Be Careful What You Wish For (41 page)

The atmosphere was incredible but with so much at stake it was also very tense. We were brilliant and at half-time were 1–0 up through Ben Watson, who scored as he had in the first leg. Bristol City were all over the place and the weight of expectation from their fans seemed to play heavily on their players’ minds, and if this continued in the second half, there was only going to be one winner.

Bristol City fans are very fervent, as I had heard first hand when we had played them earlier in the season. This time I got to see it first hand at half-time. As I went outside the directors’ entrance to have a cigarette with some of my friends I was confronted by a couple of hundred of their supporters. They stood in front of me screaming – and I do mean screaming – abuse at me inches from my nose. Stewards tried to get between them and get me to go back in but I was going to finish my cigarette.

So I stood there, smoking eye to eye with these hate-filled fans. They were standing so close to me that when one of them was screaming at me, bits of the burger he was eating flew out of his mouth and hit me in the face. Charming. But I stayed there. I was dying to say ‘One–nil’ but I kept it to myself. I was not moving
or
backing down. When I eventually finished my cigarette, I gave them a wink and thanked them for the generosity of their kind words. Just as I was about to leave my friends behind me broke into a chorus of: ‘You’re Welsh and you know you are, you’re Welsh and you know you are.’ Apparently this is a massive insult to Bristolians. We just got through the doors before being lynched.

In the second half the team got even better and in the seventy-second minute we were awarded a penalty. Looking down to the dugout I caught Neil’s eye and we both knew our time had come. Bristol City were out cold, their fans in virtual silence, and if we scored there was no doubt in my mind we would go through. I watched Ben Watson, a young player who had come from my cherished academy, step up to score his third goal of the tie – and he missed!

This penalty set in motion a sequence of events that would ultimately end in the direst of consequences for me!

That miss, as it often does, reinvigorated the other side and appeared to sap everything out of us. The team gave everything to get to that point, now we were flat on our feet. We struggled through to extra time as the scores were level on aggregate and then completely ran out of gas as Bristol City scored twice and ended the dream.

There were no recriminations between Neil and myself, just a feeling of what could have been. There was mutual respect between us. We were a unified double act, and the only competition between us was who could say the most controversial thing in the media.

A week or so after the play-off loss I went to lunch with Neil and we discussed the future. Neil, being something of a crafty bugger asked me a question that took me into a theoretical cul-de-sac: ‘Do you think I am the best manager in the division?’

Innocently, I said: ‘Of course you are, Neil.’

‘Well, how come Dave Jones at Cardiff is getting paid more than me?’

‘I guess he won’t be any more!’ was my response.

That was the quickest £250,000 pay rise Neil ever got. He was delighted and called his wife Sharon and in his broad Yorkshire accent said: ‘You’ll never guess what chairman has done?’

So that was Neil and I wedded together as far as he was concerned.

As at the end of every season I was handed the budgets for the following year and the cash flow forecast made for bleak reading once again. We had lost significant monies in the last year and the same was forecast for this season, but more importantly than losses we were now showing a significant cash call.

Losses don’t always mean cash calls. They do in the end but losses in football clubs can come from areas such as player depreciation on your books or, in some instances, sales of players for values that are less than they are valued on your balance sheet. Players are valued in accounting terms by the amount you pay for them, reduced every month by the period of their contract. So for example a player you buy for a million who signs a four-year contract depreciates at £250,000 per year, so after twelve months that same player would be on your balance sheet at £750,000 and so on. On the converse, young players from your academy carry no value, as they have cost nothing. Of course, when you sell such a player you show gains.

This year the budgets and cash flows showed a cash call of just under £5 million to stand still. This was the inevitable cash flow catch-up of the losses of £2.6 million and £8.1 million of the two years just gone. By now I had nearly £35 million invested in Palace and whilst I was still very liquid in cash terms it was getting towards the red-line area of my finances that I had promised myself and
my
family I would never cross. I decided I needed to get some funding and looked for a likely source.

In 2007 I had met Jason Granite, who was a senior figure at Deutsche Bank in the high-risk lending division, which was what lending to football clubs is classified under. I had looked at doing a deal with Jason on some funding but it never materialised. By early to mid-2008 Jason had set up a hedge fund called Agilo, which had a lot of money under management and was looking to lend into potential high-risk sectors with the requisite interest charge. There were no other traditional methods of raising money for football clubs outside of the Premier League besides third-party investment via selling equity, and there was no queue of people for that.

My relationship with Jason was very good. He asked me for advice on some investments they were looking to make, namely the acquisition of the Sports Café group of restaurants which had gone into administration, given I knew the previous owners and had experience in both sport and restaurants. More importantly though, he said if I ever required some funding we could do a deal.

Following the play-off loss and being advised of yet another huge cash call for the next season I made good on his offer and borrowed £5 million, payable back over four years at a rate of 15 per cent. Yes, it was expensive, but it was the only money available and I needed it. Costs were coming a little more under control as certain big-wage earners were coming off the payroll. Coupled with the team’s performance of last season and the management team we had I could see that in the next eighteen months our costs were going to reduce dramatically without us losing our ambition and having to sell all our best assets to keep feeding the ravenous beast that is a football club.

The final part of the decision for me was that I wanted to use
the
money we borrowed to fund the shortfall that would merely enable us to stand still. Any money I had available I wanted to use to advance the club and keep supporting Neil. The paperwork for this deal was immense, the security required was belt and braces. They took charges over all the club’s assets and finally I had to give a personal guarantee. The paperwork was so arduous and detailed and the personal guarantee so comprehensive that, while I was signing everything I made an offhand remark to my long-term lawyer Jeff McGeachie, who had worked with me when I bought Palace in 2000. I remarked: ‘Could this be the deal that finally undoes me?’ I put it out of my mind as soon as I had said it, believing that I had signed a deal that funded the club. In fact, I had signed my own death warrant.

