The Great Adventure: Al-Fayed’s Rollercoaster Ride with Fulham FC

By Pitch Publishing Ltd

The Great Adventure: Al-Fayed' s Rollercoaster Ride with Fulham FC is the fascinating tale of Mohamed Al-Fayed' s remarkable 16-year reign as the owner of Fulham.

The flamboyant Harrods owner bought the famous old London club in a 6.25 million deal in the summer of 1997, just after Fulham had been promoted from the Football League' s lowest rung. He promised to make the club a Premier League side within five years. He did it in four and then took Fulham into the unexplored territory of European football.

Along the way there were ten managers, three promotions, numerous club record signings, rows with the FA, the Football League, the Premier League, the government and his managers. There were plans to buy the Twin Towers of Wembley and there was the statue of Michael Jackson unveiled at Craven Cottage.

Author Tony Banks talks to the players, managers and staff who were there during the most remarkable period in the club' s history and uncovers their astonishing behind-the-scenes stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781801506229

Book preview

Introduction

FULHAM are often described as many Londoners’ second favourite football club.

After all, what better experience is there of football than on a sunny day, strolling from Putney Bridge tube station, through Bishops Park, admiring the views across the River Thames, out on to Stevenage Road, and going through those iconic turnstiles into one of the most atmospheric stadiums in the world?

The death of Mohamed Al-Fayed in August 2023 saw an outpouring of tributes from all around the world for the flamboyant former Fulham owner. The Harrods billionaire bought the then ailing club in the summer of 1997, and the following sixteen years saw an exciting, often giddy, ride from the depths of English football to almost the peak of its pyramid.

Al-Fayed died at the age of 94, a decade after selling Fulham. But in those 16 tumultuous years of his stewardship, that little club down by the Thames was utterly transformed.

That walk, by the way, has not changed - a stroll that is not even that bad on a cold, windy or rainy day actually, as there are a few pubs nearby for a spot of refreshment.

Fulham was, and still is, a safe place to take the kids for their first taste of football, as there has rarely been much trouble at Craven Cottage, with Fulham more often than not bobbing about in the bottom few tiers of the English game.

It was that way for years – with the occasional brief spell of success. There was the wonderful FA Cup run of 1975, which ended in defeat in the final at Wembley against West Ham. Those memories lingered long.

Bobby Moore was in that 1975 cup final team (he didn’t captain the side, as is often inaccurately stated – that was Alan Mullery), and there was that glorious, daft spell when he was joined at the Cottage by Rodney Marsh and George Best.

There was the unexpected tilt at going up to the old First Division with Malcolm Macdonald’s excellent little team in 1982/83, back-to-back promotions being denied in scandalous fashion in a controversial 1-0 defeat at Derby on the final day of the season in 1983, when the game finished early as home fans spilled on to the pitch and Fulham’s players were kicked and punched.

But after that it was a gradual, gentle decline, as the team broke up under a succession of managers, and the club battled to retain not only their ground but also their very identity at one point, in 1987 when there was the notorious merger attempt with Queens Park Rangers. The words ‘Fulham Park Rangers’ still make fans shudder to this day.

It was only actually the intervention of former player Jimmy Hill that allowed the club to stay in business, with the formation of a new company, Fulham FC (1987) Ltd. More of that later.

There was rugby league, of course, from 1980 until 1984 when that team moved away from the Cottage. There was relegation back to the old Third Division in 1986, and then, grimly, to the bottom tier in 1994. They were unhappy, sometimes desperate times. There were FA Cup defeats by non-league teams like Hayes and Yeovil.

It was a tale of a club in steady, relentless slide one way. Downwards. Parts of the ground were closed due to lack of maintenance because of the shortage of funds; crowds were down to the 3,000 mark. A paltry 2,176 saw the 3-1 home defeat by Scunthorpe on 30 January 1996, the lowest-ever official attendance for a first-class game at Craven Cottage.

The nadir came a month later when the Cottagers, after a 2-2 draw with Hartlepool, lay 23rd in the Third Division. They were 91st in the Football League. Staring non-league football squarely in the face. It was then that a young, untried but sparky and brimming-with-enthusiasm player-coach called Micky Adams was handed control of playing matters and team manager Ian Branfoot quietly ‘moved upstairs’ to become general manager.

