by Tom Bower
The witness to Roach’s subsequent ingratiation with Cruyff’s entourage was Michel Basilevitch, a Frenchman later employed by Cruyff as his executive agent. ‘Roach was obsessed to be involved in football,’ recalled Basilevitch, ‘but by then I looked after Cruyff with his father-in-law.’ Basilevitch had met Cruyff in Spain, where the Dutchman played for Barcelona. Basilevitch manufactured the club’s sportswear. ‘Come and work for me,’ said Cruyff to the Frenchman. Thereafter, Basilevitch did not allow Roach to work for Cruyff and describes himself as the eyewitness to the foundation of Roach’s increased fortunes.
In 1978, fearing death threats, Cruyff refused to travel to Argentina for the World Cup. On the day of the final between Argentina and Holland, Brian Moore, the ITV presenter, invited the footballer and his agent to appear in the studio in London. The two arrived with an entourage including Roach. In the hospitality suite they met Prince Mohamed bin Abdul Aziz from Saudi Arabia. Roach spotted an opportunity. The world’s most powerful and rich men lust to meet football stars. To the prince’s delight, Roach arranged that the famous Cruyff would visit the Saudi’s home in Park Lane the following day.
Using his friendships with Cruyff and Basilevitch, Roach cultivated relationships with key Dutch players – including Ruud Krol and Johan Neeskens – and identified the best young English players whose prospective careers could earn his own fortune. In particular, Roach targeted Glenn Hoddle, whose father he knew as a footballer playing for Barnet; and he offered his services to Trevor Francis, famous for becoming England’s first £1 million transfer, when he moved to Nottingham Forest. Francis’s agent was an accountant. ‘You should have me as your agent,’ Roach told Francis. ‘I know about football. I can get more money for you.’ Roach’s self-promotion was successful, although his employment as an agent was still forbidden by the FA.
To circumvent the FA’s prohibition on agents representing players, Roach described himself as a ‘sports entrepreneur’. There was a lucrative income, he realized, in copying the agents representing UEFA, the European football association, and FIFA, the supreme international regulator of the sport, and arranging tours for famous English football teams to other continents. Over the following years, he arranged for Nottingham Forest to play in South America, Manchester United and Tottenham to tour Australia, and Chelsea to play in the Far East. The climax was a football tour of South Africa, organized by Roach despite the international sanctions against the apartheid regime and South Africa’s expulsion from FIFA in 1976. His partner was Richard Tessel, a South African who shared his certainty of profits to be made by circumventing sanctions. Roach impressed Tessel as a man who could ‘sell ice in the middle of the winter to the Eskimos. He’s just got the gift of the gab.’ An ingredient of Roach’s salesmanship was his boast that he owned the ‘Kingston Royals’, a basketball team which, he told journalists, would win the ‘inevitably successful’ British basketball league.
In July 1982, in cooperation with Richard Tessel, Roach recruited Ossie Ardiles and other British football stars for his tour of South Africa, underwritten by a hotel chain, and led by John Barwell and Jimmy Hill. The tour was a baptism of fire, displaying Roach’s energy and ethics. Star Sports, the company organizing the tour, was registered in the Channel Islands, and Roach received £260,000 in cash from the sponsors. Many of the players were paid in cash. After three games the tour was cancelled, allegedly after Roach refused to pay a black South African official a bribe of £50,000 for ‘protection’. His problems were aggravated after a boycott by South African players and a threat by FIFA to ban for life any player continuing to participate. Key players, including Ardiles, abandoned the tour, but Roach returned home carrying profits and a reputation with Tessel that ‘there’s not a time that Dennis doesn’t try to do a dodgy deal’. Roach’s admirers would denounce that criticism as an unwarranted exaggeration derived from his repeated attraction of controversy.
The experience emboldened Roach. Not only were the profits good, but the tours introduced him to the heart of English football. During those journeys, he suggested to the best players in First Division clubs that he could offer ‘a bit of legal and financial advice’ and pathfinder sponsorships by a football boot manufacturer. Roach was unusually reassuring. Unlike the dictatorial club managers and the distant chairmen, Roach was a kindred spirit, sympathizing with the footballer’s plight in familiar language. Simultaneously, he established close relations with the clubs’ executives to guarantee immediate acceptance of his telephone calls. Brokering those relationships triggered another profitable tour. During two weeks in Swaziland in 1983, Tottenham, Liverpool and Manchester United played three games against local teams. Roach and Star Sports received £800,000 for the tour and paid each club £100,000. Proud about his new wealth, Roach bought a large house on the best road in St Albans and soon after moved to an eighteenth-century house in Mudeford, Dorset, with a two-acre garden where he would subsequently build a swimming pool and tennis court.
