Sale of Spurs to Scholar

[NO1JIB]

from what i know of it, the old board got into financial difficulty with the west stand, rather than help out, scholer waited till they were skint then gaffed in with a consortium behind him, intending to float us on the stock market and essentially fucking the club up [imo] anyone could buy shares and we had to pay dividends to cunts who had no interest in football. many fans took up the offer as well, to own a bit of spurs, thats cool enough but it was the speculaters that made us sell waddle and a decent shot at the title with him.
the wale/richardson board werent perfect, few boards are, but the reason for building the west stand in the first place was because they felt the old wooden one wasnt safe, they intended to build a stadium quite similar to what we have now, this was 5 years before bradford. executive boxes are fuckers and the stands too small, but in those days, crowds were starting to fall throughout football, so it kinda made sense.
main reason the capacity shrunk is because sugar put boxes on the shelf and turned one of the best stands in football into one of the worst. you wont see him bring that up on the apprentice though, cos he never makes mistakes. thats also why he turned down bergkamp.

 

[stevee]

Going to stick this in here, as it is to do with Scholar.

I don't know who put this together but the editing is awful.
It's to do with Spurs financials under Scholar, it starts with Spurs, then there's a bit about agents, then it goes back to Spurs.
For any of the younger fans who don't know, Scholar had the idea of buying various companies with the idea being that their profits would fund Spurs, it turned out the complete opposite.

 

[Smoked Salmon]

The Sugar debate is a tough one. Unlike Sammy I do actually think he "saved Spurs". The alternative was very bleak. We could easily have been a forerunner of Leeds United, consigned to the lower leagues and living past memories of life in the top division. So, in that sense, I think it's entirely reasonable and fair to say that Sugar saved us from the disaster that had been created under Scholar.

However, like Sammy, I don't buy the idea that Sugar proved to be the best thing for the club and therefore can just now rest on the laurels of the saviour label. Sugar has referred to his time at Spurs as a nightmare since, to him, it was the only business venture he failed at. What he seems less willing to admit though is what caused that nightmare. The fact is that he knew fuck all about football. He was a casual fan who bought a local club because he thought he could make it into a successful business. It was that simple. He did not want to listen to the football people at the club, and didn't want to get in any external football advisors. To him, he knew best as the businessman and he recruited managers on that basis. He saw that a manager had had a bit of success at another club and thought that he would get exactly the same for Spurs. Francis, recruited because of the success he had just had at QPR. Gross, because foreign managers were en vogue and he had just won the Swiss league. Graham because he's won tons of trophies, so, by default, that must be enough. Sugar didn't get the fact that there were other variables in football that did not exist in regular business. You didn't bring in people just because they had done X number of things elsewhere. His attitudes to players weren't much different. Didn't matter if they were the right or wrong players, they had done something elsewhere so that must be good enough. Player becomes popular and shows talent? Fuck him, just get in another (as Teddy Sheringham's autobiography attests to).


Sugar needed football people around him and he needed to listen to them. His job was to spot the silly spending, which he did well. His job wasn't to think he knew best on every other element of the club. That, to be, was his downfall. A lot of people accuse Levy of the same, but, between the two, you'd have to say that Levy has been willing to listen to others more than Sugar did.

All that said, I think history will be kind to Sugar. He was a necessary and vital step to ensure our place in the top league, and the alternative was too bleak to consider. He just wasn't the man to take us further on.

 

[DeeGee]

Fuck me, I remember actually watching a game for 20 odd mins in the levelled out west stand building site before being spotted by a cozzer & escorted to the paxton.
It's also ironic that the most successful years of my time as a fan attending 6 cup final appearances (inc replays) a LC final, UEFA cup final & semi finals in Hillsborough/Highbury/ Vllla Park x2 and Wembley coincided with the start of the financial meltdown of the club and I was unaware. I was too young to understand. I was12 when I joined the SSC and had just turned 19 when we won the UEFA cup.
However, there were only 3 TV stations until 1982, no internet and news did not travel/leak so fast.

We have always been the non establishment club whereas Woolwich have been the establishment club.
Maybe being old Etonians at the helm helps somewhat when you have a conservative Government.

Scholar was a fan, but knew fuck all about how to run a football club but a lot about buying property.
Unfortunately the difference between us and Woolwich is we had Scholar buying up our shares they had Dien - who was a football man, had lots of footballing contacts, got them into G14, suggested Wenger after Graham got sacked ( the others went with Rioch) and got him the next season and actually went to Italy to sign Bergkamp.

 

[Éperons]

his ideas where brilliant and he was an innovator but everything that he did wrong just left a blueprint for all the other clubs to make a success of his ideas.

