5

HOW TO BUY A FOOTBALL CLUB

I’M OFTEN ASKED how I bought a football club.

And more often than not my glib response is: ‘I wrote a cheque for £10 million.’

That’s the simple answer, and of course you have to have the funds to cover that cheque, which fortunately – or unfortunately – I did. Obviously the reality is much more complicated and convoluted than that, so I think the bigger question should be: why would you buy a football club? And, more to the point, why buy an ailing south London club – as cynics would say – like Crystal Palace?

People buy football clubs for many reasons but there is always an element of ego involved. Some simply have the means and want to show it off, for some it’s the kudos that comes with being the owner of an iconic British institution; others, especially those from foreign shores, buy clubs to gain instantaneous legitimacy and credibility. I know one chairman who bought a big club in the north-east that he had no affiliation with whatsoever just because his best mate was vice-chairman of a perceived top London club. And I’ve heard it said that one big west London club was bought as the world’s biggest life insurance policy for its owner! None of these motives has much to do with football itself, and none of these motives applied to me – OK, maybe there was a bit of ego in there – but my agenda was more about building something meaningful.

When I was younger, most of my friends abandoned their local clubs. Even my own brother claimed to support Tottenham at one stage, though he didn’t know one end of the Tottenham High Road from the other. I put that down to the trendy Admiral kit that Glenn Hoddle was wearing at the time rather than a treacherous defection. But I wasn’t one of those that subscribed to supporting a fashionable club. Otherwise I would have moved to Hertfordshire and become a Manchester United fan!

Palace was the team I supported as a child, the team my father played for, and a club that was perceived to have vast if unrealised potential. In fact, at the time I was looking to buy Crystal Palace, I could have bought Leicester City – it was a far better deal for me financially – but Crystal Palace was the club I wanted.

In the previous five years I had overcome every adversity and turned it into success, built a business from virtually nothing and sold it for a vast amount of money. At the ripe old age of thirty-two, I had the world at my feet. I didn’t need to work another day in my life but given my personality I needed a challenge. Running a football club was that challenge, one that I believed I was more than capable of rising to. Turning potential into reality was something I was good at.

That covers the why. If you asked me now what owning a football club is like, I’d say I imagine it’s a bit like being a drug addict. You indulge yourself in something you enjoy, knowing it’s bad for you, and after the initial rush of pleasure it gives you a headache and sucks all the money out of your bank account.

* * *

In the summer of 1997, as a token of appreciation to my father, I spent £10,000 on what Crystal Palace laughingly described as a ‘luxury box’ so he could watch his cherished football team out of the cold.

To some extent that is where it all began.

The following year I received a call from the club’s extremely pretty marketing manager.

‘If you’re ringing me up to renew that scabby box at Palace the answer is no,’ I said cheekily. ‘If you’re calling me to go out on a date with you, the answer is yes.’

Whilst the company of a charming and beautiful woman is priceless, after dinner not only had I spent £10,000 on the executive box, I had also coughed up £100,000 for a PocketPhone Shop marketing campaign with Crystal Palace Football Club, an expensive evening out by anyone’s standards! Was the date worth it? I think I’ll keep that to myself.

In truth I was showing off to impress her, but there was also an underlying interest in becoming involved in the club in some way, which appealed to my ego. So not only had I had a charming evening, but I also had the promise of an introduction to her boss, the new club chairman.

In the autumn of 1998 I met Mark Goldberg.

Mark was a personable, energetic character – a small chap, with slicked-back hair and braces – who struck me as being a little guilty of style over substance. He had recently paid £20 million – a vastly overinflated price – to acquire the club from its previous owner, Ron Noades, the same Ron Noades who had been locked in a long-running legal battle with my father.

