Harry's Games (18 page)

‘At first, I was only paid a bonus if a player I had signed was sold. Now I get paid if any member of my squad is sold on. I am
at a club that refuses to pay big wages and it is still a source of some frustration that I don't get the kind of basic salary that most of my peers take for granted. But my chairman does offer incentives. If we're doing well towards the top of the league, or we get into the play-offs, or get promoted, then I benefit financially. And I think you will find it's the same with every single manager in the world. The only difference is there's also an incentive for me to improve the club's playing squad.'

In his enthusiasm to nail Redknapp on criminal charges, Bower rather missed the broader moral questions raised by such sell-on clauses. Namely, how can you be sure that a manager – and anyone else at the club personally profiting from a transfer deal – is acting in the club's interests rather than his or her own? And how are the fans supposed to know whether the prime motivation for one of their best players being sold is commercial or private gain? After all, the fans pay the same amount regardless of what team the manager fields. Football's stock answer to this is that managers and clubs are all honourable and that the bonuses on offer for team performance far outstrip the incentives of a sell-on clause and therefore it wouldn't make sense for anyone to asset-strip a team. The flaw in this logic is cash flow and short-term greed – the promise of a definite gain now against a potentially bigger one later.

Untangling whether the Ferdinand deal was driven primarily by commercial or personal concerns – or perhaps a combination of the two – is a fruitless exercise. Everyone, including those involved, will almost certainly see only what their own prejudices allow them to see. But it did mark the moment when the ‘dodgy' part of ‘dodgy geezer' began to carry more currency than the ‘geezer' part in many people's minds whenever Redknapp's name came up in conversation. And this was a word that would follow him from job to job over the next decade. Redknapp didn't do himself too many favours in all this by making remarks such as
‘Don't rip anyone off . . . but if there's a chance to earn a few quid, take it,' but, in reality, he was only echoing the attitudes of everyone else involved professionally with football. His sin was to voice it out loud, to dispel the desperately held illusion that the beautiful game was still beautiful – or ever had been to those on the inside.

The more immediate effect of the Ferdinand transfer was Redknapp losing his job. When Ferdinand left West Ham, the team was in sixth place in the Premiership, playing well and in the running for European football the following season; by the end, it was fighting to avoid relegation, eventually finishing fifteenth. The focus wasn't so much on the Ferdinand sale itself, but with what the proceeds of that sale were spent on. Had Redknapp signed a big-name replacement – Gareth Southgate was often mooted as a possibility, though no deal ever materialized – then it's possible West Ham's season might have stayed on course. And, even if it hadn't, Redknapp might have escaped some of the blame by appearing to have done the right thing.

As it was, Redknapp brought in Christian Dailly, Rigobert Song, Hayden Foxe, Ragnvald Soma, Titi Camara, Litex Lovech, Svetoslav Todorov and Kaba Diawara – all less than inspirational players on more than inspirational wages who failed to make any positive impression. For once, Redknapp's luck had run out. In the past, his scatter-gun approach to acquiring other teams' castoffs and undiscovered talent had paid off with at least thirty per cent of his purchases coming good, allowing him to overlook the failures. But this time his squad of misfits lived down to their reputations and Redknapp came under fire from all sides for wasting £8 million of the Ferdinand inheritance. The other £9 million – less the lawyers' fees, bonuses and spiralling wage bill – was retained by the club, either to pay for the ground redevelopment or to prevent Redknapp from spending it. The truth might well lie somewhere between the two.

Redknapp claimed to be gob-smacked when he was sacked. In an interview with the
Independent on Sunday
, he said, ‘I'd agreed a new four-year contract with the club, but then I did an interview with a fanzine that the chairman didn't like . . . and he took the hump. So the following week, after we'd beaten Southampton, I walked in to see him about my contract and he says, “I'm not happy with you, Harry. I'm going to call it a day.” '

Terry Brown saw it rather differently, as did other members of the board. ‘We had already decided not to renew Harry's contract well before the end of the season,' says one board member. ‘What Harry did or didn't say to the fanzine was a complete distraction. The only reason we hadn't announced we were going to sack him earlier is that the club was struggling to avoid relegation and we didn't want to do anything that would unsettle the team until we were either safe or down.

