http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/sport/football/footballleague/article3837881.ece



It was like Rome after the goths had been through it, one of the staff said. Such had been the task facing them at the beginning of the summer as Portsmouth prepared to start afresh, community-owned, in English football’s fourth tier. Having prevented their club from being consigned to the dustbin of history, they have set about salvaging history from the dustbin, not to mention players from scrapheaps and their own trashed reputation.

There to witness the rebirth at home to Oxford United on Saturday were 18,181 souls, a record crowd since the bottom division became League Two and more than saw the first match of Portsmouth’s final Premier League season four years ago.

A 4-1 defeat proved what those within the club had cautioned – that a mid-ranking playing budget of £1.2 million and almost entirely new squad made talk of promotion absurdly premature – and had home fans flooding towards exits to a visiting chorus of “going down, going down, going down”. They were leaving with nothing, but it was their nothing.

The same sentiment held true in the directors’ box, even if some of its inhabitants confessed to mixed feelings about deserting their old seats. Iain McInnes, who became chairman when Pompey Supporters’ Trust (PST) agreed a settlement in April with the former owner Balram Chainrai’s company Portpin, had roused a subdued South Stand at 2-1 down, recalling his days on the North Terrace more than Delia Smith taking to the microphone at Carrow Road, but it was to be the season’s first reality check, if it were needed.

Self-conscious as McInnes is about walking the corridor, below, from box to boardroom that Jim Gregory, the chairman from 1988 to 1996, had built so as not to mix with the common man, Gregory was at least more visible than some who have trodden that route on match days. After years of secrecy and alienation since, it is little wonder that Portsmouth now employ a member of staff whose role is defined as “engagement”.

“People here know where we are and what it will take,” said Guy Whittingham, the manager, after his team’s loss. “The expectations are from outside Portsmouth, from people who see us as a big club. It will take time.”

By then a local radio phone-in was already taking calls demanding the new board dismiss Whittingham, but there is too much bitter experience of short-termism at Fratton Park for that. Four months ago the club had no manager or coaches appointed, three contracted players, no sponsor, no kit – thousands of items to be designed, approved, ordered and manufactured in eight weeks before the players, if there were any, arrived for pre-season training.

Filling in the blanks were the likes of Mick Williams, a board member and who represented one of three generations of his family among Saturday’s 18,181. “On day one after we bought the club I was here signing purchase orders, and I’ve been here ever since,” he said, between paying for a microphone for pitchside, should McInnes ever require it, and receiving news of a broken fridge for which a trailer may need to be hired at a cost of £5,000.

Beyond the relative small fry of food outlets will be structural work to restore a ground best described as lived-in to its usual capacity of 20,700. “It’s like taking over a thatched cottage,” McInnes said. “It looks great in the sunshine but when it rains it might be a different story.”

The chairman’s grandfather was among the club-record 51,000 gate in 1949, since when Fratton Park appears to have changed little. Alexandre Gaydamak was perhaps mindful of that when he bought the club from Milan Mandaric in 2006 and began to fuel a simultaneous boom and bust.

During Gaydamak’s redecorating, the trophy cabinet was deemed surplus to requirements, a painting of the Battle of Trafalgar was removed, the boardroom table, made with wood from HMS Victory, ended up in a skip, along with a hand-carved Viking longship presented to the club on a pre-season tour to Scandinavia in 1949, when they were champions of England. In their place came modern art.

Memorabilia including a day book left by Jimmy Dickinson – the club’s most celebrated player and holder of their appearance record with 828 – which contained 1940s playing contracts and letters from Tom Finney, was thrown into hessian sacks and dumped outside.

Jake Payne, who organises stadium tours and hall-of-fame nights, cottoned on to the purge and salvaged some of the artefacts. Richard Owen, the club historian, drove to Fratton Park and filled his car boot. Staff safeguarded what they could.

“There’s a massive history but none of it’s here – it’s in people’s conservatories and lofts,” said Micah Hall, he of the ‘engagement’ remit and Roman analogy. Hall had been shown around the ground’s inner sanctum in the 1980s by Alan Ball, the then manager, but returned this year to find the family silver missing. “History had been stripped out and disrespected. We had Russian plug sockets but no trophies.”

