Be Careful What You Wish For (31 page)

With this in mind I gave Iain Dowie unwavering support in order to take us back to the Premier League at the first opportunity.

During the previous season I became very friendly with the actor Nick Moran, he of
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
fame. We met over drinks at the Grosvenor in Easter 2005 and by June he had me funding and producing the West End stage version of a major award-nominated play he had written named
Telstar
. This involvement led me to my next relationship, with Meg Mathews, who was a guest at the opening party of the play and someone of whom I became extremely fond.

During the summer it was the fortieth birthday of my best friend Mark Ryan, the MD of Phones4u. His wife to be and I organised a week’s partying in my house in Spain to celebrate this landmark occasion and the impending arrival of their first child and my goddaughter, Grace.

It consisted of a fabulous week of about twenty people staying at my house and twenty others in local hotels. I hired a film crew to film a documentary-style diary of the week as we ate in restaurants, went to nightclubs, raced cars on a day up in the mountains
of
Ronda, sailed my boat around the Med, had a fireworks display in my garden and generally had a bloody good time. Mark had all his family there and Meg joined us on a wonderful week which culminated in a dinner party held at the swish Mansion House club, which was part owned by my friends the Dalli Brothers, where we drank and ate our way through £25,000 worth of food and wine.

With a summer of distractions behind me I returned to the business of football.

In liaison with the Dowie brothers we had some decisions to make and some enforced on us. But the end result was further investment from me.

Over the summer certain players had gone by the very nature of the deals we signed them under, or by their lack of desire to play outside the Premier League. Joonas Kolkka left on a free transfer, Vassilis Lakis returned to AEK Athens, Nicola Ventola returned to Inter Milan and Gonzalo Sorondo took the charming step of signing for Charlton, of all people.

Talking of the Italian giants Inter Milan, they were scheduled to play in a prestigious pre-season friendly. But in July 2005 terrorist bombs went off in London, killing innocent people and causing widespread panic amongst the nation. Milan immediately cancelled their trip, which was totally unacceptable as far as I was concerned. Letting terrorists win on whatever level was condoning their barbaric behaviour.

So I had a rant on television and in the papers calling them cowards and asserting that like the Italian tank operators in the Second World War all they knew was reverse gear. The media picked it up with glee and the politicians got involved, with Tessa Jowell, the Minister of Sport at the time, and Mayor Ken Livingstone
roundly
condemning Milan’s action. The end result? Internazionale came and won 2–0 in a damp squib of a poorly attended encounter, managed by a certain Roberto Mancini who now plies his trade at mega-rich Manchester City.

Coming to the business end of the pre-season, in terms of the squad I gave Dowie huge support and bought a variety of players to confirm that I was going to give the club more than a fighting chance to use his now famous bouncebackability phrase to full effect.

I spent £5.1 million, a significant sum, on new players. I signed centre back Darren Ward from Millwall for £1.25 million, Jobi McAnuff from Cardiff for £750,000 and Jon Macken from Manchester City for £1.1 million. Clinton Morrison came back from Birmingham for £2 million, and Marco Reich from Derby. Added to this was a raft of players who were still paid Premier League wages despite relegation. But my
pièce de résistance
was yet to come with mounting speculation that Andrew Johnson had played his last game for Palace.

Wayne Routledge’s departure to Tottenham Hotspur, although not entirely unexpected, was a huge disappointment to me. His mother’s timing in informing me he was leaving after we had been relegated from the Premier League was impeccable and now she made good on that threat or more to the point his God-awful agent, Paul Stretford, did. We had compensation rights, as the young England star was under twenty-four. But rather than go to the banana republic of a flawed tribunal system, we negotiated the best deal we could and settled for £1.25 million from Daniel ‘Dick Turpin’ Levy, the Spurs chairman.

Watching a young man of immense potential and part of my prized youth system disappear to Spurs did not sit comfortably with me.

I made one last attempt to talk him out of it. ‘You can be a
really
proper player, Wayne, stay here and learn your trade and then you will get all the things that good players deserve.

‘But if you lack confidence and believe you will never be a top player, go to Spurs, take the money and sit in their reserves.’

He went under the great guidance of his agent, who as far as I was concerned would receive a damn sight more money by engineering a move rather than a contract renewal, even though this might not necessarily be in the best interests of the player.

Routledge played the princely total of five games for Spurs before being shipped out to any Premier League or Championship club that could afford his new wages and altogether played fifty-three times in four and a half years. What a waste of talent. He will carve out a respectable career, but I believe he could have amounted to so much more.

The dust had barely settled when almost instantaneously I became embroiled in war with another agent who tried to manipulate a situation to his own advantage.

Andrew Johnson, our talismanic England striker and the highest English goal scorer in our Premier League season, was told by his agent he had been given the mandate by Palace to sell him and that he wouldn’t play for England again in World Cup year if he stayed at the club.

The agent concerned was the divisive Leon Angel who I had previous issues with over the termination of Trevor Francis’s contract in 2003. I decided this time to more than remove him from the equation; the tonic required for this particular ailment was total discredit.

Angel had the audacity to call a meeting with my management team of Dowie & Dowie. This was arranged behind my back, as if Angel thought he could go to my training ground to do a deal without my knowledge.

So I made it my business to turn up at this meeting, sitting in my training-ground lounge as Angel turned up with Andrew Johnson. It’s fair to say he was not overly thrilled to find me waiting for him. From the first word that left my mouth he was left in no doubt of my views on the situation.