It is there, really, that our story begins. Some 15 months before Mohamed Al-Fayed even arrives on the scene.

Fulham finished 2022/23 in tenth position in the Premier League after an excellent season under the astute management of the Portuguese former Hull, Watford and Everton manager Marco Silva, after promotion from the Championship in 2022.

Back in 1996, though, Fulham ended up 17th in the Third Division. Finishing bottom that year were Torquay, who were only saved from relegation when GM Vauxhall Conference winners Stevenage’s ground was deemed unfit for league football. Fulham in the end finished 24 points ahead of the Devon side, a feat that had looked highly unlikely at one stage. Champions of the division that year were Preston, under Gary Peters, whose assistant manager was a certain David Moyes.

Premier League champions were Manchester United, who overhauled Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle to win the title. We shall hear more of Keegan later in this tale. United did the double for the second time, also winning the FA Cup. Manchester City were relegated.

England hosted the European Championships that summer, Terry Venables guiding a revitalised Three Lions side, Gazza and all, to the semi-finals, where there was yet another agonising penalty shoot-out defeat, to Germany. Venables was then succeeded as England coach by Glenn Hoddle – and that will also impact on our little story, as we shall find out later.

Alan Shearer was the Premier League’s top scorer, with 31 goals for Blackburn, and later that summer he moved to Newcastle in a £15m deal, making him the most expensive footballer in the world at that point. Manchester United’s Eric Cantona was the Football Writers’ Association Footballer of the Year.

That summer, Prince Charles and Princess Diana got divorced. Yet another fact that will impact upon us in the course of events. The Olympics were held in Atlanta, Georgia. Mad cow disease hit Britain. The Spice Girls released their debut single, ‘Wannabe’. A pint of lager cost £1.70. A long time ago, wasn’t it?

But, down at battered little Fulham, dank, depressed and disregarded on the banks of the Thames, things were starting to stir.

1

The Adams Family

MICKY ADAMS sits in his back garden on a sunny autumn afternoon in Leicestershire and looks back now with fondness on those days at the Cottage. It was not always that way.

In fact, there are still moments when the glint comes into the eye, the memory flares, the thought of what might have been ignites the tinges of anger that still linger.

Because, quite simply, without Adams, none of this tale is likely to have unfolded.

It was he who hauled Fulham out of that lowest point in their proud history, and then, in the 1996/97 season, won promotion from what was then the Football League Third Division by finishing second in the table, in the club’s best season since those Malcom Macdonald days.

The spiky, effervescent Adams, a former Sheffield United youngster who made his name as a player at Gillingham, Coventry, Leeds and particularly Southampton, simply revitalised the ailing club.

Somehow, after succeeding Ian Branfoot in February 1996, Adams, then 35, managed to put together a team of hungry free transfers and youngsters and steer them to an unlikely promotion.

That rumbustious, giddy season is still regarded by many Fulham fans as one of the most enjoyable in the club’s recent history, never mind later escapades in the Premier League and in European football.

Adams, at the time of writing the technical director at the Brooke House College academy in Leicestershire and jetting off to all corners of the world delivering coaching clinics after his last managerial stint at Sligo Rovers, is still a cult hero at Craven Cottage, some 26 years after being unceremoniously sacked by Mohamed Al-Fayed.

There is, though, no question that, had Adams not taken Fulham out of that lowest rung of the Football League ladder, Al-Fayed would not have looked at the club. Even for the unpredictable Egyptian, investing in a club lying 91st in the league, or even quite possibly in non-league football, would have almost certainly been a step too far.

So Fulham have a lot to thank Adams for. And, though angered at his dismissal at the time, the Yorkeshireman has since admitted that it might just have been the right decision for the club at that moment in their history.

Adams had been brought into Fulham by Branfoot, his old manager at Southampton, in July 1994, as a player-coach, on the understanding that he would be learning the ropes of management under the hugely experienced former Reading and Saints boss.

