Be Careful What You Wish For (26 page)

I had developed superstitions and couldn’t help it. Before every game John my driver had to play Elton John’s ‘Are you ready for love’ as that bloody song had been played on this winning streak.

The game ebbed and flowed. There were nigh on 80,000 fans and the magnitude of the occasion and what it meant to every single person there couldn’t be overestimated.

I remained outwardly unfazed in my held-together-by-dry-cleaning Ozwald Boateng suit and my ever-present sunglasses.

Both sides had good chances to open the scoring but at half-time in the world’s richest game the score was 0–0 with all to play for.

The second half flew by, until the sixty-second minute when we scored and went 1–0 up.

Bedlam broke out in the directors’ box in our section. All my executives and I were up, punching the air.

As the moment calmed I looked across at my counterparts at West Ham in their section and I thought that if I were in their shoes, I would be saying to myself, ‘Knock yourselves out celebrating, you fuckers, there is still thirty minutes to go.’

So I made sure that I cut the celebration as short as possible. In this as in every game, I kicked every ball, disputed every refereeing decision that didn’t go our way, and did it at full volume.

Time exploded and space contracted. The clock crawled as we entered the last ten minutes of the game.

Paphitis leaned across and told me with ten minutes to go that it was worth £5 million a minute. After what seemed an hour there were five minutes to go and he leaned across and said, ‘That’s worth £10 million a minute.’

And every long minute that ticked past he did the arithmetic.

I looked at my dear friend with two minutes to go and said: ‘Yes, mate, I fucking well know it’s worth £25 million a minute.’

Then injury time finally came and went, the referee signalled the end of the game, and Crystal Palace owned by Simon Jordan – yes, the club I owned – had won and were now headed for the Premier League, the biggest, richest league in the world of football, taking our place amongst the elite where in my mind we already belonged.

I was remarkably calm, feeling the four years of battles with everyone and everything had taken their toll. Not talking to the media for six months, my strained relationship with Dowie, the
insults
from the two buffoons and the newspaper article on the Friday before the game had added to my mood of disenfranchisement. I never enjoyed that moment the way I should have.

As I sat there, Theo told me to get down onto the pitch and celebrate and applaud the fans. I didn’t want to but he made me see sense. So I went downstairs to the dressing room area to go out through the tunnel and onto the pitch.

As I went to walk out, Nick Craig, the in-house legal eagle for the Football League, stopped me.

‘Sorry, Simon, you can’t go out there until the trophy has been presented.’

‘For crying out loud, Nick, this is the moment I have waited for.’

‘Sorry, Simon, it’s Football League rules.’

I turned to flounce off, but then a thought dawned on me and I turned back to Nick Craig and said, ‘Football League rules, OK then, that’s fine. But I am not in the Football League any more. I am in the Premier League so get out of the way.’

I walked past him out onto the pitch to 35,000 screaming Palace fans.

There are moments in life you are lucky to be part of. Yes, this was the achievement of Iain Dowie and his coaching staff and the players, but it was because of me they were here to achieve it.

Standing in the centre circle, my phone going into meltdown, I spoke to Ian Wright, who was screaming down the phone, ‘You did it, Sim!’

I walked around the stadium waving, taking in the euphoria and elation of the crowd, an amazing outpouring of optimism and good feeling.

So this was what owning a football club was all about!

I walked down the tunnel with Dominic after being on the pitch for about twenty-five minutes.

I remember a Sky camera following me and I just looked at it and gave it a shit-eating grin. That grin was for all the people who had been against me.

Sky wanted to do an interview but I ignored them, preferring to kick a ball in the warm-up area with my brother.

We sat around for an hour or so in the hospitality lounge and Nick Craig came in to remark, ‘Here is one Football League rule you won’t mind.’

As we were now a Premier League club, I had to resign from the Football League.

