6

LEARNING THE HARD WAY

SO WHAT HAD the drive to rid myself of £10.5 million no sooner had I got my hands on it really bought me? Well, let’s find the right words. If some people’s palaces are luxurious and opulent, my Palace was a bloody toilet.

In August 1994 I had invested £15,000 and turned it into nigh on £80 million; here I had invested 700 times that amount not in a shiny new showroom and big new dreams, but at first glance a bloody eyesore fraught with problems.

As I sat in my office that first morning – and when I say ‘office’ it was a Portakabin, an actual Portakabin, a testament to the investment of previous owners – I looked out over the threadbare pitch and at the derelict building fraudulently passing itself off as a stadium, not quite with my head in my hands but certainly with some vigorous shakes of the old noggin. Had I bumped it a bit too hard when I had made the commitment to buy CPFC?

I had arrived on my first day at 8.30 a.m. to familiarise myself with my newly owned surroundings and eager-to-impress workforce.

At 9.30 my staff trickled in an hour later than I had expected, not quite the start I was anticipating. Within hours I realised there was a vast difference between my version of hard work and professionalism and that of the incumbent staff.

And a warm welcome wasn’t exactly awaiting me online either. I made the mistake of logging onto one of the fans’ websites only to read, ‘Let’s give Jordan a chance until he makes his first mistake. Then we can hammer him.’ Bloody charming, I thought.

At lunchtime I walked out of the office I was using, which was considerably smaller than the one Phil Alexander the CEO was occupying, and found the office virtually deserted. I asked my inimitable PA Sara Warren where everyone was and she said they had all gone to lunch at the pub over the road.

I immediately marched over there and told them I wanted them back in the office now. When they returned I made it simple: ‘You don’t all piss off to lunch at the same time, and from now on no more drinking at lunchtime.’ The second point went down like a lead balloon. These people needed a major wake-up call.

This football club was in a shambolic state from top to bottom.

With a few exceptions, the commercial staff I inherited were an unmotivated and unenergetic bunch nobody else wanted and who were cheap enough for the administrators to keep on.

All manner of wonders that I had been unable to uncover in the limited time I had to do due diligence were becoming apparent. It was dawning on me that my typically cavalier approach to the gamble of buying the club might just take a big bite out of my not-so-clever arse.

During his ownership, Ron Noades had raised £6.5 million from advance season ticket sales to build a new stand. Unfortunately those long-term season ticket sales were now impacting on one of my biggest income streams, meaning in effect in a perverse way I was picking up the tab, without the benefit of the £6.5 million! The spend on the stand I was told was £3 million but it was a shell, all fur coat and no knickers, and one on which the manufacturers had refused to give a warranty because someone hadn’t paid the final instalment of money he owed them. That can’t be right! I mean, £6.5 million had been raised to build it and only £3 million had been spent. So where was the rest of the money? As I gazed out on to the football ground, I reasoned that the £3.5 million must be bound up in the facilities somewhere. But where?

The stadium was in an absolute state of disrepair. Virtually everywhere you looked it was almost coming down and the lounges were like the inside of an Indian restaurant that hadn’t been redecorated since the seventies. The training ground, if you can call it that, was a series of paddy fields located in the grounds of a sports club. So clearly the excess money hadn’t been invested there; no one had invested in the facilities for twenty years. I had an inkling of where the money had gone, and it was nowhere near Selhurst Park.

The state of disrepair was typified by some news I received less than a week after I had bought the club. The roof on the Arthur Waite stand, which had been there since the sixties, was unsafe. Given that it was predominantly the away supporters’ stand, my initial response was ‘And?’ but joking aside, I had a obligation to fix that roof. The safety council for the Football League told me I had three weeks to do it or close the stand for the season.

So I brought in my brother Dominic, and £200,000 and an age later, that stand had a new roof for the new season. Quite why it had taken forty years for anyone to provide one and quite why I had it dumped on my lap a week after buying the club I don’t know – oh yes, I do: the administrators didn’t have the money to do it; Goldberg barely had a chance to get an office before losing Palace; and Noades … do I really need to spell out why he may not have fixed the roof?

After my first few hours of pleasure at the stadium I was off to meet the fans’ hero and irrepressible football manager, Steve Coppell, who, it turned out, was bloody difficult to communicate with. As I said earlier his demeanour was sullen whether unhappy or exhilarated. And the group of players I inherited, and I use the word ‘group’ very loosely, seemed totally uninterested. Even the training and playing kit was falling apart and we were tied into a deal with a second-rate manufacturer of cheesecloth-like kits for another twelve months.

The new season opened in just over a month and I had the bare bones of a team, facilities that were falling apart and no commercial activity, Palace had no shirt sponsor, ground advertising, executive box sales or significant season ticket receipts, it had bare minimum training facilities and not even travel arrangements or plans for the imminently approaching season. It frankly had a piss-poor attitude that reverberated throughout the entire business.

This was all to change within four short weeks; with a complete dose of Jordan focus and finances all of the above were rectified. All executive boxes and advertising boards were sold. For the first time in two years we secured shirt sponsorship – a major brand in Churchill Insurance – and a busy industrious environment was created. Of course all this was with an incessant background hum of ‘it can’t be done’ or ‘it’s not done that way’. I don’t think so, was my attitude. To me it was simple: sell these things or get new jobs. I impressed upon Phil Alexander that we were now not in administration and he was accountable to me and his staff would deliver – and despite themselves they did.

The two major but very different and distinct parts of the business that make up a football club are the commercial operation and the playing side – the youth set-up was a third part that considered itself a different business. I felt that each part of the club had significant importance and I would set about treating all facets the same, whether it be a steward on match day or a multi-million-pound centre forward.

The team were heading off to China for a pre-season tour, paid for by Dalian Shied, a Chinese team. Palace had purchased the national captain from them two years beforehand. The tour made no commercial sense – it was a legacy of Mark ‘Head in the Clouds’ Goldberg’s time – but the club was committed. I had neither the time nor the inclination to fly to China, so I decided to stay back and set up my stall for running this new business.

Peter Morley, the chairman through administration, came in to see me. Peter was a charming man, with an austere demeanour. He was small in build and imperious in an unassuming way. He had been involved with Palace for a long time. His wife, Paula, who had a fearsome reputation, had been Noades’s secretary when he owned the club. Peter also had the impressive background of having been a main board director at Tesco’s.

For some reason Peter had taken a dim view of me, and once in my new office he wasted no time letting me know his opinion. ‘Young man, you may think you are special, but I have met many people like you and you are not special.’

Laughing, I said, ‘Peter, I want to build a club we can all be proud of and I would really like your help with that.’

That stopped him dead in his tracks. I think he expected some cocky response and I deliberately didn’t give him that. I knew he wanted to go to China, so I asked him would he please go for me. He sniffed at it and said if it would help the club then he would of course consider it. Peter and I over the years developed a very good friendship. He became one of my biggest supporters and I was always grateful for his wise words. In fact, I wasted no time in making him the club president.