Mark’s hugely expensive deal hadn’t even included the purchase of the stadium, leaving Noades with some feeling of tenure over the club. Rather like a noisy ex-wife, he felt this gave him the right to expel his opinions. In what was his charmless way he’d spewed out one of them at the time: ‘Goldberg was stupid and he wet his knickers when I agreed to sell him the club.’ In my opinion, Noades was a thoroughly dislikeable man, who had used the club to make money for all it was worth and showed no respect for Mark and, more importantly, the club. Rather than disappear into the ether with his huge bounty, he had the audacity to ridicule someone who was prepared to put their hand in their own pocket. This made me gravitate towards Mark.

But all this did not detract from the fact that right from the start of his ownership Mark was in serious financial trouble.

He had arrived in a blaze of publicity, appointing the former England coach Terry Venables as a marquee manager following relegation from the Premier League. He talked about signing Paul Gascoigne and Ronaldo, invested heavily in the playing side and support structure and overpaid for players. His plans were unsustainable in the division they were in and the club was haemorrhaging money.

Mark wanted investment and wasted little time before instructing one of his sales staff, Phil Alexander, to invite me to a corporate club event held at the Selsdon Park Hotel in November 1998. It wasn’t my thing but I decided I would attend out of sheer curiosity.

The whole evening was a non-event. I knew I was only being buttered up for money and lo and behold found myself sitting next to Terry Venables.

I had mixed feelings about Venables. On one hand, there was the childhood memories of him as the young, energetic and flamboyant Palace manager of the eighties; on the other there was the apparently disinterested person I had seen standing in the dugout in some of the games I watched early into Mark’s ownership.

Unfortunately, for me, Venables wasn’t particularly good company. He only laughed at his own jokes, which frankly I didn’t find funny in the slightest. He really was no comedian, although I dare say a fair few supporters of certain clubs around the country may disagree with me on that.

In late 1998 Mark’s financial problems were reaching a critical level, so I suggested I might consider putting some money into Palace. PPS was at full tilt at the time and, as I’ve said before, cash flow is king, so most of the money was going back into my expanding company, but – in a way that is typical of me – I thought I would agree a deal with him and work out how to fund it afterwards. But, aside from the financial leg-up, an incident in January 1999 convinced me Mark needed some real support.

Palace had bought Lee Bradbury for £1 million and Mark was attempting to unload him for as much as he could get. Ironically he was attempting to do a deal with Trevor Francis at Birmingham City, someone I was later to employ at Palace. I was in his office when Mark took a call from Paul Walsh, the ex-Liverpool and England footballer, who was Lee Bradbury’s agent.

Walsh was on speakerphone and the way he spoke to Mark stunned me. He was yelling at him about how the player wouldn’t do this and wouldn’t do that and that was how things were going to happen. ‘If he doesn’t like it then he can fuck off.’

Once the call was over, I felt compelled to comment to Mark about the way Walsh had spoken to the chairman and owner of a football club. He just shrugged resignedly; he was prepared to listen to that shit in order to get things done.

I saw it differently. Surely the player was Mark’s asset to sell and Walsh was most likely to be working and being paid by him so where did he come off talking to him like that?

On reflection, Mark’s conversation with Walsh probably influenced the regard I held agents in and determined how I was to handle a large proportion of my negotiations with them in the future.

Very shortly after that incident, Goldberg rang and asked if I was prepared to invest £250,000 in CPFC, which would give me a certain amount of equity and say.

I mulled this over and told him that in exchange for a seat on the board, I would. As I said earlier, like drug addiction, football has a habit of pulling you in like that.

Mark arranged to come over to my head office and brought his team of sycophants and lickspittles with him. We negotiated a deal and I wrote him out a cheque for £250,000, with the condition that it was secured against something. One of his cronies piped up with some comment about Mark being good for the money.

I just ignored him. I wasn’t prepared to sink £250,000 into Palace without insisting on some form of security. I asked Mark what he could offer and he suggested a charge on his home Holroyd House, a stately manor in its own grounds in the leafy well-to-do suburb of Keston.

