![]() And quite frankly I don’t think you’ve got any money!’” I’ve got a paid banker’s draft ready to do this deal, you’ve sent an army of idiots. I said: ‘It’s all very well wanting to be a passive investor and all that rubbish, but we’re in the completion meeting here today. “I said: ‘Mr Maxwell, I don’t think you’ve got any money’. “I remember having a phone call with him,” says Lord Sugar, 29 years on. But Maxwell had sent a team of his employees to the office to interfere and called Sugar to put him off. On Friday, June 21, 1991, Sugar arrived at the office of merchant bank Ansbacher to complete the deal for Scholar and Bobroff’s shares. ![]() So who would want to buy an asset like this? There was plenty of early talk about Maxwell, but Sugar, a 44-year-old Tottenham fan who had made his money in property and consumer electronics, wanted to head off the controversial media magnate, who was trying at the same time to sell Derby County. This was 1991, before the foundation of the Premier League, and long before the days when being a big club meant you made money. ![]() And Scholar and Paul Bobroff were looking for a buyer. The club considered a sale and leaseback deal for White Hart Lane. Two years later, they had to do a deal to sell Gascoigne to Lazio for £8.5 million, a huge fee for the time, but one Spurs never got in full because of his knee injury. They had to sell Chris Waddle to Marseille in 1989 for £4.5 million. The finances needed some attention after expensive stadium renovations. Venables’ team was thrilling, but it disguised a financial crisis that put the survival of the club at risk. To understand why Sugar’s reign was so valuable to Tottenham, you have to go back to the state of the club in 1990-91. Or as Sugar put it when asking Littner to go in and troubleshoot: “It’s like World War III there. A story of constant conflict and agitation, of giving Graham “absolute hell”, of telling Teddy Sheringham to “sod off” to Manchester United and being accused of “fucking bullshit” by Darren Anderton. What we discovered was a period that continues to divide and surprise. A period of stabilisation or stagnation? Was the club rescued from oblivion? So, 20 years on, how do Sugar and those involved with the club at the time reflect on his time in charge. And none of the progress under Levy - the stadium, the training ground, the Mauricio Pochettino era - would have been possible without Sugar guiding the club through the transition of the 1990s. ![]() The club that he sold to ENIC was in a far healthier, stronger state than the one he bought from Scholar in 1991. But Sugar’s legacy deserves a second thought. Sugar was never popular with the Tottenham fans, who took Venables’ side against him, who demanded he spend more money, and who never forgave the appointment of Arsenal legend George Graham. The 1990s at Tottenham will always be about Alan Sugar, the man who rescued the club from the brink of bankruptcy, stabilised the finances, fought and won a civil war with Venables, nearly brought in a thrilling new era of foreign superstars, lurched between unpopular managerial appointments and then eventually sold up, exhausted, to a 38-year-old Levy in 2000. But it was not Scholar, Venables, Maxwell, Gascoigne or Lineker who defined Tottenham in the 1990s. Managed by Terry Venables, formerly of Barcelona, starring England’s finest, Gary Lineker and Paul Gascoigne, owned by stylish property developer Irving Scholar, they had a glamour that their better-run rivals could not match.Īnd in the summer of 1991, after Spurs had won the FA Cup, Daily Mirror owner Robert Maxwell tried to buy the club from Scholar. And having taken over in 1991, it was a decade of staggering turbulence for Tottenham.Īt the start of the 1990s, Tottenham were certainly not the best team in the country, but they were the most exciting. But before all of that, Lord Sugar was the Tottenham Hotspur chairman - with this month marking 20 years since he sold the club to Daniel Levy’s ENIC. ![]()
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