Roach had created a unique position. Unlike the majority of parochial English managers and footballers, Roach spoke French fluently after living for one year as a teenager in Paris. Aggressively, he said, ‘I put myself about, making myself known in Europe, getting people to like me so they would call me if they needed something.’ Among the first to call was the manager of the German club Bayern Munich.
Bayern had appointed Roach as its representative to buy Alan McInally from Aston Villa. Graham Taylor, the manager, wanted to sell McInally but knew that the fans would be outraged. ‘Just get it done,’ Taylor told Roach over lunch to agree the transfer. To Roach’s surprise, the following day’s newspapers reported Taylor’s ‘anger’ that he was under pressure to sell McInally and described his frustrated impotence in being compelled to deal with a dreadful, aggressive agent. In his public reply Roach justified the new phenomenon: ‘His club must deal with people like me’. In private, he accused Taylor of being ‘not straightforward’ about McInally’s desire to leave. Taylor concluded the public spat: ‘I don’t deal with agents,’ he snapped naively, unwilling to consider his limited choice in arranging the transfer, which was completed soon after.
Roach understood the new era. Increased income from television was helping England’s leading clubs to match the wages paid by their European rivals. Roach offered the convenience of bearing the financial risk to find foreign buyers or bring them to Britain for inspection. Similarly, British footballers playing in Europe were grateful for an agent helping their return to England. Two Englishmen employed by Monaco – Glenn Hoddle, the former Tottenham player, and Mark Hateley – asked Roach to broker transfers. He negotiated Mark Hateley’s transfer to Glasgow Rangers; and he later earned a fee of £400,000 for negotiating with Ken Bates the appointment of Glenn Hoddle as player-manager of Chelsea after a brief period at Swindon. Roach offered the two players additional benefits: they were sold identical houses in a new development in Oxford Gate, a quiet cul-de-sac in west London. Each cost £325,000. A third house was allocated by Roach to Martin Edwards of Manchester United, and a fourth to Mark Hughes, after his transfer in 1988 to Manchester United, and a fifth in February 1988 to Terry Venables, another close associate of the agent.
Roach would subsequently explain that he bought houses for his friends and clients because he possessed money allocated to them. Venables’s accounts showed that Roach had personally paid the £30,000 deposit. The transaction was unusual but Roach was prepared to accommodate any requirement. His income continued to grow. One reward was a new eighty-foot yacht moored in Poole, near his new home, financed, it was said, from his account in Monaco.
By force of personality and guile, Roach was audaciously participating in lucrative and unsupervised foreign transfers. ‘I’d insert myself into any deal if it was good money,’ he volunteered. David Pleat, the manager of Tottenham, was among football’s traditionalists to complain about Roach’s methods and his consequent wealth. ‘Things are getting out of hand,’ said Pleat, irritated by R
oach’s attempt to sell Clive Allen, a striker, to Torino without the authority of either the player or the club. ‘Allen’s my client,’ insisted Roach, who negotiated the player’s sale to Bordeaux. By contrast, other managers were attracted to Roach’s manner. Brian Clough was an active trader of players whose transactions were unchallenged by Fred Reacher, the club’s chairman. Clough, admitted Reacher, was ‘pretty much the law on playing matters’. Among the transfers Roach brokered for Clough was Lee Chapman’s from Niort of France to Nottingham Forest. The transfer price recorded in Nottingham Forest’s internal accounts was £378,000 plus £135,000 commission to Roach. Detailed accounts subsequently compiled by Price Waterhouse, the auditors, recorded the payment to Roach as £65,000. Clough and Ronnie Fenton, his assistant, would be criticized by a subsequent Premier League investigation for benefiting from ‘fraudulent’ arrangements by recording different transfer fees in Nottingham Forest accounts compared with those lodged with the FA.
