BOOK REVIEW – SOCCER CZARS

Anyone with a passing interest in football will have picked up the growing influence of club chairmen in the game over the last ten years or so. Before their rise to fame and fortune most fans would have been hard put to name the chairmen of more than two or three clubs other than their own. Now it is almost as if the chairmen themselves are larger than life figures whose dominance of their club is total.

The author eloquently charts the transition from the moneyed but fairly amateur involvement of the past generation of chairmen to today’s ambitious megalomaniacs. Opening illustration for this is the five legged chair in the Arsenal boardroom, specially commissioned for the incumbent to prevent his frequent habit of dozing off during meetings and falling into a crumpled heap on the floor. Now chairmen have little time to relax if their grip on power is not to be loosened.

For some this means getting involved in team selection itself, something which led to, for instance, Keith Burkinshaw being edged out as manager of Tottenham Hotspur once Irving Scholar had gained control of the club. “The more the game has grown as a business, the more managers have been marginalised,” argues Jason Tomas, the author of Soccer Czars. His contacts as a journalist with The Observer have helped him to gain some interviews with some of the biggest wheelers and dealers.

Tottenham and Arsenal are well covered, especially the former, with accounts of first, Irving Scholar’s painstaking acquisition of shares to win control of the club. Then comes the background to Spurs’ over-diversification financially, leading to Scholar having to sell out to Venables and Sugar. The well defined egos and pugnacious personalities of the various chairmen come across when they speak in their own words, a feature of Tomas’s style as an author. Ken Bates, for instance (Pictured with the late lamented Matthew Harding – who died just before the book’s publication). gives his forthright opinions on the brokering of the TV deals which led to the formation of the breakaway Premiership: “David Dein screwed it up and I’ll never forgive him for it”. Ron Noades and Sam Hammam at the other end of the chairmen’s league are portrayed as using their backstreet know how and powers of persuasion to argue for a bigger slice of the cake for their own particular clubs.

Tomas’s book is not unsympathetic to these characters, he allows them plenty of scope to tell their own accounts and describe their own motives for their involvement in football. Reading between the lines, however, the ordinary football fan begins to imagine a recurring image of these colourful characters arguing hammer and tongs over every new proposal. In this sort of crucible, with Rick Parry and now Peter Leaver QC trying to keep order, the future of football in this country is being forged. Fans rarely get a look in and are unlikely to do so – what could make such all powerful chairmen want to let go of some of their power? The only chance that fans have to hit back is when a campaign is mounted and gathers momentum against an unpopular chairman. Here Tomas’s book also gives some’ insight with a ringside view of an AGM at Norwich and a continual torrent of invective heaped on Robert Chase eventually leading him to resign. Yet the defeat of one autocratic chairman is usually followed by the arrival of another and it is debatable what the fans actually gain from their hard fought campaigns.

The account of Chase’s hounding at Norwich begins to make even the most disillusioned Canaries fan feel sorry for him on the human level. The problem is that because almost all fans are excluded from any kind of decision making process that they are reduced to cringe- making behaviour and populist campaigning. Alex Fynn, interviewed in the opening chapter of Soccer Czars, likens the most powerful chairmen to medieval barons. “They decide what the rules are. If anything will affect the success of their club – they are unlikely to feel bound by it ... In other countries, although other clubs are second class citizens, they are in the same system. But in England everything is geared to the Premiership.”

If the Premiership chairmen are medieval barons, what hope for the poor peasants, fans of Nationwide League Clubs? Will David Mellor spearhead of the newly appointed Task Force be the knight in shining armour they hope for? I doubt it, despite his grip on the popular ‘phone-in on Saturday evenings, his customary viewpoint is from the Director’s box at Chelsea in close proximity to Ken Bates.

Yet the tide of commercialism seems irresistible at present, with the trend set to continue. Ironically the next victims of the Juggernaut Commerce are likely to be the less successful Premiership teams themselves. The next logical step for Chairmen like Sir John Hall, at Newcastle, is the formation of a European Super League and pay per view TV. The quest for larger profits is the driving force. For football fans, success is very important, but loyalty used to count for something too – Sir John Hall used to hold season tickets at St James Park and Roker Park simultaneously; Peter Johnson was a Liverpool supporter before taking control at Tranmere and then Everton; Robert Maxwell infamously tried to merge arch rivals Oxford and Reading. No wonder fans are wary of such men boldly leading them where they have never been before.

True there is much more money in football now but not much of it comes the way of clubs like Chester or Doncaster or any others in Division Three. Clubs like ourselves continue to struggle financially despite the vast amounts coming in to the game as a whole. The only way for things to change would be for the Government Task Force to recommend legislation to level the playing field – but then, many of the Premiership chairmen may take their ball home and refuse to play, given their past record.

Before long some of the less successful Premiership clubs will begin to lose out as the trend towards a European League sweeps them aside. And when that all becomes too predictable – and becomes dominated by one or two clubs – may be then commercialism’s bubble will finally burst.

By then Chester’s fate along with the other also rans will be sealed. Jason Tomas’s book will then be incriminating evidence in the case of the death of football.