by Tom Bower
Regulations are anathema to mavericks, especially types like Ken Bates, the architect of Chelsea’s revival, whose business history appeared to test the assurances by Adam Crozier and Richard Scudamore that the game and its finances were properly regulated to ensure that only those passing the ‘fit and proper’ test would be accepted by the Premier League and FA. ‘An unwelcoming club,’ Bean had reported to Nic Coward, referring to Chelsea. Even Arsenal was immune to Bean’s scrutiny. ‘Investigating anything at Arsenal is more than my job’s worth,’ confessed Bean. The relationship between the Premier League clubs and agents would not be investigated. Scudamore nodded towards Rick Parry to voice the conclusion. ‘We need to compete with Real Madrid and other European clubs,’ said Parry. ‘We can’t control the agents alone. We’ve got to leave it to FIFA.’
Relying on FIFA, the international football regulator, was futile. The organization’s past investigations of alleged irregularities involving agents had been incomplete, filed and forgotten. In its Zürich headquarters, Sepp Blatter, the president, was under attack for corruption. Millions of pounds were said to be unaccounted for and there were stories about Blatter’s payments of cash to African delegates in 1998 to secure their votes for his election. Corruption in football was firmly established at the sport’s summit. Few doubted that the sport, awash with billions of pounds, was defiled by ‘bungs’. Graham Bean’s struggle to produce evidence of dishonesty satisfied outsiders and reassured the guilty. Football’s history over the previous thirty years proved the existence of dishonesty and confirmed the impossibility of its cure.
Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed and popular, Tommy Docherty, the coach of Manchester United from 1972 until 1977, personified the lovable debauchery and irresistible intoxication of football. Born in Glasgow’s Gorbals, the footballer had been the darling of his fellow professionals and the media. He personified the game’s habit of giving enormous pleasure but also inflicting terrible destruction during a managerial career before the dramatic change in football’s finances.
In Docherty’s era, BBC Television annually paid less than £50,000 for the rights to film all of the First Division’s matches, and the club owners profited from cheap labour. Contractually, players were the possession of the clubs, unable to move freely; they always risked an abrupt termination of their careers by injuries. Bobby Charlton, Denis Law and George Best – all football legends in their lifetimes – were earning between £250 and £350 per week. Apart from Stanley Matthews and other unblemished heroes, football players were treated with limited respect. In a revolutionary change in 1978, the Football League allowed players to be transferred on free contracts to determine their own fate and the transfer fees rose. Some club managers sought to benefit from the new, lucrative trade.
Greed was Tommy Docherty’s ruin. In 1977, he was dismissed by Manchester United. His fame was transformed into notoriety. Away from the spotlight, gossips spoke about his affair with the wife of the club’s physiotherapist and his avarice. In November 1978, he was suspended by Derby for admitting in a libel trial that he had told ‘a pack of lies’. He was also accused by the club of taking a £1,000 bribe for allowing George Best to play a match in 1973 for Dunstable. His nemesis came when he was arrested by Detective Superintendent Jim Reddington of the local police concerning three suspicious transfers valued at £2 million. With remarkable speed, the players had arrived at Derby and left soon after, arousing the suggestion that Docherty had received ‘bungs’ from the transactions. After his exhaustive inquiry Reddington decided not to prosecute Docherty and, untroubled, the manager departed from Derby in April 1979 for Queens Park Rangers. Docherty remained unashamed of the allegations. ‘I’ve always said there’s a place for the press,’ he said after the storm of publicity, ‘but they haven’t dug it yet.’ In a lunchtime speech to the Football Writers Association, the manager was candid about his morality. ‘Lots of times,’ laughed Docherty, ‘managers have to be cheats and conmen. People say we tell lies. Of course we tell lies. We are the biggest hypocrites. We cheat. In our business the morals are all different. The only way to survive is by cheating. And there’s no way that can be changed. That’s our life, that’s the law of our life.’
