by Tom Bower
In public, Sir John Smith’s report was welcomed by the FA. David Davies spoke about his ‘optimism that Smith will be implemented’, noting Smith’s demand for an independent regulator. He solemnly reasserted the FA’s determination to root out corruption in the game. Within the FA’s headquarters, however, the report drew mirth. ‘I can’t remember Smith’s report,’ said Graham Kelly two years later. ‘His report followed my compliance report into the wastepaper basket.’ Keith Wiseman, as chairman of the FA’s executive committee, understood how to satisfy the major clubs’ requirement ‘not to rock the boat’. Consistent with his former veto on compliance on behalf of the Premier League, Wiseman also rejected Smith’s recommendations. The message from football’s managers was similarly unambiguous. Sir John Smith’s conclusion that footballers bet against their own team and that some West Ham players were guilty prompted Harry Redknapp, West Ham’s coach and a famous gambler, to rage, ‘What a load of cobblers . . . A joke.’
David Mellor and others of the Football Task Force were indignant about the ridicule and were wary about the lack of comment from Downing Street. Alastair Campbell, some feared, had lost his interest in reforming football’s management. Mellor could no longer conceal his irritation about football’s uncontrolled greed. The clubs’ directors, Mellor cursed, deliberately uttered confusing messages in public. Sentimentally, they spoke of old values to protect football’s traditions but behaved as modern business tycoons promoting superstars. On either count they were reckless consumers of money. ‘We need some heavyweight political backing for significant change in the game,’ Mellor argued, adopting the activists’ language. ‘Football needs to be reminded of its civic duties as our national game. It doesn’t exist in its own little vacuum; it has relied heavily on the public purse.’ The response to his blast was unsatisfactory: the FA uttered insincere platitudes, but the Premier League, fearing interference, openly voiced disenchantment with Mellor and others attached to the Task Force.
Peter Leaver, the Premier League’s chief executive, understood football from his association with Tottenham. The combative lawyer, representing twenty chairmen, had been restrained during the first months of 1998 despite being irked by David Mellor’s apparent lack of preparation before meetings of the Task Force and his habit of mouthing ‘populist rubbish’. Recognizing the political direction coming from Downing Street, Leaver modified his irritation in public. Agreed reports by the Task Force about preventing racism and promoting access for the disabled were unobjectionable and published by May 1998 without complaint. Leaver’s acquiescence vanished as Mellor commissioned the next reports about the community’s control over the sport and the appointment of an independent regulator. Encouraged aggressively by Mike Lee, a consultant employed by the League, Leaver opposed any proposal which could hinder the Premier League’s interests and denied the organization was a ‘rip-off’. Those who blamed Peter Leaver for ‘disruptiveness’ failed to understand the influence of Mike Lee.
There was an irony to Mike Lee’s robust championing of the capitalists in the Premier League. In his twenties Lee had been left wing, agitating for Marxism. Later, he joined the Labour party and was employed by Westminster Strategy, a public relations consultancy which also employed Jo Moore, who subsequently became infamous as Stephen Byers’s publicist, advising civil servants to ‘bury bad news’ on 11 September, after the attack on New York’s World Trade Center. Lee offered political insight to the apolitical football executives who did not appreciate the ‘new environment’. Hearing the opinions and prejudices of those in the FA, Premier League and Football League, Lee believed that the reformers were proposing ‘unrealistic and unworkable ideas’ to interfere with independent businesses. In Lee’s recollection, he was ‘creative and honest’, trying to balance his personal preference for modernizing football against the resistance of the club chairmen. Others remember a different attitude. In the Premier League, Peter Leaver recalls Lee urging resistance to any notion of the community asserting control over football. Lee even opposed Adam Brown conducting any research; the results, Lee explained, would only support Brown’s prejudices. Football’s supporters and their representatives, Lee told Denis Campbell of the Observer with unconcealed antagonism, were ‘professional malcontents’ and the Premier League would defy its critics. Lee’s recollection of the dispute is different. Regardless of conflicting memories, the battle lines were drawn between the Premier League clubs and the reformers.