Not long after that I had another issue that would dramatically change my mind-set. Our media-hyped and potential superstar John Bostock had been developed for six years by my treasured youth academy. His stepfather had promised us faithfully that John would sign his first professional contract with us when he was legally able to at seventeen. But this promise meant nothing. After all the time and energy many others and me had put into this young man, he rejected our offer of a scholarship, which took him to his seventeenth birthday with a pro contract attached to it, and decided he was going to sign for Tottenham.

After failing to agree a reasonable fee with Tottenham we went to a tribunal which awarded us £700,000 for a player who at the time was widely considered to be one of the best in his age group. Players like Theo Walcott, who were only marginally older, were going for £11 million, and for seven years of dedicated development and support we got £700,000 and some far-off Mickey Mouse add-ons. That just wasn’t right. Yet again the system had not protected my club, my investment and hopes for our future success
from
the pillaging and lure of so-called bigger clubs. I found this insulting and demoralising: not only was the club haemorrhaging cash and I was having to borrow money, not only were the crowds diminishing but I couldn’t even get the benefit of keeping the young players I saw as my sanity and saving grace!

One of the things that always amused me in a kind of frustrated way was the unwritten rules surrounding football. Top of the pile was the one surrounding the inner sanctum of the dressing room, this mythical place where alchemy is conjured and troops are galvanised to put their lives on the line by fire-breathing call-to-action generals.

On the whole this is utter nonsense. I came to the conclusion that the reason it is called the inner sanctum, a place never to be entered besides by the chosen few, is because actually there is not a lot going on in there. I have been in the dressing area many times, most of the time spent in the room adjacent to it, the physio room, in order to hear what’s going on out of sight. And to be blunt I very rarely heard any supposed Churchill-like speeches. In fact, in my previous life I had heard more rousing speeches from my twenty-something area managers speaking to their salespeople.

My forays into the dressing room were a regular thing, as they are with most owners who have the presence of mind to actually steer their club and the confidence to ignore the ludicrous taboo perpetuated by the media of chairmen entering this inner sanctum. I went in there to see my charges, wish them luck and look into their eyes, as winning was everything to me, then departed, leaving the manager to prepare his troops, or not as the case may be. The only manager I heard who combined wit with steel and great leadership, the only manager who I remember thinking that this
was
someone I would play for if I was a footballer, was Neil Warnock. During my time I met a lot of managers, most of whom had been players and came up through the system. I have to say that there were very few who impressed me. The perception of players being selfish and disingenuous pales in comparison to a vast number of managers.

This leads me to players themselves. Often the public perception of players is one of two diametrically opposed types. Either they are selfish, unruly and as thick as two short planks or they are all-out role-model superstars. Of course, most players are neither. Most players now come through academies and youth development schemes and a very big part of their time is spent with the clubs providing significant academic support in order for these boys to ditch the stereotype of the ‘thick footballer’.

Let’s face it, football players are institutionalised: they live in a cosseted environment and are made to feel special, which does lead them into certain codes of outlook and behaviour. But to be frank, which one of us at twenty-one with £10,000, £20,000, or even £100,000 a week in our pocket and grown men chanting our names by the thousands in adoration would not be affected by that and lose perspective every now and then? Yes, there are terrible examples of bad behaviour but there are also great acts of kindness and generosity that never seem to get reported. I always found once players reached their late twenties they became much more rounded and aware of their privileged position. I remember writing an extremely disparaging commentary on Craig Bellamy only to bump into him a few years later, whereupon he marched up to me. Expecting the worst, I was taken aback to be told by Mr Bellamy that he had agreed with what I had written and how much he would love to play for a chairman like me.

When I first came into football, the ‘best chairmen’ were
apparently
the ones you never heard from, and anyone who dared describe football as a business was lambasted. Look at it now: people demand to know their clubs’ owners and want them to hear their views and woe betide you if you do not oblige. Also, managers were only deemed to be capable of being managers if they had been top footballers and could put their ‘caps on the table’. Tell that to José Mourinho or Arsène Wenger.

Despite finally having a manager who was totally with me, I felt after the Bostock tribunal decision in July 2008 that I had finally had enough. I had lost my enthusiasm and desire and I felt Palace should have an owner who had the same determination and freshness I had when I came in back in 2000. I made a formal announcement that I wanted to sell the club and I was prepared to listen to offers. I gave interviews, ensuring that my desire to sell was right in the public domain so it was not a secret, and engaged a firm of so-called experts to handle the club’s disposal. Of course wanting to sell a football club and being able to are two different things entirely. Football can be very easy to get into, but bloody hard to leave!

I decided to engage Seymour Pierce, and specifically Keith Harris, to sell Palace and went to meet him at the Carlton Tower hotel in London to discuss the mechanics. It may have seemed like a strange choice, given the acrimony that had existed between us when he was the Football League chairman during the ITV Digital affair as well as the strong words of dislike for me that he expressed at his departure from that role. But Harris had a reputation as somebody who was effective at selling clubs. With the experiences I had with him and Seymour Pierce it is difficult to understand where that reputation emanated from or what it was based on.

Harris dispelled any bad feelings over matters of the past saying
that
’s where they were: the past. He was keen to help sell Palace and said he had about ten parties around the world who would be interested in buying the club. He was adamant there would be no problems securing a sale and gave me an indication that he felt the price for Palace, debt free, which was not a problem as most of the debt was to me, and including the stadium, was circa £35 million.