Jim Duggan's TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR site

I have cobbled together an account of the AGM held on 7th December 2000. The majority of the comments come from Richard Mackey and they are interspersed with stuff from SOS who generally did an excellent job and my own views on the subject, all of which have been colour coded.

The accounts and the possibly dodgy year end dealings seemed to be a major talking point at Bradford

1.  The first part of the meeting is devoted to a discussion of the accounts, and eventually the acceptance of them.  There was a prolonged debate, raised by several shareholders, about the validity of the accounts.  The point was that the accounts are for the year ending on 31 July, and that the sales of Ginola, Baardsen and Nielsen were included even though they had been registered with the FA in August.  In the end Sugar stated that the accounts were audited and accepted by Deloitte & Touche, and therefore were ok in the board's opinion. It was implied in the above that the sales were pushed through in order to make sure that we showed a small profit for the financial year, and therefore the club weren't obtaining best value for those players.  Sugar stated that the sale of players was a management decision, and strongly denied that it was done to balance the books.
SOS members Selwyn Tash and Ashley Grove spent hours working on apparent contradictions in the directors' statement relating to the sales of David Ginola, Espen Baardsen and Allan Neilsen which had been included as sales within the financial year covered by the report despite the fact the players had not been registered with their new clubs until after the financial year had ended - so going against the stated accounting policy of the plc. While in itself not a major offence, the fact that the apparent errors had been pointed out and a vote was still forced through may prove severely problematic for Sugar and the rest of the board in to the future - if what Selwyn and Ashley pointed out is in fact true, the City is going to take a very dim view of what happened yesterday. The chairman will be severely embarrassed. As it was he was very rattled - lawyers were consulted, the accountants were brought in and Sugar ended up having to admit that he was not certain whether the report was accurate. This set the tone for the rest of the afternoon.
Selwyn followed up in another question directed to FD John Sedgwick. Sedgwick was standing for re-election but Selwyn suggested it was more appropriate for Sedgwick, who is supposed to be the guardian of shareholder value, to resign as he had failed to secure maximum value from £30 million worth of talent (Sol and Darren Anderton) who could now leave on Bosmans at the end of the season. Again Sugar was severely rattled and this bout of questioning ended up with the chairman offering Selwyn an open cheque book and the job of negotiating with Sol. We are now awaiting confirmation of this offer in writing!! Sugar's offer prompted another SOS member to get up and ask whether he could be put in charge of picking the team for the Arsenal game. That brought the house down. Even Sugar laughed. Sugar held up the SOS leaflet at one stage and suggested we started a campaign to persuade Sol to stay at the club. He knows about Save Our Spurs alright!!!

Our debt has increased because we're spending more on players and facilities.  Sugar stated that the debt cannot (and will not) increase, but pointed out that next year we can expect to get £20 million plus from the new TV deal.  The only problem is that all the other clubs will be getting more cash too, so transfer fees and wages can be expected to rise.

The club are examining media deals (such as internet broadcasts), but Sugar seemed very cautious over signing such deals; he stated that Leeds had sold themselves short with their deal (I think with Caspian?) and that the club needed to make sure they got the best value from any prospective deal.

Hodram Inc now own 5.06% of the club.  This is a holding company owned by the brother of Stelios Easyjet (who owns about 3% of the club himself as far as I know).  Sugar doesn't think they are interested in running the club or offering us more equity; he said they're just very keen Tottenham fans.

From there we went on to questions about his 1996 promise to step down if he had not brought the title to WHL within three years - SOS member Keith Palmer told Sugar that he had failed to deliver and was not wanted at the Lane. Sugar got very lacrimose and melancholy at that stage saying there was only so much a person could take. He said he had heard what the vast majority of the crowd at the Birmingham ganme was saying ("stand up if you hate Sugar") and so recognised that anti-Sugar sentiment was not confined to a small minority (the usual retort) but was the feeling held by the vast majority of Spurs fans - clearly a major breakthrough. Equally as significant he for the first time at an AGM stated he would be willing to sell if someone came in with an offer, though in heated exchanges with Mark Jacob he refused to put a price on the club, but did allude to the 85 pence a share offer made by the Littlejohn consortium a couple of years back. It may well be that this is his bottom line asking price, which if true is a huge step forward from the £1.40 previously quoted.
Sugar chose to follow the George Graham line that there had been no glory at Spurs since 1961. When Joff Wild pointed out that we had qualified for Europe in eight of the ten seasons before Sugar took over as Chairman and had finished third twice in the five years before 1991 Sugar asked one of the other board members "is this true?", which kind of indicates the depth of his knowledge about his "beloved" Spurs.