I agreed, provided that there were no other charges on that property. I left the funds and an order to set up a charge with my lawyers because I was flying off on holiday to Miami Beach with my girlfriend for a well-earned holiday.

A few days later, whilst I was sunning myself and preparing for what was to be my biggest year at PPS, my lawyers called with a problem: it transpired that everybody from the dustman to Venables had a charge on Goldberg’s stately pile.

After discovering these charges I realised just how desperate he must have been and in later years I had a better understanding of his desperation. But at the time I took a dim view of it.

As far as I was concerned Goldberg had lied to me. I had a personal rule that I always believed everything anyone told me until they lied and then I never believed another word they said again.

Goldberg phoned me up some time later and apologised profusely, and reluctantly I agreed to meet him. He was full of his nonchalant confidence. Brimming with half-baked ideas, he was going to get a huge Chinese marketing and advertising deal as one of the Palace players was the national team captain. As often was the case with Goldberg, he detached himself from the reality of the problem and operated in a cloud above it.

In my view he was a dead man walking. ‘Mark, you are living in cuckoo-land,’ I told him. ‘Your problems are on the ground here, now, and your head is up in the clouds, with dreams that are not realistic.’

I pushed him hard on the true financial position. Crystal Palace’s financial situation was all over the papers and I deduced he had wanted that £250,000 from me to help pay the players’ wages for that month. Goldberg took a moment and then said the club was on its knees; both he and it were staring into the abyss. My God, this was after only nine months of his ownership. I advised Goldberg that he would need to seriously consider insolvency and administration advice. Whilst writing this book, it’s occurred to me that in the last months of my ownership, as I was pouring money into the club and desperately trying to prevent it from going into administration, I really needed someone to lay it on the line as I had with Goldberg. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have welcomed it. But Mark had something that towards the end of my tenure at Palace I lacked: necessary, if harsh, advice.

Back to 1999. Some months earlier I had met David Buchler, who was a board director at Tottenham and one of the leading insolvency guys in the country. He had a history of dealing with football club administrations. I told Goldberg that he should go and see Buchler and see what, if any, options he had.

Goldberg went along to this meeting still in a jaunty state of mind, illustrating that the gravity of his circumstances hadn’t fully registered for him. After listening to Goldberg explain the situation, it didn’t take long for Buchler to tell him that his only choice was administration. Goldberg was determined that whatever happened he was going to come out the other side still chairman of Crystal Palace. Buchler had to put him straight: unless he was going to buy CPFC back and fund administration himself it was unlikely he would retain any kind of control.

Finally the reality of Goldberg’s situation hit home. But instead of heeding my advice to keep quiet, he went off, talking to fans at prearranged public meetings and got himself unfairly vilified. Goldberg’s only real crime was the naivety that led to the destruction of his own personal wealth in less than a year.

The next thing I heard Palace had gone under and Simon Paterson of Moore Stephens was appointed as the administrator. Perhaps the reason why Goldberg didn’t engage Buchler as administrator was because he didn’t like his advice, but I also suspect Buchler was just too expensive for him.

Aside from reading the occasional snippet in the media, that was the last time I was to really pay attention to the plight of Crystal Palace for the best part of a year. My focus was on the small matter of running and selling PPS.

In the middle of 1999 I met the well-known DJ David ‘Kid’ Jensen through 121’s MD John Barton. David’s son, Viktor, was a racing driver and was looking for some corporate sponsorship. Given 121 had just done the marketing deal with me at PPS, John Barton gave me a strong indication he would like me to talk to the Jensens so I agreed to provide some sponsorship money for him. I also knew that he was a huge Palace fan. During our discussions Palace inevitably came up and I told David that I had tried in vain to help Goldberg.

Nearly twelve months had passed and the sale of PPS was in full flow when David Jensen contacted me again to see if I would renew his son’s sponsorship deal, and of course we talked about Palace. At that time Crystal Palace had been in administration for fourteen months and had sold a large number of their players and laid off a lot of staff to fund the administration. The club really was in desperate straits.

