by Simon Hughes
At Tottenham, Rosenthal would partner German centreforward Jürgen Klinsmann in attack – a World Cup winner. Rosenthal believes Klinsmann was the profile of player that Liverpool needed to revive their flagging fortunes, though the management and board would never have sanctioned such a deal.
‘Liverpool was still a very conservative club, which only really wanted to sign the best British players,’ Rosenthal explains. ‘But by 1993–94, they had a lot of competition for these players. Leeds came. United were becoming stronger. Arsenal were there. Liverpool lost its domination of the league. For a long time, the club could get away with paying lower wages for players because of its history of success. Then – now, even – it wasn’t there to fall back on.’
Between 1992 and 1997, Manchester United, whose directors realized the potential of brand-management in the Far East at a time the club was becoming successful on the pitch, generated an income of £249 million, of which £66 million was reported as profit. Meanwhile, the London clubs were attractive to players because of their location. ‘Arsenal, Tottenham and Chelsea could all offer bigger wages because it was London. It’s like anything else, if you work in London, you earn more money than if you work in Liverpool. The rule applies to football as well. I left Liverpool for Tottenham and earned more money. This meant foreign players like Klinsmann would choose Tottenham over Liverpool too.’
Liverpool’s record in recruiting players from outside the British Isles was poor between 1990 and 1995 and has never been as good as rivals like United and Arsenal. Rosenthal believed it was initially down to an absence of cultural understanding when all aspects of football were changing quickly, particularly in the way clubs operated in the transfer market. He uses his own situation as an example.
‘Liverpool had a secret and that secret was very simple: everybody was working the same amount all of the time. It was relentless. But I was an explosive player – maybe I should have been a hundred-metre sprinter. I needed time to recover. I could not run like a maniac for ninety minutes non-stop. There were periods in the game where I was quiet. Maybe the coaches did not realize that I was more influential when I came into the game in the last thirty minutes. I was lethal. When I started the game, slowly, slowly I would fade. Instead, they thought I was resting – taking it easy, because of a different mentality. People at the club from the very top were slow to understand the foreign player.’
Although Liverpool later appointed Rick Parry as its first modern chief executive, Rosenthal thinks it came too late. He also believes that the idea of a football manager being ‘all-controlling’ is a dated concept and thinks it would be beneficial for a club’s long-term stability if it appointed a director of football with a specialist knowledge of recruitment and football finance.
‘Manchester United’s chairman Martin Edwards was a visionary and he could see the way football was going,’ Rosenthal says. ‘Liverpool did not want to admit that football was becoming a business. The board was focused only on football and it missed out. This is a decision that the club still suffers from.
‘Football is a business now whether you like it or not. For a football club to be successful it needs each person to be able to function in his strongest position. Some people are better at training the players. Some people are better at negotiating. Why not leave them to operate at their strongest?
‘The days of a manager being able to see everything are over. They need help. They need specialists who can analyse specifics. When the manager is the only person who can say what is good, this is a problem and it explains why so many clubs have gone bust. The majority of managers only want to buy for now. You must also buy for the future.’
Since retiring as a player under Graham Taylor at Watford in 1999, Rosenthal has been offered interesting positions at a variety of clubs, although he is reluctant to tell me which ones.
‘To be honest, I think I have the skill to be a perfect director of football at any top club. I am skilled at identifying and understanding the value of the player commercially. I speak many languages and I have the football experience that many directors do not have. But I have a good life: good wife and kids. The focus should be on my son, Tom, and his career, not me at this stage.’
For the time being, Rosenthal will continue to operate in the shadows.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE GOOD-LOOKING ONE,
Jamie Redknapp, 1991–2002
‘IT WAS THE biggest fucking mistake we made,’ scowls Jamie Redknapp in an interview where swear words are used almost exclusively when discussing this particular subject. ‘If we’d have won the match,’ Redknapp pauses, readjusting his body, pointing to his right. ‘I’d probably have that white suit framed on my living-room wall over there.’
