by John Crace
Something did come along. Leicester City sacked Peter Taylor and offered Redknapp a return to management in the Premiership. A more ambitious manager – one with an eye on the England job – would surely have accepted it, but Redknapp turned it down, reluctant to abandon either Mandaric or the south coast. He was also publicly still backing Rix – after a fashion. ‘If Graham left and Milan asked me to be manager then I would take it,’ Redknapp said. ‘I would be the obvious choice. But I want Graham to stay.’
Mandaric was even more equivocal in his support for his manager. ‘Graham stays on the advice of Harry,’ he said. ‘It would have been the easiest thing in the world to pull the trigger.’ If Rix hadn’t been paranoid before that, he should have been afterwards.
Redknapp may have been bored as director of football, but he wasn’t idle and he did know how to play the fans. David Ginola was never likely to be tempted down to Portsmouth even though he was nearing the end of his career, but that didn’t stop Redknapp from publicly linking the French player with Portsmouth. Much as the West Ham supporters had done so before them, the Pompey fans enjoyed the attention of being talked about and being associated with international stars. It made the club look ambitious and feel bigger than it was.
To many observers, Redknapp’s habit of publicly expressing an interest in dozens of players who may or may not be available is a form of ‘Transfer Tourettes’. And there is an element of compulsion about it; for Redknapp, professional football is a transfer merry-go-round where most players are available at a price, and he can’t help himself from thinking out loud. It’s like taking a kid to a sweet shop. But there is also something quite canny about this approach, too. Providing he didn’t make himself look stupid by linking several of the world’s best players with Portsmouth, Redknapp could create a ‘no smoke without fire’ buzz about the club, so in people’s minds it became one to which others gave a second thought. Rather than using a small fish to catch a big one, he was using a big one to catch a slightly less smaller one than he otherwise might. It worked. Portsmouth didn’t get Ginola, but Redknapp did buy Alessandro Zamperini (from Roma), Svetoslav Todorov and Robert Prosinecki from Standard Liège – all three players who might have been expected to think twice about such a move.
Redknapp also bought the six-foot-seven Peter Crouch from Queens Park Rangers in a club record £1.25 million move that would later attract the attention of the Inland Revenue after Crouch was sold to Aston Villa for £5 million within a year and would be pivotal to the prosecution case at his and Mandaric’s trial at Southwark Crown Court in 2012. The legal aspects of this case were all examined at length in court, but the wider implications of the Crouch transfer for Redknapp’s and Mandaric’s business relationship escaped scrutiny and they suggest intriguing possibilities.
Mandaric was an unusually hands-on chairman, one who travelled to every away game with Redknapp and who could laugh at himself for his initial assessment of Crouch as being more of a basketball player than a footballer. The relationship between Redknapp and Mandaric went far beyond the normal chairman–manager pleasantries, developing into a proper friendship. And yet Mandaric still changed the terms of Redknapp’s contract when he switched jobs from director of football to manager.
At the trial, it was revealed that Redknapp’s wage deal was increased from £1.775 million to £3.025 million, while his bonus for selling on players was reduced from ten per cent to five per cent – and it was this five per cent reduction the prosecution alleged Mandaric was trying to make good in the payments made to Redknapp’s Rosie47 Monaco bank account. Mandaric’s defence counsel quite reasonably pointed out that Redknapp was being rewarded well enough as it was – a near hundred per cent pay rise had been more than generous – so why would the chairman have felt obliged to give his manager any more than was legally required?
What wasn’t explored in any depth was why the contractual arrangements had been changed. And there could be only one explanation. The Crouch deal had alerted Mandaric to a possible conflict between Redknapp acting in his own interests and those of the club, and he wanted to recalibrate the deal to make sure Redknapp would be encouraged to do the latter. Nothing else makes sense. If the original deal had been satisfactory, there would have been no need to change it. Mandaric could easily have got away with paying a slightly smaller salary and retaining the ten per cent sell-on bonus. No matter what anyone else might have said, the message from Mandaric to Redknapp in the new contract was that, while he liked him and considered him to be a good manager, he also wanted to keep him on a rather tighter rein. Just in case. And if Redknapp wasn’t aware that’s what Mandaric was saying, then he ought to have been. It also sheds some light on the bust-up between the two men that was to happen two years later and that might otherwise seem to have come from out of the blue.