They had a potential buyer in the mysterious Jerry Lim, a Malaysian businessman who had been negotiating for some time with the administrators to secure exclusivity and do due diligence, but was not coming up with the money, despite promising via the media time and again to do so. From my outsider’s perspective, I got the impression he was not the real deal!

Given that now I was on the cusp of selling PPS and rather than having the ever-present issues of cash flow I was about to have a significant amount of money, I had decided I would look very closely at the possibility of buying CPFC as my replacement for the business I was about to sell and told David Jensen just that.

He was very surprised and I think somewhat sceptical; I insisted that I was deadly serious. In return for my benevolent sponsorship of young Viktor, I asked David for his public support when I made a move to buy the club. Until that time, I wanted him to keep this conversation between us. A slightly bemused David Jensen left my office with his cheque for the sponsorship and a secret.

Towards the end of April, while I was settling on final offers for PPS, I made a formal approach to Crystal Palace’s administrators with a view to making a bid for the club. I used Andersen’s again, and their guy Charles Simpson approached them, representing my interest on a no-name basis.

Surprisingly, Simon Paterson rebuffed the approach, saying they were near to a deal and exclusivity with Lim, and didn’t want to ruin it. This struck me as commercially stupid, as two factions expressing interest in buying the club was a godsend.

The bloody-mindedness of the administrators’ response strengthened my resolve. When I am told ‘no’ for no good reason, it’s like igniting a blue touch paper. I make it my mission to turn that ‘no’ into a ‘yes’. I stepped up the interest, insisting via Andersen’s they disclose the purchase price and what was required to put forward a legitimate bid.

As Andersen’s were at that time one of the biggest accountancy firms in the world, just the fact that the new bidder was being represented by them should have carried significant weight. But for some reason Paterson was not interested, insisting that he had a deal with this Lim.

This struck me as odd behaviour from an administrator whose sole purpose in life was to sell the club for the best price and to ensure the creditors got as much of the money they were owed as possible. If nothing else, having two bids was an ideal way to achieve this. Lim was hanging around like a bad smell, continuing to play the media, but he didn’t seem to be able to back up his bid with cold hard cash. And all the time the club was sinking further and further into the mire.

I decided to do two things.

First I contacted David Jensen to put me in touch with the Supporters’ Trust. The Crystal Palace fans had galvanised around their ailing club and formed a trust to see if they could help in any way. Their head guy Paul Newman came to see me in my office in Slough. He was well informed and also concerned about the future of Palace. He also had genuine reservations about Lim and informed me that the trust had collected somewhere in the region of £1 million, which they were holding to see if it could be of help.

We discussed our various experiences of Palace and he quickly understood I was a genuine fan with means. Not that it was a glowing endorsement as Goldberg had peddled the same story before he crashed and burned at Palace.

I explained to Newman the strange stance Simon Paterson was taking by stonewalling me. Newman knew Lim and suggested he would contact him and put us in touch, to see at my suggestion if there was something we could do between us. And the thought of getting Lim to step aside was starting to germinate in my mind.

In return for facilitating a meeting Paul Newman wanted, if I did buy Palace, a seat on the board for a trust member. Everybody had an agenda! I didn’t want to commit to this as it seemed to me that fans can be too passionate about their club to be able to make unblinkered decisions, with respect with your money! However, I never ruled it in or out but I did categorically say that in the event I did indeed buy the club, I wouldn’t be taking any of the Supporters’ Trust money. The focus was to ensure this club got bought and did not die.

Next I instructed Andersen’s to make sure Paterson understood that he was putting the club in grave jeopardy by not engaging with us and relying on this Jerry Lim character to come through.

Eventually Moore Stephens relented under pressure from Andersen’s, saying they wanted a name and proof of funds to the tune of £10 million. That wouldn’t be a problem once PPS was sold but technically I couldn’t provide that, so I went to Lloyd’s and leant on my bank manager, Nigel Gibson, who had been working with me on PPS for the last two and a bit years. It was testament to the strength of my relationship with the bank and the regard that I was held in that Nigel gave the Palace administrators a letter saying I was good for £10 million and more.