He was told he did not and would never have a mandate to sell any of my players, let alone my star player. Angel tried to get up on his high horse so as to look better in Johnson’s eyes but I pulled no punches. I told him that in my view he was a disgrace of an agent whose only interest in the player was money. I pointed out that he had been AJ’s agent for six months, and in that time he had done the square root of nothing for the player. Not even a boot deal, as Bob Dowie had secured that. On and on I went while Angel – who in my vivid imagination reminded me of Davros, the creator of the Daleks in
Doctor Who
– sat in silence and eventually slunk off the training ground.

This was all done in front of the player and although it made him feel extremely uncomfortable it was necessary so everybody knew where they stood.

After Angel left he went to the press stating that he was acting in the player’s best interest, that Johnson wanted to move and that he had been given an exclusive mandate to sell him.

I used the media to try and exterminate Davros and stop this nonsense of agents acting like flesh traders, popping up whenever they thought they could initiate a move which would get them paid money, irrespective of what was best for the player and the club. I accused him of everything from trespassing to larceny and being the arch-enemy of the Doctor. I even went as far as to say I would rather support Millwall than allow Johnson to leave on my watch, that’s how seriously I viewed it!

Angel threatened to sue me as I made my views on him very
clear
in every medium. I practically pleaded with him in print to sue me and reported him to everyone from FIFA, the FA, football and the Warren Commission. The upshot was I met Andrew on his own, told him he was staying, promptly gave him a new contract with a financial reward for his achievements, which he was well due. This shut up the agent and the rest of the football world, who had said to a man that Andrew Johnson was never going to stay, as he signed a new four-year deal with the club!

We did of course have offers for AJ, notably from Everton, who bid something like £7 million, to which I enquired as to whether their chairman Bill Kenwright was offering to buy one of Andrew Johnson’s trainers. And my old mates at Birmingham popped up with some imaginary offer, announcing to the press that they had made a £6.5 million bid. They must have sent it by a blind carrier pigeon, as I never received it. I’m not sure what the purpose of this announcement was as it made them look stupid. There was no bid and if there had been they would have been buying back a player they gave away for nothing and originally thought wasn’t good enough to play for them.

With this matter now dealt with I had sent out a statement of intent that I was committed to Palace getting straight back up. Everybody invariably sold their best players when they went down and I didn’t. I kept them and added a further five players. We now had a strike force of some £15 million-plus and a squad that was the strongest in the league by a country mile.

On top of the players, Dowie wanted a new assistant, deeming Kit Symons not good enough, despite Kit being in situ when we had got promoted from this division. We shuffled him sideways into coaching and managing the reserves and brought in as assistant manager Neil MacDonald, formerly Sam Allardyce’s number two at Bolton, with the remit to specifically work on our defensive unit!

With all the above in mind I said quite innocently that in my view if this manager and team performed as I knew they could, there was no reason why we could not win the league. This was roundly condemned by certain factions of the football mafia as putting undue pressure on the manager. In my view it was a statement of fact. Why should I not say in a qualified way what I thought, so the fans understood where their club owner stood? And why should Dowie not be under pressure to succeed when he had the tools, for God’s sake.

Suffice it to say he took exception to it! And some of his ‘mates’ in the media conveniently aired their views in the papers on his behalf.

But pretty soon I was to have the pen as I had just been offered a prominent column in the
Observer
and I was going to enjoy correcting certain perspectives. My first column was fittingly entitled: ‘Why agents should be neutered’!

The season started with this expensively assembled squad full of expectation, and with Dowie’s bouncebackability ringing in their ears.

Our first game was at home to newly promoted Luton Town. I hoped that my last words to the players in the away dressing room at Charlton about taking their feeling of dejection out on the opposition was prevalent in their minds. But we duly lost to a team widely tipped for relegation!

We followed that up with another defeat to a Wolves side that had been in the doldrums for some time. So after two games we were bottom of the league and there wasn’t a whiff of bouncebackability. In fact, it took us till the middle of October, some two and a half months into the season, before troubling the top six and as far as winning the league or getting automatic
promotion
, we never got anywhere near the top two for the whole season.

Finally we recorded our first win of the season at home to Plymouth. After that win and a few further decent performances we looked as if we were building a head of steam when disaster struck. We lost Andrew Johnson in the seventh game of the campaign away to Reading, a knee injury caused by his own bravery challenging a full back trying to clear a ball, which was bloody sod’s law as I fought so damn hard to keep him. We lost him for a third of the season. Somehow football appeared to have cruel twists even when you tried to do the right thing.

By now I was in full flow with my fortnightly
Observer
columns. I had possible subjects provided by the paper but was encouraged to create my own subject matter. I wrote about agents, players, referees, clubs and the joke that is our English FA amongst other subjects. Throughout the seventeen articles I produced the FA was a regular feature as the way they operated and continue to operate is, in my view, a national embarrassment.

The columns were the first time an owner/chairman had lifted the lid on the world of football and shown it for what it really was: a murky world at times, full of self-interest. The column also opened the game up to the people who it belonged to: the fans. I tackled big issues like Sepp Blatter, technology, stadium standing, agents, players, FIFA, UEFA, G14 Clubs, racism, other chairmen and, of course, the FA.

The FA was our governing body; we were the country that gave the world football, yet it was a sham of self-interest, with chief executives appointed who in my view were not capable of the job and more focused on the perks of the title rather than the task at hand. Just look at this gallery of ‘unusual suspects’ charged with running our national game.

Adam Crozier, young and innovative, who left the FA in vast debt and then went off to spend millions rebranding the Post Office to Consignia, only for it to be changed back to the Post Office.

The amorous Mark Palios, who disappeared in the scandal of who was bonking the FA secretary Faria Alam most: the CEO or the England manager.

After heading up ITV Digital, a business that nearly ruined a huge part of English football, Brian Barwick got his reward by getting the FA’s top job and presided over the debacle of the phenomenal escalating costs of building the new Wembley and the embarrassing attempted and ultimate appointment of England managers.