was very pronounced, littered with long words and parables of wisdom. It was not the Tony Adams I had met before but a new one, a highly educated philosopher of football, an Arsène Wenger protégé.

After I had removed the Friedrich Nietzsche book from his mouth and told him he had the square root of fuck all of a chance of managing at this level at this stage, the real Tony Adams emerged with a mouthful of expletives.

We then spoke in an honest fashion about football and I told him I was happy to give him a shot as Kember’s number two, learning his trade and then taking over in a few years.

That wasn’t good enough for our Tony. He was going to get a job in the Premier League or First Division.

I told him there was no way that would happen and eventually I believe he landed at League Two Wycombe Wanderers and I am pretty sure he was not an unqualified success there!

The pre-season came and went and there was a feeling of accord amongst players and management. The campaign had started with promise. We won our first three games and sat on top of the league. Everything looked rosy in the garden but along came the dog to piss on the roses.

Firstly Matt Clarke, our goalkeeper, was forced to retire, which was very sad for the lad and extremely costly for us. I had spent £1.25 million on him two years earlier and only got thirty-eight games from him. Fortunately he had an insurance policy to compensate him whereas we got nothing.

So we signed Thomas Myhre on loan from Sunderland, which proved to be very ironic, given what occurred at the end of the season.

I liked Kember and I wanted him to be successful. But everything was a joke for Steve and he had never really been under pressure. Stepping into the breach a couple of times and steadying the ship was vastly different from running it.

All of a sudden and inexplicably the wheels just came off.

We failed to record a win in seven games, taking only two points and dropping to twentieth in the table.

I tried to get Kember going but he was his usual happy-go-lucky self. It was clear that happy-go-lucky meant comfortable for players and it was not working.

The media vultures were circling overhead and the results kept on getting worse until we reached 1 November and played Wigan away in a televised game.

There I witnessed the worst performance of a Palace team for some time. I was a few minutes late and we were already 1–0 down.

As I got to my seat a woman steward shouted ‘tie’ at me and stopped me. As usual I was not wearing one. I said no thanks and she literally grabbed me and pushed one in my hands with the strict instruction to wear it.

I sat down next to Bullivant, watching us go down 2–0 after just thirty minutes. But what disturbed me most was the dire performance and complete lack of commitment from the players. So putting on a bleeding tie was the last thing on my mind.

Looking at Bullivant I asked what the hell was going on and his shrinking violet reaction told me he and Kember were lost.

Theo Paphitis phoned me and told me the TV cameras were on me every five minutes and I looked like I wanted to murder someone. Bullivant, probably, if I could have got away with it.

At half-time I went inside, forgetting the tie, and over came Nora bleeding Batty stewardess, who grabbed me and refused to let me in until I put the bloody tie on. I could hardly have a scuffle
with
her. By the size of her she would have probably beaten me up anyway. Northern charm at its finest!

The second half got even worse and we conceded a further three goals to lose 5–0.

Dave Whelan, the Wigan chairman, had made disparaging remarks about me a couple of years earlier when Steve Bruce left them to join Palace, so I avoided going in the boardroom. As the game finished I went to leave, passing Whelan, who stuck his hand out. When I shook it he said to me: ‘You must be very embarrassed, your team are pretty crap.’

I never forgot that. As I was learning all too frequently, in football your words often come back to haunt you. And they did for Whelan.

After this humiliating performance I felt I had nowhere to go and on the Monday, after maintaining radio silence for the weekend, I fired Steve Kember and Terry Bullivant.

After firing them I sauntered into the dressing room at the training ground, told Kit Symons what had happened and asked him to step in as a player-coach. He was very apprehensive and didn’t jump at the opportunity as I thought he would. Later on in the day he telephoned me in a far more positive mood and said he wanted the opportunity as long as he could bring in his own assistant manager, Stuart Gray, the former Southampton boss.

Clearly since we had spoken in the morning someone had spoken to Kit and urged him to take the opportunity.

I left him with the thought that I was grateful for him stepping in and that I was going to look for a manager but at this moment in time his hat was in the ring if he wanted it to be.

* * *

My relationship with Sarah Bosnich came to an end in November 2003, as I had no desire to settle down. That added to my good temper.

