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  CHANGE OF HEART

  “Dead money”, Arsenal chairman Peter Hill-Wood’s renowned caustic comment about David Dein’s £292,000 purchase of over 1,600 unissued shares in Arsenal Football Club in 1983, proved wildly inaccurate when, in 2007, Dein sold his shareholding (at the time consisting of less than the 16.6% stake he’d bought initially) for £75 million to Red and White Holdings Ltd. The 1983 transaction valued the club at a mere £1.8 million, even after several £1 million transfers had been undertaken, indicating the negligible importance that was then ascribed to a club’s assets apart from the players. And in compiling a fortune so large that it could pay for every ticket (at an average price of over £40) for every spectator to see all of Arsenal’s home matches for the duration of a season, by the time he sold, Dein had been part of a transformation in English football both on and off the field, and he felt much of it was due to his own contribution.

  Yet back in the early 1980s, Dein, a successful entrepreneur through his commodity business, was just another Arsenal fan, albeit an affluent one. Living in Totteridge, both Graham Rix and Tony Woodcock were neighbours and friends, and he and wife Barbara often enjoyed socialising with them. It was a different story watching from the directors’ box at a time of decline for the team. Despite three FA Cup Finals, with one outright win between 1978 and 1980, and a European Cup Winners Cup Final, there had been scant success in the league, a poor return for a side filled with gifted personnel. Moreover, in 1980 and 1981, Liam Brady and Frank Stapleton were sold to Juventus and Manchester United respectively, and although star names such as Woodcock and Charlie Nicholas were brought in to replace the former idols, the team still failed to mount a challenge for the title. Dein bought into the club at a time when English football was enduring a lengthy and tortuous trip to rock bottom, underlined by the deaths of 39 Juventus supporters as a result of trouble involving Liverpool fans before the 1985 European Cup Final in Brussels, and the subsequent ban on English clubs from UEFA’s competitions for five seasons which cast a long shadow over the game.

  In hindsight, one can appreciate Hill-Wood’s short-term view of Dein’s investment. Dein, however, was intoxicated with the increased involvement his new found status brought. His rise mirrored that of another self-made entrepreneur, property developer Irving Scholar, who took over Tottenham Hotspur in 1982. Both he and Dein had, as younger men, played in the same Sunday league, albeit for different teams, and it was a quirk that, as grammar school boys from the same part of north west London moving in the same circles, they did not come across each other. They quickly became friends once both were effectively running the clubs they loved.

  There was a nice irony in their accession as successful young Jewish businessmen that they should have secured key roles as both Arsenal and Tottenham – their large numbers of Jewish fans notwithstanding – epitomised the conservative, ageist and reactionary administrations so prevalent throughout English football at that time. Akin to golf clubs, perhaps Arsenal operated a quota system on how many ‘outsiders’ they would allow into their inner sanctum, whilst Tottenham had no choice in the matter, the old regime having been swept aside by a new breed who just happened to be smarter, youthful and Jewish.

  From the moment Irving Scholar took over at Tottenham, he set about creating an enterprise that could fund the expensive acquisitions he felt exemplified their swashbuckling image. (He characterised his club and compared them to their greatest rivals, saying, “Whilst Arsenal would spend big money on a defender, Tottenham would spend twice as much on a forward.”)

  A groundbreaking merchandising business was created at White Hart Lane and Spurs floated as a plc in 1985, but not before manager Keith Burkinshaw, having accumulated two FA Cups and a UEFA Cup, walked away with the acerbic comment “There used to be a football club over there.” Burkinshaw’s prescient criticism proved to be accurate as Tottenham diversified into non-football areas which, instead of providing new revenue opportunities, accumulated debts that compounded the overspending on the rebuilt East Stand, eventually forcing Scholar to sell to Alan Sugar and Terry Venables in 1991. Arguably, to this date Tottenham are still struggling to achieve the success and status they acquired under Burkinshaw’s stewardship.

