Post by Macmoish on Apr 5, 2011 19:33:27 GMT
And no Flavio...No Bernie...and of course, no Gianni
Football 365
F365's Top Ten Mental Club Owners
Posted 05/04/11
When Nick Miller decided to write a list of his ten favourite mental club owners/chairmen etc, he thought statue-loving Mo Fayed would be a shoo-in. However, he doesn't make the top ten...
10 - Thaksin Shinawatra (Manchester City)
It would be easy to write Thaksin off as something of an eccentric, perhaps a harmless goon who briefly made us chuckle in England. However, without wishing to get all pinko and bleeding heart on you, Amnesty International wrote an open letter to Thaksin when he was Thai Prime Minister in 2004, asking him to ensure the deaths of 87 protestors were properly explained. Under his rule, police were 'given the green light to go out and shoot anyone whose name appeared on a government 'blacklist', a ruling that, according to Amnesty, led to 2,000 people being killed. We could go on, but as this is a football website, and if the human rights stuff isn't enough to put you off, we'll just point out that Thaksin was the man who appointed Garry Cook.
9 - Stephen Vaughan (Chester City)
Given that Vaughan was imprisoned last month for breaking a policeman's cheek, I won't say too many mean things about him. I'm too pretty to risk that. All that probably needs to be said is that Vaughan was the first (and as far as we know only) owner to fail the FA's fit and proper persons test. This is the test that waved through Thaksin Shinawatra, Munto Finance and the conga of clowns that briefly paused in the Portsmouth owner's chair.
8 - Ken Richardson (Doncaster)
In the world of the crook, the fire/insurance scam is such a cliché. Still, originality and imagination clearly didn't concern former Doncaster chairman Ken Richardson, who in 1996 hired some local miscreants to torch the main stand at Belle Vue (which, as anyone who went there will tell you, wasn't the trickiest of tasks) with a view to claiming on the insurance. Sadly for him, he was rumbled after one of the prospective arsonists left his phone at the scene, and Richardson was sent to prison for four years. Not before, however, he tried to sell the ground, despite it being owned by the council.
Another section entirely could be dedicated to Mark Weaver, the manager appointed by Richardson. From the club's commercial department. Weaver, clearly something of a loose cannon, sacked a few coaches, cancelled training on cost grounds, then claimed a bunch of hoodlums turned up at his house threatening to beat him silly. According to The Guardian, Weaver then complained that 'Salman Rushdie received a lifetime of police protection while he received "bugger all"'. Given the choice between some scallies from Doncaster and Islamic Jihad, I know which I'd prefer to be knocking on my door.
7 - George Reynolds (Darlington)
You may think your owner/chairman is a bit odd, but is he a former safecracker who spent time in the choky for theft and smuggling watches? No, he probably isn't. An absolutely Olympic-class narcissist, Reynolds arrived at Darlington in 1999 with grand promises to take them into the Premier League and build them a new stadium. He managed the latter, obviously naming the 25,000-seat ground after himself, but to the surprise of absolutely nobody the stadium (complete with marble toilets and lifts) turned out to be too big and a colossal financial drain on the club. In a sensational slice of point-missing, Reynolds said of the ground: "Let me tell you something, some people said it was too big. But how could they have put an Elton John concert on if it had been small?" While the sound of 'Rocket Man' was no doubt delightful for the Darlo faithful, the club went into administration at the end of 2003, and Reynolds left shortly afterwards.
Other Reynolds wheezes included trying to sign Faustino Asprilla (only to be merked by Columbia's finest at the last minute) and Paul Gascoigne, his wife appearing at a players' meeting to accuse them of throwing games, and being caught with £500,000 in cash in the boot of his car. Now in the vending machine business, Reynolds reckons he's "making mega-bucks".
6 - Maurizio Zamparini (Palermo)
A topical one this. On Sunday, Palermo president Zamparini sacked Serse Cosmi after a run of poor results. Doesn't sound too outrageous, but Cosmi was only appointed at the end of February after a 7-0 thwacking by Udinese. And his replacement? Delio Rossi - the man who presided over that humiliation. And this is fairly standard stuff from Zamparini - Cosmi was his 14th coach in nine years at Palermo, which in itself was a fairly pedestrian rate compared to the 17 he got through in the previous nine seasons while at Perugia. Unsurprisingly, in Italy he's known as il mangiallenatori - the manager eater.