‘They’re out to block everything,’ Graham Bean, at that time the representative of the Football Supporters Association, told Adam Brown. ‘Lee’s just arrogant,’ agreed Brown. Unexpectedly, Tom Pendry had switched allegiances and announced that the Football Trust would not provide secretarial facilities for the Task Force. Mellor ‘regretted’ that Pendry had allowed himself to be used. Others cursed the man who had ‘curried favour by handing out Cup Final tickets’. The counter-attack was similarly robust. Labour supporters channelled their spleen about Mellor to Downing Street, complaining of ‘shifting allegiances’.
James Purnell, the adviser to Tony Blair about football, was puzzled. ‘What does Mellor want?’ Purnell asked his friends. Originally, Mellor had been courting everyone but recently, fearful of the fans’ criticism that he was in the pocket of the Premier League, Purnell sensed that Mellor was no longer pro-government. He was beginning to make the process ‘difficult’.
Among Mellor’s targets was Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association, a trade unionist representing, in Mellor’s opinion, 3,500 men able to kick but not think. Taylor’s lifestyle, funded by a salary in excess of £400,000, was, Mellor complained, ‘outrageous’. The story that Taylor had flown in a private jet on holiday and had spent £2 million on behalf of the Association for a Lowry painting – a painting which Lord Harris, the Tory peer, ‘laughingly rejected at £800,000’ – aroused Mellor’s spleen: ‘Taylor thinks he’s God because he’s got so much money sloshing about.’
The pretext for Mellor’s row in May 1998 with Taylor was the Task Force’s third report about football and the community. For Alastair Campbell and the Labour government, re-engaging football with the community had been paramount. The chasm between the highly paid football players and their poor fans needed to be repaired to re-establish football clubs as the working man’s sport, a cornerstone of their communities. Mellor began agitating against the FA for pledging to ‘take account of community feeling’ but doing nothing; and against the footballers for not devoting sufficient time to meeting their impoverished hero-worshippers, despite solemn promises. The players, Mellor wrote in the London Evening Standard on 12 June 1998, were idle, irresponsible and overpaid. Although contractually obliged to carry out three hours of community work each week, they were shirking their obligations. In reply, Gordon Taylor quoted statistics to prove the contrary. Those statistics were damned by Mellor as ‘decidedly dodgy evidence’ concealing the stark truth that there were just ‘0.20 visits per player per year’. Taylor had misrepresented the number of players involved in community work, alleged Mellor. Taylor responded by demanding Mellor’s resignation as chairman of the Task Force. ‘He’s pompous,’ sniped Mellor.
The public spat exploded the semblance of unity in the Task Force. Mellor became the focus for football’s disdain of interference. Taylor and others wrote to Tony Blair demanding the politician’s dismissal, arguing that he had used the position as ‘an extension of his populist rabble-rousing media career’. His removal, Taylor added, would be ‘warmly endorsed at all levels of a game which has become heartily sick of his vacuous posturing’. Mellor’s many enemies joined the chorus. At stake was the ultimate prize: the appointment of an independent regulator. Leading the attack against the reformers was Mike Lee, goading Peter Leaver to be combative, and receiving support from Tom Pendry. Resentful towards Tony Banks and angered by the minister’s friendship with Mellor, Pendry announced that the Football Trust would no longer support the Task Force. Th
e protagonists were inflamed.
Early on the morning of 21 July 1998, Leaver struck. Just before a Task Force meeting in Euston, Leaver searched out Mellor in the chairman’s office and asked him to resign. ‘Your journalism,’ Lever complained, ‘proves your bias.’ Angered, Mellor’s response was robust: ‘I was never appointed to be independent, but because of my experience and sympathy with football’s grass roots.’ The conflict between the men shocked Richard Faulkner: ‘Leaver’s general attitude seems to me to be destructive.’ Adam Brown agreed: ‘He’s plain rude.’ Leaver returned the criticism: ‘The best advice I received from Lee was to stand up against Faulkner. He’s the ultimate nose-in-the-trough man, milking his position and pushing a populist line to get a peerage.’ Eventually, Leaver would regret becoming so publicly exposed, but that was only after his own abrupt dismissal by the Premier League.