Among those helping to fill the new cabinet in recent days has been Dave Reid, whose father Duggie was a player from 1946 to 1956, scoring a final-day hat-trick to win the 1950 title, and then groundsman until 1979. His ashes were already buried by the goal at the Fratton End and now his 1949 Charity Shield plaque sits in the suite bearing his name, opposite a new mural of past players. Reid’s photographs of those days, of his team-mates, of he and Billy Wright contesting a header and of a snowed-under Milton End, can be catalogued along with items such as the original hand-written proposal to create the club on April 5, 1898.





“You used to wander around the place and look for any mark of the past,” Ashley Brown, the PST chairman, said. “Not just trophies but past players being invited back, being made to feel welcome.”

Jim Smith, now an Oxford director but who spent four years as the club’s manager from 1991 and returned in 2002 for two years as Harry Redknapp’s assistant, was there on Saturday, reuniting him with three of his old players, in Whittingham, Alan McLoughlin, the first-team coach, and Andy Awford, the academy manager. Awford has been helping Whittingham to assemble a squad while overseeing his 120 schoolboys and 15 apprentices, “gathering fundraising and hiring facilities because we don’t own ours”.

“It’s a different club – just look at the car park,” Awford said. “We’re grateful to still have a club and we’ll build slowly, within our means – people will need to be aware of that and be patient. If you’re the best supported that doesn’t win you promotion. I won’t be having a dabble on us at 4/1.”

Gambling is not on the agenda. Brown, whom Hall first met when they were teenagers catching coaches to away games, has a keen interest in the election and re-election of trust representatives next month and fan consultations thereafter, but does not liken fan input to that at Ebbsfleet United, let alone is this fantasy football for a trust that went from conception to majority owners in four years. “We needed to have a professionalism and a maturity very quickly,” he said. “You always hear that fans can’t run clubs because they make wrong decisions. But our heads are ruling our hearts.” He added that he has remained in touch with fan representatives at Coventry City, who have seen their club, too, mislay some of their identity.

During the court case, curtailed by April’s settlement, that had been brought by the administrator to ask a judge to set aside Portpin’s claim on Portsmouth’s assets, there had been a period of fact-finding behind the scenes. “As bidders we were entitled to some information from the administrator and built up a picture of what had gone on,” McInnes said. “When we took over it wasn’t the first day of school; we’d been there for a term one day a week. But for the first time we could open the piggy bank of fan pledges – we couldn’t have used their cash to fight a legal battle.”

Those pledges came from the owners of 2,061 community shares (investing £1,000 each), swollen in number by the many consortia members among the 2,061. They ensure that the community-owned club is 57.5 per cent PST-controlled, contributing £2.247 million to the £3.902 million so far raised, with a further 110 shares being processed and 350 initial deposits of £100 yet to be converted.

The rest of the finance came from 11 presidents (larger investors, although all but one are Portsmouth fans), who put in between £50,000 and £200,000 each. Pompey messageboards used to be battlegrounds for sniping between fans accused of a pro-trust tyranny and those labelled mouthpieces of rival bidders, whose mantra was that fans would be too amateurish to run a club. The irony is that the new guard look entirely at home on the board, comprising three PST representatives, three presidents and the trust’s solicitor, and including among them blue-chip millionaires and investment bankers.

“We’re seven different people in every respect except one: we’re fans,” McInnes, below, said. “If you look at the DNA of the club, the word ‘fan’ comes up again and again. Before, there was nobody in the echelons of the club you were likely to bump into locally.”

“A fan base is a corporation,” Hall said. “It has huge human resources, every skill and profession, and something people in boardrooms rarely have: money they’re prepared to lose. If someone controls a revenue stream in their job then goes and sits in the Fratton End, are they a fan or a businessman? They don’t become an idiot when they pull on a football shirt.”

Some 10,300 season tickets have been sold and sponsorship income is up 90 per cent. On Saturday the print run for the match-day programme was 5,000 – twice as many as last season – and merchandising income is up 1,680 per cent. Those figures allowed Whittingham to sign an extra couple of players, but player wages amount to 34 per cent of revenue, well within the 55 per cent limit agreed among League Two clubs.



