People's History of Tottenham Hotspur by Martin Cloake

Author:Martin Cloake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2016-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

A tiny part of Tottenham Hotspur plc

IN 1981 a car-load of Spurs fans spent the journey home from Leeds whinging about another below-par performance and slating the board’s lack of drive and ambition. Scarcely out of the ordinary. In fact, the sort of post-mortem conducted by generations of homeward-bound Tottenham fans before and since. What was different about this lot was the response: one of them decided to buy the club.

From the outside looking in, Spurs were perceived as a wealthy club, a ‘moneybags’ team who were part of the so-called ‘big five’ most influential sides at the time, Manchester United, Spurs, Arsenal, Liverpool and Everton. Supporters had a reputation to match, affluent rather than flash. The media often called the Spurs crowd ‘fickle’ because supposedly they quickly turned on their team as soon as things did not go well.

Irving Scholar was hardly a typical supporter. Based in Monaco to avoid tax, Scholar still managed to attend virtually every Spurs match home and away and was prepared to share his encyclopaedic knowledge of Tottenham minutiae with anyone prepared to listen and many who were not, to the point of aggravation. Travelling to and from games by plane and Bentley was a far cry from his teenage years spent on the Shelf, ironic given what happened during the East Stand redevelopment that he masterminded. To describe Spurs as the first fan-owned club stretches credibility to snapping point but there’s no doubt Scholar and his associates were long-standing fans with a deep and lasting feeling for the Lilywhites.

Since the late 1930s, the Wale family and their close associates had run Spurs. Making money from the club was not their concern. Scholar, brash and ambitious, was in the vanguard of a fresh generation of Thatcherite free market entrepreneurs. In 1982 the Football League abolished the regulation restricting the dividend payable to shareholders to 7.5%. This rule had been in place for a century to prevent owners investing in clubs for the sole purpose of profit. Now, directors could run a football club and make money for themselves.

Changing times demanded radical solutions and in October 1983 Spurs became the first club to float on the Stock Market. To be more precise, the football club became a wholly owned subsidiary of Tottenham Hotspur plc. Within minutes, 3.8 million shares sold out. Echoing the rhetoric used by the Conservative government as they sold off nationalised industries, the launch of the share issue trumpeted that Spurs fans could be fully involved in the club’s future.

Buy a bit of Spurs – as shareholders they owned the club, and 14,000 small shareholders invested, not for profit but to be a part of the club. Such a wide spread of ownership also fragmented any potential opposition to the board. That Christmas THplc shares solved those nagging ‘what to buy a Spurs fan who has everything’ problems in an instant. One of this book’s authors had a framed share hanging forlornly in his toilet for many years.

Jill Lewis remembers the wave

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