ok Red Frog, here goes.
1. I would totally refute that. Paolo was undoubtedly very demanding, but that was because he was the complete professional, with almost tunnel vision - winning was all he was interested in. His remit was to get us to the Championship in three years and he wanted to get there in two. He was prepared to bust a gut to achieve this and expected everybody to do the same. we had a great relationship but not without its bust ups. I don't think AB ever understood how time consuming such a relationship is, but the end result was worth it.
2. This is another misconception that needs clearing up. There was no miscalculation of the tribunal payments, nor were we unaware that these needed to be paid upfront. At this stage AB was relying heavily on outside advisors who had no interest in football or the football club and on their advice he was doubting the three year plan. They had advised him that the club had no value, even in the Championship and that he should not put any more money into the club. I had always told him that if we got to the Championship, the club could be self sustaining and would have real value. To be fair to AB, whilst his advisors could not care less what happened to the club, he was very conscious of its future wellbeing. So he was constantly wrestling with the dilemma of protecting the club, while becoming increasingly reluctant to fund the club. The pain of having to write large cheques was evident and in retrospect something i took too much for granted. When the tribunal payments fell due, he was only prepared to advance money as loans not equity, so we were embargoed by FL since we then breached our wage cap. In absolute terms, the tribunal costs took our budget to £4.15m and Paolo and Phil Spencer were made aware that the £150k overspend would be deducted from the £500k extra in january - they both agreed with this.
3. Spoke with PdC yesterday for the first time in a long while. He was on great form, enjoying Italy but no doubt keen to work again in UK soon.
4. He is still owed a small amount, I believe, but his main claim would have been mitigated by his obtaining the sunderland job.
5. Phil Spencer has been much maligned, not least on forums like this. We would certainly not have got Paolo without his agreement, they are best friends. He was focused entirely on Paolo's success, so his interests were aligned fully with those of the club. The amount he was paid was a fraction of the amounts bandied around. The large agents' fees in L2 were largely down to players signed from abroad, by far the biggest of which related to Magera, which I must take the blame for since Spencer was not involved in the deal. If you think that we spent £2.6m in L2, and all players got 2 year deals, then the following year, Spencer only had £1.4m extra (net of players he got rid of) to spend in L1 (and that sum included all related costs, agents' fees etc). So the squad that was top of L1 when Paolo left cost a fraction of what most people thought, for which bith Spencer and di Canio can take credit.
6. There was no case to answer with the Jonathan Tehoue affair, a truly absurd publicity stunt. We kept it as quiet as possible since it was one of those no win subjects. Nick Watkins paid some of Tehoue's legal costs to bring the matter to an end, which infuriated Paolo, who wanted his day in court to prove he was in the right. He was undoubtedly in the right, but Nick probably took the action that was in the club's best interests at the time.
7. Sadly no, which I deeply regret, few things in life are worth losing your best friend over. I probably underestimated the pressure he was under and maybe took his largesse for granted, but on the flipside, having got him involved in STFC in the first place, I was determined to see the Club reach the Championship so that he would see a return on his investment. Ultimately it comes down to trust and I suppose it still hurts that he thought the opinions of paid advisors somehow had more merit than the genuine intentions of a close friend. I was also saddened by much of the stuff, some blatantly untrue, that he posted on twitter on the day we had signed a non disclosure agreement. Looking back, I can accept that much of that was probably said in the heat of the moment - I would certainly like to think he regrets some of it.
bonus question......STFC of course !
Love it.
Great post and clears a hell of a lot up about certain things.