Docherty’s confession aroused little surprise. In that era, at least one turnstile on every football ground was said to belong to the club’s chairman, to provide cash for bungs and his lifestyle. ‘Folding doesn’t tell stories,’ was the maxim mentioned by players, stuffing brown envelopes in their pockets and laughing over the apocryphal story describing a gust of wind blowing their manager’s cash dividend across a beach. Docherty, insiders knew, was unexceptional. Sir Denis Follows, the general secretary of the FA, was renowned for his collection of emeralds and the acceptance of gold cuff-links as presents for casting his vote. His confidants at the FA were familiar with Follows’s complaint that Stanley Rous, his predecessor and the president of FIFA, had informed the representatives of other nations about his gratitude for contributions to his collection of gold watches. Rous, it was said with some laughter, had lost his position in 1974, after twelve years, to the challenger Joao Havelange because the Brazilian had actually given the gold watches to African delegates casting their vote for him. Rous’s greed influenced Ted Croker, the FA’s general secretary in the 1970s. Croker was fond of charging his suits, haircuts and holiday golf trips to his expenses. His income, it was said, was supplemented by supplying black market tickets for key matches to Flashman, a notorious character. In 1977, allegations were made about the corruption of Don Revie, the admired but neurotic manager of England’s team, and renowned for encouraging the Leeds United team to play violently.
Don Revie’s appointment as England’s manager had surprised those who remembered his corruption during the 1960s as the manager of Leeds. Eyewitnesses recalled five occasions on which Revie had offered cash to opposing players to ‘go easy’ and let Leeds win or score more goals. Among those who refused was Bob Stokoe, the player-manager of Bury, who rejected Revie’s offer of £500. Revie also offered illegal payments to attract players to Leeds. Other eyewitnesses recalled that Revie in 1971 had ordered his subordinates to enter the dressing rooms and offer players money to throw a match allowing Leeds to win. In 1972, he had repeated the offer to get ‘the right result’ against Wolves, when Leeds needed one point to win the Double. The offer was rejected, and Leeds lost 2–1. Rigging match results in English football was not unknown. In 1963, three had been jailed for such a conspiracy on behalf of Sheffield Wednesday; but that had not been orchestrated by a lauded manager of the England team.
In 1977, the Daily Mirror threatened to expose Don Revie. To avoid embarrassment England’s manager suddenly abandoned the national team without any public explanation and accepted a two year contract with Abu Dhabi’s Football Association. Revie assumed (correctly) that while he was away he could stymie the FA’s investigation of the Mirror’s dossier. Ted Croker, the FA’s general secretary, had assembled a five-man committee, but they were content to remain paralysed until Revie returned to Britain four years later. To Croker’s satisfaction, when Revie returned to Britain the Mirror’s allegations were suppressed by Revie serving a writ for libel on the newspaper and claiming that the rules of ‘sub judice’ prevented him answering the FA’s questions.
Croker’s behaviour showed that the football family cared for its own kind; the ‘guardians’ of football would resist outsiders imposing any restrictions upon their heroes. Although a judge subsequently condemned Revie’s behaviour as ‘deceitful and greedy’, Croker continued to remain silent and quietly assisted Revie’s masquerade. Croker’s memoirs, published in 1987, conjure a false scenario for Revie’s unexpected resignation in 1977. Revie, Croker wrote, threatened to resign unless he was paid £100,000. Croker described the FA’s refusal to pay as the provocation for Revie’s departure and effectively concealed the anticipated revelation of Revie’s corruption as the reason for the manager’s resignation. The truth only emerged after Revie’s dea
th in 1989, and even then the FA maintained its silence. Some simply blamed an encrusted regulator, but insiders understood that Revie’s corrupt methods had developed deep roots. Insiders were even suspicious that some players at Manchester United may have also been involved in a conspiracy to fix certain matches between 1960 and 1962. Harry Gregg, United’s goalkeeper, claimed publicly that he had been offered money to allow goals through.
The personification of football’s culture of dishonesty was Brian Clough, the hero of Nottingham Forest. Drunken, outspoken and flamboyant, Clough, who managed Nottingham Forest between 1975 and 1993, was praised by fans and commentators for winning the League and twice winning the European Cup, in 1979 and 1980. The price was Clough’s apparent belief that success had bequeathed a licence for a secret income. Between April 1987 and April 1993, Clough masterminded fifty-eight transfers worth £19.5 million and he allegedly pocketed about £1 million in cash paid back to him by grateful agents and managers. Provocatively, in 1980, Clough created a company called Sting Ltd. Eventually he would pay the Inland Revenue £600,000 for unpaid taxes. Clough’s dishonesty passed unchecked, partly because he generously ensured that others benefited from his deceit, and partly because no one in football’s family deemed it proper to interfere.