I suspect that Scholar's biggest move was to float the club on the market by creating a holding company that owns the company that owns the club. Wale talks in The Glory Game about how making money off the club was a completely foreign idea to him. The club had to make money, obviously, and be able to "live within its means", but being the chairman never enriched him personally, except of course, once he cashed out and sold his shares (Owners often see ancillary financial benefits to owning a club, but that's not quite the same thing). He describes how he worries that eventually the chairman might even become a full-time, paid position. I imagine the directors ate their fancy banquets and drank their sherry in the clubhouse on the club's dime, but that's a whole lot different from being paid. Wale and Cox even retired once they got heavily into running the team, as it was so much "work".

The way Wale describes the role of the director, it's more like a caretaker—or, even better, trustee. Levy would not recognise himself in Wale's words, I wager, other than in the fact that there's something a bit stronger than financial incentive guiding his moves—Wale, of course, considered himself a longtime fan of Spurs, as did every other director of his era. The directors then used their networks (all self-made men (many graduates of Tottenham grammar) w/ no Oxbridge sniffing about) to help Spurs out. Cox talks about being brought in precisely because he was from a slightly different social milieu.

Scholar, I imagine, single-handedly changed the role of chairman from trustee to CEO (or something). The fiduciary duty to the company got merged with short-term personal financial incentive. And thus football was ruined for everybody.

 

[Flannerz]

I just remember being told once that the overspending was on the ground and Hummel rather than on the team. Is that right?

 

[Blanchflower]

Scholar essentially made everyone else's mistakes for them, his ideas where brilliant and he was an innovator but everything that he did wrong just left a blueprint for all the other clubs to make a success of his ideas.

 

[NO1JIB]

suger rebuilt the shelf, and at least, in his defence, kept a tiny bit of terrace in front of the almighty executive cunting boxes.
scholer overreached himself and the club in many ways, bit like leeds i think.
worst thing scholer did, for me, was to double the price of admission for the uefa cup final , on the night, no fucker knew and kids walked away in tears as they couldnt get in, wonder how many came back ? when keith burkinshaw left, he said 'there used to be a football club over there' and he was right.
the hummel fiasco fucked us as well, you couldnt buy a spurs shirt anywhere but direct from spurs, so we keep all the profit. well, thats fucking stupid marketing for what was even then, a 'global brand' .
also, when talk of the big 5 was going on, arseanal were on the fringe, not us.

 

[NO1JIB]

only working on memory here, so a bit vague but now you mention it, i remember sugar saying the fans wanted the shelf and it was important that he gave them what they wanted. sort of.
if the shelf then the west stand were rebuilt properly, would we have to move ?

btw, north stands 'the paxton' south stands 'the park lane'. can we only use these names, anyone can have a north or south stand only we have the park lane.
west stand always been the west stand but if 1882 got the lower tier [and they should] it should be called 'the enclosure'.

 

[sammyspurs]

Isnt alot of the negative spin on Scholer, Sugar peddled propaganda though?

At the end of the day, he was Chairman through a decade of actual acheivement, where as Sugar likes to talk about saving Tottenham...yet what did he actually do?

Re-negotiated the terms of a 10M pound debt with Midland Bank -

By 1991 it (Spurs) owed £10.5m to Midland Bank (now part of HSBC), a debt which reportedly made the bank transfer the account from the Smithfield branch to its casualty unit in Cannon Street and demand a series of changes including a new chairman and the sale of its then best player Paul Gascoigne. - Financial News

Sugar tries to live off signing Klinsmann (who fucking hated him), and stabilising the club financially (which he did to be fair) yet look at the managers he appointed. He was the chairman that took us into the dark ages on the pitch, and while we couldnt exactly splash the cash in those days, we didnt have to flirt with relegation every season either.

How would that have panned out for his hero status..

 

[Flannerz]

If Sugar had appointed good managers we wouldn't have been in decline for so long. We were on the same level as the scum in 95, they had Bruce Rioch as manager. They signed Bergkamp and Sugar wouldn't as he didn't want another "Carlos Kickaball"

 

[sammyspurs]

Yes we were in the shit, and Scholer was in charge.....but its more the notion that "Sugar saved us" that irks me. He did some fantastic things financially, but held us back woefully with his awful "on the pitch" decisions.

The two cant just willfully be separated. The worst era of football for Spurs came under him.

 

[Flannerz]

Sugar told Sky to blow BBC and ITV out of the water for the TV deal. He knew how much money was coming in but we went backwards on the field under him

 

[sammyspurs]

Seeing Sugar for what he is doesnt mean Im defending Scholer.