When asked about his intentions about staying at the club, he said that he'd made some comments in interviews which he now regretted, had heard the opinions of the crown in the game against Birmingham and didn't appreciate them, but also said 'If there is anybody out there who can look after the club better than I can...I will gracefully step aside'.  Marc Jacob returned to this point later in the meeting, and was challenged to find someone willing to buy the club and then make a substantial investment. Effectively Sugar said that if any potential backers didn't have enough cash to invest in the club after purchasing the shares, he wasn't going to sell.

Sugar claimed that the Manchester United wage structure (bar Keane) was not that dissimilar to ours, and that we were willing to compete in the transfer market and pay top prices.  However, he admitted that we had a problem getting players to sign because we're not in Europe - Solskjaer was named as someone unwilling to come after the two clubs had agreed a fee, and an unnamed player we had agreed to buy just after the 1998 World cup also refused to come.  Apparently we did not want to buy Zola, Gullit or Bergkamp - these being Gerry Francis decisions.

George Graham was not present (at a funeral), so David Pleat answered most of the football-related questions.  He said that 'the ultimate decision on players who come and leave rests with the manager'.  Someone stated that we weren't proactive enough in recruiting local players to the extent that Charlton have set up a youth academy on White Hart Lane - Pleat responded that the last three years have been our best three seasons regarding our youth teams.  However, I got the impression that it would be still be a couple of years before we saw them in the first team.

Other juicy items were that there seems to be a huge split between David Pleat and George Graham over the style of play at Spurs. Pleat said we were clearly less entertaining than previous Spurs sides. In response to a question from SOS member Sarah McFall, both Sugar and Pleat hinted very strongly that both Robbie Keane and Craig Bellamy had been presented to George on a plate but he had not wanted them. We had also been turned down by Solskjaer and a very famous striker at a very famous club (Kluivert probably) because were not playing in Europe on a regular basis. As for an expanded stadium - forget it, it ain't going to happen whilst Sugar is there. It's that or new players we were told.

Sugar was non-committal over the stadium expansion.  We now have planning permission to expand the East Stand by 8000 seats to get the capacity to 44000, but this will cost £15 million to build and Sugar really didn't sound as if he wanted to spend that money on a stand.  A move to Picketts Lock has yet to be considered as there are still planning problems with that stadium.

Sugar firmly denied that he knew the original Sky / Premier League deal was in the offing when he took over in 1991.

We are now considering buying players despite the indecision over the pending EU decision on freedom of movement - it looks as if some sort of transfer system will be retained.

A £10 million pound improvement to our youth academy will happen, involving the purchase of a new site in the Chigwell area, as long as the EU ruling is sensible and allows us to retain young players if we have developed them.

For the first time in the last four meetings, Sugar actually came across as knowing a fair amount about the wider game, and even managed to express some humility.

All in all this was the most hostile AGM seasoned attendees of such events could remember. Sugar was on the back foot throughout and was only given a break when planted questions were asked and people questioned the football being played on the pitch. We learned two very important things:

1. Sugar hates the criticism. SOS opponents say that we have no chance because Sugar ignores what his critics say. Clearly that is nonsense. He hates it and it affects him deeply. At one stage when he was talking about the Birmingham game he became very emotional.

2. He wants to sell. He is a proud man and in public is setting out terms that have to be abided by. But this is all a face saving ploy. Sugar wants out, make no mistake about that at all. The first decent offer he gets and he will be gone.

Same desire - a sucessful Tottenham, but different perception on the meeting - for any comments or additional info about te AGM please contact the webmaster wearetottenhamfromthelane@jmdcon.globalnet.co.uk