Some of the players at Forest were paid cash paid out through the club’s community scheme and the catering business; some scouts were rewarded with huge sums of cash in brown envelopes, and a favoured few were alleged to have received signing-on fees in Guernsey accounts. Even the club’s accountant, Andrew Plumb, was convicted of stealing money. During the Clough era Plumb stole £70,000 from the club for personal expenses, possibly from cash received at the turnstiles for tickets. The club never complained to the police, and even after Plumb’s conviction the club declined an independent examination of its accounts.
In spite of the restrictions on football agents, the FA showed little concern whether the rules were followed. ‘I don’t trust any agent,’ said Doug Ellis, who had reluctantly collaborated with rogue agents over the previous thirty-three years – he saw them as necessary evils to sustain his dream. In 1993, Ellis had sought to buy Mark Bosnich, an Australian goalkeeper who had been forced by British immigration laws to resign from Manchester United and return home. In order to play for Aston Villa, Bosnich would need to become a British citizen. A plan to change Bosnich’s nationality was encouraged by Graham Smith, the director of First Wave, an agency. By marrying Lisa Hall, an English woman, suggested Smith, the Australian would automatically receive British citizenship. ‘I suggested a marriage,’ said Ellis, although Lisa Hall would angrily deny that the marriage was ‘arranged’, albeit that six months later the couple parted. Graham Smith’s fee from Ellis for arranging a transfer was an immediate payment of £150,000 and a promise of a further £150,000 after Bosnich had made 150 first-team appearances. As a member of the FA’s international and finance committees, Ellis knew that his use of an agent was a breach of the FA’s rules.
Graham Smith denied acting as an agent for Bosnich. ‘Everything we do is absolutely 100 per cent above board,’ Smith declared. ‘If I put a price on a player it’s not a transfer fee. It’s a consultancy fee.’ Few believed the explanation. Aston Villa was fined £20,000 by the FA for irregular dealings with an agent, but Ellis remained on the FA’s committees. ‘I only broke the rules slightly,’ said Ellis, adding that only ‘very few’ managers took ‘bungs’ from agents. The chairman of Aston Villa showed himself to be a canny businessman with a special talent for sniffing out dubious relationships.
The leaders of English football consoled themselves that corruption in other countries appeared to be far worse. In Brazil, Renata Alves, a secretary employed by the national coach, admitted that he left meetings with a briefcase stuffed with dollars from commissions for selling players; while Wanderley Luxemburgo, a Brazilian coach, admitted that players were included in the national team at the request of unnamed agents to increase their value. In Italy, Paolo Rossi, a sprightly forward, was accused of throwing matches in return for bribes but was acquitted in a trial on the grounds that ‘sporting fraud is not a crime’. In Portugal, referees were convicted of accepting money, furs, holidays and prostitutes from clubs for fixing matches. In France, a six year investigation of Olympique Marseille’s defeat of AC Milan in 1993 for the European Cup established that teams and players had been bribed to ease Marseille’s path to the championship. In Switzerland, Kurt Roethlisberger, an international referee, was banned for life after offering a Swiss club to fix a match for 100,000 Swiss francs. The condemnation of Roethlisberger triggered off other accounts about referees and stories of whole teams across Europe and South America wilfully throwing matches in return for bribes. In the Greek and Italian championships the final positions at the end of the season were notoriously price-sensitive.
