Arsènal (3 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When it came to contracts, Graham's toughness as a negotiator was soon established. A young Martin Keown was one stubborn individual who met his match when he held out for better terms and found himself sold to Aston Villa. Graham later showed the folly of his intransigence by re-signing Keown in 1992 on terms that made the disparity in their 1986 dealings look paltry, although it did establish a precedent. Striker Alan Smith, who Graham recruited from Leicester in 1987, recalls Graham's negotiating technique, “He liked to keep a ceiling on things which he didn't like to go over. He'd say, ‘Tony Adams is on that so I'm not giving you any more.'” The bottom line though was that Graham felt he should be the top earner as he had the ultimate responsibility. “He always wanted to be on more money than the players and so as long as he was, he would be happy,” says Smith. From the receiving end, Paul Merson described the manager's way of working: “It was pointless having an agent. He used to come in and say ‘Right, this is what you're getting, here's your new contract. If you don't like it, see you later.'”

But it was not only the players who were affected by Graham's methods. David Dein, despite his power at the club, was still starry-eyed, delighted to be working alongside a former hero. In his twenties he had supported the side that won the 1970 Fairs Cup followed by the domestic league and cup double in 1971, of which George Graham was an integral part. But although he had helped to bring Graham back home, Dein increasingly found himself marginalised in the day-to-day dealings with the players that he had previously enjoyed, as Graham took it upon himself to deal with the contract negotiations and transfers, aided by coaching staff such as Steve Burtenshaw and Theo Foley who loyally backed up his every move. Dein reluctantly accepted the change, admitting, “I pride myself on being a good negotiator, but George has got me knocked into a cocked hat.” His admiration for Graham was such that it may have impaired his judgement. When Graham called, Dein – according to colleagues – invariably responded, sometimes putting aside commercial decisions in order to involve himself with the playing side. Dein's willingness to help, however, did not endear him to Graham, who remains dismissive about the alliance between Wenger and Dein which he intimates allowed Dein “to play with his toys” in a manner you can be sure he would never have stood for.

An incident in February 1988 after Graham had been in the manager's seat for less than two years, pointed up the reality of the relationship. At the end of a press conference to promote the forthcoming friendly between Arsenal and the French national team, a friend of David Dein's and a director of the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency who had produced a radio campaign to promote the match on Arsenal's behalf, asked for a lift back into the West End. “Certainly,” replied Dein “but I am taking George”, who was just chatting to some journalists on the other side of the room. After a few minutes chit chat, Dein's friend said, “Come on David, let's go”. “I can't interrupt him,” said Dein. “Of course you can,” said his friend. “You want to go. I want to go. He's only talking to some hacks. Tell him we're going.” Dein demurred. “Ok then, I'm going to”, said his friend.