The Trillion Dollar Conman E-Book

Ben Robinson

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 395

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Based on the hit BBC 5Live podcast series, The Trillion Dollar Conman is an audacious tale of an international fraud that is stranger than fiction. In 2009, Notts County FC were on the brink of bankruptcy when they were taken over by a mysterious company supposedly backed by the Bahraini royal family. The club was promised millions of pounds worth of investment and a list of marquee players, including Sol Campbell and Kasper Schmeichel were signed, in a recruitment drive led by former England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, who was appointed to take the club all the way to the Premier League. However, within weeks, as the bills began to pile up, the dream came tumbling down as it transpired that the club, the players and the fans had been tricked by a convicted fraudster called Russell King. The world's oldest professional football club found itself at the centre of one of the most outlandish frauds in sporting and world history, which spanned the globe from Nottingham to North Korea, involving fake sheikhs, fast cars, broken promises and a trail of destruction.

Leseprobe

 

For Dad and Uncle Billy, lifelong Notts fans.

 

 

Published in the UK in 2024 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-183773-142-8

eBook: 978-183773-143-5

Text copyright © 2024 Ben Robinson

The author has asserted his moral rights.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make acknowledgement on future editions if notified.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in the UK

CONTENTS

Author’s note

Prologue

1.Dreamland

2.The interview

3.Toy story

4.We had Sol but he’s not a soldier

5.Back in the fast lane

6.The Italian job

7.Treasure island

8.The big bluff

9.Busy in Bahrain

10.A weekend in Pyongyang

11.Pay the milkman

12.Come back to what you know

13.To catch a King

14.This time it’s real

Epilogue: Where are they now?

References

Acknowledgements

AUTHOR’S NOTE

As a child, I was incredibly lucky to have a dad who spent his every waking hour doing whatever he could to provide my sisters and me with the very best start in life. Guiding us through homework he may barely have understood himself, endlessly ferrying us round to whatever hobby had found favour, all the while encouraging us to do our best and follow our dreams. It was his life’s mission to set us on the path to a bright and happy future. Which makes it all the more unfathomable that he failed to stage an intervention to prevent me joining him on the terraces at Notts County FC.

Growing up, I was obsessed with football and could boast some stand-out attributes that I fully expected would carry me all the way into Notts County’s first team: namely bags of enthusiasm and a head full of dreams, which unfortunately couldn’t be supplemented with anything resembling talent. I should have known from the start those dreams would never be fulfilled. I’m sure my dad knew it, but he wasn’t about to burst his son’s bubble. Counterintuitively, it was actually going to watch Notts County that kept my hopes alive far longer than they should have done. On so many occasions I sat watching Notts defenders pick up a loose ball and hoof it long in the vague direction of our labouring strikers, who may or may not have been able to bring it under control, before it was launched back the other way again. And repeat. Even I could manage this, I thought, and I genuinely believed it. It was a cruelty, really.

That’s not to say things had always been this bleak. We’d had great teams: famous names playing exciting, attacking football in front of packed crowds. It’s just that for much of the time I’d supported Notts, the club had been in a particularly prolonged barren spell from which it felt like there was no escape.

Then, in the summer of 2009, the club was so dramatically shaken from its malaise that the most outlandish and improbable footballing fantasies were now ours to savour. What followed was a year so exciting, exhilarating, bizarre and troubling that it must surely stand alone in the history of British sport.

I lived through this incredible season as a supporter on the terraces. At the time I was a trainee journalist, having finally abandoned any hopes of a glorious career in the heart of Notts County’s defence. I was instead dreaming of landing a jaw-dropping, world-exclusive, Watergate-level scoop. I would love to be able to say I had a critical eye on events at Meadow Lane from day one; that I knew there was more to all of this; that I started chipping away, trying to get to the truth while all others lost their heads. But no, I was just as deliriously excited as everyone else, because, apart from anything, it simply felt so good to have a dream come true.

Now, all these years later, through this book and a BBC podcast I produced called Sport’s Strangest Crimes: The Trillion Dollar Conman with Alice Levine, I’ve been given the opportunity to get to the bottom of the questions I never stopped to ask back then. What on earth was really going on at Notts County? How did they do it? And why?