5 - Dmitry Pietrman (Racing Santander)
There have been a fair few owners who have insisted on also being the manager, be it explicitly or through 'behind the scenes' puppet-mastery, but Pietrman is surely the daddy of this group. A former athlete, Pietrman made his money in American property, before relocating to Spain and eventually purchasing a 24% stake in Racing Santander. He promptly made himself head coach, but after being told he needed, you know, qualifications to do that, without which he wouldn't be allowed pitchside, he appointed an old pal called Chuchi Cos as the official coach, and himself chief photographer. That way, he was allowed to sit next to the bench, taking the occasional snap but spending most of the time ordering around both Cos and the players.
In response to those questioning his suitability for the coaching gig, he magnificently replied: "There's a dork out there running the most powerful country in the world without a qualification to his name. And you want me to have a diploma to run a football team?" The dork was, of course, George W. Bush. Which bit of that are you going to argue with?
4 - Luciano Gaucci (Perugia)
Ah, you probably already know the stories about the former Perugia owner, but they are too good to leave out of this list. If you didn't know, Gaucci is the maverick self-publicist who probably thought of himself as something of a trailblazer for women's rights in football. While owner of Serie C club Viterbese, he appointed the only woman to coach an Italian team, Carolina Morace, then after buying Perugia claimed he wanted to sign a female player. This never materialised after the Italian FA closed the loophole which would have allowed such female participation, so Gaucci did what anyone would've done - he threatened to sign a horse on the quite reasonable basis that it wasn't against the rules.
Probably Gaucci's most famous act came when he ensured Ahn Jung-Hwan never played for the club again after scoring the South Korean golden goal that knocked Italy out of the 2002 World Cup. This story is often reported as Gaucci sacking Ahn, but it wasn't quite that simple. Ahn was only on loan at Perugia, and while Gaucci did say "I have no intention of paying a salary to someone who has ruined Italian football," he retracted the words shortly afterwards. Ahn, understandably, still wasn't keen, and his loan was not renewed. Sadly, Perugia went bankrupt in 2005, and after the local feds started sniffing around, Gaucci did a runner to the Dominican Republic.
3 - Silvio Berlusconi (AC Milan)
In truth, most of Silvio's most memorable antics have been away from his beloved AC Milan, but this list would surely have been null and void without him. There isn't enough internet to list his many, many pearls of joyous nutcaseness, but our personal recent favourites include spending £59,500 of Italian taxpayers' money on repairing the shmekele of a statue in his stately home, describing the western world as 'superior' to Islamic countries after 9/11, suggesting a German MEP should star in a film about concentration camps and describing Barack Obama as 'tanned'. To use a rather inexact method, Berlusconi's Wikipedia entry is around 10,500 words long. A whopping 7,500 of those are under the heading 'Controversies', and there's a whole other section for 'Legal Problems'. We should also remind you that this man has been elected Italian Prime Minister three times. They do things differently over there.
2 - Jesus Gil (Atletico Madrid)
Under British law, you can't libel the dead, which is probably a good job when it comes to Gil. It's difficult to know where to start really, but racism is as good a place as any, as before a game between Atletico and Ajax (a team that featured Clarence Seedorf, Edgar Davids and others) Gil referred to his opponents as 'Congo FC'. Not enough? How about punching a rival president in the face outside the Spanish FA's headquarters? Want more? Will making 40 managerial changes in his 16 years as president do for you? Keep them coming? He closed the Atletico academy to save cash, and a young lad called Raul hopped across town to Real and did quite well. Still not satisfied? He rode an elephant around Madrid after they won La Liga in 1996. That should do it. Although there are plenty more stories.
However, Gil's most despicable act came before he was anywhere near football and Atletico. Gil made his money through property, or perhaps more accurately, extremely shonky property. The veracity of that statement was tragically proved in 1967, when 58 people died after the ceiling in one of Gil's buildings collapsed. It was later found that the cement hadn't been given enough time to dry, and the building was constructed with little regard to things like architects, surveyors or even plans. He spent a brief spell in prison, but was pardoned by General Franco, of whom Gil was - shall we say - quite the fan. Gil was forced to leave football after one accusation of corruption too many in 2003, and died a year later.
