The Joy of Six: the ups and downs of football chairmen and owners - 7M sport

The Joy of Six: the ups and downs of football chairmen and owners



Posted Saturday, August 02, 2014 by theguardian.com

From oil-rich oligarchs to poetic patriachs, those at the business end of football are often seen as visionaries … or less so

The Joy of Six: the ups and downs of football chairmen and owners
Carlisle chairman Michael Knighton in 1997

1) Michael Knighton

It is never easy to write a summary of yourself online and emerge unscathed. The profile you see as witty, charming and intellectually stimulating is actually enough to make anyone who reads it take out a restraining order on you and the black and white shot you chose as your main picture is being mocked on a snide tumblr somewhere. Sorry to break it to you. It hurts. But that’s social media. That’s the world we live in.

But there are some people who can pull it off. Take Michael Knighton. "Born in the heart of England – with a made in England stamp running through his centre – Michael Knighton is an entrepreneur, an artist, a poet, a political commentator, and, so some respected writers claim – English football’s ‘greatest visionary’," begins the self-effacing bio on his official website. "Michael Knighton does not make that ‘visionary’ claim for himself. That is a view put forward by those of the more intelligently perceptive and benign observers who have followed his remarkable story from when he first shot to fame with his £30m bid to purchase the Manchester United Football Club a quarter of a century ago."

Moreover Knighton "sees himself more of a poet than an artist" and has proved that by writing over three thousand poems. His "unquenchable thirst for all forms of knowledge" manifests itself in him being "profoundly interested in world issues" but only "particularly interested in philosophy". That is to be expected from someone who has more than "30 thousand books in his vast library". The mind, lest we forget, is the strongest muscle in the body.

And there you were thinking that he was just the bloke who did some keepie-uppies on the Old Trafford pitch in an abortive bid to buy Manchester United back in 1989. However, Knighton’s unquenchable thirst to run a football club was only quenched when he took over at Carlisle United in 1992, making promises that he would lift them from Division Three to the Premier League. It was a bold claim, although not quite as bold as the one that he made about seeing a UFO in 1996. The local paper, Carlisle News and Star, ran the story with the headline "Knighton: Aliens spoke to me" and later ran a front-page apology for publishing it.

They had some success and in 1997 they were promoted to Division Two and won the Football League Trophy. Yet after a poor start to the season, Knighton sacked Mervyn Day and found himself in need of a new manager. So he sat there thinking for a while. Names came and went until, finally, gloriously, deliciously, he was engulfed by a moment of inspiration – he, Michael Knighton, entrepreneur, artist, poet, political commentator, English football’s greatest visionary, would be manager. Eureka! The solution was staring him in the face the whole time! How could he not have seen it? How could he have been so stupid?

Carlisle were relegated.

At least Knighton sacked himself as gaffer after only winning 19 of his 68 games in charge – that must have been an interesting conversation – and appointed Nigel Pearson in December 1998, but Carlisle still needed Jimmy Glass to save them from dropping out of the Football League with the last kick of the season.

The situation quickly unravelled. Knighton resigned from the board late in 1999 and a Leeds court banned him from being a director or being involved in the management of any company for five and a half years in September 2000. However, he still owned 93% of the club, which he wanted to sell, and a supporters’ trust was soon established in opposition to him. Eventually, after Carlisle were put into administration in 2002, he sold up to John Courtenay, an Irish businessman.

Football’s loss was to be poetry’s gain.

2) Sam Longson

Brian Clough rarely saw eye-to-eye with his bosses. "Football hooligans," he said. "Well, there are 92 club chairmen for a start." He might have been thinking of Sam Longson, with whom he clashed on several occasions during his time at Derby County. When Clough arrived at Derby in 1967, they had been marooned in Division Two for a while but he got them promoted in no time and won the First Division in 1972.

Yet his relationship with Longson was always strained. Longson was said to have disliked the way that Clough attracted attention with his newspaper columns and his television appearances, the way he courted controversy with his abrasiveness, his apparent lack of respect. There were regular clashes and it seemed that the Baseball Ground was not big enough to hold their two egos.

The problem for Longson was that Clough was a genius. It might have felt like good riddance when he resigned in 1973, especially when Derby won the league under Dave Mackay in 1975. But we have the benefit of hindsight.

3) Roman Abramovich

The Joy of Six: the ups and downs of football chairmen and owners
Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea

Unless you support Chelsea, there is a strong chance you think Roman Abramovich is the worst thing ever to happen to English football, even more so than music after goals, Sloop John B and those bloody foreigners coming over here and waving imaginary yellow cards at our referees.

That might be pushing it a tad but you would have a point, for while Chelsea had been established as challengers for a few years before his arrival, Abramovich’s stunning takeover in 2003 ushered in a period of success that would not have been possible without his cash. For many, the Russian distorted the competition and the argument that those who opposed him made was that Chelsea had essentially used a Championship Manager cheat, awarding themselves unprecedented and undeserved funds and buying up trophies and players. "Abramovich has parked his tanks on our lawn and he’s firing £50 notes at us," said Arsenal’s chief executive, David Dein, alarmed by a level of spending that was both unprecedented and unforeseen as the Russian introduced himself to the Premier League.