Before they departed, Steve Coppell and I had a number of conversations about the playing squad and his coaching staff. Clearly they both needed investment, but Steve was not the easiest man to talk to. We attacked his coaching requirements first.

He needed a new first-team coach so, feeling like some eager-to-please new pupil, I asked who he wanted. That was Bobby Houghton, a well-respected coach who was working abroad with Malmo. I took Steve at face value and asked how much he would want. Steve came back with ‘Two hundred grand a year.’

Coppell was on £125,000. I was confused – was that the right money for his assistant? Apparently not! In fact, the right money was £50–60,000. I sighed inwardly. ‘So why did you suggest him then?’

‘Because you asked me who I wanted,’ Coppell replied.

‘So what do you want me to do then?’ I persisted.

‘Nothing, as Houghton wouldn’t come anyway.’

I looked at Steve Coppell, bemused by this totally pointless conversation. Was he being clever with me?

After that enlightening chat, we moved on to players. He liked two boys at Arsenal on the periphery of their first team, Tommy Black and Julian Gray, ideally both but certainly Black. I promised to look at buying them, asked for a steer on the price and got a big fat helpful ‘No idea!’

I wished him a successful trip to China, thinking it was an appropriate place for him after the Chinese torture of a conversation I had just had with him.

I immediately arranged to meet David Dein, the Arsenal vice-chairman, at their London Colney training ground. Dein greeted me with manager Arsène Wenger, and I think this was designed to impress me, but frankly I have never been over-impressed with anyone and I certainly was not happy to have to put blue bags over my feet to see Arsenal’s ‘wonderful’ training ground.

I listened to David Dein do his best Fagin impression of wanting to help, as he put it, any new boys coming into football. Almost straight away I worked out that you didn’t want Dein to do you any favours – he would sell you a player with a real foot and a wooden leg if he could. We got down to business and after much haggling Dein did me one of his wonderful ‘favours’ of selling me two young players for £500,000 each.

I had just spent a million pounds on two players who had no first-team experience on someone else’s say-so. I knew we should have got more information on the boys but I wanted to show Coppell I had faith in him. Quite why, I’m not sure, but that’s the thing about not knowing your business or people within it, you do things differently and learn the hard way.

Signing these two players was my first experience of dealing with agents and I wanted to make sure from the get-go that agents knew I was not an idiot who would pay them for doing absolutely nothing. The two agents in question became well known to me over the years: Tony Finnigan for Julian Gray and David Manassi for Tommy Black, and these first negotiations were terse to say the least.

Let me tell you how signing a player works, so you can see the absurdity of the situation.

You agree a fee with the selling club for the player. Ironically, that’s the easy part. You are then contacted by the player’s agent, who arranges to come and see you and negotiate a deal for his client. In principle, this is fine and for young boys early on in their careers pragmatic advice from an agent is perhaps appropriate; grown men later in their careers should be man enough to negotiate their own deal and I always had a big regard for players who did that. Players always knew exactly what they wanted, more often than not all agents achieved was a feeling of bad will and additional fees.

Upon meeting, the agent’s aim is to achieve the optimum amount of money he can get for his client and of course there is always going to be a difference of opinion on that subject as you negotiate.

The key factor for them is the player’s basic wage, his ‘guarantee’, but once that is achieved suddenly everything else becomes just as important.

Firstly you have sign-on fees, a golden hello every year for the player agreeing to be paid a basic wage. Then there are appearance bonuses for the player turning up – but isn’t that the very thing his basic wage and sign-on covers? Then you have goal bonuses for forwards – but hang on, surely that is what you pay them a weekly wage for? You also have the same for clean sheets for goalkeepers. The list goes on.

Agents ideally like to write in staged increases so if you sign a four-year contract with a player they want a pay rise every year irrespective of performance and, if they can, a pay rise after a certain number of games. Then there are loyalty bonuses, typically paid annually, which are for the monumental thing of the player turning up for a year, and on top of that they want win bonuses. Win bonuses? The fact that we are paying a basic wage, sign-on money, appearance money, etc., etc., on the expectation of them securing wins seems to be lost in all of this.

But that’s not all. Irrespective of where the player lives, you pay a relocation fee of about £10,000, then their medical insurance, and 90 per cent of the time all of these costs are greater than you want to pay.

With a straight face, the agent then tells you that he has worked for you, and it is hardly fair for the player to bear the costs of his fees. So after you pick yourself up off the floor you have this to consider.

Someone who is purporting to work for you, who has got a deal for his client that is worse for you than you could have got yourself, is now demanding to be paid or he would be unable to recommend this deal to his real client – who is not, of course, paying him, that is your job. Confused? Clear as mud, isn’t it!

How this business had got like this was beyond me. Greed, I suppose. The alternative is to not sign the player, but then you are in a public domain situation and the rules are different. Managers, supporters and results put pressure on you and in the end you have to bite down.

I soon developed a reputation as someone who didn’t pay fees to agents, which had good and bad ramifications. Over the years the controls and regulations over agents have changed, but they still get their money come what may. For the record, I would always be perfectly happy to pay agents who clearly work for me, and I did on many occasions.

The team arrived back from China. Coppell appeared to be pleased about signing Gray and Black, although he could have been unhappy, I couldn’t really tell!

I was more established in my new environment. Phil Alexander came back to find me sitting in ‘his’ office, having removed his stuff. He wasn’t best pleased. Mind you, I wasn’t best pleased about some of the unacceptable behaviour that had gone on in China either, notably from Phil. Phil Alexander, incidentally, was the only person to be in a business that went into administration and come out better off. He went in on a certain wage and came out on a much bigger wage, with all kinds of perks like the fees paid for his children’s schools and a one-year notice period. As I was to learn, ‘The king is dead, long live the king’ is Alexander’s mentality.

The pre-season was drawing to a close and there were four games left to play. These would be the first I was to see under my ownership and, oh boy, what joys awaited me.

I had been trying to develop a relationship with Coppell. He was a hero to the Palace fans. He had presided over the team’s most successful period, the 1990 FA Cup Final and finishing third in what is now the Premier League. More recently, his hero status had been elevated further as he managed Palace through the period of administration and kept them in the division, which was all fine to me, so of course I wanted to try and galvanise the euphoria surrounding a new owner with the popularity of the manager, but this relationship wasn’t really there. We seemed to be speaking different languages.

One evening he mentioned he was going scouting at Southend. I had heard he had been scouting with former chairmen, and I thought that this might be the ideal opportunity to start building a relationship with him. I asked if I could join him. Silence. Undeterred, I asked, ‘What time?’

‘Seven thirty at Southend,’ was the disinterested response.

I mooted the idea of going together and was greeted with silence again, so I changed tone. ‘OK, Steve, I would like us to go together,’ I said and set about arranging a time and location to meet. We must have spent five minutes with me saying one time, him another, me suggesting where we met, him wanting to meet somewhere else … After losing the will to live, I decided no more debate. We meet at Selhurst Park at six, and go in my car. I had my driver, John, so Coppell and I could discuss business on the way to Southend.