1 - Vladimir Romanov (Hearts)
The daddy. The top dog. The standard against which all nutjobs are judged. Romanov bought Hearts in 2004 when they were on the brink of financial oblivion, and initially things went reasonably well. George Burley was appointed manager, and led them to the top of the SPL, at which point Romanov did the only sensible thing - sack him. Vlad attempted to placate angry fans by talking up the appointment of assorted big names (Kevin Keegan, Ottmar Hitzfeld, Claudio Ranieri) before settling on Graham Rix, a convicted sex offender who had only had one previous managerial job. He also sacked chief executive Phil Anderton, causing chairman Bill Foulkes to resign. A mere mortal would assume one would need two men to replace two men, but not Vlad - he brought in one chap to do both jobs, his son Roman Romanov.
Rix went later that season, replaced by Valdas Ivanauskas, who was in turn replaced by Eduard Malofeyev, and it's probably fair to say that this line of bosses received 'significant assistance' in team affairs from on high. These shenanigans caused a player revolt, which Vlad attempted to quell by giving free transfers to the ringleaders, Steven Pressley and Paul Hartley, coincidentally Hearts' two best players and most saleable assets. All throughout this, Romanov was such an incorrigible gobsh*te that the SFA changed its own rules in order to attempt to shut him up. Highlights included claiming Hearts players were 'mutilated' in a game against Rangers, asking for a replay of a game against Celtic in which he claimed Hearts were wronged and calling the Scottish media 'monkeys'.
He also threatened to sell all of Hearts' players, is still to write off the club's debt, filtered a steady stream of Lithuanian players of varying quality to Edinburgh through FC Kaunas, starred on the Lithuainian 'Dancing With The Stars' and last year tried to stand as president of Lithuania, only for some pedant to point out that - as he's Russian - that probably wasn't going to happen.
And after all this, he's still there.
Special mentions go to Stan Flashman for sacking and re-hiring Barry Fry eight times at Barnet, Robert Maxwell, he of the 'Thames Valley Royals' wheeze, Simon Jordan for his services to gobsh*tery, Joaquin Bilbao, the Xerez owner shot outside a brothel, Peter Ridsdale for obvious reasons, and statue enthusiast and inspiration for this list, Chairman Mo Fayed.
Nick Miller
www.football365.com/story/0,17033,8750_6854212,00.html
Football 365
F365's Top Ten Mental Club Owners
Posted 05/04/11
When Nick Miller decided to write a list of his ten favourite mental club owners/chairmen etc, he thought statue-loving Mo Fayed would be a shoo-in. However, he doesn't make the top ten...
10 - Thaksin Shinawatra (Manchester City)
It would be easy to write Thaksin off as something of an eccentric, perhaps a harmless goon who briefly made us chuckle in England. However, without wishing to get all pinko and bleeding heart on you, Amnesty International wrote an open letter to Thaksin when he was Thai Prime Minister in 2004, asking him to ensure the deaths of 87 protestors were properly explained. Under his rule, police were 'given the green light to go out and shoot anyone whose name appeared on a government 'blacklist', a ruling that, according to Amnesty, led to 2,000 people being killed. We could go on, but as this is a football website, and if the human rights stuff isn't enough to put you off, we'll just point out that Thaksin was the man who appointed Garry Cook.
9 - Stephen Vaughan (Chester City)
Given that Vaughan was imprisoned last month for breaking a policeman's cheek, I won't say too many mean things about him. I'm too pretty to risk that. All that probably needs to be said is that Vaughan was the first (and as far as we know only) owner to fail the FA's fit and proper persons test. This is the test that waved through Thaksin Shinawatra, Munto Finance and the conga of clowns that briefly paused in the Portsmouth owner's chair.
8 - Ken Richardson (Doncaster)
In the world of the crook, the fire/insurance scam is such a cliché. Still, originality and imagination clearly didn't concern former Doncaster chairman Ken Richardson, who in 1996 hired some local miscreants to torch the main stand at Belle Vue (which, as anyone who went there will tell you, wasn't the trickiest of tasks) with a view to claiming on the insurance. Sadly for him, he was rumbled after one of the prospective arsonists left his phone at the scene, and Richardson was sent to prison for four years. Not before, however, he tried to sell the ground, despite it being owned by the council.
