Harry's Games (20 page)

With his high public profile and perfectly respectable track record at West Ham – falling out with the chairman is generally treated as an occupational hazard and rarely warrants a black mark on a manager's CV – there was a general expectation that Redknapp's next job would be with another Premiership team. Instead, he slipped down a division to Portsmouth. There were good reasons for this: he hadn't been flooded with other offers; he wasn't so ambitious about climbing the football management career ladder that he was prepared to hold out until the perfect job came along; and Fratton Park was a very easy commute along the south coast from Poole.

Any of these might have been enough in themselves, but there was one more factor which was the clincher. When Redknapp had been playing for the Seattle Sounders in the 1970s, one of the men with whom he had become friends was Milan Mandaric, the Serbian billionaire who had made his fortune in personal computers after arriving in the US with next to nothing, and then took over the San Jose Earthquakes football team. After leaving the US, Mandaric had moved back to Europe, buying football clubs first in Belgium and then in France, before settling in Britain and buying Portsmouth in 1999, at a time when the club was drowning in debt and had gone into administration. After first saving the club from going bust and then helping to save
it from relegation, Mandaric had become the town's local hero. And he was about to become Redknapp's as well, by offering his old friend a job as director of football.

In an interview for Les Roopanarine's biography of Redknapp, Mandaric says that Redknapp's response to being offered the job was, ‘By the way . . . can you tell me what the director of football job is?' This was almost certainly a classic piece of Redknapp disingenuity, because he had every reason to know exactly what a director of football was, having seen – or been party to, depending on whose version you believe – Billy Bonds' exit from West Ham some seven years earlier having been offered just that job. For men like Bonds and Redknapp, director of football was the ultimate non-job. There was no getting grubby with the players out on the training pitch, selecting the team or doing any of the fun, hands-on stuff they both enjoyed; the director of football was just another suit, a board member detached from the action whose main responsibility was identifying potential players to buy from other clubs.

Redknapp had always accepted jobs that had been put his way by friends, but why did he accept one that he must have known he wasn't going to enjoy that much? The money must have helped; it came out in the 2012 court case that Redknapp had originally agreed a salary of £1.75 million, a breathtakingly high salary for a job of that description in the First Division (now Championship) at the time. But even so, it didn't make a lot of sense. Mandaric may have been extremely rich but he wasn't a man to chuck money away on salaries unnecessarily, and Redknapp wasn't so desperate he had to accept the first job he was offered.

It makes rather more sense if you allow for the possibility that, right from the off, Redknapp was being lined up as a replacement for Graham Rix, Portsmouth's then manager. Not that there was ever a formal agreement along those lines, more a mutual understanding – a nod and a wink. Mandaric was fundamentally a
decent man and he didn't want to get rid of Rix just like that, but his patience must have been running thin. He had invested millions into the club and had got precious little in return except league finishes of eighteenth and twentieth. Rix was a manager who inspired neither the team nor the fans. So a hedge bet on Redknapp must have seemed a good idea.

‘Harry is somebody who knows a lot of players and has a lot of character,' said Mandaric. ‘I needed that at Portsmouth, because nothing was going in the right direction. That particular year was a breaking point for me. I didn't have room for a manager at that time, but when I found Harry was available I called him immediately. I didn't really know what he was going to do, I just yanked him in to be somebody I could lean on, if nothing more.' Hmm. Perhaps.

On taking up his new job, Redknapp made all the right noises about not wanting to be a threat to the manager. ‘It's not easy for Graham and I to understand his situation,' he said in a newspaper interview. ‘When someone tells you there will be a director of football coming in, who will suddenly be responsible for buying and selling players, you suddenly think, “Hang on, what's going on?” But I had a meeting with Graham the other night and the one thing he knows is that I don't want his job. I don't want to be the manager.'

How reassured Rix would have been by this is anyone's guess. Under the circumstances, Redknapp could hardly have said anything else. ‘Well, you know how it is, lads. The chairman's not too happy with the way the manager is performing at the moment . . .' Even Redknapp wouldn't have gone that far.

