Be Careful What You Wish For (9 page)

But all this did not detract from the fact that right from the start of his ownership Mark was in serious financial trouble.

He had arrived in a blaze of publicity, appointing the former England coach Terry Venables as a marquee manager following relegation from the Premier League. He talked about signing Paul Gascoigne and Ronaldo, invested heavily in the playing side and support structure and overpaid for players. His plans were unsustainable in the division they were in and the club was haemorrhaging money.

Mark wanted investment and wasted little time before instructing one of his sales staff, Phil Alexander, to invite me to a corporate club event held at the Selsdon Park Hotel in November 1998. It wasn’t my thing but I decided I would attend out of sheer curiosity.

The whole evening was a non-event. I knew I was only being buttered up for money and lo and behold found myself sitting next to Terry Venables.

I had mixed feelings about Venables. On one hand, there was the childhood memories of him as the young, energetic and flamboyant Palace manager of the eighties; on the other there was the apparently disinterested person I had seen standing in the dugout in some of the games I watched early into Mark’s ownership.

Unfortunately, for me, Venables wasn’t particularly good
company
. He only laughed at his own jokes, which frankly I didn’t find funny in the slightest. He really was no comedian, although I dare say a fair few supporters of certain clubs around the country may disagree with me on that.

In late 1998 Mark’s financial problems were reaching a critical level, so I suggested I might consider putting some money into Palace. PPS was at full tilt at the time and, as I’ve said before, cash flow is king, so most of the money was going back into my expanding company, but – in a way that is typical of me – I thought I would agree a deal with him and work out how to fund it afterwards. But, aside from the financial leg-up, an incident in January 1999 convinced me Mark needed some real support.

Palace had bought Lee Bradbury for £1 million and Mark was attempting to unload him for as much as he could get. Ironically he was attempting to do a deal with Trevor Francis at Birmingham City, someone I was later to employ at Palace. I was in his office when Mark took a call from Paul Walsh, the ex-Liverpool and England footballer, who was Lee Bradbury’s agent.

Walsh was on speakerphone and the way he spoke to Mark stunned me. He was yelling at him about how the player wouldn’t do this and wouldn’t do that and that was how things were going to happen. ‘If he doesn’t like it then he can fuck off.’

Once the call was over, I felt compelled to comment to Mark about the way Walsh had spoken to the chairman and owner of a football club. He just shrugged resignedly; he was prepared to listen to that shit in order to get things done.

I saw it differently. Surely the player was Mark’s asset to sell and Walsh was most likely to be working and being paid by him so where did he come off talking to him like that?

On reflection, Mark’s conversation with Walsh probably influenced
the
regard I held agents in and determined how I was to handle a large proportion of my negotiations with them in the future.

Very shortly after that incident, Goldberg rang and asked if I was prepared to invest £250,000 in CPFC, which would give me a certain amount of equity and say.

I mulled this over and told him that in exchange for a seat on the board, I would. As I said earlier, like drug addiction, football has a habit of pulling you in like that.

Mark arranged to come over to my head office and brought his team of sycophants and lickspittles with him. We negotiated a deal and I wrote him out a cheque for £250,000, with the condition that it was secured against something. One of his cronies piped up with some comment about Mark being good for the money.

I just ignored him. I wasn’t prepared to sink £250,000 into Palace without insisting on some form of security. I asked Mark what he could offer and he suggested a charge on his home Holroyd House, a stately manor in its own grounds in the leafy well-to-do suburb of Keston.

I agreed, provided that there were no other charges on that property. I left the funds and an order to set up a charge with my lawyers because I was flying off on holiday to Miami Beach with my girlfriend for a well-earned holiday.

A few days later, whilst I was sunning myself and preparing for what was to be my biggest year at PPS, my lawyers called with a problem: it transpired that everybody from the dustman to Venables had a charge on Goldberg’s stately pile.

After discovering these charges I realised just how desperate he must have been and in later years I had a better understanding of his desperation. But at the time I took a dim view of it.