Having managed to steer Portsmouth away from relegation during the last couple of months of the 2001/02 season, Redknapp typically set about making such wholesale changes to the squad that only Nigel Quashie made the starting eleven for the last game of the season and the first of the next. In came – among others – the Australian Hayden Foxe, the Dutchman Arjan De Zeeuw, the French-Cameroonian Vincent Pericard, the goalkeeper Shaka Hislop and the former Arsenal midfielder Paul Merson.
‘Harry did get a bit lucky,’ says Pete Johnson. ‘ONdigital, the ITV digital TV service, had finally been wound up in May 2002 and was unable to fulfil its £315 million deal to broadcast First Division matches. This left a huge hole in many clubs’ cash flow, making them temporarily unable to compete in the transfer market. With Mandaric’s money behind him, Harry had no such problems and was able to get some players a great deal cheaper than he otherwise might.
‘Having said that, Harry still had a wonderfully good eye for players that other managers had either overlooked or thought were past their sell-by date. He could get the best out of a strange collection of different temperaments. For all the big names he brought in at the start of the 2002/03 season, it was the little-known Matt Taylor he picked up for £600,000 from Luton who was the pick of the bunch. He was a decent enough player in the Premiership, but in the First Division he was outstanding. Matt often seemed to be the player who was holding the team together and making things happen in his first season.’
Redknapp’s Portsmouth got off to a flying start in his first full season in charge and, after he had strengthened the squad in the January transfer window by buying the Nigerian striker Yakubu, and the Spurs midfielder Tim Sherwood, the team went on to win the First Division title and win promotion to the top level of English football after fifteen years of trying. ‘Arthur Hopcraft put it beautifully in The Football Man,’ says Julian Guyer, ‘when he wrote that a football crowd never has to be told when their team is playing well – they know. And at Pompey, we did know. We achieved success by playing attacking football, rather than packing the defence and booting a hopeful long ball up to the strikers. Friends of my dad said it was the best football they had seen the side play since the fifties.’
Not only did Portsmouth get promoted; against all expectations, they stayed up. There was even a brief moment at the beginning of the season when they topped the table. ‘The last time we had been in the top division we had gone straight back down,’ Guyer continues, ‘and most of us thought the same thing was bound to happen again. We weren’t that unhappy about it, just resigned to it. There was a feeling we had played above ourselves to get promotion and that we should just enjoy a season in the bright lights while we could. But it was so much better than that. We beat Manchester United at home for the first time in nearly fifty years, a result I certainly never thought I’d ever see. The mood in the city was just brilliant. The club’s performances lifted everyone and, even when we were thrashed at home by Arsenal, we were still cheering because it was so wonderful to be watching such fantastic football.’
Success had been predicated on the usual Redknapp strategy of hyperactivity in the transfer and loan market. At times, it
seemed as if the club was almost operating a revolving-door policy and the players must have sometimes wondered who was going to show up for training as nineteen squad members were signed over the course of the season. The fans didn’t mind; their team was doing well and they assumed Mandaric was good for the money. Besides which, when was the last time you heard a terrace chant of ‘We’ve got the best balance sheet in the world’?
Despite Redknapp’s assertions that he wasn’t costing the club a lot of money – he was unquestionably getting some players, such as Alexey Smertin, at knock-down prices – the club’s wage bill was beginning to rocket and the first sign of a crack in the hitherto good relations between Mandaric and his manager came towards the end of the 2003/04 season when the chairman suggested a new infrastructure needed to be put in place the following season to make the club less reliant on new signings. The fallout initially centred on the future of the assistant manager Jim Smith.