By now I had been a multi-millionaire for over three years. Instantaneous and significant wealth is something you have to learn to be comfortable with. It’s one thing being the owner of a business worth £75 million, another thing entirely when you have that worth sat in your own bank account.

You do change, but others around you change much more. People I had grown up with and known for years now treated me completely differently.

Everywhere you go people open doors for you and pretty soon you buy into all of that. Everything is first class and all of a sudden you stop checking bills because it doesn’t matter.

I had a £2.5 million penthouse in Chelsea, a £6 million villa in Marbella, a permanent suite at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane and a boat worth £2.5 million.

I flew everywhere by private jet, had fifteen luxurious cars, a wardrobe with over a hundred tailor-made suits and a full-time chauffeur.

I spent money as if it were going out of fashion, because I could, and because I was earning £40,000 in interest a week.

That said, owning a football club was making a big dent in my fortune. I was focused on achieving what I wanted with Palace but I also wanted other outlets for business. I had set up the magazine
Octane
, tried to buy the TV production company Planet Rapido and looked at all manner of other investments.

And all this time I lived a life of decadence. Whatever I wanted, I bought.

What I’m trying to get at here was that it wasn’t about being rich or flash. Not quite.

What I had was irreverence towards money. It was the end product of success and was not the thing that motivated me. Having money was fantastic but if you were not careful it took away desire and hunger and replaced it with ego and falseness.

With a smoke-and-mirrors business like football you could become detached from the things that made you successful and then believe the things you read about yourself in papers and magazines and on TV.

All of a sudden you could become a caricature of yourself.

After a few years of vitriol between myself and Ron Noades, the former owner of Palace and – in my opinion – the undeserving owner of Selhurst Park, I tried to come to a deal to buy the stadium. Noades was open to sell, the only problem was he wanted double what it was worth, £12 million. Over lunch I tried to reach some form of agreement. As one American president said: ‘We do not negotiate with terrorists.’ I should have taken this advice, I felt like I was dealing with one. Of course I’m joking, but Noades would not budge.

I offered £9 million, then £10 million, which was already massively higher than the £6.4 million valuation, but he would not move. I endured lunch with this tiresome man trying to find a deal whilst listening to his opinions of how I should run the football club. Eventually I said I would give him £10 million, plus a further £3 million if/when we got promoted to the Premier League, thus a million more than he wanted. The response was no and, as a final insult, he said I would never get Palace promoted. That was the last conversation I was to have with that man.

Whilst Kit was setting up for his new role I was searching for my sixth manager.

Tony Finnegan, an agent and friend of Ian Wright’s, suggested Stan Ternent, the Burnley manager.

I asked Wrighty about Stan and he was glowing about him as he had played for him under Coppell in 1990 when Ternent was first-team coach.

Ternent was a tough northerner whose management style was no nonsense, forthright and upfront. No, let’s not dress it up, he was aggressive and he stood no nonsense from players. The more I thought about it the more I liked the idea.

The press were doing the usual uninformed speculation about who the next manager would be, running all kinds of names.

The one they kept harping on about was Peter Taylor, from Hull City. He was a former Palace player and had previously shown interest when we had the vacancy in the summer after Trevor had gone. I never fancied Taylor, considering him to be a coach not a manager. With press speculation being rife, I decided to phone Adam Pearson, the Hull chairman, and let him know I had no interest in Taylor, so one Saturday I phoned Pearson and left a message on his voicemail, asking him to call me back. Unfortunately, he got the wrong end of the stick and called me, raging on my voicemail that I was phoning him about his manager on match day. I phoned him back and left a very curt message. Eventually we cleared up the misunderstanding, but three years later there was to be no such misunderstanding around Taylor.

I met Stan Ternent in my suite at the Grosvenor with his agent and his assistant manager Sam Ellis. He was very cocky and it felt like he wanted to talk down to me a little, as he was much older and more experienced in football. Like most people he had preconceived notions of me. I mentioned I considered him to be a strong independent man who had ‘bollocks’ and was not intimidated by anyone and made his own decisions and stood by them. So why
then
, I asked, did he need his hand held by his agent and assistant manager to speak to little old me, who was on my own? He clearly had enjoyed listening to me praise him, but the last bit caught him on the hop and after being thrown, he came back guns blazing and I liked him.