  Seeing this turn of events across town must have encouraged Dein to become more proactive. With his share purchase in 1983, he had been invited onto the board in return for the amount by which his outlay had boosted the club’s coffers. One of his initial acts was to agitate for the dismissal of then manager Terry Neill, a situation Brian Clough had anticipated. Dein had been introduced to Clough by Ken Friar, the club secretary, when Nottingham Forest were the opponents at Highbury as “our new director”. “Now don’t you go making trouble for your manager, young man”, was Clough’s immediate and typical response.

  It may have been an era when Bob Paisley’s Liverpool were the dominating force in England and Europe, but both Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa had shown that the Football League Championship, and indeed the European Cup, were not beyond the reach of a run-of-the-mill First Division club. Smaller than Arsenal in terms of resources, they had built successful teams due to the managerial abilities of the exceptional Brian Clough and Ron Saunders respectively. Arsenal had an excellent cup record, but in the early 1980s never challenged for the league. Terry Neill had been given the funds to buy the best but had by and large failed to produce a team that equalled the sum of its parts. When Brady and Stapleton moved on, both intimated that they were leaving for bigger clubs. Certainly, despite the rich history, there was a feeling that Arsenal were a club marking time, and perhaps had never fully recovered from the 1979/80 season that saw them play 70 matches and reach two cup finals, yet fail in both and miss out on European qualification as well.

  Matters came to a head with a League Cup defeat at home to Walsall, two divisions below Arsenal, at the end of November 1983. Less than three weeks later, after two subsequent Division One losses, Neill was given his cards. The Arsenal board were historically very reluctant to dismiss managers (there had been just eleven in 60 years, two of whom had died in the post). But the manager probably knew his time was up when, shortly before the Walsall defeat, he admitted, “The players don’t seem to know what it is to hunger for goals and glory. Some days I think they just want to pick up their money and go home. But we’ll finish in the top six again this season. Whether or not I’ll be around to see it is another matter!”

  Increasingly, there were supporter protests on matchdays, demanding Neill’s sacking. And Dein, so recently one of their number, empathised with the fans and argued for a change in the manager’s office. “I am not a hatchet man,” he said later in relation to Neill’s departure, “but I like to think of myself as an action man. And where surgery was needed, I was prepared to recommend it.” Neill had been concerned about the new director’s relationship with the players, whilst Dein was obsessed about the club’s position in the table. However, if, as Neill said, the players were content to just go through the motions, the inability to motivate them was down to him. Dein could have picked this feeling up from his mates in the squad, even if they felt the nature of their association had changed somewhat now that he was effectively one of their employers rather than a mere fan with whom they could socialise.

  At the time Dein stated that Neill “was not the right person to lead us into the next decade.” And despite Dein’s role in his sacking, Terry Neill is today very generous about him. A regular media pundit when Arsenal are in the spotlight, Neill readily praises his erstwhile antagonist for the part he played in the transformation of the club that has occurred since he left. Moreover, there was little for the former manager to feel bitter about. The reason the players were not performing for him was unrelated to who was on the board. In his own words before the Walsall debacle, he had accepted that he had done as much as he could. The task for any manager who had known success (and four cup finals in four years at the end of the 1970s was no mean feat at a time when competition
was more widespread than it is today) was to renew his resources, changing the key components before they passed their sell-by-date. Thus the Liverpool team that Bob Paisley led to European Cup glory in 1977 was very different to the one that won the championship in his final season in 1983. In the intervening years, players came and went, but the bandwagon rolled on. Retiring six months before Neill was sacked, Paisley could count 12 major trophies in a reign of similar duration to Neill’s at Arsenal. One FA Cup trophy was scant return for all those years.

  Neill had survived for so long because of the traditionalist view from the boardroom that regarded him as one of their own, with almost 20 years’ loyal service as player, captain and manager. Besides, he was a good egg. Dein would come to fill an executive vacuum that existed at the club, in the process coming into conflict with club secretary Ken Friar, a more cautious individual by nature, who had effectively become part of the furniture, having worked his way up through the ranks since starting out in the post room as a teenager.