Mandaric had told the BBC it was Redknapp who had suggested Smith should leave. ‘I tried to protect Harry and not go public,’ he told Radio 4, ‘but he said this in an official meeting in the boardroom in front of others, including the chief executive. Harry said he could do without Jim and really didn’t need him. He said he would like to keep him for the rest of the season because he was doing this favour for Jim. That is not a good reason to keep somebody.’ Mandaric went on to say Redknapp had said Smith should really go in December because he was useless, but ‘pleaded with me not to make the changes there and then because he was concerned about what Sir Alex Ferguson or some of his friends might say.’
Redknapp was outraged when Mandaric went public with this, accusing his chairman of telling ‘filthy lies’, and saying it had been the chairman’s idea to get rid of Smith and that he would leave Portsmouth if his assistant was fired. ‘Milan’s record in bringing in coaches is not good. Tony Pulis and Graham Rix were good coaches but not good enough. If Milan wants to bring in a coach to work under me, I’ve got no problem,’ he said. ‘I’m all for coaches – that’s why I brought in Luther Blissett to help the strikers – but I don’t see why there’s any reason to break up the current staff.’
This was slightly disingenuous on Redknapp’s part. There is no way he wouldn’t have had a problem with Mandaric bringing in a new coach under him. Redknapp has always been careful to appoint staff who aren’t going to challenge him directly or – possibly with one eye on his own guilty conscience – replace him. Smith and coach Kevin Bond were men who could be relied on to do what Redknapp wanted. Redknapp didn’t like threats to his hegemony, and he didn’t like not getting his dues. Blissett had been brought in to teach the strikers to score more goals and, when they had done so, Redknapp had not been all that happy about Luther being given the credit in the local press. Anyone Mandaric appointed under him without consultation would have been cause for suspicion. In the end, Smith and Bond stayed as Redknapp and Mandaric patched up their differences, but the spat was to be the first of several in which chairman and manager would show themselves to have memories diametrically at odds with one another.
Portsmouth’s good form continued into the new season with the team comfortably positioned in mid-table, but by early November 2004 the relationship between Mandaric and Redknapp was again at breaking point. This time the disagreement centred on Mandaric’s decision to bring in the Croatian Velimir Zajec, from the Greek club Panathinaikos, to be director of football over Redknapp’s head, and it was to prove fatal. Redknapp took this to be a direct challenge to his authority and wasn’t shy about making his feelings known – an entirely predictable reaction that Mandaric, a man who is nobody’s fool, must have seen coming. This suggests that he can only have intended to provoke the inevitable response from Redknapp. So why did he want to have a head-on confrontation with a popular manager who had lifted the club from one that bumped along the lower reaches of the First Division to one that looked entirely at home in the Premiership and who had just been voted Premiership manager of the month for October?
Some supporters reckoned it was little more than a clash of egos. Before Redknapp had come along, Mandaric picked up all the plaudits for having rescued the club from going under. Normally, the only time a chairman’s name is sung on the terraces is when the fans want him out, but Mandaric had been used to hearing his chanted with something approaching devotion. But when Redknapp arrived and the team started playing well, it was the manager’s name, not the chairman’s, being heard at Fratton Park. That may have stung, but a businessman as shrewd as Mandaric wasn’t in the habit of making important decisions based on a fit of pique, so there had to have been more to it than that. And that was the amount of money Redknapp’s transfer activity was costing the club in fees, wages and – in particular – agents’ fees. During Redknapp’s two and a half years in charge, he had bought in thirty-eight players – either as transfers or loans – in deals that had cost the club £11.5 million, of which more than a third had been raked off by agents.
Zajec’s arrival was a clear if clumsy signal to Redknapp that this level of expenditure was no longer going to be tolerated. It’s less evident, though, why it was necessary. Redknapp’s spend, spend, spend approach can’t have come as a surprise to Mandaric – it’s what he had done at both Bournemouth and West Ham – and the chairman and managing director, Peter Storrie, would have had the final say on every deal as they were the ones who legally signed them off. Redknapp could have wanted anything he liked, but Mandaric had the power to say no. Why couldn’t Mandaric, then, have just told Redknapp enough was enough? Or had he said exactly that, and Redknapp hadn’t take him seriously?
