The afterglow of Tottenham Hotspur’s most recent FA Cup triumph faded quickly. It was the summer of 1991, Spurs had captured football’s oldest competition for a record eighth time, and yet the club was in a total mess.
Though a debt of £20 million seems piffling today, back in ’91 it represented a crippling millstone around Tottenham’s neck. Worse still, the financial lifeline due from selling Paul Gascoigne, with Lazio offering a world-record £8.5m fee, had just been jeopardised by Gazza injuring himself at Wembley with an extraordinarily bad tackle on Nottingham Forest’s 21-year-old full-back Gary Charles, who ironically got to his feet immediately. Spurs needed money and fast.
Their saviour was a former barrow boy from the East End. Alan Sugar had made a fortune with his electronics company Amstrad, and now he came to White Hart Lane to stabilise Spurs’ parlous finances.
Terry Venables sat alongside Sugar in his opening press conference that June. The former Barcelona head honcho had just masterminded Tottenham to their record-breaking FA Cup final triumph over Brian Clough’s Forest, but he found the boardroom even more alluring than the dugout and moved upstairs to become chief executive. In Sugar’s words: “He’ll look after the 11 players on the pitch; I’ll look after the £11m in the bank.” What could possibly go wrong?
“EVERY FIGURE HAD MINUS IN FRONT OF IT”
It’s fitting that Sugar would later become best-known for The Apprentice, because when he walked through the doors at White Hart Lane 32 years ago, there wouldn’t have been a better setting for a reality television show – specifically, on how not to run a football club.
Throughout the 1980s, the decade that created the yuppie, Spurs had blurred the boundaries between football and business. It was the first English club to fully embrace the sport’s commercial opportunities, an attitude which prompted Keith Burkinshaw to swap north London for the Middle East in 1984. With that year’s UEFA Cup under his belt and back-to-back FA Cup wins to