Their sudden riches were made more offensive by the accusation from fans of other clubs that Chelsea "ain’t got no history", that they were just a rich man’s toy, insults intended to rationalise their success, strip it of meaning and make it less moral. It is, of course, untrue that Chelsea have no history, but beggars can’t be choosers when they are trying to clamber onto the moral high ground. The best thing Chelsea supporters could do in response was enjoy it, laugh and cry jealousy. So they did.

Has Abramovich been good for English football? If you like money, and there are plenty of people within football who inject the stuff into their veins, then the answer is yes. For everyone else, the answer is no, that his presence, and that of others like him, reduces the romantic spirit that makes people fall in love with football in the first place. Matthew Syed went as far as to call him a corrosive influence on the game from a moral point of view, the man from the Times questioning his wealth and saying that he bought Chelsea for political reasons. It was a compelling argument.

Equally, from Chelsea’s point of view, he has been an excellent owner, bringing league titles, cups and the Champions League trophy to Stamford Bridge, and when Didier Drogba put away that penalty in Munich, no Chelsea supporter took a moment out of the celebrations in order to agonise over whether their joy was justifiable on moral grounds. Football will do that to a person.

4) Ratko Buturovic

Eccentricity is not uncommon among football owners but they are not supposed to look like this. Just look at him. A curious cross between Larry David and Ali G, FK Vojvodina’s owner between 2006 and 2013 was a true one-off, a real-life cartoon character with a backstory every bit as unfathomable and colourful as his wardrobe. Anyway, the story goes that Buturovic worked as a mechanical engineer for a short while before leaving the former Yugoslavia to try his hand at being a bodyguard in Vienna in the early 1980s. Here he learned a few life lessons from Serbian gangsters, among whom, reportedly, was Jordje Bozovic Giske, a fierce paramilitary who died in the Yugoslav wars in 1991.

Upon returning to Yugoslavia in the mid-80s, Buturovic made his millions selling expensive Italian clothing – an odd career move for a qualified engineer and former bodyguard and one which invited his detractors to accuse him of ties to the Serbian mafia. His empire expanded and took him to Paris, apparently, where he assumed the nickname Bata Kan Kan after a local nightclub he enjoyed frequenting. Around this time, when he was travelling on business trips across Europe and the war was raging back at home, he decided to change his name from Buturovic to Butorovic, a minor alteration, but one which he figured would bring him greater respect when he stayed in grand western hotels. He also set up a chain of shops called Kan, supposedly bought a stake in the Greek basketball team PAOK Salonika and at some point survived two assassination attempts on his life. This brush with death gave him something in common with the rapper 50 Cent, whom Butorovic later befriended and who, he claimed, introduced him to his fetching shellsuits, extravagant backwards-facing caps and bling. Still following? Good. Finally he returned to Serbia and Montenegro to buy a chain of hotels and invest in various sports clubs, one of which was FK Vojvodina.

In 2006 the club were in the middle of a five-year slump that almost culminated in their relegation from the top flight. His investment saved them. They finished third in his first full season as president, and broke the Partizan-Red Star hegemony for the first time in many years in 2009 when they finished runners-up. Whether the success was by fair means or not is still a matter of debate in Serbia. Butorovic was arrested the year before on suspicion of match-fixing but later released after the prosecution failed to prove the case. In the five years that followed Vojvodina were twice beaten in domestic cup finals and enjoyed a rare run out in Europe. Butorovic continued to mystify stuffy boardrooms with his dazzling attire until June 2013, when he was found dead in a hotel room. Perhaps to his dismay his end was rather less interesting than the life that preceded it. The cause was natural, according to the autopsy. The 59-year-old’s heart had simply stopped beating.

5) Francis Lee

"This will be the happiest club in the land. The players will be
the best paid and we’ll drink plenty of champagne,             
      celebrate and sing until we’re hoarse."                                      

Things were going to be great under Francis Lee. Weren’t they? A barrel-chested former legend whose midas touch was such that he even made millions selling toilet paper. Here was a chairman who, it seemed, really cared about the club. Having ousted Peter Swales, universally loathed by Manchester City fans, Maine Road greeted Lee with a banner that read: "Saint Francis: the Second Coming." The optimism that bubbled up in the Kippax would soon turn to despair. City’s long-suffering fans would have to suffer a good deal more before the "champagne" days arrived two decades later. Brian Horton, Alan Ball, Asa Hartford, Steve Coppell and Phil Neal would all pass through City’s revolving door as Lee furiously scrambled around on deck trying to offload the water that was threatening to submerge the club. He couldn’t. "We spent too much money on a new stand and infrastructure when we should have spent it on players," admitted Lee. "And our managers weren’t very good, although I’ve got to take responsibility for appointing them."