But with things rapidly declining under Branfoot in the spring of 1996, on the back of a dreadful run of one win in 21 games and with the club lying one place off the bottom of the Football League, Adams was quietly handed the job as his mentor moved upstairs.

The effect was almost immediate. Fulham lost only seven of their remaining 19 matches to end up safe in 17th place. Still their lowest-ever league finish – but things were turning.

Adams now remembers, ‘I had said to Ian, if I come in as player-coach, I want to learn the ropes. I wanted him to teach me how to be a manager. And he did.

‘I was responsible for the reserves. I used to drive the minibus to games, go scouting. One time we went to Manchester. Ian did United’s reserves, I did City’s. I remember, one o’clock in the morning, Ian had dropped me off, I got in my car, going down the A34, sirens go off and I got done for speeding – got a two-week driving ban!

‘But I managed to change the mentality of the group when I got the job. When I came in that February I said to them, listen, you are playing for your futures. I am going to try and change it around. I want you to buy into what I am doing. I tried to change the style of football.’

That summer, Adams, who was to be handed a five-year contract by then Fulham chairman Jimmy Hill the following January, set about rebuilding his team with some shrewd signings, all for either small fees or on free transfers. His battling, youthful side lost only nine games all season, with Mike Conroy top-scoring with 23 goals as they finished runners-up to Wigan Athletic, after leading the table for most of the campaign.

Adams says, ‘I’d seen Gillingham come to Fulham at the end of that season when I took over. They finished second under Tony Pulis. I studied his team, and I knew what I wanted to do when I got the job eventually.

‘Which was – make us bigger and stronger. Gillingham weren’t a good team, but they were big and strong, seven six-footers in the side. If you wanted a scrap they were going to scrap you, if you wanted to play football they would try. I had studied that.

‘I gave about 14 free transfers that summer, to most of the smaller players, much to the disgust of the chairman, Jimmy Hill. I said to Jimmy, I’m going to recruit bigger – and that’s what I did. With Mike Conroy, who had been a big signing for Ian but did not show any confidence in front of goal, I just had to get him firing and believing in himself mentally, and we were there.

‘Simon Morgan, though, was key to it all. He was captain of the team, pissed off, had heard it all before from various managers, We are going to do this and that. He wanted to leave, was under contract, had been tapped up by other clubs. We went to Hartlepool early on after winning our first game, and lost. I pulled him at the back of the bus and said, Listen Morgs, you are key to what I am trying to do here. I know you have heard all this shit before, but stay with it, and things will improve. And they did.

‘The spirit we had. One game, Darlington away, we won 2-0, they had two players carried off in the first 20 minutes. It was uproar! The police came into the dressing room after the game. I told them get the fuck out.

‘That summed us up. I wanted to create an atmosphere where if teams wanted to play football we would play them, if they want to scrap, I’m fucking going to get some people that can scrap – Richard Chippy Carpenter, Danny Cullip, Morgs. They could all put their foot in – but they could all also play. I had Nick Cusack as a sweeper. I changed the formation. Suddenly Conroy started scoring from everywhere. It just showed what confidence and belief could do.

‘I used to take them up Epsom Downs every Tuesday, run up and down the hills, we didn’t touch a ball. We’d get a result and I’d tell them to lay down and think, Do you think other teams are doing this? Are they fuck. But we are, and look where we are now. Look at the table – top of the league. That’s why.

‘Once you get people buying into your philosophy, you have half a chance. But they were clever with it as a group – they used to go and have a beer thinking I didn’t know, but I did.

‘We should have won the league. That really grates with a lot of people. We lost at home against Northampton late on. But we finished level on points with Wigan, had the better goal difference – lost the title on goals scored!

‘It had been decided by the league, helped by our chairman – Jimmy – that that would be the rule for that season. Goals scored rather than goal difference. So we lost the title! That was Jim. Very Fulham.’

In the October, Fulham had celebrated 100 years at Craven Cottage with a 3-1 win over Doncaster Rovers, which at that point made it nine wins from their first dozen games. Their first recorded match at their famous home had been in the Middlesex Senior Cup in the mists of time back in 1896, against Minerva, when Fulham won 4-0.