Andersen’s now gave my name to the administrators under strict confidentiality.

Despite getting what he asked for, Paterson still refused us access to the books, claiming there was insufficient time to do due diligence and complete the purchase by the date the Football League had stipulated for Palace to come out of administration. This was utter crap: the Lim deal was not done, and there was nothing to lose by giving me access. I knew the timelines and if I felt that we could do enough due diligence in that time to convince me to buy the club then it was my money that was going to be at risk.

By now I was completely pissed off. Paterson was standing in my way for no good reason that I could see. So I upped the ante. I instructed Andersen’s to phone Paterson to tell him that I wanted access and I was going to get it one way or another.

Up to now we had avoided the media but, given the complete wall we were running up against, we told Paterson that if he didn’t cooperate immediately, we would go to them and say how obstructive he was, how he was risking the future of the club and how if the club failed we would ensure he was held responsible through whatever means or authority it took.

Paterson came across as a belligerent individual, rotund in appearance, phlegmatic in conversation and seemed to revel in his fifteen minutes of fame as he presided over the future of CPFC. Regularly popping up in front of cameras resplendent in his Palace tie, he was intransigent. ‘Do what you want,’ was his response.

So I laid it bare to the media. I had the motivation, the means and the intent to buy this club and was being blocked by a fee-generating administrator who in my view could ruin the club.

This provided the pressure we needed. After an outcry from the 2,000-strong Supporters’ Trust and the adverse media attention, I was reluctantly allowed access to do what turned out to be a very limited form of due diligence.

At this time, John Barton, 121’s MD and key driver in the purchase of PPS, invited me to the England v Brazil match at the old Wembley on 27 May 2000. I went along to ensure that I was well in touch with John as the sale was coming to its critical stage. Now that my interest in buying Crystal Palace was common knowledge, Barton attempted to use that information to his advantage by chipping the price of PPS down. He knew I would be buying Palace with money from the proceeds of the PPS sale, and I hadn’t yet agreed a final price.

During this game I met Theo Paphitis for the first time. He was big friends with John and was also the chairman of Millwall FC. He spent the entire afternoon saying it was madness to buy a football club. Perhaps it had slipped his mind that he himself had bought one, although Millwall can barely be described as a football club. He gave me his oracle-like view of football at the same time as ridiculing Palace as they were Millwall’s big south London rivals. It wasn’t the first time I heard Crystal Palace referred to as ‘Crippled Alice’, nor would it be the last.

Sometime at the end of May, Jerry Lim walked into my office in Slough. He was far from mysterious or mythical, in fact, he was a bit of a caricature. No joke – he looked and spoke like he had jumped off the set of a Charlie Chan movie. Just five minutes into the meeting I was struggling to take him seriously. He was an excitable little fellow with a pronounced accent and a rhetoric that would make a sailor blush – and that’s coming from me! He was going to ‘fluck this person up’, ‘fluck that person up’, he had ‘big flucking plans’, and ‘Won’ Noades was every flucking name under the sun – on this point we did agree. He was talking about building bowling alleys, nightclubs, multiplex cinemas and a luxury hotel. Quite where he thought he was going to build all this and quite why anyone would want a luxury hotel in an unglamorous suburb of south-east London seemed to have escaped him.

There was nothing about football – sorry, excuse me, he did touch upon it, advising me of his plans to bring his close personal friends the Gurkhas to be stewards at the club. I remain unconvinced to this day that he ever had the money to go through with this deal or even that Lim was his name.

And this was the guy that Paterson, the administrator at the club, was telling me was the reason I could not make a bid for Crystal Palace.

This made no sense to my advisers. Surely this stance didn’t stack up. Maybe I had missed something!