‘Let’s call Peter Leaver’s bluff,’ suggested Adam Brown on 22 July 1998. ‘It’s cards on the table time . . . We cannot proceed with endless wrecking tactics.’ Professor Roland Smith, the chairman of Manchester United, agreed: ‘Leaver is trying to sink the whole ship.’ The battle was taken to Downing Street. Recalling the earlier enthusiasm, the government needed to be persuaded, urged Adam Brown, that there was ‘significant political capital to be made out of tackling greed and social exclusion’. Tony Banks brokered a peace. That Tuesday evening, the minister persuaded Leaver to withdraw his objections to the Task Force and to help redraft the third report, ‘Investing in the Community’, published on 23 July 1998. ‘It all went very well,’ sighed Mellor, content that all sides appeared to agree to the appointment of an independent regulator. To the reformers it appeared that a milestone had been passed in resolving the ultimate issue: how much money the Premier League would donate to the football community.
In late October 1998, Andy Burnham, the devoted administrator of the Football Task Force, was summoned to the Football Trust’s headquarters in Euston to explain the final draft of ‘Investing in the Community’. Graham Kelly, Peter Leaver, Nic Coward and David Sheepshanks were waiting for the 28-year-old New Labour activist and Everton supporter. Their mood was ugly. In the manner of a Star Chamber, they had agreed their tactics to ambush and destroy the young football enthusiast. Two hours later, eyewitnesses noticed Burnham emerge, crushed and tearful. The yob culture prevalent on the terraces had been carried into the committee room. ‘It was a bad-tempered time and a sour atmosphere,’ complained Burnham to an eyewitness. His modest challenge to the FA to expunge selfishness from the football establishment had been torn into shreds. He vowed revenge.
The argument was about money. Burnham’s commitment was to ‘change the world’ of football. His draft, echoing a firmly socialistic sentiment, suggested a strategy to ‘put the game in order’ by controlling football’s commercialization. ‘English football,’ Burnham had written, ‘depends on the redistribution of income. It has been a feature of the game since it began.’ Over the previous six years, the Football Trust had given £88.5 million to thirty-one major English clubs in the Premier League. In the same period, the Premier League had earned £1.1 billion (£1.05 billion from television) and, Burnham complained, invested none of that huge revenue back into the grass roots to support the poorer clubs or schoolboys deprived of facilities. The Premier League, he had recommended, should accept a 10 per cent levy on its income for the benefit of all the 43,000 clubs affiliated to the FA.
Reaching that recommendation had been fraught. Mike Lee, representing the Premier League, had aggressively questioned the levy. Lee fumed about everything, not least Burnham’s piety: ‘English football depends on the redistribution of income.’ Lee damned those thoughts as ‘socialistic’, an irony considering his Marxist pedigree. Negotiating with Lee, Burnham discovered, was akin to trading with a second-hand car salesman. Agreements which were assumed to be ‘finalized’ were suddenly subject to renegotiation. The two men were barely speaking. In Mike Lee’s opinion, ‘the arguments were part of the process. I was being constructive if difficult, but I’m not combative.’ James Purnell in Downing Street had sought to mediate an agreement but had failed. David Mellor had never underestimated the ‘forces of football’s establishment’. Stubborn self-interest would resist any change. ‘Like you,’ Mellor wrote to Adam Brown, the academic, ‘I was dismayed by their reaction to the report and, as we approach the critical issue of regulation, football politics will intrude more and more.’ The Premier League’s lobbyists were seeking to undermine the government’s policy.