Promotion was mathematically clinched with a goalless draw at Mansfield on 8 April 1997, which had followed a famous win at Carlisle three days earlier, when Irishman Rodney McAree’s long-range drive earned a crucial 2-1 victory. It was the club’s first promotion in 15 years.

Adams was handed the Third Division Manager of the Season award, presented by Sir Alex Ferguson. All seemed set fair for one of English football’s brightest young managers.

But things were about to rapidly change. Very rapidly indeed.

2

Mohamed Comes to the Cottage

RUMOURS HAD been circulating for around a week before news of Mohamed Al-Fayed’s actual takeover of Fulham – announced on 29 May that year – broke. But it was still a major shock within football. Why would a multimillionaire businessman want to get involved with a middling London club, who had rarely tasted any success in their history?

Actually, the move into Fulham was far from being a sudden leap into football club ownership for Al-Fayed. Over a long period, the Harrods owner had been planning to buy into the English game.

In 1984 Al-Fayed and his brothers had bought 30 per cent of House of Fraser, the retail group that then included Harrods, and a year later bought the whole group in a £615m deal. House of Fraser’s chairman at the time was Professor Sir Roland Smith, who in 1991 was to become chairman of Manchester United.

Smith developed a relationship with Al-Fayed from that House of Fraser deal, and soon after taking up the chairmanship of the Old Trafford club, he told the Egyptian that the Edwards family, who owned United, wanted to sell a share of their club to raise money. Al-Fayed was initially keen, but then backed out of the deal.

But then Michael Cole, the former BBC royal correspondent and reporter who had become director of public affairs at Harrods with a seat on the board of the parent company, and was coincidentally a staunch Fulham fan, remembers, ‘One day in 1997 Mohamed came into my office at Harrods and said, He is coming in, we go to lunch with him!

‘I said, Who? and he said, Him, from Chelsea. The little guy with the beard! I said, Are you talking about Ken Bates? Yes! he said.’

Bates at the time was looking for investors to take over the stake in Chelsea that had been owned by director Matthew Harding, who had died in a helicopter crash in October 1996. Harding had ploughed some £26.5m into the club, as well as £16.5m to buy the Stamford Bridge lease, and was later to have a stand at the ground named in his honour.

After the lunch, Bates then invited Al-Fayed on a tour of Stamford Bridge, which was being extensively rebuilt at the time.

Cole added, ‘Part of the new stadium complex had been completed, amid all the other construction work. I declined to go on the visit but I think the large reception area was called the Osgood Lounge. Some sort of event was going on – a party or perhaps a trade show or something similar. Anyway, Bates walked Mohamed through around 500 people.

‘The next day in the newspapers it was Fayed is buying into Chelsea – and the share price rocketed. Mohamed felt Bates had used him to ramp up the share price.’

A Stock Exchange statement later in 1997 confirmed that Al-Fayed, just months before he took over at Fulham, had held ‘informal’ talks with Bates over buying a stake of around 20 to 25 per cent in Chelsea, but when that deal collapsed, he then made an offer to buy a majority stake in the Stamford Bridge club. But Bates had been unwilling to sell.

Al-Fayed said at the time, ‘I was approached by Chelsea and by Ken Bates, but I was not interested. I only wanted to be involved if I was in charge, not just to invest.’

But Bates then told the Evening Standard, ‘We never approached him. That’s not how it happened.’

The former Chelsea chairman claimed that an anonymous approach had been made to solicitors handling the estate of the late Matthew Harding. Bates said he believed that the approach had come from Al-Fayed – who, he claimed, had told the solicitors he would buy the Harding shares – but only if they could persuade the Chelsea chairman to sell his own shares as well.

Bates told The Standard, ‘I wasn’t interested. Then, six months later, we were all amused to read how Fayed’s family had apparently always been Fulham supporters, and he was buying Fulham.’

Bates would have to wait another six years before Roman Abramovich would come along and buy up his struggling club. But Fulham were closing in on their man.

Cole explained, ‘In the office at Harrods at the end of the day Mohamed and I would sometimes talk about football.