Roach had not acted illegally. He was simply amenable to the requirements of club managers. Clough’s arrangements appeared to be routine. On 8 August 1989, unfettered by the club’s owner, the FA or the law, Clough negotiated the purchase of two young players from Leicester City for £15,000. After the usual negotiations, the official contract stipulated that the transfer fee was £40,875 and Fenton was dispatched to the Leicester Forest service station on the M1 motorway. ‘Is that my money in the envelope?’ Fenton asked a familiar face. The parcel was handed over. In the midst of another transfer in March 1993, Ronnie Fenton visited Southend United and agreed to buy Stan Collymore, a rising star, for £1.75 million, to satisfy Nottingham Forest’s need of a striker to avoid relegation. Fenton’s requirements were understood. To complete the deal, Vic Jobson, Southend’s chairman, was told, ‘You’ll have to give Fenton a bung of about £50,000.’ Initially, Jobson refused but agreed after Nottingham Forest were relegated to the First Division. Collymore was sold for £2 million in July 1993.
Roach, like most others immersed in the football world, would never have betrayed Clough by calling him dishonest. To belong to the fraternity required an acceptance of the special rules. ‘Clough was always a gentleman,’ said Roach. ‘They should build a statue for him.’ After fifteen years as an agent, Roach’s expertise and his willingness to obey the gospel were proven despite Clough’s condemnation: ‘Agents,’ Clough railed, ‘put things into players’ heads which weren’t there already.’ If not in the head, it was inserted on paper. During an investigation of Roach’s business by the Inland Revenue, an official showed Roach two different but equally ‘valid’ contracts negotiated by himself for the same player’s transfer to Spain. ‘So what?’ replied Roach. Roach and his company, PRO International, acted fearlessly.
The sale by Tottenham in 1989 of Chris Waddle, a winger, was a template of Roach’s operation over the following decade. Chris Waddle’s sale was initiated by Irving Scholar to pay for a new stand at White Hart Lane. Waddle had been represented for many years by Mel Stein, a solicitor, but Glenn Hoddle advised his friend to switch agents. ‘Use Dennis, he’s good,’ urged Hoddle, who regarded Roach as a father figure. Waddle agreed and encouraged Stein to cooperate with Roach. ‘It’s all rubbish,’ commented Roach about Stein’s previous negotiations. ‘I’ll do it better.’ Although Stein might have expected some respect because he also represented two other stars – Paul Gascoigne and Alan Shearer – he was cowed by Roach.
Shortly after, Scholar telephoned Stein. Marseille, he said, had made ‘a good offer’ for Waddle. ‘It’s a lot of money and I won’t stand in his way,’ added Scholar encouragingly. The only obstacle, said Scholar, was the club’s reluctance to deal with Roach, who was coincidentally on holiday. Stein began negotiating and was on the verge of concluding the deal when Roach returned. ‘What the fuck are you doing with my client?’ he shouted, and arranged for Waddle to travel with him to Marseille.
At midnight on 13 July 1989, Waddle telephoned Stein from Marseille. ‘I’ve got a contract in front of me. Shall I sign?’ After reviewing the contract faxed to his home, Stein agreed that Roach had done well. The transfer would produce a record £4.25 million. Roach also provided help to avoid taxation. ‘You’ve got a good signing-on fee,’ Roach told Waddle. ‘Let me invest it for you through Toranco, my company in Monaco. Don’t worry. I’ll look after it for you.’ Stein made supplementary arrangements to avoid tax by suggesting that the footballer spend seven days in Jersey, a tax haven.
Waddle began playing for Marseille but became a victim of the club’s perilous finances. To resolve the problem, Stein and Roach travelled to Marseille, but Roach soon departed for Bordeaux. In his absence, Stein negotiated with Alain La Roche, the club’s manager. During their conversation, Roach telephoned and over the loudspeaker was heard saying to La Roche, ‘The lawyer does not know about the 2 million francs. That’s between you and me.’ ‘What’s the 2 million francs?’ Stein asked Waddle. ‘I don’t know,’ replied the footballer. ‘Do yourself a favour,’ said Stein, who possessed a tape recording of Roach’s request. After hearing the tape, Roach agreed to return the money to Waddle from Monaco.
Roach felt no embarrassment. Those dealing with the agent were attracted to his tenacity rather than his ethics. Mel Stein himself was being questioned by the French police on a separate issue. Integrity was often compromised to secure the transfer of a player and earn the commission. Roach’s scrupulousness was as irrelevant as the morals of the owners of many football clubs. By 1988, Roach had become a valuable ally to many executives in leading clubs, who called upon his expertise to facilitate their dealings. Ron Atkinson, just fired from Manchester United, was grateful that Roach asked Richard Tessel in California to arrange a month’s job ‘with the local American football association’ for a $50,000 fee plus expenses. Despite the FA’s prohibition scavenging traders were welcomed by the chairmen of England’s football clubs. Like Roach, even Maurice Watkins, a director of Manchester United, ignored the rules.