I wish I hadn’t bothered. I sat in the back of the car trying to strike up some form of rapport with him. It was like talking to the Grim Reaper. Everything was doom and gloom and very quickly I found it quite annoying. I had just spent £11.5 million and counting in three weeks, to listen to this negative, dour, unresponsive football manager do me a favour and sit in my car grunting at me.

As the journey continued I persevered, just to receive more of the same. In the end I remarked that he was so negative he was interfering with the signal strength on my phone. That raised a rare reaction, a smirk, and we discussed a few things like centre backs and was I prepared to spend £1.5 million on Jody Craddock at Man City etc., etc. I felt like I was being challenged and almost as if he wanted me to justify myself to him. So this fun-packed evening of bonding and bonhomie dragged by, and to top it all the game we watched was crap.

When we dropped him off later that evening, my driver John looked in the rear-view mirror and said, ‘Excuse me, boss, but fuck me that was hard work.’

The excitement of watching my first game as owner against non-League Crawley Town, at the time only some 120-odd places below us in the football pyramid, as part of a pre-season schedule was tempered by a 5–1 thrashing. It was embarrassing.

When I asked Coppell afterwards what that was, ‘I told you the deficiencies were deep,’ was his reply.

‘Are you joking, Steve? They are a non-League side, for crying out loud.’

All I got for my answer was a dismissive shrug.

And there was more to come. The following Wednesday we played Reading behind closed doors at the training ground. Reading were a league below us and managed by an ex-Palace player Alan Pardew and his assistant, Martin Allen. I remember hearing Pardew and Allen saying Palace had no arsehole and Reading should beat them up.

That offended everything I stood for as I did have an arsehole. Unfortunately my new team didn’t, and we got thrashed 4–0.

Again, that oh-so-endearing shrug of the shoulders from Steve Coppell.

It was evident further strengthening was required and someone suggested the signing of Neil Ruddock from West Ham United. Ruddock had been a good player and a big name, and even Coppell thought it was a good idea. On approaching West Ham, I discovered he was a free transfer, although he did have a weighty salary – which was not the only weighty thing about him. West Ham were very helpful. Harry Redknapp, the West Ham manager at the time, told me to put in a weight clause. ‘If his weight was right, he’d be right.’ So I decided to put a 10 per cent penalty on the contract we were proposing to offer him if he was over the recommended weight of 99.8kg, which by the way was still frigging huge. At the time I was grateful to West Ham for being so helpful and open, but soon realised they could not believe their luck, and would have driven him round in a cab, or possibly, in his case, a bus.

I phoned the ever-enthused Coppell and asked him to come to the meeting with Ruddock, thinking the weight clause issue was better coming from the manager. I should have known better.

‘I can’t come,’ he told me. ‘I have a previous engagement I can’t and won’t change.’

‘So, Steve, I am signing a player that costs ten thousand pounds a week and you can’t come?’

‘No, I can’t.’

‘OK, Steve, thanks for your help.’

I put the phone down, this guy was beginning to get on my nerves.

The raison d’être for Ruddock’s signing was a statement of intent. He was an experienced ex-England player, a good leader and I hoped he would be an example to this young squad we were assembling, and what a fine example he turned out to be.

The next warm-up game was away to Millwall, one of Palace’s biggest rivals just five or six miles down the road. Getting out of my car at the New Den I was greeted by a bunch of their supporters and for the first time I learnt my full name: ‘Simon You-are-a-fucking-cunt Jordan’. It was to change over the years to ‘Simon you blond-headed wanker’ or ‘Jordan you fucking poof’. Going to Millwall was always a pleasure.

So with that warm welcome I was looking forward to shutting up their fans with a resounding victory.

We lost 6–0!

And Ruddock didn’t even play.

After getting the ringing of laughter out of my ears from the Millwall fans, I went down to their manager’s office and saw Coppell in there. I declined to ask what the hell that was as another shrug might have resulted in the death of one of us. I just said: ‘Where was Ruddock?’

‘We didn’t have a pair of shorts big enough for him and he would have looked like a right cunt out there,’ said Coppell.

‘Would have fitted in nicely with the rest of them, then,’ was my response.

The silence that followed pretty much said it all for both of us.

The next morning my phone rang. It was Steve Coppell.

‘Not working out, is it?’ he said.

‘Nope,’ I replied.

‘Shall we call it a day?’

‘I think so,’ disguising my enthusiasm for his suggestion.

And that was that. No massive blow-out, just two people who didn’t gel. In hindsight, I think Coppell had been used to doing what he wanted and without having to answer to anyone. I was irritated by the lack of help he was prepared to give me in a whole new industry where I had no experience. Anyway, the reasons for our lack of chemistry were academic – we were parting company. It was a sure-fire way to lose some shine: appear to get rid of the fans’ hero.

With the season less than two weeks away, things had just got a little more difficult. I had a brainwave that was to make life even harder. I decided to approach Alan Smith, the ex-Palace manager. Smith had led Palace to the Premier League in 1994 and they only got relegated when the League dropped an additional team for the first and only time in their history and Palace went down with a record forty-nine points.

He also fell out with Noades, which was always a plus for me, and knew his way round the place. He was currently running Fulham’s youth academy and as Palace had a lot of young players, he seemed to be the ideal candidate.

I rang my newfound pal Peter Morley for his thoughts and advice. He had scant sympathy for Coppell. Reading between the lines I think Pete had found him difficult during administration and quite liked the idea of approaching Smith. He furnished me with his number. Thanks, Pete, you could have said you didn’t have it …

That evening I met Alan Smith at the Selsdon Park Hotel, intent on offering him the job to succeed Coppell if he didn’t say or do anything ridiculous. In my previous life I spent weeks, sometimes months, making senior appointments, but in this game, I did it at a hundred miles an hour and on the back of a fag packet.

We got on well and he asked if there was money available for players as he thought the squad needed significant strengthening. He asked what I expected, and naturally I said success. He also wanted to employ his own staff: Ray Houghton, the former Palace and Liverpool player, as his assistant and Glenn Cockerill, the ex-Southampton captain, as his first-team coach.

I have to say he was not quite what I expected, having spoken to him earlier in the day. In that call he came over as self-effacing with an edge of self-belief and cockiness. Yet on meeting him I could see he was more than enamoured with himself, but at least he was positive and talked a bloody good game.

We spoke for a couple of hours; I told him I would remove the existing first-team coach. Coppell had employed Brian Sparrow on his return from China. He had been in the job for about a week and was about to lose it. I learnt very quickly that football people walk around expecting this situation so the only reaction is ‘What am I getting paid?’ Paying someone for failing to do their job was one of the many things about football that was to perplex and irritate me.

Coppell came in on Monday morning and a statement was issued that said he was leaving by mutual consent. We agreed a figure to settle his contract. It was the first and only time I would pay a football manager what they wanted on their departure, which was a good thing as I went through my fair share in my unrelenting determination to bring success to this club.