PROLOGUE

‘I always said I wanted to come back to Premier League because that’s the best league in the world. I chose a little bit difficult way to do it, I think. It will take some years but I’m sure speaking to Peter [Trembling], speaking to the investors, that they will do it – we will do it. And that’s why I am sitting here. It’s maybe the biggest challenge, football challenge in my life to try to take … Notts County back to Premier League.’1

It is July 2009 and former England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson has just stunned the football world by announcing that he is taking over as director of football at Notts County FC, a struggling club based in Nottingham in the East Midlands and rooted firmly in the nether regions of English professional football’s fourth tier.

The press conference at the club’s ground, Meadow Lane, is packed with journalists from around the world who are scarcely able to believe what they have just seen. Or heard, for that matter, because Sven, a man who had led England to two World Cup quarter-finals (which was as good as it got back then), has vowed to steer a team many in the room had scarcely heard of all the way to the Premier League.

BBC Radio Nottingham’s veteran Notts County correspondent Colin Slater had been covering the Magpies for more than 40 years by this stage and could have been forgiven for thinking he’d seen it all when it came to the club. That was until he found himself jostling for position amid a frenzied global media pack in what he described as ‘easily the most extraordinary press conference I’ve ever experienced – at Meadow Lane or anywhere else’.2

Extraordinary as this moment may have been, the club would soon find itself in an even stranger world, one that promised riches, success and glory beyond any supporter’s wildest dreams.

1. DREAMLAND

Meadow Lane, May 2009

It was early May 2009, and to everyone’s relief another dismal season at Notts County was winding down. The Magpies had mustered just eleven wins as they limped to a nineteenth-place finish in League Two – England’s fourth and final professional league – accumulating an impressive goal difference of minus twenty along the way. With an instantly forgettable season behind them, the club went into a brief period of semi-shutdown, as many of the backroom staff, coaches and players disappeared off on holidays or to seek alternative employment.

Among the few people who had remained in situ, however, was lifelong Magpies fanatic Matt Lawson. Whether it was sweeping the car park, shovelling sand onto the pitch, serving pints in the bar or helping his mum Lynn run the club shop, the 21 year old was just the sort of person County – and every lower-league club – relies upon for their survival.

Matt was one of only a handful of people in the office at Meadow Lane, and that suited him fine. What he really needed was to get his head down and focus without any distractions, because when he wasn’t sweeping the car park or selling shirts, he’d been making the most of his access-all-areas status at the club to study the players’ diets as part of his master’s degree in dietetics and nutrition. The deadline for his dissertation was looming and Matt really needed a good run at it.

Then the phone rang. The caller introduced himself as Peter Trembling and got straight to the point, asking ‘if the club was for sale and could I speak to someone about it?’1 Matt was, understandably, thrown by the call. The very few people who rang the office at this time of year were usually enquiring about season tickets or maybe looking to buy a shirt – not the club. This was above Matt’s pay grade.

‘I said, “Oh look, just give me a moment.” And then I’m just sort of running round the bowels of the club trying to find someone high up but they weren’t at the club that day.’

Matt took Peter Trembling’s details, and with any hope of tackling his dissertation quickly forgotten, he promised that someone more senior than him would be in touch to discuss the sale of the club, just as soon as they could be located. Matt had never heard of Peter Trembling and he had no idea whether the caller was serious, but it had brightened up his day. There hadn’t been any cause for cheer at Notts County for almost as long as he could remember.

Notts County are a club rich in history, but in 2009 it had been many years since they had seen anything resembling success. Founded in 1862, they held the honour of being the world’s oldest football league club, a title that was theirs as long as they were able to avoid relegation.

Nicknamed the Magpies on account of their black-and-white shirts, they made occasional appearances as pub quiz tie-breakers, after lending Italian side Juventus one of their black-and-white striped kits in 1903. So taken were they with the strip, the Serie A giants permanently ditched their fetching ensemble of pink shirts matched with a black tie in favour of the Magpies’ more understated strip.2

On the pitch the late 1800s were very much the golden era for Notts County. It was a decade that saw them lose to Blackburn Rovers in the FA Cup final of 1891, before reaching the final again just three years later, where Second Division Notts hammered Bolton Wanders 4–1, making them the first team from outside the top flight to win the FA Cup. That win remains the club’s only major honour – unless you count beating Ascoli in the final of the (now defunct) Anglo-Italian Cup in 1995.