The Joy of Six: the ups and downs of football chairmen and owners
Francis Lee welcoming another manager to City … Joe Royle in 1998

In the Premier League’s early days, with branding considered vital as clubs jostled to look their best on Sky TV, it wasn’t uncommon for boardrooms to neglect the actual business of focusing on the football. As the Guardian’s David Conn wrote in When Saturday Comes in 2008: "Having cheered Franny in as a fan, I went to interview him as a journalist. I had expected to find him pure in his support, obsessed with restoring Swales-free City to where the fans believed they should be. I found him and his associates planning to take advantage of the Premier League era by floating City on the Stock Exchange and making money for themselves. That utterly jarred with my idea of the football club and what, and who, it was for."

With Lee’s mind elsewhere and having narrowly escaped relegation in 1994-95, City fell into the second tier in full-on shambolic-style the very next season with the manager Ball telling his players to shield the ball to avoid relegation in the final game of the season when they in fact needed to score to stay up. Here’s Steve Lomas: "Alan Ball, God rest his soul, told us a draw was enough to keep us up. If it wasn’t so serious there was great comic value in seeing big Niall [Quinn] running half-dressed down the touchline to say a draw wasn’t enough … it was just crazy. I was taking the ball into the corner flag to kill time." Oh City.

Did Lee panic? Well, not immediately. He stuck with his good friend as manager for the start of the following season in the second tier. But after three matches the friendship was no more. And neither was Ball. He was gone after an argument over transfer policy. Lee hit full-on press-all-the-buttons panic mode. Between 26 August and 28 December 1996, Hartford, Coppell and Neal all had a crack at the job and all failed. Not one lasted for more than 10 games. Coppell appeared broken by his 28 days in charge. Chaos became a byword for the goings-on in City’s boardroom. They suffered 15 defeats in their first 25 matches in the second tier, a season that was supposed to see them bounce back into the top flight.

When Lee did find a man who he felt comfortable with, Frank Clark, whose Father Stone demeanour appeared a sure bet to steady the ship, he got it spectacularly wrong. Despite guiding City to safety in 1996-97, the former Nottingham Forest manager somehow convinced Lee to part with a club-record fee of £3.75m for the Portsmouth striker Lee Bradbury. "I asked our manager, Frank Clark, if he was sure because it was a lot of money. 'Yes, this lad could be the next Alan Shearer'. I saw his debut in pre-season at Burnley and he never looked to get into the six-yard box … I went home afterwards and my wife, Gill, said 'What is it, you look fed up?' I said 'This new striker, I don’t fancy him, honestly'."  Lee’s judgment here was sound. Bradbury scored just 10 goals in 40 City games and ended his career as a right-back.

City dropped into the third tier the next season. In the previous season’s AGM Lee had claimed that he would "jump off the Kippax" if this happened. Perhaps he was being metaphorical. He resigned as chairman just before the final whistle blew on City’s lowest moment, handing the sorry mess over to David Bernstein. Sometimes legends should just stay away.

6) Bob Lord

The Burnley butcher was perhaps the first chairman to become prominent in the national media for being outspoken. His blunt style of delivery was everything you would expect from a self-made businessman from working-class roots, but the content of what he said could be hugely offensive, often appearing completely oblivious to the hurt he caused. He first caught the attention when he called Manchester United’s players a bunch of "Teddy Boys" after Burnley beat them 3-0 in 1958 just weeks after the Munich air disaster. As Rob Bagchi wrote in the Guardian in 2009, instead of apologising he pretended he had been wronged, "embarking on an orgy of hair-splitting before blaming a journalist 'trespasser' for having the temerity to record his rebuke." It was a tactic he would employ on numerous occasions.

The Joy of Six: the ups and downs of football chairmen and owners
Bob Lord, centre, arrives to watch Burnley in the 1965 FA Cup third round at Brentford

Lord had a problem with the media full-stop. While many other chairmen were happily preparing to welcome the Match of the Day cameras into their stadiums in 1964, Lord was preparing for war, arguing that TV footage would "damage and undermine attendances". What’s worse is that his reasoning had a darker side, telling a Variety Club dinner: "We have to stand up against a move to get soccer on the cheap by the Jews who run television." When Leeds’ Jewish chairman, Manny Cussins, said he would walk out of the Elland Road boardroom if his Burnley counterpart turned up, Lord played the victim again, claiming he was offended by such a slight and ordering his board to stay away from the game. He banned the cameras from Turf Moor and fined any player who spoke to journalists without his permission. The press called him the 'Khrushchev of Burnley'.

But Lord still rose to prominence in football. He was admitted to the Football League Committee in 1967 only a few years after the Committee itself had decided to ignore his constant complaints. "It was decided unanimously that the Committee could not tolerate the irresponsible comments of Mr Lord," read the minutes from a meeting. Maybe they figured it was better to work with him than against him. Lord continued as Burnley’s chairman up until his death in 1981, aged 73. But even as a 71-year-old he was still looking for trouble, falling out with Fulham’s owner Ernie Clay mid-match and having him escorted out of Turf Moor.



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