Sir Alan Sugar (12 page)

However, by this time, the two north London clubs had become the source of a far more spectacular story. Sugar was about to make one of his most audacious moves as Tottenham manager – and one he was in time to regret bitterly. Never before had the two rival clubs witnessed the like of what was about to happen. Scottish football legend George Graham is synonymous with Arsenal’s history of success. As a player, he was a key part of the Gunners’ side that won the 1971 double, and he returned to the club years later as manager, to guide them to a period of success that had not been seen since Herbert Chapman’s legendary 1930s glory days. He won two League Championships, an FA Cup and League Cup, as well as conquering Europe with the 1994 Cup Winners’ Cup victory over Italians Parma. During this period of sustained success for Arsenal, Graham had been the architect of numerous victories over Tottenham, as the Gunners utterly outclassed their rivals. Understandably, then, he was far from a popular figure among the White Hart Lane faithful.

So imagine their shock when they found out that their bitter enemy had been appointed manager of their club!

That was the incredible situation facing them in the autumn of 1998. At the press conference that saw Graham unveiled to a shocked public, Sugar was forthright in defending his move. Sitting alongside a tanned Graham, Sugar said, ‘If you work for IBM or the Ford Motor Company, you would go for the best in the
field, someone who has been successful. George is one of, if not the top manager in English football. Why has he come to Tottenham? Results, that’s the end of it.’

It was a good sales pitch from a good salesman, and Graham’s stock in English football was high at this time. However, Sugar knew that, thanks to the Scotsman’s Arsenal associations, it would take a lot more than this to sell him to many of the White Hart Lane faithful. This was a courageous appointment indeed.

Giving the manager his unequivocal backing, Sugar asserted, ‘The single most important man at a football club is the manager. Maybe we will start a trend here, but it should have happened a long time ago. We must never sit on the edge of our seats again wondering whether we will be relegated. If George is not successful, we should have to examine the reasons why. We will have to see if the place is doomed, I’m jinxed, or that we might have to get an exorcist in – or even [one-time England manager Glenn Hoddle’s faith healer] Eileen Drewery. But the fact is we have not performed for the fans at all. We have not given them anything to cheer about. Some managers come in and wave chequebooks about and others get spontaneous results. George is consistently a winner and, in any walk of life, you have got to get those kind of people around you.’

It seemed Sugar had been taken aback by some of the flak that he taken from football fans during his short time in the game. He is no wimp, but, nonetheless, the
ferocity of the abuse had stunned him and, for the first time, the prospect of quitting entered his vocabulary. ‘I have passed my sell-by date in the eyes of the fans, but it’s time to get this club in shape and performing well, give it the status it deserves. But there is a limit to the thickness of a rhino’s skin and I won’t put up with the abuse from the fans. It’s just not worth it. However, I am in no frame of mind to think about selling out, it’s as simple as that. But I like to work in an environment where there is a goal at the end of the rainbow or that your efforts are appreciated. The fans are part of our team here, and in appointing George I believe the board have made an excellent choice.

‘Anything I do, in any companies that I own, you work as a team, and your efforts are appreciated. Having been branded cynical and a cold person who has no knowledge of football, or interest in the heritage and tradition of the club, you spend seven years trying to convince people it’s not the case and in the end you go with the flow.’

Graham was similarly clear about what lay ahead. ‘I just want people to be patient,’ he told reporters. ‘I have always been a manager involved in a building process wherever I have managed, like Millwall and Arsenal. Millwall fell to the bottom of the table before I got them promotion, and Arsenal could do no better than seventh before I got them success.’

And success was exactly what Graham brought to
Tottenham when he won the club their first trophy for eight years in the shape of the Worthington Cup. Facing the combative Leicester City in the final on 22 March 1999, Tottenham were heroes on the day. They played with just ten men for nearly half the game after seeing their defender Justin Edinburgh sent off. However, a poacher’s goal from Dane Allan Nielsen was enough to win the day for them.