  Dein’s background was far more cut and thrust. The family business began in Shepherd’s Bush Market importing exotic fruit and vegetables from the Caribbean. From these humble origins, Dein oversaw its transformation into a commodity-broking company with offices in Pall Mall. However, when he joined the Arsenal board, his enthusiasm for his business waned somewhat, in contrast to his new life at the football club that his wife has described as being akin to taking a mistress. Although Dein was ambitious enough to see the post of vice-chairman created especially for him in January 1984, the change in the boardroom didn’t initially seem to beneficially affect the playing side.

  It would be another two and a half seasons after Neill’s exit before the new vice-chairman would begin to see real potential emerge. Don Howe – Neill’s number two and the coach of the 1970/71 double side under Bertie Mee – was promoted to the post of manager, yet no significant improvement was seen as Arsenal finished sixth, followed by a fall to seventh by May 1985. During the following season, then Barcelona manager Terry Venables was sounded out about coming to Highbury.

  Venables had won the Spanish league during his first season and was in the midst of a campaign that would end with a defeat on penalties in the European Cup Final. He was hot managerial property and exemplified the kind of sea change that Dein felt was imperative if the club was to show any sense of ambition. Howe got wind of what was going on and resigned in March 1986. He had earned a reputation as an excellent coach, but never really convinced as a top class manager despite subsequently carrying out the role at several clubs. Venables himself rejected the possibility of the post because he objected to it being offered behind Howe’s back (and the respect he had for Howe was subsequently demonstrated when the latter became part of the England set-up when Venables was appointed national team coach in 1994). Howe’s precipitous departure at least made it easier for the board. Dein later admitted, “We were having second thoughts about the long-term viability of Don Howe. He found himself in an invidious position and resigned.”

  So whilst chief scout Steve Burtenshaw took over as caretaker manager for the remainder of a season that saw the club finish in seventh position once again, Dein was on the hunt for a man who could actually change the culture of mediocrity at the club. It was not the only change he intended to effect. The name of Arsenal was still box office despite a solitary trophy since 1971, and Dein intended to ensure that the club profited financially as a result. In his belief that what was good for Arsenal was also good for English football he widened the scope of his ambition. There was an opportunity, he felt, to increase the potential revenue the game could earn, but also to steer such increased income towards the clubs that were most responsible for earning it. He believed the First Division was subsidising the supporting acts lower down on the Football League ladder to an unjustified degree.

  In 1985 Dein was elected to the Football League Management Committee (FLMC), the only member who was not the chairman of a football club, even if in reality he was now the principal director at Arsenal. “I don’t know why he’s bothering with all the football politics,” said Peter Hill-Wood at the time, reflecting what many now see as a further example of the short-sighted attitude of a board that was in dire need of a shake-up. Ironically, Hill-Wood would have been a more obvious candidate for the FMLC had he been interested, representing old money, the establishment and a laissez-faire attitude that had become synonymous with Arsenal’s methods over the years. Now, though, Dein would stir up a hornets’ nest in his attempts to improve the club’s lot.

  With Everton chairman Philip Carter, he was mandated by the FLMC to look after the television negotiations. Following the tragedies of Birmingham, Bradford and Heysel (within the space of less than three weeks) and the unforgivable loss of supporters’ lives, the stock of English football had fallen so low that both ITV and the BBC were indifferent to its questionable attractions. Absent from the television screens for the first half of the 1985/86 season, league football returned only when a derisory fire-sale offer was accepted from the two broadcasters: £1.3million for the rest of the season and £6.2 million for the following two seasons. As that deal approached an end, in alliance with the other of the ‘Big Five’ clubs – Manchester United, Tottenham and Liverpool – Dein and Carter courted ITV.