After wading through Lim’s initial claptrap, I suggested that perhaps I could buy the club and use him to work up the remainder of the deal. He jumped at that. I bloody knew it. As I thought, he had no money and I had just given him the out he needed. From that point he was my fiercest ally; smelling money and an earning opportunity, he snuggled up close to me. I also had the added benefit of having the Gurkhas as extra security if anyone ever threatened to kidnap me again.

It was now 20 June 2000 and the sale of PPS had been completed.

That evening I had drinks in the suite I had rented in the Dorchester. Arthur Andersen’s people, the ones who had sold PPS and the ones that were acting for me on the CPFC deal, joined me, along with my brother Dominic.

Charles Simpson of Andersen’s put pressure on me about doing this deal and all of a sudden, I felt like I was drowning.

My brain went into a meltdown. All the pressure of selling PPS came to the fore and within hours I was moving into another problematic high-pressured deal.

All my instincts said, ‘Don’t do it.’

I walked into the bedroom to get away from everyone. I had a deep sense of foreboding, and paced up and down the room muttering to myself, ‘I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this.’

I had worked myself into a bit of a state and was getting quite distressed when Dominic came in and was understandably concerned.

‘Jesus, Dom,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I’m ready for this. I’m being pushed into something that I’m not sure about.’

‘Don’t do it, you haven’t got to do anything,’ he replied. ‘Just tell Andersen’s to piss off and stand down.’

I got myself together and we all went out to dinner at Daphne’s in London to celebrate the sale of PPS. The conversation turned to Palace and my brother got quite irritable with Andersen’s, indicating I was having second thoughts and that they should slow things down.

Overnight, despite the grave reservations I had, I changed my mind again. My father had told me once that buying Crystal Palace was my destiny, and his words were ringing in my ears. So, for want of a better expression I called myself out. I said to myself: ‘You have sold PPS, you need and want a new challenge, and here it is, son. What is the worst that can happen?’ Bloody understatement of the year right there!

So I committed myself mentally to this deal and the following morning informed Andersen’s that I would be proceeding with the purchase of CPFC.

I met Jerry Lim again, this time with Charles Simpson of Andersen’s in tow, who also scratched his head at this strange little character. A deal was agreed with Lim that I would buy CPFC 2000 Ltd, the company that had been set up by him to buy the club and take them out of administration. This was to be done in complete secrecy. Lim had negotiated all of the deal to date and I wanted him to complete the process on my behalf in the strictest confidence, whilst ensuring all aspects of the deal came as close to my satisfaction as possible.

One key area concerned me: the stadium. There was no way I was dealing with Noades. I knew he would try and take me like he had taken Goldberg. Ridiculously he demanded £12 million for a stadium that was actually valued nearer £6 million.

So, via Lim, I resisted the Goldberg trap of paying option fees on freehold purchases or ninety-nine-year leases, Instead, I opted for a ten-year lease, believing it would enable me to be fleet of foot if ever there came an opportunity to move to a purpose-built stadium in the borough. I was not going to let myself be taken in by Noades. I later said that I did not need to deal with Noades on the stadium – given that he was getting on I could deal with his estate. It wasn’t the most tactful remark, but in my view there was no dealing on a reasonable level with this man. Ironically the fact I only wanted a ten-year lease put me in breach of Football League rules after my first day of ownership, as you needed to have a minimum of ten years’ tenure, but, as I was to find out later, there was no surprise in the lack of diligence exhibited by the governing bodies of this business.

I wanted Lim to deliver these things for the money he was getting out of the deal. At the time I believed he had the deal in the best shape but later I was to find out that that was not in fact the case and certain parties, namely Noades, might not have received monies if I had had the time or opportunity of dealing with it myself.

The transaction was now ready according to Andersen’s, which in any other deal wouldn’t have been true: we had limited access and did limited due diligence purely because the drop-dead date from the Football League for the club to exit administration or face liquidation was virtually here. But I was in the deal now and I took what can only be described as a fly. By making this somewhat reckless call, I backed myself to have the means financially and logistically to make up for any parts of the deal that fell short.