After an hour or so I walked out of the Millennium Stadium with my mates and looked at the empty street. No one had the number of the driver to pick us up so we decided to walk across the road to a local pub. It was heaving inside with Palace fans, and as I walked in the roof came off.

It was the best fifteen minutes I could have spent with the people who make a football club, the fans. Once the driver arrived we made our way back to the Vale of Glamorgan for a big knees-up.

As the celebrations broke out, Debbie, Iain Dowie’s wife, had only this to say to me: ‘That’s going to cost you.’

Charming and unnecessary. She was, of course, referring to the new contract her husband would invariably be demanding and I suspect was a throwback to the non-negotiable contract I gave Dowie six months previously.

When the party was in full swing Phil Alexander suggested I say a few words and as I went to take the microphone Dowie grabbed it and gave a speech. I didn’t think it was his place to do it, but I let him, only to be further disappointed when he made references to myself as ‘not being so bad all in all’ and generally was a little unnecessarily sarcastic about our relationship.

The next day we flew back in the helicopter. As we passed over
London
and Stamford Bridge Theo Paphitis pointed it out and I gave it a cursory glance, remarking, ‘Yeah, I will see it next season,’ which was greeted with a flurry of abuse from Paphitis. Also at that time Theo announced that he believed that Palace would be in the Premier League for three seasons: autumn, winter and spring – very funny!

I read the papers, which were adorned by Palace’s achievement on the back pages and numerous pictures of me.
The Times
even had a headline: ‘Golden Boy Does It Again’. It wasn’t the way I would ever describe myself.

Arriving back in town I felt very melancholic. Paul Smith, a friend of mine, was a journalist and the chief football writer for the
Sunday Mirror
. He had come to know me well over the years and he wanted to do a big article on me. He knew I was disillusioned with football and although I was pleased with the achievement I was not ecstatic.

I did the interview and then left all my friends on the Sunday afternoon at the Grosvenor House Hotel celebrating and getting extremely drunk.

The piece was published saying that, having achieved my dream of getting Palace to the Premier League, I had spent much more than I had anticipated, had had more confrontations than I expected, and hadn’t overly enjoyed the ride. There was a feeling of everything going on around me when really it was going on
because
of me. And that sense was only going to escalate as the big league beckoned. Maybe it was time for me to sell up.

Shortly afterwards Iain Dowie phoned and there ensued a conversation that was probably one of the strangest between an owner and a manager who had just worked the oracle, won the richest game in football and got promoted to the Premier League. Probably, with hindsight, I should have kept my views to myself.

He was off on holiday to Dubai and had unilaterally decided that there would be no open-top bus to mark our achievement. But wasn’t that my call?

Prior to speaking to Dowie, I had thought about the last six months and what he had achieved, and it had been a phenomenal achievement. But it had taken place against a backdrop of constant belligerence and arguments between us. He was difficult enough to deal with in the First Division, God knows what he was going to be like in the rarefied world of the Premier League. His wife’s rude and unnecessary comment about his contract no doubt reflected his attitude, and his somewhat snide speech at the post-match celebrations reverberated around my mind. I briefly contemplated firing Dowie. It would have been an unprecedented move to remove the manager of a team promoted to the Premier League before even playing a game; it was a step too far, even for me.

Add in the troubles I had with the media, the two buffoons at the sporting dinner, the disruptive newspaper article on the eve of the play-off final – all this made me feel unhappy at a time when I should have been full of pride and happiness. I couldn’t help but think that it was such a shame. And with this mind-set I answered the phone to Dowie.

I told him what was on my mind, omitting the firing bit, and said that I didn’t enjoy working with him.

This stopped him in his tracks for a moment. To be fair on him he said, ‘Simon, that can’t be right. We have to fix that. We are going into the Premier League, and this is your club and we need to be together.’

This brief moment of harmony was replaced very quickly with a list of players he wanted, players out of contract, and, of course, his new contract.

Dowie and I reached an accord, a sort of agreement to get along
with
each other, and this was supported by me bringing his brother Bob into the fold.

