WHEN Mohamed Fayed threw £30 million at dear
old Fulham in May 1997, everybody assumed he was either up to something or mad.
One day, surely, one of Fayed's ex-SAS minders would trudge
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Mohamed Al Fayed, Chairman
and Owner of Fulham FC
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into his office at Harrods muttering: "Er, boss,
I think there's been a cock-up. We've just noticed that there's a club called
Chelsea five minutes up the road."
It has been another lively week for the man who claimed to have fled Egypt "with
the king after Nasser's revolt" but was, according to Tom Bower's explosive biography,
the son of an impoverished school teacher who started out selling old televisions
and Coke. But then when does the chairman of Tommy Trinder's old club ever have
a quiet week? While m'lads were at Liverpool in the Worthington Cup, m'lud was
considering the latest twists in the Fayed-Neil Hamilton libel trial and the role,
if any, played by a professional rubbish-sifter and muckraker called `Benji the
Binman'.
It's common in football circles to ask whether Fulham are ready for the Premiership.
The real question is whether the Premiership is ready for Fulham. People would
pay a lot of money to attend the first meeting of Premiership chairmen featuring
Fayed and his almost paramilitary entourage. Chelsea's Ken Bates might not be
so amused. Fulham used to be a geezer's enclave in Boat Race territory, a running
joke in Minder (not the SAS variety). With Jean Tigana transforming the team,
the club have become a direct threat to the embattled principality known to fretting
bankers as Chelsea Village.
Bates against Fayed: what a sub-plot for 2001-2002. Assuming, that is, that the
Stamford Bridge glitterati apply themselves just often enough to keep Chelsea
in the Premiership. Watching Fulham on Wednesday night, it was easy to concur
with those who say that they are playing a brand of football vastly superior to
anything else in Division One. The orchestral sweep of their high-tempo passing
game has its own commercial magnetism, as Bates well understands. The purpose
of bringing 'sexy football' to Stamford Bridge was to assist the financial metamorphosis
of Bates' new Olympus.
Fulham's Motspur Park training ground far surpasses Chelsea's borrowed university
site near Heathrow. And the zeal with which Craven Cottage is promoted as a business
emporium is impressive enough to rattle the accountants up at the Bates Motel,
a 20-minute walk away. Unlike Chelsea, Fulham have not pulled up their local roots.
A thriving youth academy dovetails with the many initiatives designed to strengthen
the club's presence in a traditionally Chelsea-dominated community.
The appointment of Tigana was plainly inspired. With one stroke of Fayed's Mont
Blanc pen, a club who used to assume that `abroad' started at Kilburn were suddenly
splashing in the ocean of French expertise which has brought a World Cup and European
Championship to Les Bleus inside two years. The Anglo-French fusion that started
with Eric Cantona and developed through Arsene Wenger, Gerard Houllier, Emmanuel
Petit, Patrick Vieira, Nicolas Anelka, Thierry Henry and Fulham's own Louis Saha
now extends to a corner of London which last staged top-flight football in 1968.
This is the key to it, not Fayed's millions; and though Chelsea have Marcel Desailly
and Frank Leboeuf, Bates and his board flew not to France in search of managerial
wisdom but Holland and Italy. Tigana brought Christian Damiano as his assistant
and Roger Propos to work on fitness. It would be too simplistic to say that there
is `a French way' which Tigana is applying, but surely there is a lesson to be
learnt from the fact that he was an eminent member of the French Class of '84
who then went on to win the French title at Monaco with the likes of Petit, Henry,
David Trezeguet and Fabien Barthez.
Quite simply, Fayed went to the Harrods of football wisdom to buy himself a successor
to Kevin Keegan and Paul Bracewell, leaving the rest of us not quite sure whether
to be enthused or perturbed by Fulham's dramatic upward mobility. A common instinct
in football is to be turned off by sugar-daddified clubs. The idea that you can
buy your way into heaven conflicts with our deeply masochistic belief that you
ought to grind your way to the top while shedding buckets of tears.
Try telling that to Fulham fans, who are watching some of the best football in
England, laid on by a chairman who so far this year has tried to sue the French
government over the inquiry into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, assailed
New Labour for allegedly causing contamination of the crops on his Scottish estate,
and agreed a £1.4 million settlement with the widow of Tiny Rowland in the
Harrods safety-deposit box saga.
Plenty to talk about, then, if Fulham are promoted and Fayed joins the other 19
Premiership chairmen for a cup of tea and a Jammy Dodger before the start of the
season. Ken Bates will turn whiter than his beard.
Source sport telegraph by Paul Hayward