‘We felt that Harry had probably taken the club as far as he was going to and we didn't share his vision of the future. Harry likes to talk about the money he has made on transfer deals but he forgets the wage bill which had risen to an unsustainable level by the time he left. So we had to do something. Harry has said that it was as much the chairman's fault as his that we signed off so many transfers and salary increases, and he's right about that. After he left, the first thing we did was change the arrangement so that three board members had to sign off every deal rather than just the chairman. Maybe if we'd done that earlier, then Harry wouldn't have had to go. Many of us came to regret his leaving; appointing Glenn Roeder as his replacement was an utter disaster.'

Fans are rarely noted for being in sync with the board. This time, though, they were. ‘We were all pissed off about the way the money the club had made from the Rio deal appeared to have just been squandered,' says Sam Delaney. ‘We felt it [the club] – and Harry in particular – had wasted what could have been a
great opportunity to build on the success we had had by bringing in a whole load of below-average players and we would inevitably resort to being a bit rubbish again. So I was in favour of Harry going. But within a year, I found myself really longing for him to be back in charge. That's the thing about Harry: when he's around, he infuriates the hell out of you . . . and when he's not, you miss him.'

March 2012

As Spurs slipped to a second successive league defeat, this time at home to Manchester United in the first week of March, speculation that the England job might be adversely affecting both Redknapp and his team got louder the longer the silence from the FA was maintained. The FA was in a no-win position – it didn't want to appoint a new England manager while so many issues were still to be decided in the Premiership for fear of being accused of unsettling the team whose manager was named, yet the silence in itself was unsettling because the very fact the FA was saying nothing was widely taken to be an endorsement that the public's front-runner was also their own preferred candidate.

With news pages to fill, the media were happy to step into this vacuum. In some papers, the FA was hoping to get José Mourinho; in others, it wasn't. According to some reports, Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA's director of football development and member of the selection panel, had intractable problems with Redknapp dating back to Harry's time in charge of West Ham. In others, Brooking had long since resolved these problems and was said to be happy with Redknapp. The sources for all these stories were FA members briefing journalists off the record, so there must
have been a fair few in the FA hierarchy who were either misinformed or were guilty of extremely wishful thinking.

The one story that no one had at that time was whether there was any kind of power struggle going on within the FA over the appointment of the next England manager. It was seldom presented as anything other than a happy family that spoke with a single voice. So, to all intents and purposes, it was still ‘Harry, Harry, Harry' all the way, with the FA offering nothing by way of contradiction.

The only real power-play in town was back at White Hart Lane. When the trial had ended, I had said rather gloomily to Donna Cullen, Spurs' Communication Director, ‘I suppose this means Harry will now be off to England.' She had replied, with a smile, ‘It's not a done deal . . .' and sure enough, within a matter of weeks, there were reports being leaked that the Spurs chairman, Daniel Levy, was in negotiations with Redknapp to extend his contract beyond the end of the following season with an improved pay offer.

Levy is one of the shrewdest and toughest negotiators in football; those who have done business with him say it is an exhausting process. Every time you think you've reached an agreement, Levy will say, ‘Just one thing . . .' and you're back where you started. He grinds you down. It's a skill that has, by and large, served Spurs quite well during his time as chairman, as the club is in better financial shape than most other Premiership clubs, although he does give the impression of suffering from a peculiar myopia whereby he overvalues his own assets considerably and undervalues other people's by just as much. Somehow he felt right for the club, though, as frustration has always been one of the team's main gifts to its supporters and Levy had become as much a part of the entertainment as the football. For every Harry-watcher there was also a Daniel-watcher.