Another section entirely could be dedicated to Mark Weaver, the manager appointed by Richardson. From the club's commercial department. Weaver, clearly something of a loose cannon, sacked a few coaches, cancelled training on cost grounds, then claimed a bunch of hoodlums turned up at his house threatening to beat him silly. According to The Guardian, Weaver then complained that 'Salman Rushdie received a lifetime of police protection while he received "bugger all"'. Given the choice between some scallies from Doncaster and Islamic Jihad, I know which I'd prefer to be knocking on my door.
7 - George Reynolds (Darlington)
You may think your owner/chairman is a bit odd, but is he a former safecracker who spent time in the choky for theft and smuggling watches? No, he probably isn't. An absolutely Olympic-class narcissist, Reynolds arrived at Darlington in 1999 with grand promises to take them into the Premier League and build them a new stadium. He managed the latter, obviously naming the 25,000-seat ground after himself, but to the surprise of absolutely nobody the stadium (complete with marble toilets and lifts) turned out to be too big and a colossal financial drain on the club. In a sensational slice of point-missing, Reynolds said of the ground: "Let me tell you something, some people said it was too big. But how could they have put an Elton John concert on if it had been small?" While the sound of 'Rocket Man' was no doubt delightful for the Darlo faithful, the club went into administration at the end of 2003, and Reynolds left shortly afterwards.
Other Reynolds wheezes included trying to sign Faustino Asprilla (only to be merked by Columbia's finest at the last minute) and Paul Gascoigne, his wife appearing at a players' meeting to accuse them of throwing games, and being caught with £500,000 in cash in the boot of his car. Now in the vending machine business, Reynolds reckons he's "making mega-bucks".
6 - Maurizio Zamparini (Palermo)
A topical one this. On Sunday, Palermo president Zamparini sacked Serse Cosmi after a run of poor results. Doesn't sound too outrageous, but Cosmi was only appointed at the end of February after a 7-0 thwacking by Udinese. And his replacement? Delio Rossi - the man who presided over that humiliation. And this is fairly standard stuff from Zamparini - Cosmi was his 14th coach in nine years at Palermo, which in itself was a fairly pedestrian rate compared to the 17 he got through in the previous nine seasons while at Perugia. Unsurprisingly, in Italy he's known as il mangiallenatori - the manager eater.
5 - Dmitry Pietrman (Racing Santander)
There have been a fair few owners who have insisted on also being the manager, be it explicitly or through 'behind the scenes' puppet-mastery, but Pietrman is surely the daddy of this group. A former athlete, Pietrman made his money in American property, before relocating to Spain and eventually purchasing a 24% stake in Racing Santander. He promptly made himself head coach, but after being told he needed, you know, qualifications to do that, without which he wouldn't be allowed pitchside, he appointed an old pal called Chuchi Cos as the official coach, and himself chief photographer. That way, he was allowed to sit next to the bench, taking the occasional snap but spending most of the time ordering around both Cos and the players.
In response to those questioning his suitability for the coaching gig, he magnificently replied: "There's a dork out there running the most powerful country in the world without a qualification to his name. And you want me to have a diploma to run a football team?" The dork was, of course, George W. Bush. Which bit of that are you going to argue with?
4 - Luciano Gaucci (Perugia)
Ah, you probably already know the stories about the former Perugia owner, but they are too good to leave out of this list. If you didn't know, Gaucci is the maverick self-publicist who probably thought of himself as something of a trailblazer for women's rights in football. While owner of Serie C club Viterbese, he appointed the only woman to coach an Italian team, Carolina Morace, then after buying Perugia claimed he wanted to sign a female player. This never materialised after the Italian FA closed the loophole which would have allowed such female participation, so Gaucci did what anyone would've done - he threatened to sign a horse on the quite reasonable basis that it wasn't against the rules.
Probably Gaucci's most famous act came when he ensured Ahn Jung-Hwan never played for the club again after scoring the South Korean golden goal that knocked Italy out of the 2002 World Cup. This story is often reported as Gaucci sacking Ahn, but it wasn't quite that simple. Ahn was only on loan at Perugia, and while Gaucci did say "I have no intention of paying a salary to someone who has ruined Italian football," he retracted the words shortly afterwards. Ahn, understandably, still wasn't keen, and his loan was not renewed. Sadly, Perugia went bankrupt in 2005, and after the local feds started sniffing around, Gaucci did a runner to the Dominican Republic.