Bob had been doing a lot of work with Iain over the last six months, scouting and match reporting, and I got on quite well with him, so I brought him in as an intermediary to work between myself and Iain as a director of football.

To this day I remain undecided whether that was a good move or one of my stupidest ever.

The dust had hardly settled before I was inundated with every conceivable demand from players, managers and coaches, and that was before you even got into the realms of buying new players.

The benefits of getting into the Premier League were for everyone else but the owner.

Managers, coaches and players all had sizeable bonuses for the promotion. I think we paid circa £3 million in such bonuses. We paid millions out to other clubs who had promotion clauses on players we had bought from them.

Then, of course, the existing playing squad had salary increases for the Premier League and there were players on the last year of their contracts that we had to renew at the manager’s request, which again was not insignificant.

Then we had the contracts of the management. This was Dowie’s moment. He had taken the salary I had told him he would get when he had been offered the job six months earlier; now the boot was on the other foot. He got a 500 per cent pay rise on top of a half million bonus for achieving promotion.

In what seemed like hours since the final whistle, the best part of £7 million had been added to the cost base and that was even before you started to buy for the Premier League.

* * *

I had placed a bet with the bookies at the beginning of the season on Palace to get promoted, which I was not really allowed to do. So I had got John my driver to place it. I had bet £2,000 on promotion and got a betting slip showing odds of 33–1. I had won £66,000 from the bookies, or so I thought.

When John went to collect my winnings the bookmakers said this was never odds they would have given.

‘Pardon?’ was my response, so I sent John back with a flea in his ear to get the bloody winnings.

I was in a bit of an awkward position as I couldn’t go myself and put them in the picture surrounding their ‘not a legitimate’ bet bullshit.

In the end they paid out but only on the basis that it was 33–1 each way rather than straight on, and given there were four teams in the play-offs they paid out at 8–1.

Not a lot I could do really as I was not supposed to bet on my own team so those bastard bookmakers legged me right over.

This was symptomatic of my bittersweet experiences in football. Sometimes even when you won you lost.

10

WELCOME TO THE BIG TIME

AFTER MY TEMPERED
reaction to promotion to the Premier League I adjusted my attitude; after all, this was what I had set out to achieve. This was why I had bought a football club and now we were there, amongst the purported big boys. We had reached the promised land of football and I was now the youngest ever owner of a Premier League football club.

Unfortunately my jar of honey was topped up with vinegar. Literally less than a week after promotion 121 succeeded in claiming back in excess of £4.5 million off me. My lawyers heralded this as a victory as the original claim was for £6.5 million. They appeared to forget that I had paid them £1 million in fees to save a further million.

Following the conversation with Dowie after the play-off final win I made a conscious decision to improve our relationship. I formalised his brother Bob’s role with the club. I respected Bob’s football knowledge and as his background was in commerce, he knew about the business side of things.

I made him director of football, and he was to become a conduit between Iain and myself. His first task was to look at player
recruitment
for the ensuing Premier League season. This was much harder than first anticipated; our scouting network was not really geared up for acquiring players for top-flight football. On the whole players required for the Premier League were of a different calibre than some we had previously bought.

We needed a team capable of competing in the Premier League, which brought about its own set of challenges.

In order to assemble a squad we had to first overcome the fact that a newly promoted team were the bookies’ favourites for relegation. As players spent a large amount of time in their shops it was a task to convince them to join a ‘doomed’ enterprise, according to the ‘experts’.

If you managed to hook a Premier League player, the next challenge was to convince them that if they were in fact part of a relegated team their wages would then be reduced, which of course met with complete resistance.

And while we obviously weren’t competing with Chelsea, Manchester United and Arsenal for players we were competing with two other promoted sides and five or six established Premier League teams with bigger budgets, who were not only competing for players with us but ultimately for a place of safety in the league. Whilst gaining promotion through the play-offs was the ultimate high it gave all our rivals a four-week head start on us.