Redknapp is referring to the FA Cup final of 1996, an occasion where it was suggested by goalkeeper David James – a model with Armani – and agreed by the senior Liverpool players, that the squad should complete its pre-match amble around Wembley Stadium wearing attire that, at best, made them look like a team of turf accountants at the wrong sports event, or, more realistically, as Redknapp admits, ‘a bunch of idiots’.
Redknapp remembers being presented with the suit at a Melwood photo shoot before the meeting with Manchester United. ‘My first reaction was to say, “Wow!” But everyone was focused on the final; it didn’t seem to matter. We all went with it. Nobody stopped it happening.’
The previous Sunday, Liverpool had let slip a two-goal halftime lead at Maine Road to draw in the final game of the Premier League season. It was a curious occasion, where Manchester City believed they had escaped relegation only to find out they’d gone down on goal difference, with Southampton benefiting. It was also a classic Liverpool collapse. A month earlier, Roy Evans’ side remained in contention for their first championship in six years by beating Newcastle United in the first of those famous 4–3 games, only to lose hopelessly at Coventry a week later, gifting United with a clear run to the title.
‘We were finishing third no matter the result at City, so it was understandable we eased off in the second half,’ Redknapp reasons. ‘At half-time, Roy [Evans] told us not to do anything stupid, because he didn’t want anyone getting injured for the FA Cup final. City also had everything to play for, so it was no surprise they ended up getting something from the game.’
Back to the hideous suits, which to the critics confirmed that Liverpool’s pretty young things were more concerned with how they looked off the pitch than how they performed on it. The football media considered them a team that lacked the bottle to turn their slick passing game into a realistic title challenge.
‘It was typical of the flak we received,’ Redknapp says. ‘Yes, we had a young team but you wouldn’t catch any of us out on a Thursday or Friday night before a game. If one of us had been out – and we weren’t – we would have deserved to be in trouble.’
Redknapp was confident of a victory over United.
‘The spirit was really good, better than it had been at any other point in my Liverpool career. That season, we’d played United off the park at Old Trafford, with Robbie [Fowler] lashing two goals past Peter Schmiechel. A couple of refereeing decisions went against us and they managed to scrape a draw on the day Eric Cantona returned from his long ban for kung-fu kicking the Crystal Palace fan at Selhurst Park.
‘Then, at Anfield, we did them 2–0 with Robbie on fire again. On a level, we had the measure of them. In my eyes, we could have walked round Wembley wearing flip-flops, never mind white suits. It wouldn’t have mattered, because we had confidence that we’d beat them.’
Redknapp, a former Liverpool midfielder and captain, is now a seasoned pundit with Sky Sports. I meet him on a bright midsummer afternoon at his home in Oxshott, Surrey, the most expensive village in England and the premier address for top footballers. Oxshott is one stop on the South West railway line from Cobham, where Chelsea’s training ground is situated. Redknapp can count John Terry amongst his neighbours as well as tennis player
Andy Murray. It is to the south of England what Wilmslow or Alderley Edge is to the north.
Redknapp greets me by offering a lift from the nearest station in his top-of-the-range Mercedes Benz. He winds down the smoketinted window on the passenger side and, leaning over, removes his sports cap in an act of courtesy, introducing himself. His face is smooth, tanned and unshaven. His smile reveals two rows of excellent white teeth. His inky brown eyes remain deep enough for a swim. The car roars with pleasure as Jamie switches on the ignition before settling at a gentle speed, coolly using one hand to steer the wheel, easily negotiating the country lanes.
Sandwiched between the A3 and M25 and known as the country’s ‘wealth corridor’ according to Savills estate agency, Oxshott is thirty-five minutes from Waterloo in central London. Not a single family house on the Crown Estate where Redknapp lives is for sale for much under £2.5 million.
It has not always been this way. In 1885, Oxshott was, as it had been for centuries, a hamlet of pig farmers living on ancient hunting land owned by the Crown. The arrival of the railway led to the development of a high street that contained three shops – a draper’s, tobacconist and set of tea rooms – as well as a rapidly growing community of comfortably well-off commuters living in new-build mock-Tudor homes.