Peter Leaver, David Sheepshanks and Graham Kelly protested to Chris Smith that the Task Force’s new remit was unauthorized. Their damnation appeared to be conclusive. In a telephone call to Burnham by Colin Jones, a civil servant at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Burnham was told, ‘Your negative proposals are disgraceful.’ The Task Force’s draft, Jones warned, would not be submitted to the appropriate Downing Street committee. Only a bland report would be submitted. Rapidly, Jones was outmanoeuvred by Tony Banks, keeping the faith against the Premier League. To the distress of the Premier League’s executives, Burnham’s report was cleared for publication with a recommendation that the 10 per cent levy, to be imposed on the League’s income from television, should be distributed to football’s grass roots. Reluctantly, the Premier League accepted the principle of a levy, without agreeing 10 per cent, but in return for a price.
In August 1998, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) had launched an action in the High Court, accusing the Premier League of acting as a cartel against the public interest. Unexpectedly, nearly all of football’s antagonistic groups united with the government to oppose the OFT. All feared that the destruction of the Premier League would prevent collective bargaining, would undermine the FA’s authority, and would weaken the sport. David Mellor, after a ‘pitched battle within the Task Force to get common ground’, offered to testify in the Premier League’s favour. In return, he expected the Premier League to agree to the 10 per cent levy on its income. A minority of the activist reformers criticized the unholy alliance for endorsing the Premier League and Sky as ‘good for football’ and, three weeks after the OFT launched its case, they believed their opposition was proven.
On 7 September 1998, Sky TV announced a £624 million takeover bid for Manchester United. Those committed to resisting the commercialization of football were incensed by Rupert Murdoch’s threat. His bid threatened to subordinate the Premier League to Sky’s interests, widening the gap with the rest of football. If successful, Sky would be sitting on both sides of the negotiating table, eroding fair competition and the FA’s governance of the sport. The projected finances confirmed their suspicions; Murdoch expected to earn just £25 million a year on the investment. That uncommercial profit portrayed the bid as a strategic ploy to turn the Premier League into a subsidiary of his television station. Football’s traditionalists feared that Tony Blair, who before the election had flown to Australia with Alastair Campbell to obtain Murdoch’s endorsement, would abandon the Task Force’s principles.
On 21 September 1998, to challenge the government Adam Brown suggested that the Task Force should issue a statement officially opposing the takeover. The divisions among the members became wider. ‘You’re trying to hijack the Task Force,’ charged Mike Lee in a telephone call. ‘Leaver’s also been ranting on the phone,’ Brown reported to Andy Burnham. The Premier League again lobbied Colin Jones at the DCMS. ‘There’ll be no statements,’ Jones warned Brown.
In west London, on 11 January 1999, at the Wormwood Scrubs playing fields the festering disagreements manifested themselves. Ministers, politicians, football groups and members of the Task Force gathered as a publicity stunt to launch the ‘Investing in the Community’ report. The most notable absentee was Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers Association. Taylor knew that football players disliked community work and would support his snub to David Mellor, an implacable enemy. Graham Kelly was secretly pleased by Taylor’s publicized def
iance. ‘I would have been antagonistic towards any view supported by Mellor,’ said Kelly. Personalities threatened to overwhelm all the well-intentioned policies, while the existing regulators turned a blind eye to the sport’s notorious suspects.
6
EL TEL: PART II
In November 1998, a fraud squad attached to Hampshire police announced a four-month investigation into Terry Venables’s purchase of five Australian players during his management and ownership of Portsmouth Football Club between 1996 and 1997. The police had been summoned by Martin Gregory and Peter Hinkinson, the club’s abandoned shareholders. The complainants were uncertain whether Venables had bought the five players to improve the club’s performance or for another reason. Subsequently, Venables was completely exonerated.
Venables had arrived at Fratton Park in August 1996 after hastily resigning as England’s coach to fight a libel case launched by Alan Sugar. Eddie Ashby, under investigation by the police for managing Tottenham while disqualified as a bankrupt, still continued as Venables’s intimate adviser. ‘At Portsmouth,’ Ashby recalled, ‘I was Terry’s sweeper. All the people were coming to me and telling me his deals. Because Terry was away, I ran it from the inside.’ From his office, Ashby watched his employer being driven away in a black Rolls Royce, registration number 1 VEN, by Soki, a glamorous Serbian woman. The appointment at Portsmouth was a honeymoon for Venables and Ashby.