  In 1988, British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) was preparing to launch and needed exclusive content. It was prepared to raise the rights fees for live football, providing competition for the BBC and ITV for the first time. Greg Dyke had become chairman of ITV Sport and, as a result of Irving Scholar’s persistent probing at a lunch with the Big Five representatives, admitted to the Tottenham chairman that the BBC and ITV had previously worked as a cartel to hold down prices for broadcasting rights artificially. This was music to Dein’s ears. “I wanted to pinch the football rights from BSB’s grasp,” recalled Dyke, “and he [Dein] might be able to deliver them. He in turn wanted more money for his club and the other big clubs and I could afford to pay it.”

  Dyke’s policy was to “go direct to the Big Five clubs of the day and offer them a minimum of a million pounds a year each for the exclusive right to broadcast their home matches. This was more than any of them had received in the past.” Moreover, up to then, fees to the Football League were more evenly spread and even filtered down to encompass the lowest division. As far as Dyke was concerned, “The Football League could sell the rest of the First Division matches to whomever they wanted, but of course without the big clubs’ home games, they were worth much less.”

  With support from Tottenham, Manchester United and Liverpool, Dein and Carter agreed to a deal which would see their five clubs do very nicely, albeit at the expense of the top flight’s lesser lights as well as those in the divisions below. For £11 million a year, rising to £18 million after three years, ITV had bought the rights to show 21 live matches, as well as highlights from any other fixture in the league if they desired, as well as League Cup coverage. The rest of the league, effectively powerless with the Big Five not prepared to contemplate any alternative course of action, fell in line, with the consolation that they would also be financially better off as a result of the settlement, albeit as second-class citizens. But there was obvious indignation at the way that Dein and Carter had ensured that the Big Five were the primary beneficiaries, and both men were unsurprisingly booted off the FLMC as a consequence.

  It was a set of circumstances that would have analogous repercussions almost 20 years later. On both occasions, those who felt Dein had betrayed their trust removed him from office. In 1988 he acted as he did in the belief he was serving the interests of both his club and the game in general, but was at the same time working independently of those he supposedly represented. He was a man wearing two hats – one for Arsenal and another for the Football League. He felt he had served both parties well and saw no conflict of interest. Indeed, his parting shot revealed the resentment he felt. “What other employer,” he asked, “fires a man who has just brough
t him £44 million?”

  By the time the deal was struck, Arsenal had consolidated their status as one of the Big Five through two successive seasons of progress under new manager George Graham. As a former Gunner with a good managerial apprenticeship at Millwall, he was an obvious candidate for the job. There was a vogue at the big clubs for recruiting former players as managers – Howard Kendall had done very well at Everton, emulated across Stanley Park by Liverpool’s Kenny Dalglish. In a BBC Football Focus piece on Graham in 1986, filmed in his office at Millwall, clearly visible on the shelf behind him were books on Arsenal and The Good Food Guide, an indication of his tastes, perhaps even his priorities. Certainly here was a man David Dein could relate to. In the frame for pulling the trigger on Terry Neill, Dein never received the same (positive) public exposure for promoting George Graham’s credentials with his co-directors.

  Once at Arsenal, the new man was fortunate to inherit a very promising group of players who were emerging from the club’s youth system. Reassured, and immediately putting into practice Brian Clough’s dictum “in this business, you’ve got to be a dictator or you haven’t got a chance”, Graham felt free to dispose of many of the senior players who he felt might not be so malleable to his modus operandi. So Paul Mariner and Tony Woodcock were released before a ball had even been kicked in anger, and over the course of his first two seasons, Viv Anderson, Charlie Nicholas and Graham Rix were also shown the exit door. Captain Kenny Sansom was the last major casualty, sold against his will to Newcastle at the beginning of the momentous 1988/89 season, having been stripped of the captaincy midway through the previous campaign. (His replacement as skipper, Tony Adams, would hang on to the armband until his retirement in 2002). These were men who had been around long enough not to respond to the strict discipline that Graham wanted to instil as the best way of getting a positive response from his charges, described by defender Lee Dixon as “a sergeant-major approach to management”.