English football appeared immune from that level of corruption until in November 1994 the Sun newspaper published allegations that Bruce Grobbelaar, an unorthodox and theatrical goalkeeper, had taken a bribe of £40,000 in 1993 while playing for Liverpool to allow Newcastle to score and win. Grobbelaar was also accused of being offered £175,000 to ‘miss’ saves in two matches and that he had lost a £125,000 bribe by mistakenly saving a goal. The evidence against Grobbelaar appeared damning. He had been secretly filmed in a hotel room discussing the bribes with a friend from Zimbabwe. The revelations cast a mood that English football had ‘lost its soul’ in ‘a season of scandal’. But the comments of Rick Parry, the first chief executive of the Premier League, suggested scepticism: ‘None of us want to believe it, and I don’t by the way, because that would be betraying the game more than any single act I could think of.’ Grobbelaar and others were arrested on 14 March 1995. Two years later, a jury failed to reach a verdict. At the end of the second trial in August 1997, Grobbelaar and his co-defendants were acquitted. Grobbelaar’s innocence appeared to be finally established by a jury awarding him damages of £85,000 in a libel case against the Sun. But the two juries who had declared his innocence were refuted by the Court of Appeal in January 2001. Three judges upheld an appeal by the Sun and declared that Grobbelaar had confessed to match-fixing in the secret tape, a decision in large measure confirmed by the House of Lords who awarded Grobbelaar contemptible damages of £1 on the basis that although there was evidence of his taking money, it was not proved that he was fixing match results. Six years after the original allegations Grobbelaar was declared to be guilty. By then, any shock had evaporated. The only punishment he suffered was a fine of £10,000 and a ban on playing for six months imposed by the FA for admitting he forecast the result of matches to a Far East betting syndicate. Grobbelaar had become an unmentioned sideshow to more serious chicanery.
In the House of Commons, on 30 January 1995, Kate Hoey, the feisty Labour MP with a special interest in sport, had demanded that the Conservative government intervene to deal with ‘the variety of allegations, scandals and corrupt practices which have surrounded the game in recent years’. Hoey, an active football supporter, used the protection of parliamentary privilege to accuse a clutch of football’s heroes of dishonesty. Among her cast list were Brian Clough, George Graham, Ron Atkinson, Terry Venables and an infamous agent, Eric Hall. ‘Millions of pounds,’ she alleged, were ‘siphoned off from the game in backhanders, bungs and fixes.’ Some personalities, she alleged, had breached the 1906 Corruption Act; and one was renowned for asking, ‘Is there a sweetie in it for me?’ Conservative ministers, she shrilled angrily, refused to treat football seriously. Shrugging off Eric Hall’s insistence that ‘football is monster clean’ and the ‘patronizing’ denial of sleaze in football by Doug Ellis, she demanded an independent inquiry to expose how the taxpayer was being ‘ripped off’. ‘This government,’ she lamented, ‘is refusing to step in and bring to book the arrogant men who run our national sport.’
Hoey’s passionate plea was rejected by the Conservatives. Ian Sproat, the minister of sport, believed that football should regul
ate itself. Rather than government control, he preferred to rely on the assurances of Howard Wilkinson, the manager of Leeds United and of the League Managers Association. However, in February 1995 Wilkinson conceded that ‘strong action needs to be taken’ to end the sleaze in football. If the business was to prosper, said Wilkinson, the sport’s regulators were required to investigate the allegations of corruption. Since then, without government pressure, little had been done. Football’s critics were invited to vanish. The game belonged to its admirers and heroes, and few more heroic than Terry Venables, who represented the genius, the fun and the worship of the game. His admirers preferred to ignore his unscrupulousness.
2
THE HERO: TERRY VENABLES
Lying is common among the football fraternity and Terry Venables was a flawless practitioner of the art. On 21 June 1991, the purpose of his lies was special. The location of his deception was Henry Ansbacher’s, a small merchant bank in the City of London. And here Venables was to consummate a union with Alan Sugar, the founder of Amstrad, the computer and electronics company. In what was blessed as ‘a football marriage made in heaven’, the two men were to become the joint owners of Tottenham Hotspur.
Even Alan Sugar, a crude streetfighter glowering with suspicion, was deceived by the camouflage. El Tel’s wisecracks, his scruffy clothes and the universal acclaim from being Tottenham’s football coach obscured his greed for money. Venables’s eccentricities diverted any doubts. His habit of publicly holding court in hotel lobbies – alternating between the Royal Garden in Kensington, the Carlton Tower in Belgravia and the Royal Lancaster in Bayswater – rather than using a conventional office, aroused amusement. Terry, everyone knew, hated solitude and lusted for strangers’ recognition while guffawing with his admirers. Even his recent purchase of Scribes, a bankrupt nightclub in Kensington, evoked smiles. The image of Terry hosting a continuous party in a gloomy basement – pouring champagne and leading raucous karaoke sing-songs – was endearing. No one speculated that the cheeky chappie, ambitious and desperate, had blatantly lied to fulfil his dream of buying Tottenham.