Some fans were disappointed with Coppell’s departure and maintained that I had forced him out. I was to find out that football fans and the media often believe what they want and don’t let the truth stand in the way of their opinion.

After Coppell’s departure I wanted to give the players the courtesy of an explanation. I soon learnt that wasn’t time well spent. On the whole, the players couldn’t care less and were only concerned with things that directly affected them, such as how much they were getting paid and what cars they drove. Departure of managers was part of the territory and, more often than not, down to the performances of the players.

I took this opportunity to have a chat with Neil Ruddock about the importance of the example he would be setting and impressed upon him that I wanted him to lead the younger players. Neil said all the right things but I was to discover he was just a flash Herbert and was exactly the opposite of what I required.

I then phoned Fulham and spoke to their MD, Michael Fiddy, and informed him I wanted to speak to Alan Smith about the manager’s job. It was football etiquette to ask permission. In real terms that is utter rubbish, but I did it. I found the concept of ‘tapping up’ slightly ludicrous as what was the point of not sounding someone out before approaching the club they worked for? Fiddy said no problem and good luck with him. That should have been a warning sign right there, a complete lack of concern about keeping Alan in what was a key role as academy director.

The next day the press conference was called and I introduced Alan Smith, Ray Houghton and Glenn Cockerill as my new management team. I also introduced the world to my bright red Ozwald Boateng suit, a fashion faux pas I was to regret for years to come, and proceeded to rattle on about my ambitions and my belief I had brought together a team with a ‘winning mentality’. Because football is such a public business you get to say things in haste and repent at leisure. By now I had done lots of press and attracted a lot of attention being so young and, to be blunt, seemingly irreverent about everything.

Alan set about supplementing the squad or, let’s call it what it actually was, spending my money. We had already secured Mikael Forssell on a season-long loan deal from Chelsea and goalkeeper Stuart Taylor from Arsenal. We then signed Jamie Pollock for £750,000 from Manchester City and Craig Harrison from Middlesbrough for £250,000. So that was £2 million in four weeks and seven new players. All these signings were done in complete faith on my part, as this was the world I was now in and money kept it spinning. The key was to spend it wisely, again, learning the hard way.

The Sunday before the first game of the season the club had its annual open day where supporters got to tour the ground and meet all the players. It was my first experience of meeting the fans en masse. I pulled up in my ‘trademark Ferrari’, as it was now being called in the newspapers, and I was immediately surrounded by hundreds of fans. Two or three thousand people showed up that day, and for most of the afternoon I was signing autographs, which was a new experience but one I was soon to realise was part and parcel of the world of football.

On the whole I think we quite liked one another, the fans and I, despite my alleged treasonous removal of Coppell.

So after a somewhat difficult pre-season, with abhorrent results and now a new management team, we were to play our first game. We were playing away to the recently relegated and red-hot promotion favourites Blackburn Rovers, managed by the enigmatic Graeme Souness.

It was my first visit to a boardroom and Phil Alexander was drooling over the Blackburn directors and their facilities, like it was some kind of honour to be there. My attitude was, yes, it was impressive, but so what? I grabbed him to one side and said, ‘For God’s sake, Phil, stop walking around like we are lucky to be here.’

Blackburn as expected beat us quite comfortably 2–0, but it was bloody better than what I had seen to date.

After the game Graeme Souness, who I came to like very much, popped into the boardroom and made a point of saying hello. ‘Welcome to the madhouse,’ he joked.

‘Well, if it’s a madhouse, I should fit in nicely,’ I replied.

I left quickly after the game, scowling at Phil Alexander for being such a flake and heading back to London.

Our opening home game of the season was the live televised game against QPR and so there was a fair degree of excitement. My friends from Rhode Island, USA, Walter and George, came over. It was also a busy media week. I did a big interview on Sky, and a radio phone-in with the late great Brian Moore, in which I was very verbose, stating I intended to put Palace back in the Premier League in five years. I even went as far as to say that in potential terms Palace were the fourth biggest club in London, which endeared me no end to the Premier League Charlton supporters.

On the day of the game I was walking my two pals George and Walter around the stadium. I had a message put up on the electronic scoreboard and drew their attention to it. ‘To Walt and George …’ They started to take pictures of the scoreboard before the message finished ‘… a right pair of wankers’. Well, if you own a football club and you can take the piss out of your mates, why wouldn’t you?

We drew the game 1–1. After nearly six weeks, I had seen my team not get beaten – progress at last.

I had brought in two very important additions to support me. The first was my brother Dominic, initially as operations director, to look after all the logistics, starting with stadium maintenance and getting on with the remedial work, which it desperately needed. Dominic’s work became far-reaching as we uncovered so much abuse in every facet of the business – the culture was just rotten. We were being ripped off in every conceivable way: programme sellers pocketing monies; stewards signing one and another in for games when they were not there; merchandise being stolen by staff or given away; turnstile operators letting hundreds of their mates in per game for free. All of this – and more – cost us thousands of pounds.

I then brought in Kevin Watts, my human resources manager from PPS, as I knew that I would have to go through the staff with a dose of salts and would need a good HR guy.

On the commercial side, people’s standards were low, their discipline was poor, they were generally quite sloppy and after about six weeks of being in there I set about changing things.

First thing every Monday morning at 7 a.m., which was a shock to their systems, we had a management meeting consisting of all the department heads. These management meetings were for them to put forward ideas on how to improve the business and they were told that if they didn’t have any ideas, not to bother to come and work out how much longer they would be department heads for.

As if I was not having enough fun it wasn’t long until I experienced my first example of football’s internal bullshit and the nonsense that goes on inside this self-serving, make-the-rules-up-as-you-go-along industry. The club was being taken to the football tribunal by a player, Craig Foster, an Australian who hadn’t got his work permit renewed due to failing to meet the necessary criteria. Nevertheless, he was expecting to be paid up for the rest of his contract, which was for another two years.

Every year Foster was required to have his work permit renewed. To do this he had to have been a key member of the team for the club he played for and also play in over 60 per cent of the available international games for his country. Foster qualified on neither front, and without a work permit he couldn’t legally play professional football in this country.

At tribunal the case advanced by the PFA, the players’ union, and his lawyers was that even though he was not able to work or be paid legally under the laws of the land in this country, he should still be paid two years’ money – around £600,000 – for doing nothing according to the ‘laws of football’. Foster’s interest level was so great he couldn’t even be bothered to come back for his work permit hearing, let alone attend this kangaroo court. He just wanted to be paid.

The tribunal was made up of my first experience of so-called ‘football people’. You had a Football League representative, an FA council member, an ex-manager, Frank Clark the former Nottingham Forest boss, and you had a chairman who was a QC. And guess who got to pay for them attending? Muggins.

It was a complete try-on. It was the football establishment closing ranks around a newcomer, which believe it or not is how football really works, self-interest at all times.