On Friday, a few minutes after 5pm, Mark Catlin, the chief executive, gathered the long-suffering staff in the club office, located behind the mock-Tudor façade that news crews have tended to use as a backdrop to their regular items about liquidation. As those present allowed themselves a celebratory lager, the revenue from Oxford’s away ticket allocation arrived and Catlin raised a toast to the summer’s progress. Earlier, an email had arrived from Trevor Birch, who took charge of the last administration, sending his best wishes for the season.

Some of the CVA triggered by April’s takeover is paid off, with further portions scheduled this month from the next Premier League parachute payment, including to the charities left out of pocket by the previous regime. One of the more shameful episodes in the club’s recent history had been the broken promises to reimburse them by the trust’s predecessors.

“If they could have taken the pitch, they would have,” McInnes said. “Staff were used and abused, the fans lied to. We were at war for three years.”

How has Catlin found the task of attracting players and businesses back to a tainted name? “Easy,” he said. “It’s a good sell. You could put on a pigeon-spotting contest here and 10,000 people would come. Running a club isn’t quite as complex as people sometimes make out. If you keep fans in the loop, they appreciate it. And before we exited administration we met sponsors and said, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’ A lot of them had become disenchanted in the Premier League years.

“The staff here have been incredible. There was a demoralised workforce whose numbers and wages had been cut constantly, so we needed to motivate people but manage expectations. They and the club are blooming again. We’re putting the vision of PST into a community-owned club.” Such was the acumen of the corporate body of fans, “when we get to vote we don’t have factions along political lines”.

In a parallel reality, the trust might have remained a pressure group had the Football League allowed Birch to accept the bid tabled in February by Keith Harris, the financier and former Football League chairman. Harris’s interest in the club aroused suspicions of links to Chainrai, because he had brokered Chainrai’s 2011 sale of Portsmouth to Convers Sports Initiatives (CSI) and initially proposed to rent Fratton Park from Chainrai rather than free the club from his clutches. Grave-faced news crews might by now have been back outside the Tudor façade given that Hussain Najadi, father and business partner of Harris’s backer Pascal, was shot dead in Malaysia last week in an unrelated incident.

“The lowest point for us was when Harris’s bid came in,” Mick Williams said. “At one point Trevor told us he’d have to go with it because it was better for the creditors. One of the presidents was on the phone trying to console me because I was in the gutter. Then the Football League said it had to be trust or bust. I rang [another president] Mark Trapani and tried to read out the news to him but couldn’t – my missus had to do it. It was emotional. It had looked as if 16 months’ work was gone.”

Williams risked the wrath of Mr Justice Peter Smith when Birch and Portpin finally reached court on April 10, when his mobile phone twice rang as he awaited news of the negotiations outside court. “I was more worried than most people,” he said, “because I’d seen the books and knew better than most just how bad the finances were.” But if, contempt of court aside, he had had to serve time in prison to get his club back, “I’d have done it.”

No custodial sentence was required, rather four years spent chained to clandestine owners and rummaging through rubbish for relics of the past. Instrumental in the clean-up was Hall, whose blogs during those four years did the most to shed light on the post-Gaydamak ownerships of Sulaiman al-Fahim, Ali al-Faraj, Chainrai and the Russians of CSI – and two administrations. In his non-Pompey guise, Hall’s vocation had been in crisis management: “When multimillion-pound situations went wrong, I was sent in to talk people down from the roof.” Like McInnes, who has specialised in starting companies and turning them around, his career to date has prepared him amply for his role in Pompey’s corporate body.

Having first been taken to Fratton Park by his grandparents and uncles, Hall was raised on stories dating back to the 1920s and not kindly disposed to what he saw as Gaydamak’s “agenda to create a boutique football club”. Hall nonetheless savours the 2008 FA Cup triumph. His Uncle Les was a regular before Portsmouth lifted the Cup in 1939 but missed out on a ticket that year and died in 2006.

How had recent owners misplaced this sense of continuity? “Through massive overinvestment in all the wrong things,” Hall said. “If you go into football to make money, it will cloud your thinking.“ In a time of financial fair play and less extravagant bank lending, "the ‘pump and sell’ style of ownership no longer stacks up anyway. Some people were here to squeeze money out of other people. The club was like a giant colander.”