As far as I was concerned Goldberg had lied to me. I had a personal rule that I always believed everything anyone told me until
they
lied and then I never believed another word they said again.

Goldberg phoned me up some time later and apologised profusely, and reluctantly I agreed to meet him. He was full of his nonchalant confidence. Brimming with half-baked ideas, he was going to get a huge Chinese marketing and advertising deal as one of the Palace players was the national team captain. As often was the case with Goldberg, he detached himself from the reality of the problem and operated in a cloud above it.

In my view he was a dead man walking. ‘Mark, you are living in cuckoo-land,’ I told him. ‘Your problems are on the ground here, now, and your head is up in the clouds, with dreams that are not realistic.’

I pushed him hard on the true financial position. Crystal Palace’s financial situation was all over the papers and I deduced he had wanted that £250,000 from me to help pay the players’ wages for that month. Goldberg took a moment and then said the club was on its knees; both he and it were staring into the abyss. My God, this was after only nine months of his ownership. I advised Goldberg that he would need to seriously consider insolvency and administration advice. Whilst writing this book, it’s occurred to me that in the last months of my ownership, as I was pouring money into the club and desperately trying to prevent it from going into administration, I really needed someone to lay it on the line as I had with Goldberg. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have welcomed it. But Mark had something that towards the end of my tenure at Palace I lacked: necessary, if harsh, advice.

Back to 1999. Some months earlier I had met David Buchler, who was a board director at Tottenham and one of the leading insolvency guys in the country. He had a history of dealing with football club administrations. I told Goldberg that he should go and see Buchler and see what, if any, options he had.

Goldberg went along to this meeting still in a jaunty state of mind, illustrating that the gravity of his circumstances hadn’t fully registered for him. After listening to Goldberg explain the situation, it didn’t take long for Buchler to tell him that his only choice was administration. Goldberg was determined that whatever happened he was going to come out the other side still chairman of Crystal Palace. Buchler had to put him straight: unless he was going to buy CPFC back and fund administration himself it was unlikely he would retain any kind of control.

Finally the reality of Goldberg’s situation hit home. But instead of heeding my advice to keep quiet, he went off, talking to fans at prearranged public meetings and got himself unfairly vilified. Goldberg’s only real crime was the naivety that led to the destruction of his own personal wealth in less than a year.

The next thing I heard Palace had gone under and Simon Paterson of Moore Stephens was appointed as the administrator. Perhaps the reason why Goldberg didn’t engage Buchler as administrator was because he didn’t like his advice, but I also suspect Buchler was just too expensive for him.

Aside from reading the occasional snippet in the media, that was the last time I was to really pay attention to the plight of Crystal Palace for the best part of a year. My focus was on the small matter of running and selling PPS.

In the middle of 1999 I met the well-known DJ David ‘Kid’ Jensen through 121’s MD John Barton. David’s son, Viktor, was a racing driver and was looking for some corporate sponsorship. Given 121 had just done the marketing deal with me at PPS, John Barton gave me a strong indication he would like me to talk to the Jensens so I agreed to provide some sponsorship money for him. I also knew that he was a huge Palace fan. During our
discussions
Palace inevitably came up and I told David that I had tried in vain to help Goldberg.

Nearly twelve months had passed and the sale of PPS was in full flow when David Jensen contacted me again to see if I would renew his son’s sponsorship deal, and of course we talked about Palace. At that time Crystal Palace had been in administration for fourteen months and had sold a large number of their players and laid off a lot of staff to fund the administration. The club really was in desperate straits.

They had a potential buyer in the mysterious Jerry Lim, a Malaysian businessman who had been negotiating for some time with the administrators to secure exclusivity and do due diligence, but was not coming up with the money, despite promising via the media time and again to do so. From my outsider’s perspective, I got the impression he was not the real deal!

Given that now I was on the cusp of selling PPS and rather than having the ever-present issues of cash flow I was about to have a significant amount of money, I had decided I would look very closely at the possibility of buying CPFC as my replacement for the business I was about to sell and told David Jensen just that.