Before Coppell left, the subject of Foster had come up and he had said in no uncertain terms that he didn’t rate the player and he would rather not have him back, preferring to use the money on someone better. So it came as a surprise to see Coppell as one of his key witnesses, and I was outraged when he got on the stand and told the tribunal that Foster was a major player and part of his squad plans if he had remained in charge. I nearly choked.

It was clear that the tribunal wanted to make Crystal Palace, or more pertinently me, pay Foster, even though the law of the land said differently. When I went on the stand I launched into a diatribe. I said that I didn’t recognise the authority of this tribunal, and pointed out that if they awarded the player this money they would be breaking the law and I would take this into the public domain. I also launched a scathing attack on Coppell, quoting exactly what he had told me. All of which I am sure endeared me to the establishment no end.

In one of the breaks I bumped into Frank Clark, who had the damn audacity to tell me this is how football was, I should accept this and just pay it. I erupted with fury and we had to be separated.

My legal team really cranked up the legality of it all. Despite their best endeavours the tribunal knew they couldn’t find a basis that wouldn’t be challenged outside of the football world, although they bloody tried.

Most people accepted the internal self-regulation of football. From the get-go that was not me and I put the football establishment on notice very early of that.

The decision was begrudgingly given: we didn’t have to pay Foster’s wages but had to pay his signing-on fees of £100,000, which they argued could have been paid at the start of his contract. This enraged me. I had to pay £100 grand to a player I had never even seen, as well as £10,000 worth of costs for the comic tribunal. Taking the damn thing to the High Court would have been uneconomical so I had to get on with it, but not before telling the tribunal exactly what I thought of them.

This was my first experience of how everybody else, bar the owners and funders of the clubs, seemed to be looked after. Everything appeared to be geared to the well-being of players, agents and managers and tough shit on the club owners – how can that be right?

Then, and over the years to come, I listened to what was, in my opinion, supercilious rot from Gordon Taylor, the head of the PFA, a man who ran the smallest union around but had the biggest salary of any union leader, who talked about players’ wages and how they have a short career. If you are earning £5,000, £10,000, £50,000 a week it can afford to be a short career.

Also players were insured for injuries, which most of the time was paid for by the club, so if their career finished then they would get a huge pay-out.

Managers had fixed-term contracts and if they were fired for doing a poor job, they got paid up to the end of their contract or part of it. In other words: paid to fail.

Despite our first point, the team had started poorly, winning only one of our first five games. Alan Smith was having trouble with certain players and struggling to get control over them. One particular player was getting up his nose, Jamie Fullerton, a Scottish international and a barrack-room lawyer. Every club had one, apparently, and Alan wanted rid of him. So I did it for him, which should have set off alarm bells for me as the manager should be able to deal with these things himself, but again I was learning the hard way.

I sent Fullerton a letter about his conduct and he ignored it. So I had Kevin Watts remove him from the training ground in front of all the players. Within hours I had his agent on the phone, demanding he was either reinstated or paid off. That call was quickly followed by one from the PFA. I told them all to go forth and multiply.

The next day he returned to training, and again I had him removed. I warned him I would call the police and have him arrested for trespassing. I knew I couldn’t but I wanted him to realise I was serious. We also served him with a dismissal notice. His agent and the PFA were up in arms demanding meetings; I refused.

At the time this was controversial behaviour. The PFA were powerful and used to getting their way, but not with me. Players were under the impression they could do and say as they pleased – perhaps they could in other clubs but not here. After a short war of attrition the penny dropped and Fullerton was moved out to Dundee on a free transfer.

I wanted to support Alan as much as I could, so as well as ridding him of troublesome players, I supported him with purchases. He wanted a goalkeeper and an attacking winger. The two players he identified were in the Latvian national team managed by Garry Johnson.

Allegedly we scouted both of them. I say ‘allegedly’ because at later times when I looked into the actual scouting and research behind buying players and multi-million-pound investments of my money there was not a lot, another thing I learnt the hard way and set about changing.

They both played for Skonto Riga in Latvia. I bet the club couldn’t believe their luck when we paid £650,000 for keeper Aleksandrs Kolinko and £1.5 million for winger Andrejs Rubins. I spoke to Gary Johnson whose words were: ‘You can stand on me on these two players’ and I can assure you there were many times later I wished I had stood on Johnson from a great height.

Their agent was Phil Graham. Physically he reminded me of a cross between Ming the Merciless and Dick Dastardly. He wanted a large commission for getting them to join the club, but I was not prepared to pay him a fee as he was working for the players negotiating their contracts.

An avaricious man, Graham said he would be able to reduce the players’ wages to a figure I was comfortable with if I paid him. This was the first example of how disingenuous agents were and how much they really cared about their clients, although the players would never believe it.

At the end of September we had played ten games, had the princely sum of eight points and were third from bottom of the league. This was despite having brought in nine players and spent over £5 million on transfer fees, as well as taking several highly paid Premier League players on loan. It was not quite the start I had envisaged. Coupled with the investment in the team, I was buying a new eight-acre training ground for £1 million. I was certainly putting my money where my mouth was, but getting scant return.

Alan decided that during the international break he wanted to take the players away on a five-day trip to a training camp in Jerez in southern Spain. This was supposed to boost morale and help the players bond.

So in the first week of October this bunch of ingrates were ferried off to a camp to train and get themselves together. I joined them at Alan’s request; the surroundings were absolutely first class. I watched a couple of training sessions and played some golf.

Over the first few months I had had little contact with the players, preferring as much as possible that the manager deal with them, but of course I knew who was who. I also got the impression they eyed me warily. One of our more talented young players was Clinton Morrison, who had a rather unfortunate attitude, so I had formed a dim view of the little rat bag. I later christened him the ‘Pest’, which was how I always referred to him. He was a belligerent little runt and on one afternoon in this luxury training ground in gorgeous Spain he sauntered past me with some of his teammates. I went to acknowledge them and was greeted by Morrison with a scowl and a kissing of his teeth. No, Clinton, not at me.

I called Morrison over and let him have both barrels. ‘Listen, you, I have had about enough of your shitty little attitude. Next time you kiss your teeth I am going to kick them down the back of your throat.’

This shocked him and his teammates: it was not how the chairman was supposed to speak to his players.

From that day forward I never had another problem with Clinton. He was a good lad underneath all his bluster and I became one of his major supporters, awarding him a new contract later that season. I had a very good relationship with both him and his mother, who was very important to him – just ask Rufus Brevett of West Ham, who had a scrap with Angela Morrison in a players’ lounge.

Whilst I was in Spain I found the atmosphere to be a little too carefree and easy. Certain players and management were going out at night to some local bar, which I soon found out doubled as a knocking shop.

The last day comes around and the players are having a drink in the hotel bar so I decide to join them. Sitting in the corner was Andy Linighan, last year’s player of the year. He was a brooding character and it was obvious that he had been drinking heavily; I made the mistake of trying to engage him in a conversation. He wasted precious time airing his grievances, claiming the trip was ‘shit’, questioning why he wasn’t in the team and demanding to know why Steve Coppell had been sacked, although apparently he had never liked Coppell anyway. Rather than quit whilst he was ahead, which incidentally he was not, he then turned his verbal attentions to me, being quite provocative and confrontational. I tried to calm the situation but Linighan was having none of it, finally overstepping the line by saying I knew ‘shit about football and should stick to selling mobile phones’. All of this was listened to by the other players.