Money, as well as trust, poured out. For Portsmouth, 40 per cent of revenue is non-ticket. “We had been earning zero of the 40 per cent,” Hall said between interruptions to sell scoreboard rights and perimeter fences. “We were making zero catering revenue, paid six times too much for turnstiles, far too much for a ticketing system, £200,000 rebranding the badge but we found when we got the flags for the top of the North Stand that the image needed redoing – a friend has done it for nothing.”

Staff mobile phones that used to cost the club £27,000 a year now earn a six-figure sum. “Media agencies were selling things we were in dispute about. Every possible bad deal you could imagine had been done. CSI wasted loads of money: they paid a six-figure sum to get out of our website contract then bought us one that lost £50,000 a year. At this level £100,000 is a top-earning player plus a low-earning one. This place was scorched earth.

“The most important word in ‘Portsmouth Football Club’ is ‘club’ – it’s a social club and the business is there to support the club. To meet a major partner, demand more money and know we could then sign an extra player and that player knits us all together or could win us promotion, that makes you proud. The business side is what’s happening on the pitch.”

As Tony Brown, the new finance director who has seen his share of ups and downs working at Blackburn Rovers, Everton, Cardiff City and Plymouth Argyle, later put it: “You have to run a football club like a business, but realise the product you have is an art form, not a science.”

“The raison d’etre is the football,” Hall said. “What we’re selling is memories, dreams, experiences. Now all four stands are sponsored for the first time and those sponsors are giving us things for nothing. All these people had been told they weren’t wanted.”

That was indeed the experience of Jon Head, operations director at Ridgeway Group, a sponsor for five years. “There’s been a complete sea-change,” he said. “The place had been on a downward spiral. There was no contact from the club whatsoever. It had been a one-way relationship, and not in our favour. It was doom and gloom, you couldn’t speak to anyone here. Now the enthusiasm is back.”

On Thursday a couple of senior club staff took a group of fans out for a curry to thank them for their fundraising at last month’s fan day, to which 18 of the 19 first-team players turned up (the other had a family commitment). “You wouldn’t have got that a few years ago,” Williams said. “What we would love to see next is a framed share certificate in every shop and business.” There is talk of the players going out to speak to them. Whittingham has found attempts at re-engagement to be warmly received and Awford, remembering the unpaid creditors of the past, has been advising suppliers to be paid up front.

There has been one supplier who refused to sell the club old Kappa kit stock, who said they would rather make a big pile of it and set it alight than have to deal with them again. Meanwhile, Kappa itself was in dispute with Portsmouth over the ground’s Pompey Megastore even before it was closed without the club’s knowledge one morning in February, when shop staff received a phonecall ordering them to vacate by 2pm. The club made no attempt to sell shirts last Christmas because of the dispute, but with negotiations progressing the shop is set to re-open this month.

For the first time in 15 years, home and away replica kits were on sale for the opening fixture. Past seasons’ kits – owing to “stunning incompetence”, according to Hall – would arrive, from the same factory as they do now, in October. Whereas the Cup-winning kit of 2008 made the club £60,000 profit, this season’s will net “an unrecognisably high multiple of that”. A pop-up shop at last month’s friendly against Charlton Athletic sold more shirts than the megastore ever had in any one day.

The turnaround testifies to the value of history, which reveals that a similar ownership model succeeded in the days of the carved Viking longship and back-to-back top-flight titles in 1949 and ’50. Club shares then were spread between a large number of local people who voted in the board and hung share certificates on their walls. The epic waste, lapses in taste, suspected sock puppets and suspect plug sockets were 60 years away. But for those framed displays read the tweeted photographs of the 2,061, plus 11.

“You need to remove your ego,” McInnes said. “There is always pressure from fans to spend money and you’d be susceptible to that if it was just your baby. Here it’s everybody’s baby.”

It is Whittingham’s, too. “They all know how a business should be run,” he said of the men upstairs. “As manager it’s your job to push for things and for them to decide. I won’t push so far as to push us back to where we’ve come from. The main thing is we are here.”



This article was first published by The Times on August 8.

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