And the Daniel-watchers immediately began to wonder if
Levy's contract negotiations were all that they seemed. The club had been immensely supportive to Redknapp during the build-up and course of the trial, but relations between Levy and Redknapp had otherwise been sticky at times. They were very different personalities and had very different attitudes to money – Redknapp's was to spend it, and Levy's to conserve it – and they had clashed over transfer policies, with Levy generally winning, as he usually does. So, despite the Spurs team playing some of the best football in the Premiership and Redknapp no longer at risk of being detained at Her Majesty's pleasure, the idea that Levy would immediately initiate a public romance with Redknapp and love-bomb him with promises of cash seemed a little far-fetched.

‘I wouldn't be surprised if what Daniel is really doing is trying to drive up the amount of compensation he can get from the FA when Harry goes to England' was a frequently expressed opinion on the Tottenham fan blogs and in much of the media. It had all the hallmarks of the ideal Levy scenario of appearing to keep everyone happy whatever the outcome. If Redknapp went to England, Levy would be a few million quid richer because, at that stage, there was still no mention that the level of compensation would be a serious obstacle; and if Redknapp stayed, then Levy would be in favour with the fans for having made every effort to hang on to him. Even better, if Redknapp was rejected by England, his price tag could probably be negotiated down again.

Meanwhile, Redknapp was busy playing his own game. It would have been prudent not to discuss openly his position with England and Spurs while everything was still in the balance, and yet he gave an interview with the French sports magazine,
L
'
Équipe
, in which he said he was unsure about taking the England job if it was offered. ‘I'm not sure,' he said. ‘I have a good job at Tottenham today and I like it. I do not know. Wait and see. When you have a club and are looking for a striker, you go out
and take one. When you're [England] coach, you must make do with the players you have. If you do not have a good scorer, you have no one. You almost never see the players. Two days every month. It's very difficult.'

Redknapp's reservations about being England manager had the virtue of being true. But since everyone knew that, despite the lack of any apparent hunger for the job, Redknapp would take it given half a chance, Harry-watchers immediately began to become suspicious that he was ramping up his own bargaining position. While Redknapp might generally find it hard to resist stopping in front of a journalist's microphone, even he would have been aware of the sensitivities of his position – especially as he had been specifically asked to keep his mouth shut. It was hard to imagine he had been caught off guard by a French magazine, so it seemed reasonable to think he knew exactly what he was doing – and what he was saying – when he gave the interview. And for the Harry-watchers, his game seemed to be playing hard to get. By not looking too keen, he might make himself more attractive to the FA and force them to make their decision sooner rather than later. Who knows, it might also even lead them to offer him a better contract?

It's possible, of course, that the Harry- and Daniel-watchers were generating their own conspiracy theories and that neither the Spurs chairman nor manager had any hidden agenda behind what they were doing and saying in public. It would have been unusual for them both, but possible. But as the FA maintained its omertà about the managerial succession, the devil was more than happy to make work for idle hands. One thing that wasn't really open to interpretation, though, was that Spurs' on-field form was beginning to dip alarmingly.

After an unconvincing win in the FA Cup replay against Stevenage, Tottenham had lost 1-0 away to Everton. Redknapp had been defiant in his post-match interview that Spurs had ‘battered'
Everton, deserved at least a point and would still come third in the Premiership, but his audience was becoming increasingly sceptical. This wasn't a game – like those at Arsenal and Manchester United – that Spurs might have been expected to lose, it was one where a draw should have been a bare minimum for a third-placed team and the Spurs fans voiced their displeasure by chanting, ‘
Gareth Bale . . . he plays on the left
' in response to Redknapp's decision to field his most effective player out of position on the right wing in an unsuccessful effort to fill the gap left by an injury to Aaron Lennon and to maintain a hitherto successful 4-4-1-1 formation. Even the neutrals noticed the team had lost some spark and confidence in front of goal. When asked outright if he thought that the speculation over his future was affecting the club, Redknapp replied, ‘It is the biggest load of nonsense I have heard in my life. They [the players] don't care if I'm manager next year.'