I kept my temper through gritted teeth, said goodnight to the other players and left the room, raging. The assistant manager Houghton and the rest of the coaching staff were sitting at a table in another part of the hotel as I burst in. I gave them a rundown of the conversation I had just had with Linighan. ‘I want this drunken imbecile dealt with,’ I said.

Houghton and Cockerill went out to see him as he was staggering out of the toilets. Houghton was the first to speak to him. Linighan snarled back, ‘You can fuck off too, you little cunt’ and then headed for the door and went out into the night.

That was it for me. I got Alan Smith out of bed and my PA on the phone and told her to book Linighan on the first flight out of Spain. Then I told Cockerill and Houghton to go into his room, pack up his stuff and wait for him.

About 5 a.m. the phone rang.

‘Chairman, it’s Andrew.’

‘Who?’ I ask.

‘Andy Linighan, why am I being sent home? I’m sorry. I love this club, chairman.’

‘I don’t care, Andrew, you don’t get to abuse me in public and apologise on the QT.’

‘I am not going, chairman,’ he said weakly.

‘Oh yes you are, if I have to physically put you in the car,’ and I hung up.

Linighan caught his flight and the rumour circulated amongst the players that there had been retribution for Linighan’s unacceptable behaviour.

I flew back from Spain to headlines in the Sun that there had been a fight between the player and myself. Once back I wasted little time terminating Linighan’s contract. Another bad egg gone, but I was far from impressed with Alan’s control over this trip.

As if I didn’t have enough on my plate I became embroiled in a row with Terry Venables. After Kevin Keegan had walked out on England, the press were speculating about who should be the next England manager and I was asked my view as Venables was a former Palace manager and was heavily tipped to succeed him. I don’t know what the big deal was. I just said if Venables was the only name on the list for England manager, then it was a very poor state of affairs for English football.

This provoked a furious response from Venables and his agent Leon Angel called me, demanding I make a public apology.

I told Angel where to go, as I was just saying what I thought. This was the first of a few altercations with Angel over the years.

During my first season I joined the team on Friday evenings on away games staying in the same hotel. I noticed that the players were put to bed early but the management team and other back-room staff would stay up drinking quite heavily, on expenses of course! This struck me as strange the night before a game, but looking back for some reason I stupidly accepted that this was part and parcel of the management team bonding. In fact, it was them taking liberties, and after seeing them getting on the team coach blurry-eyed and hung over one time too many, I banned them from drinking the night before an away game.

Soon we were in the papers again. This time the story was about Ruddock, the player I had personally asked to set a shining example for the rest of the team. He had taken the players out after a game (which they had lost!) to a swish London hotel for a night out and the papers claimed they were drunk, singing ‘going down going down’.

Naturally, when I confronted Alan Smith and Ruddock, they denied the story was true.

In my desire to make the players proud of their club and for us to look the part one of my not-so-bright ideas was to get all the players and management to wear club suits. Not just any suits. I wanted them to wear suits made by the celebrity tailor Ozwald Boateng. I wanted the suits to be handmade and I wanted the lining of the jackets to be red and blue, Palace’s team colours.

It turned out to be a nightmare as footballers come in all shapes and sizes and not all are suited to the designs of highfalutin Savile Row tailors, especially the kind of suits that Boateng produced, which were fine for lithe – OK, skinny – people like myself but not so good for strapping young footballers and slightly pot-bellied coaching staff.

Our next game was at home to Grimsby, a team we would expect to beat. The performance was dire. Looking back it was no wonder, given the leadership from Alan Smith and his team and the example they were setting. After this game I took an action which followed me for many years and shaped people’s perception of me. For the first and only time, I went into the dressing room to talk to the players about their performance. Smith was talking to them and, in the middle of his speech, Andy Morrison, a player on loan from Manchester City, stood up, bent over and farted.

That was it for me. I’d had enough and exploded with rage at the players. You have to accept the industrial language, as this was how they spoke and anyway was the only language this fucking lot understood.

‘How fucking dare you think you can behave the way you are and put out fucking performances like that? You are a fucking embarrassment. If you are under the impression you are going to get this manager the sack, you are very fucking wrong, and you will all go before he does.

‘If you don’t want to be here then you can all fuck off and form an orderly queue outside my office and I will get you away from this club. Have some pride.’

Surprise, surprise, there was no response. They were all looking to the floor like little boys.

I walked out, taking Alan with me, and sat in his office.

‘Get a hold of this, Alan. Whether I was right or wrong to come into the dressing room I have done it because you are not dealing with it. I want you to take a stance and put Mullins, Morrison and Jamie Smith on the transfer list tomorrow.’

This was shock tactics. Mullins and Morrison were amongst our star young players and Jamie Smith was considered to be a strong character. The next morning, much to the surprise of their teammates we transfer-listed them – ironically we received no offers, giving them a touch of reality – and Alan Smith went and did a massive interview in the papers, and the headline was, ‘Players are lazy, sloppy overpaid whingers who only care about what they look like.’ This sort of outburst was unheard of at the time in football, especially from a manager.

My mentality was to support my manager, and to build a club on a foundation of respect. I didn’t deliberately seek controversy or confrontation, I just didn’t avoid it. I wanted the players and management to behave as winners and role models, not this shambles, but because of my determination and single-mindedness and, at times, ignorance, I was building myself a reputation in the media.

My programme notes were also attracting attention. I wrote them for every game. I didn’t pull any punches and was very strident in my opinions. Within a year, segments of my column were being lifted by lazy journalists and put in match reports, which put a stop to me writing in the programme.

My attitude towards other football clubs had also not gone unnoticed. I was not overly interested in going into boardrooms: I went to games to win, not to fraternise; drinking Chardonnay with the ‘enemy’ didn’t interest me. I expressed this sentiment quite openly, which I suspect made the owners of other teams think ‘Who is that cocky arrogant bastard?’ But frankly I didn’t care about their opinion.

I had walked out of a couple of boardrooms as they would not allow my guests in, preferring to go in the public bar instead; I had been refused admission in one boardroom as I was not wearing a tie. The trend of not going into the boardroom was to continue over the years. I much preferred eating a hot dog in the car park outside away grounds than eating prawn sandwiches in the boardroom, although my outlook softened as time went by.

As if a light had been turned on, the team suddenly clicked.

It started with an away game at Leicester in the League Cup. They were the cup holders. The Premier League outfit put out a full-strength side to defend their trophy and were expected to win with relative ease. The team performance was outstanding and we trounced them 3–0.

Around this time I allowed Alan to supplement the squad even further and we took Steve Staunton on loan from Aston Villa and attempted to sign James Beattie from Southampton. Glenn Hoddle, the ex-England manager now at Southampton, accepted an offer for £1.5 million, but then the Southampton chairman Rupert Lowe got involved. He wanted £2 million. I told him that we had already agreed a price with Hoddle and Lowe told me that Glenn had changed his mind.

