He has, it is estimated, a personal fortune of £410m, sundry businesses, foreign retreats and a lavishly restored Victorian mansion worth £5m in leafy Surrey. The grounds of his mansion include a golf course, a newly constructed runway (he has held a pilots licence for over 30 years, notching up a triumph The Malta Air Rally), floodlit tennis courts and a Wildlife conservation area. So how does the Birmingham City chairman sleep at nights?
“I take absolutely no chances since I received a threat from the neo-Nazi group, Combat 18 a few years ago,” he explains darkly from me fortress he calls his bedroom. “I’m a successful Jew and that annoys many of these lunatics. I have to be 2,000 percent safe at night. I’m acutely aware of kidnapping threats and worse. All the doors to my sleeping quarters are steel-reinforced with unbreakable windows.”
He points to a security panel just outside the bedroom door which displays 30 buttons. “Once I retire for the night I’m locked in and that’s the way it stays until daybreak. I would never venture downstairs, or outside, even if I heard a noise” – unlike the late George Harrison, who confronted an intruder at his home two years ago, sustaining life-threatening injuries. “I really can’t understand that,” he sighs. “You can get killed, for goodness’ sake – madness.”
Chairman Gold clearly enjoys guiding people round his acres, through an impressive array of guestrooms, bedrooms, even an indoor swimming pool and snooker room, before descending a spiral staircase to the wine cellar, office, kitchens and utility area. How many rooms are there in the house? “I have
absolutely no idea,” admits ‘Mr David’, as he is known to his domestic staff, “but there are 14 toilets if that helps!” Outside, he peers up the fairway on the. private nine-hole golf course and, without a hint > irony, announces: “I’ve arrived at last.”
By way of serendipitous commentary, from inside his house The Chalet, The Beatles’ classic Ticket To Rule tinkles out from a player-piano, drawing a thin smile from the man who, among his 12 companies,
David Gold may now have to build a trophy cabinet heads up Gold Air, a private airline which counts Posh and Becks, Rod Stewart, Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta Jones and Jasper Carrott among its clients.see the headline now,” he beams. “‘Gold has Premiership’…”
DAVID GOLD WAS BORN INTO ABJECT poverty a stone’s throw from the ground of his first footballing love, West Ham United, but as a teenager he discovered that sex sells. His first venture into the skin trade was importing US Playboy magazines back in the 1950s, before expanding the daring British Spick and Span pin-up magazines Business flourished. He was on his way towards making his first million through a wholesale business which later developed into publishing. Later he bought out a struggling sex shop and developed it into the Ann Summers chain which now, under daughter Jaqueline, represents his flagship operation.
Gold does not shy away from his involvement in an industry that has regularly seen him dubbed a ‘Porn Baron’ by the tabloids, but he prefers to give it a veneer of respectability. “These days I’m more often described as an entrepreneur,” he says. “I’m part owner of Sport Newspapers which has been very successful, whilst Ann Summers is an exciting business operation. It’s not a sex shop – they have to have a licence, we don’t!” Subject closed.
Things could have turned out very differently. Gold has been passionate about football since he was six years old and, offered the chance to sign schoolboy forms with the Hammers, made several appearances in the claret and blue, only for his “wayward and philandering father” to put the mockers on his dream of turning professional. “It was a very bad moment,” he recalls. “He wasn’t having it, believing it was a dodgy way to make a living. The Hammers really wanted me but there was no way.
“I’d appeared at Upton Park as a player about 20 times and scored the winner for London Youth against Glasgow Youth in a 2-1 victory back in 1953.I was a very nippy left-winger and would have done well in the game.”
Much later, in partnership with David Sullivan, he failed to take a stake in West Ham but always believed he’d eventually become a club owner. In 1994 he bought the “khazi” that was St Andrews. Birmingham City was close to administration and co-owner David Sullivan wanted the Gold brothers, David and Ralph, to join him on the board. They made it in “half an hour flat”. After taking over, David Gold pledged to send the club back into the big league within five years. It’s taken eight and that annoys him. He admits he’s always been a man in hurry, describing himself as a workaholic who “got lucky along the way”.
Now he answers his mobile phone with the greeting: “Hi, Premiership chairman Gold here.” The hobby has become the day job and he spends most of his time looking after Birmingham City with his chief executive Karren Brady. “I have quality people
looking after all my business and Karren is absolutely brilliant. I can’t speak highly enough of her. She’s been head-hunted by other clubs on several occasions but this is where her heart is. She won’t leave.”
He is effusive, too, in his praise of partner Sullivan, a controversial character but whose passion for the Blues is unquestioned. “None of this would have happened without him. He was the first in and I’m grateful to have had the chance to join him. He understands the game and the personalities. We have a great mix of lively personalities.”
NOW CHAIRMAN GOLD CANT WAIT FOR another big moment – the arrival of Manchester United at St Andrews. “It will be a truly great moment when they come here. To see David Beckham and all the others running out on our turf is a moment I am going to treasure. But if we manage to give them a good hiding that will be priceless. I just hope, if it happens, that Alex Ferguson will take it and give us our due. He really doesn’t have a lot of grace, does he? He’ll tell you all about why his team got beaten and find 16 reasons why it happened. You don’t hear him say the other team might have played better. In defeat, he lacks grace. Sorry, but truth is truth.”