If there had been an implicit understanding that the manager's job was on offer if Rix didn't shape up, then Redknapp would have been the man to read the signals. He had inherited David Webb's job at Bournemouth within a year and Billy Bonds' at West Ham within two, so he knew the form. Or at least the
possibilities. And it's equally hard to imagine Redknapp accepting the job of director of football at Portsmouth without having some kind of conversation with Mandaric along the lines of, ‘I don't much fancy being stuck in a fucking office all day, Milan. It's just not my style . . .'

Maybe there were no prior deals – implied or otherwise – as Mandaric and Redknapp have since insisted, but within nine months of joining the club as director of football, he had his feet under Rix's desk. And no one was surprised or upset by his appointment, as Redknapp had become a firm favourite with everyone in the town. It felt like a home from home for him, a piece of the East End transposed to the south coast, a working-class, one-club town.

‘He immediately seemed to “get” the club in a way other managers never had,' says Julian Guyer, a Portsmouth season ticket holder and sports writer for Agence France-Presse. ‘He could remember when it had been a footballing force. I had started going to matches in the late seventies and, by then, Portsmouth was a fairly rubbish second or third division club and fans of my generation felt we had missed the boat . . . that we were condemned to listen to the old boys in the pub talking about the glory days and that my grandparents' 1939 FA Cup Final programme was as close as we would ever get to a trophy. Redknapp filled that longing within the fans for the sleeping giant to awaken. None of us thought he was cut out to be a director of football. It was a job description that smacked of European sophistication – something neither Portsmouth nor Redknapp possessed. So we all thought he'd either leave quite quickly or become manager.'

This assessment proved to have been spot on. Redknapp did admit to getting bored. ‘I miss picking the team and all the aggro that goes with it,' he said. ‘The life I've got now is easier with no aggro or pressure but perhaps I thrive on them. It can get boring. If something comes along, then who knows?'

Something did come along. Leicester City sacked Peter Taylor and offered Redknapp a return to management in the Premiership. A more ambitious manager – one with an eye on the England job – would surely have accepted it, but Redknapp turned it down, reluctant to abandon either Mandaric or the south coast. He was also publicly still backing Rix – after a fashion. ‘If Graham left and Milan asked me to be manager then I would take it,' Redknapp said. ‘I would be the obvious choice. But I want Graham to stay.'

Mandaric was even more equivocal in his support for his manager. ‘Graham stays on the advice of Harry,' he said. ‘It would have been the easiest thing in the world to pull the trigger.' If Rix hadn't been paranoid before that, he should have been afterwards.

Redknapp may have been bored as director of football, but he wasn't idle and he did know how to play the fans. David Ginola was never likely to be tempted down to Portsmouth even though he was nearing the end of his career, but that didn't stop Redknapp from publicly linking the French player with Portsmouth. Much as the West Ham supporters had done so before them, the Pompey fans enjoyed the attention of being talked about and being associated with international stars. It made the club look ambitious and feel bigger than it was.

To many observers, Redknapp's habit of publicly expressing an interest in dozens of players who may or may not be available is a form of ‘Transfer Tourettes'. And there is an element of compulsion about it; for Redknapp, professional football is a transfer merry-go-round where most players are available at a price, and he can't help himself from thinking out loud. It's like taking a kid to a sweet shop. But there is also something quite canny about this approach, too. Providing he didn't make himself look stupid by linking several of the world's best players with Portsmouth, Redknapp could create a ‘no smoke without fire' buzz about the club, so in people's minds it became one to which others gave a
second thought. Rather than using a small fish to catch a big one, he was using a big one to catch a slightly less smaller one than he otherwise might. It worked. Portsmouth didn't get Ginola, but Redknapp did buy Alessandro Zamperini (from Roma), Svetoslav Todorov and Robert Prosinecki from Standard Liège – all three players who might have been expected to think twice about such a move.