He was very surprised and I think somewhat sceptical; I insisted that I was deadly serious. In return for my benevolent sponsorship of young Viktor, I asked David for his public support when I made a move to buy the club. Until that time, I wanted him to keep this conversation between us. A slightly bemused David Jensen left my office with his cheque for the sponsorship and a secret.

Towards the end of April, while I was settling on final offers for PPS, I made a formal approach to Crystal Palace’s administrators with a view to making a bid for the club. I used Andersen’s again, and their guy Charles Simpson approached them, representing my interest on a no-name basis.

Surprisingly, Simon Paterson rebuffed the approach, saying they were near to a deal and exclusivity with Lim, and didn’t want to ruin it. This struck me as commercially stupid, as two factions expressing interest in buying the club was a godsend.

The bloody-mindedness of the administrators’ response strengthened my resolve. When I am told ‘no’ for no good reason, it’s like igniting a blue touch paper. I make it my mission to turn that ‘no’ into a ‘yes’. I stepped up the interest, insisting via Andersen’s they disclose the purchase price and what was required to put forward a legitimate bid.

As Andersen’s were at that time one of the biggest accountancy firms in the world, just the fact that the new bidder was being represented by them should have carried significant weight. But for some reason Paterson was not interested, insisting that he had a deal with this Lim.

This struck me as odd behaviour from an administrator whose sole purpose in life was to sell the club for the best price and to ensure the creditors got as much of the money they were owed as possible. If nothing else, having two bids was an ideal way to achieve this. Lim was hanging around like a bad smell, continuing to play the media, but he didn’t seem to be able to back up his bid with cold hard cash. And all the time the club was sinking further and further into the mire.

I decided to do two things.

First I contacted David Jensen to put me in touch with the Supporters’ Trust. The Crystal Palace fans had galvanised around their ailing club and formed a trust to see if they could help in any way. Their head guy Paul Newman came to see me in my office in Slough. He was well informed and also concerned about the future of Palace. He also had genuine reservations about Lim and informed me that the trust had collected somewhere in the region
of
£1 million, which they were holding to see if it could be of help.

We discussed our various experiences of Palace and he quickly understood I was a genuine fan with means. Not that it was a glowing endorsement as Goldberg had peddled the same story before he crashed and burned at Palace.

I explained to Newman the strange stance Simon Paterson was taking by stonewalling me. Newman knew Lim and suggested he would contact him and put us in touch, to see at my suggestion if there was something we could do between us. And the thought of getting Lim to step aside was starting to germinate in my mind.

In return for facilitating a meeting Paul Newman wanted, if I did buy Palace, a seat on the board for a trust member. Everybody had an agenda! I didn’t want to commit to this as it seemed to me that fans can be too passionate about their club to be able to make unblinkered decisions, with respect with your money! However, I never ruled it in or out but I did categorically say that in the event I did indeed buy the club, I wouldn’t be taking any of the Supporters’ Trust money. The focus was to ensure this club got bought and did not die.

Next I instructed Andersen’s to make sure Paterson understood that he was putting the club in grave jeopardy by not engaging with us and relying on this Jerry Lim character to come through.

Eventually Moore Stephens relented under pressure from Andersen’s, saying they wanted a name and proof of funds to the tune of £10 million. That wouldn’t be a problem once PPS was sold but technically I couldn’t provide that, so I went to Lloyd’s and leant on my bank manager, Nigel Gibson, who had been working with me on PPS for the last two and a bit years. It was testament to the strength of my relationship with the bank and the
regard
that I was held in that Nigel gave the Palace administrators a letter saying I was good for £10 million and more.

Andersen’s now gave my name to the administrators under strict confidentiality.

Despite getting what he asked for, Paterson still refused us access to the books, claiming there was insufficient time to do due diligence and complete the purchase by the date the Football League had stipulated for Palace to come out of administration. This was utter crap: the Lim deal was not done, and there was nothing to lose by giving me access. I knew the timelines and if I felt that we could do enough due diligence in that time to convince me to buy the club then it was my money that was going to be at risk.