Our stand out columnist Darren Young is back for the first installment of his a weekly look at all things football and this week it is the noisy football club owner under the microscope…..
I’m A Friend First, A Boss Second. Probably An Entertainer Third.
Remember – those old enough to – in the late seventies and the eighties when Liverpool were ripping it up in their heyday with League championships, European and League Cups all over the place?
Remember the people in charge of them at the time, always on the telly and in the news? You don’t remember? No?
Me neither.
Because it didn’t happen. I couldn’t even tell you who it was who owned the club or who the Chairman or Chief Executive was at the time. Why? Because they weren’t that bothered about you knowing and as a punter, I couldn’t care f*****g less. You barely knew in those days who owned or ran the football club you supported, never mind those of any other clubs.
The end of the 1980s heralded a time when this began to change. Michael Knighton – no, Knighton; the other one was Batman – came along in 1989 with a highly theatrical, well-publicised, memorable and ultimately, ill-fated takeover of Manchester United.
He paid a then-record £20m – bargain! – for a 50.06% stake and promised a further £10m (in today’s money; Paul Pogba’s annual hairdressing bill) for team strengthening. Moreover, he arrived on the pitch by helicopter – in full kit – and did a number of keepy-ups before an astonished Stretford End. Unfortunately, the takeover – only requiring audit approval – fell through when his backers dropped out and he couldn’t keepy-up the façade and took a seat on the board instead of full control.
Later he purchased Carlisle United with the aim of restoring former glories and talked to aliens, but that’s not the point; he had started a new trend. The visible and high-profile football club owner. Things would never be the same again.
Although to be fair, it wasn’t really the start of it. I’m afraid to admit that it might have been my club, Walsall, that started that particular ball rolling a couple of years earlier when billionaire Terry Ramsden – a long-haired stockbroker from Enfield who likes a bet (his words) although as he gambled away £58m in three years he might have also enjoyed an understatement – brought the club in a similar glitzy helicopter-arriving fashion, but ended up not too long later, with huge debts, no home and in prison (much like he left the club; except the prison bit).
Why is any of this relevant? Other than I need a subject for this column – Walsall have started the season well so are off limits – and on Friday, I read the story Gus Poyet’s week-long suspension from Bordeaux in France because he ‘thought he was the boss’.
Turns out he was just the manager. Or head coach as it was France.
The real boss, club president Stephane Martin, said that the manager/coach had criticised the club for selling a player from under his nose during the transfer window and that Poyet had got delusions of grandeur (my words).
It’s that not-so-new trend in football where the people running the club are as well- known as the people picking/coaching the team, if not more. And it’s not social media that has driven this, before anyone says it has; these people want to be known, seen and heard in a way that whoever was in charge of Liverpool in the late seventies and eighties didn’t.
Be it those in charge of West Ham United, for whom buying the club seems to really be buying a licence to never shut up, or the high-profile top dogs at Leeds, Accrington Stanley, Peterborough and Swansea; to name but a few, they are always in the news.
I hear Simon Jordan on the radio a lot – he’s incredibly well spoken and intellectual par se (his words too often) – but it feels like he’s on there all the time and he always struck me as one of the breed of owners (Crystal Palace at the time, in his case) who needed an outlet for their voice, and TalkSport can provide that.
Now it’s commonplace at clubs for owners to be well-known and in the public eye. We’d think them a bit odd if they kept themselves to themselves and let the team do the talking. They’d say they’ve earned the right to a voice, of course, and that’s a valid and powerful counter argument. They’ve shovelled – in many cases – millions into the cause and sometimes propped the club up, so why shouldn’t they get their point across?
But is it good for the club?
It’s old fashioned now to hark back to the way that Surralex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger stayed at the helm so long with almost complete control of what went on at their clubs. But can you imagine if whoever owned the club said, ‘they thought they were the boss’ and suspended them for a week? Or even just said it without the suspension?
A manager – be he Head Coach or manager – needs to be seen as the person making the key decisions about players. The fans too, need to see someone take responsibility and communicate with them as a key stakeholder.
An owner that constantly battles for air-time and the microphone is muddying the waters, surely. Why not take a back seat and say, ‘we appointed this manager, so we back him to do our talking on and off the field’?
If they don’t then they have the wrong man anyway.
The minute they begin to confuse matters by telling fans and the public that the manager got it wrong by thinking he was the boss, they confuse fans who thought they were the one looking after the club’s best interests.
I’m not advocating a not seen and not heard approach like we had thirty to forty years ago but I also respectfully suggest that owners don’t make their manager’s already impossible job even harder.
Of course, it doesn’t always work like it should.
Another rather high-profile owner, ‘Deadly’ Doug Ellis once said to then-Villa manager, ‘Big’ Ron Atkinson (they had to have obligatory nicknames in those days) that he was right behind him.
‘Big’ Ron said he’d prefer him in front….’where he could keep an eye on him’
And Michael Knighton sacked Carlisle’s popular manager and took control of the team himself in 1997/8 and it did not go well. They were relegated in his full season and only narrowly avoided relegation from the Football League altogether when goalkeeper Jimmy Glass scored a last-minute winner in the final game of the season.
Maybe Michael Keaton might have been a better bet as it turned out. If he’d been given the opportunity, he might not have made such a hasty decision as he did. You see,
he gave up the much-coveted role of Batman in the mid-nineties because he thought the too-comedic way the franchise was heading ‘sucked’.
Compared to the way Carlisle was being run at the time it would have probably seemed too dark.
NEXT WEEK: Do club shops need to stock all sizes of replica kit? (Not really!)