Sale of Spurs to Scholar

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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…
 
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.
 
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.
 
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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Éperons said:
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.
I remember it well. It was the first time a breakaway was discussed, sowing the seeds of the Premier League.

Ironically, Scholar bankrupted us just in time for the launch of the old 'Premiership', which led to us being left behind the big boys from the early nineties until recently.
 
Scholar fucked it all up. Then we had Venables/Sugar. No wonder it took us so long to recovery. The rest had consistency and got richer off the back of it. We had to get past the fact we almost lost everything.
 
Overspending.

But then I'm only remembering what I was told after the fact. There was no internet back then to micro analyse boardroom drama.
 
The cost of paying for two 'chirpys' not to mention Warren Mitchells exhorbitant fees for a half time appearance is what really skinted us.....


Didnt scholar also introduce some ticketing thing that also made a huge loss?
 
Christ, I should really know this. Was it East Stand work? I'm fairly certain it was an improved to the stadium that had major impact in its aftermath.
 
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.
 
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.
 
another thing to bear in mind, the european ban hurt us badly, cant blame anyone at spurs for that. we were regulers in europe, we bought and paid players accordingly, then it was gone, but the contracts remained. lost hoddle and waddle because if that.
 
Blanchflower said:
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.
 
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