Today, the high street has twelve shops that include four estate agents, three interior stores and the Clay Salon and Spa, which describes itself as a ‘blissful sanctuary of tranquillity’. They serve rows of homogeneous multi-million-pound houses, commonly owned by twenty-something footballers and thirty-something fund managers, mostly sited on ‘The Crown’, as the main patrolled estate is locally known.
Here, each property is built on half an acre or so, separated from the others by red-brick walls and swathes of evergreen foliage. In 2011, a report in the Sunday Telegraph revealed that there are no listed properties in the area. Currently, the old manor houses built in the fifties are falling down faster than Didier Drogba in the penalty box. So too are the detached houses from the sixties, seventies, eighties and even the nineties, making way for neo-Georgian stone pads, like Redknapp’s home, which is safely tucked behind an electric wrought-iron gate.
‘We’ve been here for nearly seven years,’ Redknapp tells me as he parks on the block-paved drive, where there are already five other cars, including a mandatory large black Range Rover Sport. ‘I lived in north London when I was at Spurs. But for some reason, I never took to it. I like it more down here.’
Redknapp removes his Adidas training shoes as he pushes through the huge front door and steps on to a wide marblefloored entrance hall that opens into a guest sitting room on the right and a kitchen to the left, where his wife and former pop star Louise Nurding is waiting.
Wearing a pair of cotton tracksuit bottoms and an oversized woollen jumper, Louise briefly discusses secondary-education options with Jamie for their ten-year-old son Charley. ‘I’d like Charley to focus more on school than I did, because I didn’t focus and it’s a bit of a regret,’ Jamie says, while a kettle of water boils in the background as he offers me a selection of flapjacks and caramel shortbreads from Waitrose, to accompany the steaming mug of tea that follows shortly.
We leave Louise filling in forms and move into the aforementioned guest sitting room, a space that, despite its size, I suspect is used rarely. There is a clinical opulence: sophisticated French-style bay windows affording shards of natural light through the towering Monterey pines outside. There are cream walls and carpet, a two-tone grey-fur rug and a glass table. We sit on two comfy black-leather couches and the interview begins.
Financially, football has served Redknapp better than any of the other characters in this book. Football is the family business. There is his father, Harry, who has managed teams for four decades; Harry’s brother-in-law is Frank Lampard senior, who played for England and West Ham United, and his son Frank Lampard, who followed the same path before becoming a legend at Chelsea. When Jamie was Liverpool captain, he faced his father and the Lampards when they were all involved at West Ham.
‘I caught Frank with a late tackle on the ankle and he had to go off,’ Jamie remembers. ‘Les Sealey was my dad’s goalkeeping coach, God bless his soul. He ran over to Frank on the touchline and I could hear him shouting, “Go back and do him, Frank. Go back and do him good and proper.” My dad was standing behind him in front of the dugout shaking his head. He was saying, “Hang on, Les – that’s my son!” It was a really weird feeling. I suppose that’s football for you.’
I suggest to Jamie that football must be in his DNA. He believes it is more to do with ‘obsession’ and necessity colliding. Harry entered management when his playing career was over because there were no other options. Football was all he knew. He was not qualified to do anything else. To tell Jamie’s story is also to tell Harry’s.
‘My grandfather was a dock worker in the east end of London,’ Jamie explains. ‘He was crazy about football and used to go to Arsenal a lot. He was a grafter and my dad was the same. After he finished playing, his only immediate path was into coaching or management. I’m sure he would have found another way eventually if that hadn’t worked out, because he’s a survivor.’
Jamie was three years old when the Redknapps moved to the United States after Harry accepted a player-coaching role with the Seattle Sounders in the North American Soccer League.
‘My dad had to go where the work was, like any other regular family in the seventies, because he hadn’t made enough money out of the game to sit on his bum for the rest of his life. The difference was, my dad would take me to training most days. I fell in love with the game very quickly. When we moved back to England, I have more memories of training at Bournemouth than I do of being at school. I’m not saying I’m proud of that. Without knowing it, my dad was subconsciously making me a footballer.’
