Own goals galore
D. J. Taylor
BROKEN DREAMS: VANITY, GREED AND THE SOURING OF BRITISH FOOTBALL by Tom Bower Simon & Schuster: £17.99, pp. 342, ISBN 074322079X FOOTBALL CONFIDENTIAL: SCAMS, SCANDALS AND SCREW-UPS by David Conn, Chris Green, Richard Meilroy and Kevin Mousley BBC, £6.99, pp. 256, ISBN 0563488581 By chance I picked up Tom Bower's Broken Dreams shortly after putting down a paperback reissue of Selina Hastings' biography of Nancy Mitford. Curiously there was a solitary point of contact. This was the description applied by Lady Redesdale, Nancy's mother, to the collection of preening Oxford aesthetes that her daughter invited to the house for weekends: `What a set!' Invited to meet the 20 chairmen of the Premiership, bidden to dine with the Football Association or inspect the assorted riffraff operating as `agents', Lady Redesdale, you fear, would have expressed her disdain in rather similar terms.
Driven by the need for instant results, and with much of its money coming in the shape of cash receipts, professional football has always incorporated a hulking sleaze factor. There was a famous match-fixing scandal as far back as 1962, involving the England international Peter Swan, and several of the saintlier managerial figures of soccer legend are thought to have trousered brown envelopes in obscure corners of the grandstand. The exponential heave was administered by satellite television. By 1997 Sky's offer for four years' worth of TV rights weighed in at an unheard-of £743 million, Football, previously a game into which quixotically minded businessmen had put money, had become a game from which their rather less quixotically minded successors had determined to take money out.
To any armchair sports fan who affects to believe in the idea of the 'beautiful game' (if such a quaintly exotic figure still exists) Bower's expose and the equally enlightening volume produced by the BBC Radio Five Live team will come as a deeply disillusioning experience. For the rest of us, they confirm not only what we knew and suspected but a whole lot more besides. The charges laid against — to name only the most conspicuous offenders — Ken Bates, chairman of Chelsea, and Terry Venables, the former England manager now miserably employed at Leeds, are so extraordinary that I couldn't quite work out why the pair of them are still allowed to function in the sport, or indeed are still at liberty.
Of Swan Management, for example, the elusive offshore holding supporting Bates's manoeuvring at Stamford Bridge, one senior accountant remarked that he `had never come across, before or since, the phenomenon of a majority shareholder remaining a mystery to the board of any company — never mind one with a public listing'. El Tel's repeated swoops on those clubs unwise enough to employ him as manager, alternatively, are characterised by a pattern of dodgy transfers. No sooner has our man arrived than players no one has heard of are being bought from clubs no one has heard of at prices never formally confirmed between vendor and buyer, and a whopping commission for ... Well, it would be unkind to go on and yet Venables turns out to be a promising amateur when set against the more purposeful Norwegian agent Rune Hauge, who arranged the sale of Alf-Inge Haaland from the Norwegian club Byrne to Nottingham Forest in 1992. Byrne wanted £150,000, and agreed to pay Hauge anything he secured above this figure. Hauge quoted Brian Clough, the Forest manager, a sum of £250,000. Clough told his chairman it was £350,000. Hauge's profit, consequently, was a cool £200,000, £45,000 returned as a cash bung to the Forest head scout via a Hull-bound trawler.
Ah well, no wonder the Prime Minister, having briefly interested himself in a cleanup campaign, beat a hasty retreat. Of the two items here. Bower's is the more doggedly punctilious and also the funnier, by virtue of its nightmare syntax. There is also a faint suspicion that Mr Bower came late to the soccer party. I never knew Vinnie Jones to spell his forename with a and the account of the shadow sports minister, Tom Pendry. watching a game 'in Millwall' betrays a sad ignorance of the fact that the team of that name plays over the river at Lewisham. As for the sport itself, market forces, to which all the sharks on display here habitually defer, caused the mess and are now silently correcting it. With the TV boom over there is no money for agents' commissions, Bates has a £75 million loan to settle four years hence, and Venables. contemplating a much depleted Leeds dressing room, is having to face by far the most desperate challenge of his career — making do with the talent available.
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