3 - Silvio Berlusconi (AC Milan)
In truth, most of Silvio's most memorable antics have been away from his beloved AC Milan, but this list would surely have been null and void without him. There isn't enough internet to list his many, many pearls of joyous nutcaseness, but our personal recent favourites include spending £59,500 of Italian taxpayers' money on repairing the shmekele of a statue in his stately home, describing the western world as 'superior' to Islamic countries after 9/11, suggesting a German MEP should star in a film about concentration camps and describing Barack Obama as 'tanned'. To use a rather inexact method, Berlusconi's Wikipedia entry is around 10,500 words long. A whopping 7,500 of those are under the heading 'Controversies', and there's a whole other section for 'Legal Problems'. We should also remind you that this man has been elected Italian Prime Minister three times. They do things differently over there.
2 - Jesus Gil (Atletico Madrid)
Under British law, you can't libel the dead, which is probably a good job when it comes to Gil. It's difficult to know where to start really, but racism is as good a place as any, as before a game between Atletico and Ajax (a team that featured Clarence Seedorf, Edgar Davids and others) Gil referred to his opponents as 'Congo FC'. Not enough? How about punching a rival president in the face outside the Spanish FA's headquarters? Want more? Will making 40 managerial changes in his 16 years as president do for you? Keep them coming? He closed the Atletico academy to save cash, and a young lad called Raul hopped across town to Real and did quite well. Still not satisfied? He rode an elephant around Madrid after they won La Liga in 1996. That should do it. Although there are plenty more stories.
However, Gil's most despicable act came before he was anywhere near football and Atletico. Gil made his money through property, or perhaps more accurately, extremely shonky property. The veracity of that statement was tragically proved in 1967, when 58 people died after the ceiling in one of Gil's buildings collapsed. It was later found that the cement hadn't been given enough time to dry, and the building was constructed with little regard to things like architects, surveyors or even plans. He spent a brief spell in prison, but was pardoned by General Franco, of whom Gil was - shall we say - quite the fan. Gil was forced to leave football after one accusation of corruption too many in 2003, and died a year later.
1 - Vladimir Romanov (Hearts)
The daddy. The top dog. The standard against which all nutjobs are judged. Romanov bought Hearts in 2004 when they were on the brink of financial oblivion, and initially things went reasonably well. George Burley was appointed manager, and led them to the top of the SPL, at which point Romanov did the only sensible thing - sack him. Vlad attempted to placate angry fans by talking up the appointment of assorted big names (Kevin Keegan, Ottmar Hitzfeld, Claudio Ranieri) before settling on Graham Rix, a convicted sex offender who had only had one previous managerial job. He also sacked chief executive Phil Anderton, causing chairman Bill Foulkes to resign. A mere mortal would assume one would need two men to replace two men, but not Vlad - he brought in one chap to do both jobs, his son Roman Romanov.
Rix went later that season, replaced by Valdas Ivanauskas, who was in turn replaced by Eduard Malofeyev, and it's probably fair to say that this line of bosses received 'significant assistance' in team affairs from on high. These shenanigans caused a player revolt, which Vlad attempted to quell by giving free transfers to the ringleaders, Steven Pressley and Paul Hartley, coincidentally Hearts' two best players and most saleable assets. All throughout this, Romanov was such an incorrigible gobsh*te that the SFA changed its own rules in order to attempt to shut him up. Highlights included claiming Hearts players were 'mutilated' in a game against Rangers, asking for a replay of a game against Celtic in which he claimed Hearts were wronged and calling the Scottish media 'monkeys'.
He also threatened to sell all of Hearts' players, is still to write off the club's debt, filtered a steady stream of Lithuanian players of varying quality to Edinburgh through FC Kaunas, starred on the Lithuainian 'Dancing With The Stars' and last year tried to stand as president of Lithuania, only for some pedant to point out that - as he's Russian - that probably wasn't going to happen.
And after all this, he's still there.
Special mentions go to Stan Flashman for sacking and re-hiring Barry Fry eight times at Barnet, Robert Maxwell, he of the 'Thames Valley Royals' wheeze, Simon Jordan for his services to gobsh*tery, Joaquin Bilbao, the Xerez owner shot outside a brothel, Peter Ridsdale for obvious reasons, and statue enthusiast and inspiration for this list, Chairman Mo Fayed.
Nick Miller
www.football365.com/story/0,17033,8750_6854212,00.html