This was the club’s first trophy under the Sugar reign, and he was delighted; he didn’t even complain when captain Sol Campbell soaked him in champagne in the dressing room after the final whistle. There was acclaim from all quarters. David Pleat, director of football at Spurs, was gracious enough to praise the chairman, amid the celebrations. ‘Now it’s time for Alan to sit back and enjoy it. The chairman has gained experience from the first few years. Early on he had a few problems not of his making, as there was no one on the board with a football background.

‘Very often mediocre players were signed. Very often cover was needed for injuries and sometimes players were bought on a whim simply as cover when they weren’t really up to it. Now there is confidence in the management and I’m there to provide information and keep the chairman in touch. He is a hands-on chairman, and rightly so. He should be aware of everything that happens at his football club.’

As indeed he was, and Sugar would also have been
well aware that Tottenham’s value on the stock market was back up close to
£
90 million and rising. He soon launched a new
£
5 million private jet, called the GSpur, which was decked out in club colours. These were optimistic times at White Hart Lane. Could Spurs build on their Worthington Cup triumph to win one of the big trophies?

To do that, Graham would need more transfer funds, which he duly received. Sergei Rebrov had won eight League titles and four cups in nine years with Dynamo Kiev, scoring at a rate of almost a goal every game throughout his career, including 28 goals in 60 games in Europe. Winning 36 caps with Ukraine, Rebrov formed a deadly partnership with Andrei Shevchenko and even turned down a move to join his old partner at AC Milan in favour of a switch to White Hart Lane. But he didn’t come cheap: his
£
11 million fee smashed the Tottenham transfer record. It had proved a painstaking process to sign Rebrov, and Sugar had bravely held out against the
£
12 million asking price.

But, finally, Spurs had their man and the manager was delighted. ‘He is a quality player and a great acquisition,’ Graham beamed. ‘He is a team player and I have the philosophy individuals play, teams win Championships. He can play well with others but produce on his own as well, he is an ideal player for me.’

Although this was not quite a transfer in the Klinsmann mould, still, people seemed surprised that the
Ukrainian had chosen to come to White Hart Lane, and Rebrov was asked why he had turned down the mighty Milan in favour of Spurs. ‘Maybe there would have been a better offer from Milan, but I dreamed of playing in England and the chairman and the club respected my wishes and so I am here,’ he said. ‘I know the team are going up and looking to win the English League and to be a part of that success would be a dream for me. I am confident about the future, I know the targets of the club. They told me they would like to bring more players in and I am very happy with that. Any club wanting to be the best must do that. I hope they will play in Europe very soon and I can help them to do that.’

However, Rebrov’s magic was obviously not enough to lift Tottenham straight into title contention, and it seems George Graham would soon be knocking on Sugar’s door wanting money for more players. ‘I would like to think if I targeted someone I could buy him, but we are not there yet,’ he said. ‘If you look at the bench it’s full of kids, but the youngsters we have bought are for the future.

‘There is a lot of hard work to do here. I don’t think you can challenge the top three for two or three years after avoiding relegation. The task of acquiring players to challenge is virtually impossible within that time. Right now the top of the League does not bother me. I’ve got to get us right and somewhere near that top six. The main problem we have had is long-term injuries. If I can get them back it will be a massive boost. But we still
need new players. Without them I don’t know how far we can go.’

By the time that fans’ favourite David Ginola quit for Aston Villa, the writing seemed to be on the wall, as Sugar came under intense pressure to quit. And he eventually and uncharacteristically succumbed. ‘No jokes. No tricks. I’m off. And I will do it in a professional manner,’ he said. ‘The company has made an announcement to the Stock Exchange that we are in talks with various people. As soon as any of these become statutory and reportable, we shall comment on them. There are no deals right now. But, as they say, we are hot to trot.’ That trot came a step closer at the end of the year.