Redknapp also bought the six-foot-seven Peter Crouch from Queens Park Rangers in a club record £1.25 million move that would later attract the attention of the Inland Revenue after Crouch was sold to Aston Villa for £5 million within a year and would be pivotal to the prosecution case at his and Mandaric's trial at Southwark Crown Court in 2012. The legal aspects of this case were all examined at length in court, but the wider implications of the Crouch transfer for Redknapp's and Mandaric's business relationship escaped scrutiny and they suggest intriguing possibilities.

Mandaric was an unusually hands-on chairman, one who travelled to every away game with Redknapp and who could laugh at himself for his initial assessment of Crouch as being more of a basketball player than a footballer. The relationship between Redknapp and Mandaric went far beyond the normal chairman–manager pleasantries, developing into a proper friendship. And yet Mandaric still changed the terms of Redknapp's contract when he switched jobs from director of football to manager.

At the trial, it was revealed that Redknapp's wage deal was increased from £1.775 million to £3.025 million, while his bonus for selling on players was reduced from ten per cent to five per cent – and it was this five per cent reduction the prosecution alleged Mandaric was trying to make good in the payments made to Redknapp's Rosie47 Monaco bank account. Mandaric's defence counsel quite reasonably pointed out that Redknapp was being rewarded well enough as it was – a near hundred per cent
pay rise had been more than generous – so why would the chairman have felt obliged to give his manager any more than was legally required?

What wasn't explored in any depth was why the contractual arrangements had been changed. And there could be only one explanation. The Crouch deal had alerted Mandaric to a possible conflict between Redknapp acting in his own interests and those of the club, and he wanted to recalibrate the deal to make sure Redknapp would be encouraged to do the latter. Nothing else makes sense. If the original deal had been satisfactory, there would have been no need to change it. Mandaric could easily have got away with paying a slightly smaller salary and retaining the ten per cent sell-on bonus. No matter what anyone else might have said, the message from Mandaric to Redknapp in the new contract was that, while he liked him and considered him to be a good manager, he also wanted to keep him on a rather tighter rein. Just in case. And if Redknapp wasn't aware that's what Mandaric was saying, then he ought to have been. It also sheds some light on the bust-up between the two men that was to happen two years later and that might otherwise seem to have come from out of the blue.

Having managed to steer Portsmouth away from relegation during the last couple of months of the 2001/02 season, Redknapp typically set about making such wholesale changes to the squad that only Nigel Quashie made the starting eleven for the last game of the season and the first of the next. In came – among others – the Australian Hayden Foxe, the Dutchman Arjan De Zeeuw, the French-Cameroonian Vincent Pericard, the goalkeeper Shaka Hislop and the former Arsenal midfielder Paul Merson.

‘Harry did get a bit lucky,' says Pete Johnson. ‘ONdigital, the ITV digital TV service, had finally been wound up in May 2002 and was unable to fulfil its £315 million deal to broadcast
First Division matches. This left a huge hole in many clubs' cash flow, making them temporarily unable to compete in the transfer market. With Mandaric's money behind him, Harry had no such problems and was able to get some players a great deal cheaper than he otherwise might.

‘Having said that, Harry still had a wonderfully good eye for players that other managers had either overlooked or thought were past their sell-by date. He could get the best out of a strange collection of different temperaments. For all the big names he brought in at the start of the 2002/03 season, it was the little-known Matt Taylor he picked up for £600,000 from Luton who was the pick of the bunch. He was a decent enough player in the Premiership, but in the First Division he was outstanding. Matt often seemed to be the player who was holding the team together and making things happen in his first season.'

Redknapp's Portsmouth got off to a flying start in his first full season in charge and, after he had strengthened the squad in the January transfer window by buying the Nigerian striker Yakubu, and the Spurs midfielder Tim Sherwood, the team went on to win the First Division title and win promotion to the top level of English football after fifteen years of trying. ‘Arthur Hopcraft put it beautifully in
The Football Man
,' says Julian Guyer, ‘when he wrote that a football crowd never has to be told when their team is playing well – they know. And at Pompey, we did know. We achieved success by playing attacking football, rather than packing the defence and booting a hopeful long ball up to the strikers. Friends of my dad said it was the best football they had seen the side play since the fifties.'