Meanwhile, his ambition for next season is to achieve the traditional new boy 40-point safety target. After that, European qualification and an expanded stadium. “If we are to become the next Newcastle United that’s what will be needed. We have to increase to 40,000 as that’s the minimum UEFA requirement for European football. [Gold is actually wrong here, according to UEFA. There are in fact no minimum requirements for holding UEFA European club competition games.
confusion may be caused by the four and five star stadia categories which are used to determine the potential of stadia to host UEFA Club competition finals- four star being minimum 30,000 capacity and five star 50,000.]
The plans are in hand. The old stand will be demolished and a new stand constructed with provision for a second tier to be built on top. That side of the ground will house all the banqueting rooms and corporate facilities.”
None of this would be under discussion, Gold believes, had he not experienced another of those defining moments in deciding that Trevor Francis and the club would have to part company midway through last season. Gold had been Francis’s staunchest boardroom ally, often flying from Biggin Hill to Birmingham to offer his manager a shoulder to cry on: “It was wearing, but I understood Trevor’s nature and sometimes he needed instantaneous personal reassurance.” Hut this time he knew that the end of the road – to coin a Blues anthem – had been reached. “The chemistry had gone. I could tell it just by looking in his eyes, and when I asked if we should part company pure relief appeared.”
Steve Bruce was always the chosen successor despite speculation involving Joe Royle, Dave Jones, Gary Megson and even Harry Redknapp. The former Blues skipper had always enjoyed a “special relationship” with Gold. But his arrival was delayed by a spat between him and the Crystal Palace chief Simon Jordan. Bruce was sent on gardening leave before finally arriving at St Andrews with the Blues sitting in an unpromising 12th position.For Gold, life at St Andrews improved straight away. For a Start, he was made to feel involved in team affairs, being granted the odd “special privilege” of knowing the line-up before press and fans were informed. “Trevor Francis was secretive and more often than not I would not know his team selection until I received die team sheet 15 minutes before kick-off.” Under his new team chief, he’s a regular visitor in the dressing room and training ground. “I visitemployees in each of my other businesses so why shouldn’t it happen in football? I think the lads appreciate seeing the chairman now and again. It doesn’t mean you want to do the manager’s job.”
Gold has seen the likes of Sheffield Wednesday, Nottingham Forest and Bradford City fall into the Nationwide with wage bills that have jeopardised their futures, and has no intention of going down that road. He says a new reality has hit the game following the ITV Digital “scandal” and that all involved in football are waking up to it at last.
Or almost all. Ever since getting involved in the business of football, Gold has had a bee in his bonnet about the Professional Footballers Association. “I believe general secretary Gordon Taylor is building a mausoleum to greed in Manchester. They take millions when that cash rightfully belongs to club owners. I don’t, and never will, understand how they can justify that. The players are our employees and the cash is used to pay their wages. By insisting on such a large share of the cake the PF’A is ensuring there is less available when we next negotiate with players, so they arc actually hurting their own members.”
He scoffs at Taylor’s claims that the PFA helps to bail out clubs in trouble, claiming that they merely make loans which eventually have to be repaid with interest, thus adding to the beleaguered club’s mounting debt burden. “The PFA has millions on deposit as more and more clubs face bankruptcy, in the main because of the wages they are being forced to pay players whose union only asks them for a £75 yearly subscription. He is constantly crowing about how much the organisation is doing for the game and I find that laughable and very serious. The PF’A buys Lowry paintings as ‘an investment’ when they should be ploughing cash back into the game on non-loan arrangements. The whole thing makes me angry, and I don’t know why they have been allowed to develop an image of being great philanthropists.”
Birmingham City fans, meanwhile, have been asked to cough up a 40 percent increase on their season tickets next season. The chairman has no problems defending the decision. “Back last season we offered season ticket holders the opportunity to renew at existing prices. Many did and I have some sympathy for those who maybe couldn’t afford to do so at the time. Others may have gambled on us staying in Division One this season. Sad to say they lost, but every penny of the increased price of admission will go into the transfer and wages pot. In a sense it gives supporters a stake in the club.”He insists that the fans, like the board and Sky, have to help foot the bill of running a successful Premiership club. Indeed, Gold will be paying£12,000 for his own executive box, something he’s done since becoming involved at St Andrews.
There’s likely to be around £12m available for new signings but each new arrival will have to accept wage deals in line with those players already on the books, who will each receive a small rise on their Nationwide contracts with Premiership bonuses being paid on an appearance basis. That, says Gold, is the “only sensible, reasonable and proper way forward.”
Steve Bruce’s managerial skills will he tested like never before. “He’ll be OK. Look at the players he’s brought here. Stern John for£l 50,000 was a bargain and seasoned Premiership performers like Jeff Kcnna and Steve Vickcrs were persuaded in under our pay structure. I’m confident we have the nucleus of a good Premiership side and we’ll work with Steve to give him what he wants, within reason.”
Gold brings the tour of his grand plan to a close. “We promised the fans a great stadium and Premiership football, and both have been achieved. Yes, I feel proud of that.”