Aged eleven, Redknapp was allowed to take part in full-scale training matches with Bournemouth’s professionals.
‘They were adults, good players. Ian Bishop was there and he later signed for Manchester City. Shaun Teale progressed his career with Aston Villa. My dad wanted me to play and compete. If I gave the ball away, it would mess up the session. It made my touch so much better than it should have been.’
Jamie played for a Sunday-league team in Bournemouth. Harry watched every match but stood quietly.
‘He never interfered. He later told me that Ron Greenwood, West Ham’s manager, wouldn’t allow any parent to shout from the touchline. Ron thought that players should think for themselves. Although my dad was in a position to give the best advice, he was the one who said the least and just let me get on with it. The rest of them would be screaming, “Get rid of it.” Of course, they were wrong.’
Although by then comfortable enough, Harry made sure Jamie took on a paper round as a teenager – to learn the value of money.
‘I was the spare boy and covered for my brother Mark if he was unavailable. Mark was three years older than me and a decent footballer. He would have had a career if it wasn’t for an ankle injury that left him in pain for days after games. The paper round meant I had to learn all of the routes. Bournemouth is hardly The Wire but my dad didn’t really like me being out alone on my bike. He just wanted me to experience the discipline of working for a wage. If the call from the newsagent came at short notice, he’d whizz me around in his car and help me deliver the papers to the door.’
Harry was regularly recognized.
‘“Harry Redknapp … what are you doing?” one season-ticket holder at Bournemouth asked. “Yeah, yeah,” he’d say. “Times are hard, I’m not getting paid much by the chairman that runs your club.” Then he’d walk off, laughing to himself.’
Management in the football league’s lowest divisions was stressful for Harry, even with twenty years’ experience behind him as a player.
‘My mum [Sandra] never went to watch my dad. She’s a very quiet and unassuming lady. We’re very protective of her. She doesn’t ride a bike; she can’t swi
m. She’s very gentle. To be able to put up with us being obsessed with football, it’s probably best that she’s very relaxed. Even now when we’re having dinner, the conversation will be based around football. She’s very patient and always has been. My dad could get stressed at work but it’s all he’s ever known. People tell me that at his age [now in his late sixties], he shouldn’t be managing. But I think it’s the best thing for him. He likes stress. Whenever Bournemouth lost, it was horrible because I knew how much he cared. If he won, on the Saturday night he’d treat us to a Chinese takeaway. All I cared about as a kid was Bournemouth winning, because I wanted to see him happy. I’m like that now. Of course I’ve got a soft spot for Liverpool, because my kids support them, but the first result I look out for is whichever team my dad is managing. It was the same whenever I was a Liverpool player. If we won and he won, the weekend would be complete.’
During the course of this interview, it is clear that Jamie and Harry share more than just an average father–son bond. A friendship exists. The pair were brought closer together when Jamie was seventeen, a few months before he joined Liverpool. While visiting Italy during the 1990 World Cup, Harry was involved in a road accident with Bournemouth’s managing director Brian Tiler. Travelling near Rome, their minibus collided with a van containing several Italian soldiers and Harry’s vehicle was flipped on to its roof and skidded fifty yards along the road. Tiler was killed, while Harry was doused in petrol and pulled clear of the accident, suffering a fractured skull, a broken nose, cracked ribs and a gash in his left leg. Ambulance services arriving at the scene believed him dead and placed a blanket over his head. Unconscious for two days, Harry was flown home two weeks later in a special air ambulance paid for by Bournemouth. Though he recovered, the physical scars remain, with Harry developing a facial tic and losing his sense of smell.
‘It was a terrible time,’ Jamie remembers. ‘It made me realize, maybe a bit earlier than it might have, just how important family is. I know he’d do anything for me. He’s like a best mate. I’m a parent myself now but I still speak to him two or three times a day. I just want to make sure he’s OK. We protect each other.’