‘Well, that’s not very Christian of him,’ I remarked, referring to his much publicised religious beliefs.

So I offered £2 million, but then Lowe wanted £2.5 million so I made that offer. He hiked it up to £3 million, and once again I offered what he asked for and then he came back with £3.5 million.

That was it as far as I was concerned. Alan still wanted another striker and I suggested Dougie Freeman, an old favourite. I bought him back from Nottingham Forest for £750,000, little realising that it would prove to be some of the best money I would spend at the club.

After the cup win the team went on a great run, winning a succession of games that fired us up the league. Our cup run continued and we beat Sunderland again from the Premier League to reach the semi-finals, where we faced Merseyside giants Liverpool.

After six months of turmoil we seemed to be in a period of harmony. The only exception was Ruddock, whose performances and conduct at the club had been far from exemplary. Alan was fed up with him. He had been sent off twice, had been at the heart of off-the-field nonsense and was fined eight times for being overweight.

My patience finally snapped and I summoned him to Selhurst Park. Sheepishly, Ruddock came into my office and I proceeded to give him a tongue-lashing. I told him he was a disgrace, calling him a fat slob and to my amazement he broke down. Ruddock was sat in my office whining about his weight and moaning about his personal life. This cut no ice with me. I warned him that if he wasn’t under the weight level in forty-eight hours I would find some way to fire him.

He weighed in underweight for the first time for two months and stood on the scales celebrating like a boxer, in his case a bloody heavyweight. The point was made but it was the beginning of the end for him at Palace.

Players seemed to think they lived on an island on their own where the normal rules of society or employment didn’t apply to them. I did an interview around this time, cryptically saying that ‘I cared about players as much as they cared about me.’ Daniel Sugar, Lord Sugar’s son, phoned me to say that my comment had greatly amused his father as he knew exactly what I had meant when I said it. The culture of football revolved around taking liberties, and players were the biggest exponents of it.

Three examples sum up the culture of a large number of footballers. The first was the squad training kit. No sooner was it shipped to the training ground for the players to wear during the season than it was reported lost, as certain highly paid players were stuffing it in the boots of their cars and selling it as knock-offs. Then there was the married player on loan who was staying in a hotel on his own and complaining about not seeing his wife for weeks, but putting condoms on his expenses claim. Lastly there was the player who came into my office with his agent, clutching four match reports from the Sun where journalists had given him a high performance rating. This he saw as a reason for me giving him a fat new contract. Pillars of society? No. Just young boys being paid a lot of money by people like me and afforded sometimes far too much leniency in the scheme of the world.

January came around and we played Liverpool in the first leg of the League Cup semi-final at home in front of a full house; the atmosphere was electric. I had invited John Barton, a devout Liverpool fan and the MD of 121 who seven months earlier had sanctioned the purchase of PPS, giving me the money to waste – sorry, invest – on football. We pulled off a sensational 2–1 victory with goals from Rubins and Clinton Morrison. Liverpool got a goal back with ten minutes to go but the headlines were about how Morrison’s performance and Alan Smith’s management had turned Palace around.

But of course there was some controversy that had been stirred up by the papers. Morrison was asked if he had as many chances as Michael Owen would he have expected to have put them away? Clinton of course said yes, which the papers turned into Morrison considering himself better than Owen.

‘The Cocky Face of Division 1 puts the Premier League Mighty in their place’ was just one of their headlines and set up a spicy return leg at Anfield.

Alan had started believing his own press, and had become a little bit difficult to deal with. He loved seeing himself in the papers. I remember around this time taking him for a drink at the Fifth Floor Bar at Harvey Nichols. He was carrying around a copy of the Evening Standard as it had a big picture of him on the back cover.

I will always remember Alan walking down the road outside Harrods and some guy coming up to him with a magazine. Alan must have assumed he had been recognised and took the magazine and signed it. The guy just looked at him in total amazement, as he was a Big Issue seller and wanted Alan to buy one, not give him his bloody autograph.

The eagerly awaited Merseyside return leg arrived, and it was a media circus. I came into Anfield with the team and as we walked through, Gérard Houllier, then Liverpool manager, was waiting for us, insisting on shaking everybody’s hand and wishing them luck. This annoyed me intensely as it was clearly just a mind game, so I ignored him and walked past.

But this was nothing to what I was going to get in their boardroom.

Before going upstairs I went in and wished Alan and his staff good luck and told them how proud I was of them, irrespective of the result.

I only went into Liverpool’s boardroom because my best friend Mark Ryan was a big Liverpool fan and had brought his dad along. We were roundly ignored by their chairman David Moores, but one of the Liverpool directors handed me a plaque, saying, ‘We like to give the smaller teams a memento of their visit to Anfield.’

I responded in the only way I knew: ‘You are fucking kidding me.’

I turned away handing my coat off to one of the boardroom attendants to hang up. Unfortunately it wasn’t a boardroom attendant, it was Chris De Burgh the singer of ‘Lady in Red’.

How embarrassing. But in fairness, he did hang it up for me.

I looked at the famous Anfield chairman’s room. It was the size of a broom cupboard with a big chandelier in the middle of it that almost touched the floor.

As Moores refused to even acknowledge me my only thought was, ‘God, I hope we beat these arseholes.’ That was another prayer that went unanswered: we were trounced 5–0.

Alan Smith had made a rousing speech before the game, telling the players they needed to hold Liverpool at bay for the first fifteen minutes and we had a chance of pulling off a major shock. That worked. Fifteen minutes into the game we were already 3–0 down.

Liverpool had moved Steven Gerrard to right back to stop Rubins and in the first five minutes he crunched him with a welcome to Anfield message. Rubins was never the same after that game.

So we were brought down to earth with a bang, and that light, which had suddenly come on for the team, was just as suddenly switched off. The team went into complete free fall and failed to win in the following twelve matches.

We dropped down the league like a stone. I went out and signed more players, including Matthew Upson on loan from Arsenal and agreed to cover his £10,000-a-week wages. I was later to find out that was one of those favours David Dein liked to do for you, as he was only earning £5,000 a week at Arsenal.

We also signed Ricardo Fuller and Gregg Berhalter, a US international, and Aki Riihilahti, who had just scored for Finland against England in the 2001 World Cup qualifier at Anfield.

Then I went and spent a further £1.5 million bringing Palace hero David Hopkin back from Bradford. Hopkin was on £16,000 a week, which was huge for the then First Division, and didn’t even want to come back to Selhurst Park. So I flew up to Bradford with Ray Houghton, who had played with Hopkin at Palace and went to meet the Bradford chairman Geoffrey Richmond. I always liked Geoffrey. He was a huge man and reminded me a bit of Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary. There was quite a bit of the dour blustery northerner about him, but I warmed to him because he had a great sense of humour.