Im aware of what Sugar did, just also highlighting what he didnt do, as I think "saving Spurs" is a bit rich considering how he also left us, footballing wise.

 

[zin]

Seeing as I was a schoolboy in the early 80s, and I've not found anything about the sale in an initial search of Lexis-Nexis, the questions I asked in the OP of this thread remain unanswered.

It still seems like Scholar was buying shares secretly from about 1980, before wresting control in 82/83. But considering that in 1972 owners had veto power over sales, it's unclear why, 10 years later, they were selling secretly. Did they need the money to finance the West Stand?

No answers either way are emerging…

http://twohundredpercent.net/?p=20728

Suggests West Stand debt.

Scanned something for you from the illustrated history book published in 1995.

 

[Mrs Perryman]

I think Scholar also invested quite a bit of money into the introduction of ID cards, as there were real signs that they would be introduced, but it came to nothing.

 

[Spursidol]

Going to stick this in here, as it is to do with Scholar.

I don't know who put this together but the editing is awful.
It's to do with Spurs financials under Scholar, it starts with Spurs, then there's a bit about agents, then it goes back to Spurs.
For any of the younger fans who don't know, Scholar had the idea of buying various companies with the idea being that their profits would fund Spurs, it turned out the complete opposite.

Looks as it it maybe a composite from a number of tv programmes ?

Either way its an illuminating 'documentary' on Spurs financial issues in the Scholar/Sugar years, football agents etc

 

[Éperons]

I've just finished The Glory Game, which means that I've now completed two of the four football books I bought on Thursday. Oops. Anyway, it's a certifiable must-read, and it's brilliantly written and paced.

One thing I found very interesting, however, was the description of the directors. It explained that the directors had veto power over any sale of shares, which would prevent any kind of hostile takeover (and which goes towards explaining in part why Keston never became a director). But in 1972, Wale, Cox, and the rest were already rather old, with only one person—Geoffrey Richardson—standing in as a director from the thirtysomething audience.

Yet ten years later, Scholar wrested control of the club from Wale and Richardson. I can't find any more details on the sale than the previous sentence, other than that Scholar had been buying up shares clandestinely over time.

Was he buying from directors who were running out of money?

How could he have (hostilely?) taken over the company, if the directors had veto power?

Did Wale et al. want to get out from under the burden of the West Stand redevelopment?

(Additionally, was it the redevelopment of the West Stand that removed 20,000 places from the WHL capacity, or was it getting rid of terraces?)

Anyway, like I said, I haven't been able to find much about this sale online, and I'm not quite ready to fire up Lexis-Nexis, so if anyone has quick answers…

 

[Éperons]

Not having much luck with Lexis Nexis so far, but this article came up on a different (though currently topical) bit of news:

The Globe and Mail (Canada)

October 4, 1985 Friday

Rift could rattle foundations of English soccer

BYLINE: RONALD ATKIN; SPCL

LENGTH: 734 words

DATELINE: London ENGLAND

BY RONALD ATKIN
Special to The Globe and Mail
LONDON
It has not taken long for the disasters at Bradford and Brussels to
have repercussions on English soccer. Attendance is down this season and
television is carrying every sport except soccer, so the biggest names in
the game have decided to do something about it - something that threatens
the future of the English league.

Representatives of the Big Five - Liverpool, Everton, Manchester
United, Tottenham and Woolwich - met secretly at Manchester last weekend to
discuss the cash crisis, caused partly by the ban on competition in
Europe, that is plaguing English soccer.

Officially, the agenda was to deal with the continuing absence of
soccer on television because the league has failed to come to terms with
the BBC or any independent network. Government-sponsored moves, such as
the issuing of identity cards to soccer spectators in a bid to curb crowd
violence, were also debated.

But in the end, the discussion moved to what the league has long feared
- the breakaway formation of a super league.

Irving Scholar, a 37-year-old Monte Carlo-based millionaire businessman
and chairman of Tottenham, called the meeting and said afterward: "If we
don't make changes, our sport will continue to decline."
Scholar and others with the leading clubs are eager to implement the
recommendations of a report on the future of soccer in Britain. The
report, presented by Sir Norman Chester, was put on the shelf by the
league after its publication in 1983 simply because its recommendations
were not palatable to the majority of the 92 clubs.

 

[Éperons]

Right, searches for "Scholar AND Tottenham" before 1983 bring up nothing. Searches for "Wale AND Tottenham" between 1979–1983 also bring up nothing appropriate (but a lot of news about Spurs and Wales).

Odd to think that the sale of a "Big 5" club would not be covered in the press.
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