It’s impossible to tell if Mandaric was using Zajec merely to limit Redknapp’s powers or as a means of forcing him out. Redknapp, though, would have been alert to the latter possibility. He had been parachuted into Portsmouth above Graham Rix and had replaced him within a year, so there was a precedent. It was a modus operandi with which both Redknapp and Mandaric were familiar; added to this were Redknapp’s own feelings that the position of director of football was a total waste of space. If Redknapp felt that way, then he probably reckoned others did, too, and therefore the only reason Zajec would have taken it was if he had had his eye on the bigger prize of the manager’s job.
For a short while after Zajec’s arrival, an uneasy truce was reached with the Croatian being appointed executive director, with responsibility for developing a youth academy and European scouting, rather than director of football – a semantic quickstep to try and save everyone’s pride in front of the media. Portsmouth released a statement saying, ‘Any issues that the manager had with a new appointment were pure speculation. Harry Redknapp remains manager of the club which was never in doubt. The board will continue the expansion of the club with the appointment of a new executive director who will be Velimir Zajec. Speculation that he was joining as a director of football was ill-founded and he will become a main board member.’
Redknapp responded rather more bullishly. ‘I’m the manager and I’m in total control of the club,’ he said. ‘He [Zajec] has other specific duties and if he does those jobs it will be for the benefit of Portsmouth and that’s what matters. I’ve spent two days chatting with the chairman and he’s assured me that I’m completely in charge of my own job. No one will interfere and my responsibility will be exactly the same. It’s fine by me.’
Not so fine, though, that Redknapp ever planned to talk to Zajec face to face. After losing to local rivals Southampton in mid-November, Redknapp was asked how he felt about the Croatian. ‘I will never meet him,’ he said. Hardly a peace offering and, within a week on 24 November 2004, Redknapp had resigned after Mandaric once more voiced his concerns about Redknapp’s transfer dealings and the amount of money that was finding its way into agents’ pockets, leading many to conclude that the chairman thought his manager was personally benefiting from these transactions. Redknapp’s resignation announcement made no mention of this; rather, he asked everyone to believe that
his departure was ‘something I have been thinking about for a while. I made it without any pressure from the chairman or the board.’
Mandaric pushed the charade still further by declaring, ‘Harry and I remain good friends. People will obviously make their own minds up and say Harry has stepped down for reasons that have been intensely speculated over in the media. That could not be further from the truth. The truth is Harry sees this as a perfect opportunity to bow out.’
The fans did make up their own minds and came to the same conclusion as everyone but Redknapp and Mandaric. Within minutes of Redknapp’s resignation, the supporters’ websites were condemning the chairman with messages such as ‘Harry Redknapp has been a revelation at Pompey – regardless of the money MM has put in, without Redknapp’s football wheeling and dealing nous, Pompey would still probably be a decent Championship team . . .’ and ‘I’m really at a loss to understand MM’s motives. He says he wants to improve the football structure, but unsettling the one man who has proved to be so pivotal is a contradiction in terms.’
If Portsmouth hoped these statements would draw a line under the bad blood between its chairman and manager, it was mistaken. A week after Redknapp’s departure, Mandaric issued another public statement – one that had all the hallmarks of having been forced upon him by Redknapp’s lawyers – saying that when he had complained about Redknapp’s transfer dealings and the large sums paid out to agents, he had never intended to imply that the manager had been involved in taking bungs. ‘At no time did I imply there was any wrongdoing,’ Mandaric said. ‘I was simply saying that agents take too much money from the game. All transactions and fees have been registered with the Football Association.’
Mandaric also held out a further olive branch – the possibility of Redknapp reconsidering his decision to resign and returning to the club. Redknapp responded by accepting the chairman’s public apology, saying, ‘This needed to be done. I don’t deserve the innuendoes and we needed to clear the air. Milan’s done that. I’ve done nothing but good for the club.’ He did, though, reject any return out of hand. ‘There’s a future for Milan [at Portsmouth],’ he said, ‘but not for me. I decided to quit because it was time to move on and it was one million per cent my decision.’ Redknapp went on to say he was planning to take a break from football. ‘Have I spoken to other clubs? None at all. I haven’t gone down that road.’