In December 2000, it was confirmed that leisure group ENIC, led by sports executive Daniel Levy, was buying 27 per cent of Tottenham chairman Sir Alan Sugar’s majority stake in the club, giving it a total of 30 per cent. It was reported that this was the third time that Sugar had offered ENIC the chance to buy him out. Sugar would have been justified in allowing himself a wry chuckle when fans began more or less immediately to question ENIC’s ambition. When it was revealed that ENIC believed it would take five years for them to turn the club’s fortunes around, Bernie Kingsley, of the Tottenham Independent Supporters Association, said, ‘If this means we are going to have to wait another five years before ENIC believes we’re
going to be major players again, the fans will not be happy. This is exactly the sort of thing we’ve heard year after year from Sugar. The fans want to see something happening soon. We want to know what ENIC’s plans for the club are. We hope we’re not going straight from the frying pan into the fire. We’ve already waited ten years for some sort of success.’

It appeared to be a case of new owners, but the same old story.

Sugar, meanwhile, seemed to be well out of it. He had stepped down as chairman, but not before winning a libel case against the
Daily Mail
for an article that unjustly branded him ‘The Miser of N17’. He donated the proceeds of the case to the Great Ormond Street Hospital. Citing the personal abuse of his family as the straw that broke the camel’s back, Sugar was relieved to be away from football. ‘It is a sad end, mainly because I have been stuck with a label. They will talk about Alan Sugar as a money man and that’s all down to people’s attitude. But that’s how I’ll always be remembered.’

His position had become increasingly difficult, as the Spurs fans continued to turn on him. ‘We want Sugar out!’ became a depressingly familiar chant at White Hart Lane. Hunter Davies joked in the
Evening Standard
, ‘The only solution for Sugar: Sack the Spurs fans and sign a new 10,000 crowd.’

However, the situation became far from amusing when details of a secret meeting of anti-Sugar Spurs ‘supporters’
was leaked to the media. A sinister three-point action plan was revealed:

In addition, an anti-Sugar website, with his mobile phone number on it, was published on the Internet. No wonder Sugar, a man who has always put family well before business, had had enough.

After leaving Tottenham, Sugar seemed to remain bitter about much of what went on there, and took a swipe at George Graham, after the Scotsman had blamed Sugar for the club’s continued woes. ‘George Graham is very experienced at playing the media game, orchestrating the press with a clever quote or an easy headline. Unfortunately, many fans can’t see through this little trick unless someone like me spells it out,’ wrote Sugar. ‘But let me ask you something: Have you ever noticed nothing is ever George Graham’s fault? And I mean nothing. Now how can that be true? None of us are perfect, yet George has cleverly mastered the art of deflection and is very successful at diverting attention
from himself and his failings.’ He joked that, even if footage was found of George Graham robbing a bank, it would be blamed on Alan Sugar and not the Scotsman. He concluded, ‘In my time at Tottenham I made lots of mistakes, the biggest was possibly employing him.’

Looking back over his up-and-down reign at White Hart Lane, Sugar was philosophical but blunt. ‘What went wrong was, I think, my persistence in thinking that perhaps I could make it a successful business and also successful on the football pitch,’ he said. ‘What went wrong is my poor reading of the situation. After year in, year out trying to do things that way, what went wrong was it took me too long to realise that I was pissing in the wind, literally wasting my time, banging my head up against the wall. That’s what went wrong. My fault.’ Having accepted his part of the responsibility – a very Alan Sugar trait – he fired a defiant parting shot at football, and looked to the future. ‘It was a waste of my life. I think a clever person, a clever outside observer who wants to do a commercial analysis on me, should track Amstrad’s results throughout the course of that ten years, then track them now. After I leave Tottenham and get back to concentrating on Amstrad, you start to see the profits rising again. And that tells a story. No one’s picked up on that really. The story is, I suppose, I’m a one-horse pony man, or whatever you want to call it. When I give my attention to something I tend to give it all and I think, in hindsight, that, apart from my losing
ten years out of my life, Amstrad shareholders actually lost me for a while. I took my eye off the ball for a wasted, hopeless, ungrateful bunch of people.’