In 1988, Roach was paid £25,000 by Manchester United for negotiating the transfer of Mark Hughes, a Welsh forward, from Barcelona for £1.8 million. The payment broke the FA’s rules. After Roach’s participation emerged, Watkins insisted that Roach’s fee was for ‘promotional work’ and not for the transfer. Reluctantly, Graham Kelly, the FA’s chief executive, agreed to investigate the payment. Watkins emphatically denied the allegation. Kelly relented and closed the investigation. ‘C’est la vie,’ the timid official sighed. ‘It was impossible for me to refute Watkins’s denial,’ he subsequently explained. ‘I was keen to enforce rules but no one was keen to stop agents getting commission although it was a breach of the rules. There was no point in taking it further.’ With hindsight, Kelly admitted his error. ‘At the time,’ he conceded, ‘I didn’t see the sums of money escalating to suggest corruption.’ Kelly’s explanation was self-delusory; football was already tainted by increasing sums of money which the FA preferred to ignore. Kelly was universally acknowledged to be powerless to enforce rules if football’s scions, the participants in the deception, did not protest about the skulduggery and preferred to operate beyond the FA’s control. In Roach’s opinion the solution was to legitimize agents as acknowledged parties to the players’ contracts. Until then, he could take advantage of an ‘open market’ lacking any regulations. ‘It’s a very complicated business, this,’ he admitted, ‘and quite honestly you tended to get your commission from where you could.’
In early 1991, Scholar asked Roach, at the request of the club’s board of directors, to find a buyer for Paul Gascoigne who ranked among Britain’s most valuable footballers. Commercially it was wiser, Scholar decided, to use Roach rather than personally offering the player. Direct approaches by Scholar to other chairmen would give the impression of desperation, undermining Gascoigne’s value. In contrast, Roach guaranteed discretion and deniability. Scholar’s agreement with Roach for Gascoigne’s sale stipulated that the agent would receive £10,000 in advance, £55,000 once
the sale had been completed and 1 per cent of any transfer fee. That commission was in addition to the £64,400 he would receive during that year from the club. Mel Stein, Gascoigne’s agent, would also expect a fee of £400,000 for his services.
In Roach’s version, he received a tip from Italy that Lazio were interested in Gascoigne and he told Scholar. Roach denied expecting any additional payment from Lazio, but some evidence suggested that Roach also expected to receive payment from the Italian club, which was a breach of every rule. But Lazio would not be behaving unethically to pay Roach – and he denied payment from both sides.
After a series of telephone calls Roach secured a bid of £6.7 million from the lawyers representing Lazio, who also agreed that Roach’s own success fee, paid by Lazio, would be £37,500. Despite the huge fees, Roach’s attitude towards Gascoigne was ungenerous. In a conversation, he told Richard Tessel laughingly, ‘When he plays at Wembley, as you put your clothes up on the peg, he craps in your socks. That’s the mentality of the boy. He’s pig ignorant.’ The true story was that, as a joke, Gascoigne’s team-mates at Tottenham had cut the toes off his socks. In revenge Gascoigne had defecated into their socks in the changing room. That behaviour was hardly likely to endear Gascoigne to Roach, whose principal concern was, ‘How much will I make on the deal?’ Controlling a player’s destiny was the source of his profit. In May 1991, on the eve of the deal’s completion and the receipt of considerable income, a disaster struck. At the FA Cup Final, Gascoigne was seriously injured. The transfer was postponed, plunging Scholar into a financial crisis compelling his sale of Tottenham and, in turn, exposing a crippling sickness within English football.
Despite Gascoigne’s injury, Lazio continued the negotiations. On 20 June 1991, their representatives in London sent a letter directly to Tottenham offering £5.5 million for the injured midfielder. The following day, Tottenham was sold by Scholar to Sugar and Venables. On arriving at his first board meeting Sugar was unaware of Lazio’s latest offer. Venables would assert similar ignorance. Since Venables boasted of his prowess at negotiating and was a friend of Dennis Roach, his neighbour, his innocence was questionable.