‘He told me that when he first came to London in the 1960s, he would sometimes go to games at Craven Cottage on Saturdays after a busy week.

‘When he did eventually buy Fulham, some fans immediately jumped to the wrong, if inevitable, conclusions. There were dark mutterings, He’s just going to exploit it, all that sort of thing.

‘Especially if they are foreign owners – there is often an element of racism in it I am afraid – they think these people are going to exploit their club. The exact reverse was the truth.

‘Mohamed never made any money out of Fulham. He put far more money in than he ever took out, even when he sold out at the end.

‘I used to say to him, Mohamed, I have loved Fulham and been a fan since the age of 12, there are only two happy days when you own a football club: the day you buy it and the day you sell it! It’s like owning a yacht.

‘But he said, No. Don’t worry Michael, we will have fun, we do it for the fans. It was always, Do it for the fans. They appreciate. He never talked about the people, he would talk about the masses. That’s a phrase he got from his background. All of those things were foremost in his mind. It was never a profit centre.’

Later that year, Al-Fayed also had a meeting with Kevin Keegan, the former Liverpool and England star and Newcastle manager, who wanted the Egyptian to invest in his Soccer Circus project. The move never came to fruition, but Keegan had impressed Al-Fayed and Cole. A seed had been planted.

Al-Fayed’s moment finally came when Jimmy Hill unexpectedly stepped down as Fulham chairman on 23 May 1997, after ten difficult but crucial years in charge, to be replaced by vice-chairman Bill Muddyman.

Six days later the Fulham world changed. Forever. Al-Fayed was announced as the new owner, buying the club for an initial £6.25m and ploughing in £30m, with the promise of more to come.

Cole, who had advised Al-Fayed against both the Manchester United and Chelsea moves, said, ‘Mohamed was always full of surprises. He came into my office that day and said, I didn’t ask you, I knew you would say no. But I am buying Fulham.’

Cole said he often cast himself as the ‘Abominable No-Man’, opposing unwise or unworkable ideas, but backing to the hilt other Al-Fayed moves.

He explained, ‘I said, Mohamed, you are like the little boy who doesn’t believe there is electricity in the plug until you put your fingers in. You’ve just got to do it.

‘I told him I was extremely moved that he was buying Fulham, because from a young age the Whites had been my club. My father had taken me to Fulham. We bonded over the years watching them.

‘I had followed them all my life. But, I said to him – I still would have said don’t buy it, because being an owner you might be feted, but you are more likely to be traduced, criticised and libelled.

‘He said, I don’t listen to you Michael, I have bought it – and you will become a director. I said that my father sitting up in heaven would have been extremely chuffed. I was honoured. But, I said, I would still have told him not to do it. I would have stood between him and the bullet, I said. My job is not to tell you what you want to hear, but what I think is right.

‘He replied, It doesn’t matter Michael – we will have some fun. I like Fulham – it is beautiful. I like the place. We can make it better.’

There was in fact some footballing background with Al-Fayed. Official documents have him as born in 1929, though he himself claimed 1933 as his birth date. As a boy growing up Alexandria, the son of a primary school teacher, Mohamed had played football with his younger brothers Ali and Salah, later to become his business partners, in the El-Gomrok area of the city where they grew up.

Cole says, ‘The three boys used to play football on the beach when they were growing up in the 1930s. Alexandria at the time was a very big British naval and army base.

‘Just along the beach from where they lived was a big barracks. They used to play football with the Royal Marines and soldiers who were stationed there. They loved it. Mohamed’s brother Salah was a good player.’

The young Al-Fayed began his career modestly, selling Coca-Cola on the streets of Alexandria and then working as a sewing machine salesman. Everything changed when he met the Saudi Arabian businessman and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who gave him an import-export job. Al-Fayed was later to split from Khashoggi, and then founded a shipping company with his brothers.

The dynasty began – and his long-lasting admiration for the British, because of his experiences in Egypt, was embedded in his personality. By the time the Fulham deal came to fruition, Al-Fayed had lived in England for a dozen years.

That Fulham deal was in fact helped through by the agent and broker Keith Harris,