I transferred the money for Lim to complete the deal on my behalf and also had legal documentation drawn up between Garrets, my lawyers, and Vincent Brown, who was representing Lim, that would transfer the ownership of CPFC 2000 from Lim to me immediately after he acquired it.

The completion meeting was set for 5 July 2000. The newspapers had phoned me to ascertain if I was out of the deal now that Lim had confirmed that he was buying CPFC. I played along, confirming that if Jerry Lim said that he was buying Crystal Palace Football Club, then he was buying it. I didn’t want the papers running stories that could potentially threaten the deal.

In those days there was no such thing as the, frankly laughable, fit and proper person test for ownership of a club as there is now. Not that it would have been an issue for me personally. But if those rules and regulations had been in place at the time it would have prevented me from doing the deal this way.

So with my money Jerry Lim would buy Crystal Palace Football Club and all its assets through his vehicle CPFC 2000 and no sooner was that done than I would buy CPFC 2000 from him.

What needed to be paid was the administrator’s sale price for the ownership of the club. I also had to put £1 million into the fully paid-up share capital, which was a requirement to get the Football League share, and then pay Lim his fee.

All in all I put £10,175,000 into Vincent Brown’s account held to my order and agreed to meet him on the morning of 5 July at the offices of Denton Wilde Sapte, the solicitors handling the legals for the administrator.

I was not invited to their party, so I crashed it.

On 5 July I met Charles Simpson and my lawyer Jeff McGeachie and we made our way to Denton’s.

We rocked up there and somehow or other Andersen’s got us into the floor where the signing was taking place. Just as I was about to enter the room flanked by my team, I walked straight into the irritating Paterson, the administrator. His face said it all but he still had to ask, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘You’ll find out in a minute.’

It was clear that he knew from the moment I walked through the door why I was there, but he couldn’t help himself.

Over his shoulder was a room full of people. Lim’s lawyer was there and I made to go past Paterson into the room.

He blocked my path – as he was quite rotund this was not overly difficult for him. ‘You can’t go in there, the room’s full.’

‘You’re right, full of my bloody money. Now get out of the way,’ was my frosty response.

Pushing past him, I entered the packed room. Very quickly the penny dropped and everyone realised what was going on. Vincent Brown had just signed on behalf of Jerry Lim and he now signed everything across to me.

A Football League representative was there, a perplexed expression on his face. I would get to see that look on the faces of League officials many times over the years.

Andersen’s took over the show and within five minutes Crystal Palace had a new owner. Actually, in point of fact, it had two new owners in the space of those five minutes: one that lasted for approximately one hundred and twenty seconds, and yours truly.

Fifteen days after the protracted and difficult sale of PPS I was now the youngest owner of a football club in the world.

I was told the expectant management team of CPFC were sitting in another office waiting for Lim to come in and announce his purchase. They had been working with him for a long time on his takeover and clearly thought they were going to be part of a management buy-out and would be free to run the club in their own way whilst Lim ran around hatching his hare-brained schemes to build hotels and bowling alleys.

The silence in the room was palpable when I walked in and announced to Phil Alexander, Steve Coppell and Peter Morley – chief executive, first-team manager and acting chairman respectively – that I was now the owner of the club, thus dashing all their hopes.

Alexander, being the animal I know him now, disguised his disappointment and said, ‘Great, what do you want me to do?’

Steve Coppell just looked at me sullenly, although as I got to know him sullen was his normal expression, whether ecstatic or miserable.

And Peter Morley looked at me imperiously, remarking: ‘I guess you won’t be needing me any more.’ He was wrong in that and was later to become a great friend and ally.

I told them I was heading straight over to Selhurst Park to meet the staff and I would see them later. I would have loved to listen to their collective comments in their car on the way back to the ground.

The next morning would see the beginning of a new dawn and a complete change of culture for Crystal Palace FC.