He was desperate to sell Hopkin as they needed the money and were about to be relegated from the Premier League. For some reason I had convinced myself we were desperate to sign Hopkin as our plight was now pretty perilous.

Richmond called in Hopkin and after a preamble where the player expressed his views, namely he was quite happy where he was thank you very much, an instantaneously incandescent Richmond announced, ‘I don’t like you and I have never liked you. If you want to stay then by all means stay, but I promise you I will make your life a fucking misery.’

Hopkin was stunned, and stammered, ‘But I have never met you, chairman.’

Undeterred Richmond boomed back, ‘I don’t care; I don’t like you.’ Geoffrey was a huge man and clearly used to intimidating players.

Hopkin left the room to talk to Houghton and Geoffrey winked at me. ‘Fuck me,’ I said, ‘I thought I could bang a bit.’ Within minutes Hopkin came back in and agreed to sign.

The next game we lost 2–0 to Preston, plunging us into even deeper trouble.

No sooner had we signed a midfielder, than another one fell out with the club, Alan and ultimately me. Jamie Pollock had been difficult for Alan Smith to manage all season. He was a bright lad, with a slightly inflated opinion of his own importance. He had clashed with Smith on a number of occasions. He had been sent off in an earlier fixture and missed the Preston game through suspension, but had taken it upon himself to go on radio and criticise Alan and his team selection. This resulted in an ugly altercation between Alan, myself and Pollock and us shipping him out the door on loan to Birmingham.

Rather than shoulder the blame for the team’s failing, Smith looked to deflect some of it on to the coaching staff he himself employed. As a result, he fired the first-team coach Glenn Cockerill, who probably was the weakest link in the chain between himself and the assistant manager Ray Houghton. Smith then brought in Terry Bullivant as first-team coach. Earlier in the year he had rehired Stevie Kember, who was a Palace legend, making him reserve team manager. Without knowing it, Smith had hired his immediate successors.

We finally reached crisis point on 28 April, losing 2–0 at home to Wolves.

The fans were in an uproar. Alan Smith had been getting a hard time from them in recent weeks but this loss looked more than likely to have guaranteed relegation.

I had spent £8.75 million – a huge sum in the First Division in 2001 – on players and quadrupled the wages bill and we were staring at relegation. A unified crowd booed Alan off the pitch. Ironically, the same crowd who three months earlier had proclaimed him a hero turned on him with absolute vilification.

I made a decision after the game. It was time for him to go.

What choice did I have? He had lost the support of the fans and the dressing room and if we were going down, I wasn’t going down without a fight.

I walked into Alan’s office and with great sadness, the only time I ever really felt it, I fired him. I think Ray Houghton was expecting to take over the team but I fired him as well.

From the fans’ point of view, it was too little, too late, but I had done it and took the monumental decision to put Steve Kember and Terry Bullivant in temporary charge for the final two away games.

Over the years my relationship with the Palace fans was very important to me. In all football clubs, fans are the lifeblood of the game. Without fans you have empty stadiums and the air football breathes is made up of the fans’ fervour. For the ten years that I owned the club, I enjoyed a very good relationship with 95 per cent of the fans. Of course, there was always a vociferous minority on websites, and for them, even if I had bought Lionel Messi, built a brand-new stadium and halved the ticket prices, they still would have said the hot dogs were shit. But I enjoyed a unique relationship with Palace fans and over the years that was to extend to fans of a lot of other clubs who liked the fact I was prepared to stand up for what I believed in.

Early in my tenure I went into the fans’ end in an away game at Norwich and was picked up and lifted in the air and thrown from the front to the back of the stand for ten minutes as their way of saying hello to their new chairman. Whilst that was fine, sitting with the fans is not usually the right thing to do. Fans want to know you are funding and running your club, not necessarily sitting next to them in the stands.

I had a particular affection for away fans as their passion and fervour was something to behold and I admired and respected them for their commitment, so much so that during my first season I refunded the entire away support their ticket money for one particularly inept performance in an away game to Barnsley. Nothing like this had ever been done before, but I felt it was the right thing to do.

* * *

Back to the last two games. We needed to win both of them and then rely on other results going our way to avoid relegation.

Steve and Terry were very calm and confident. I suspect they felt they had nothing to lose.

They changed the team around and we went to Portsmouth three days after that shocking display at home to Wolves.

Portsmouth were also in a relegation battle so this was a must win game for both sides. We destroyed them, winning 4–2.

We had given ourselves a chance. We needed to win away on the Sunday against Stockport and hope other results went our way. It appeared relegation was between Portsmouth and us. The game on Sunday was televised and we took 3,000 fans down to Stockport.

I sat up in the stand watching the game unfold with the chief scout Barry Simmonds.

Less than a year ago I had been sitting in my offices at PPS selling a business for a vast amount of money, now I was sitting at a football match watching a club I had owned for less than a year that I had pumped £20 million-odd into, and we were facing relegation, which would have huge financial ramifications.

The game was not a pleasant experience as we huffed and puffed and at half-time it was 0–0. Portsmouth were winning their game, and it looked like we were going to be relegated.

We had chance after chance in the second half. When we missed one chance I kicked the structure in front of my seat, putting my foot through it in exasperation. I had to pay for it later.

The game was coming to a close and out of the blue with three minutes to go, we scored.

David Hopkin, who ironically hadn’t wanted to play for Palace, blatantly handled the ball on the edge of our box and the referee completely missed it.

He cleared it upfield to Clinton Morrison, who put Dougie Freedman through on goal and he scored, catapulting himself into legend status at Palace.

Cue pandemonium from the fans who burst onto the pitch. It took two or three minutes to restore order. Portsmouth had won and appeared safe but Huddersfield, who went into the last game two points clear of the relegation zone, were losing at home to Birmingham. If we held onto the lead they would be the club to drop.

We did just hold on and waited five minutes after our game for the Huddersfield result to come through. They had lost when the Birmingham goalkeeper made a wonder save in the last minute. We had avoided relegation by one point and were celebrating narrowly avoiding failure. Said it all, really.

The journey home was riotous as myself and Dominic travelled back on the team bus and celebrated with the team. At the time, the avoidance of failure felt like winning. God, I was so bloody naïve.

The next night I took the players out for an end-of-season dinner at Quaglino’s and then to the lap-dancing venue Spearmint Rhino’s in London. I gave the players £5,000 and told them to have some fun – not something I suspect most chairmen would do. Well, I suppose that’s what happens when your chairman is aged thirty-two. The next morning my phone rang. It was one of the red-top newspapers, alerting me to the fact that my players had been out last night en masse and had been in a lap-dancing bar. I said, ‘I know, I was with them.’ That stopped them in their tracks.

I had learnt so much during that season. I never meant to have all this aggravation, it just followed me because I wouldn’t accept things as they were. I was a proud man and wanted a club to be proud of and I would stop at nothing to get it. The narrow escape at the end of the season convinced me that fortune favours the brave and I was golden. But I was to learn that life affords you both good luck and bad, and I had just used up a large slice of my good luck.