The club did enjoy three successive seasons in the top flight in the early 1980s led by their greatest ever managerial duo of Jimmy Sirrel and Howard Wilkinson, but soon afterwards they began slipping rapidly back down the pyramid. Things had been very different just a few hundred yards away, on the other side of the River Trent, where neighbours Nottingham Forest had amassed a somewhat more extensive trophy collection, which included two European Cups, the European Super Cup, the First Division league title, two FA Cups and four League Cups (but notably no Anglo-Italian Cup).

Fast-forward to 1989, and Notts were once more languishing in the old Third Division, when they appointed a go-getting young manager with a spring in his step called Neil Warnock, who set about waking the sleeping Magpies from their slumber. After years of stagnation, Warnock led Notts to two successive promotions into the old First Division in 1991. It was a pivotal season in the club’s history: stay up and Notts County would have a place in the inaugural Premier League season and benefit from the vast sums of money the new league would belch out. But despite valiantly avoiding the clutches of the relegation zone until late March 1992, Notts couldn’t hold on. That failure to stay up set in motion an improbably fast descent, which saw them sink from the first to the fourth tier of English football by the 1997–98 season.

It did briefly appear as if the Magpies’ fortunes were changing for the better again when another straight-talking manager, this time Sam Allardyce, arrived with a point to prove and led Notts to the old Third Division title with an impressive haul of 99 points in 1997–98.

But for Big Sam, who would fleetingly manage England, Notts County were but a brief stop-off on his own charge to the summit of English football. He left the following season to join Bolton Wanderers – despite Notts having hammered the Trotters in that famous FA Cup final of 1894.

In 2000 an American journalist called Albert Scardino bought the club and set about signing players on exorbitant six-figure salaries. As an investigative journalist Scardino had an exemplary track record of exposing fraud and corruption, which saw him win the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. His credentials for running a struggling lower-league football club were less clear, and within two years Scardino was defaulting on payments to former owner Derek Pavis, the club was borrowing from the Professional Footballers’ Association to pay the players and the Football League banned Notts from making new signings.

Scardino turned to the fans to try to bale the club out of trouble by launching a so-called ‘Great Escape Fund’. But despite the supporters’ efforts to pay the bills, the club had accrued too much debt and collapsed into administration in June 2002. There they remained for 534 days, which saw them play a full season while insolvent and finish a respectable fifteenth in what is now League One.

Deadlines for takeovers came and went until time ran out and the club was being readied for liquidation. Their only hope of survival was a fan-led supporters’ trust. Armies of desperate supporters took to the streets on match days with buckets. The response was something that would not be quickly forgotten. Away fans set aside their rivalries and gave as generously as home fans. People passing in the streets with no interest in football realised how important it was that the club was saved. Even Nottingham Forest helped out with a fundraising friendly.

Iris Smith, who chairs the original Notts County Supporters’ Club and has missed just one game in more than a quarter of a century (for her daughter’s wedding), was among the army of supporters spending their every waking hour either trying to scrape together donations or worrying it was all too late. Among the many thousands of people who threw money in Iris’s bucket on the very first day she took to the streets was one man who caused her to stop in her tracks: ‘We’d hardly got the bucket out of the car when a very elderly gentleman on a Zimmer frame came over and gave us an envelope. And he said, “I’ve saved my pension for this week and I want this to go to Notts.”’

This moment more than any other brought home to Iris both the burden of what they were asking of their fellow fans and also just how much it meant. She was loath to take it off him but he was insistent. ‘I can manage,’ he said. ‘I want my club to have this money.’

The old man’s pension slid into Iris’s bucket. Evidence, if any were needed, of just why football clubs must always be cherished.

Notts County did survive, just, thanks in no small part to a wealthy season-ticket holder called Haydn Green, who stepped in at the eleventh hour and bought a 49 per cent stake in the club and the lease on Meadow Lane.3 It enabled the supporters’ trust to complete a takeover of Notts County and lead them out of administration in December 2003, punch-drunk but alive and ready for a fresh start.

Five years on, as that miserable 2008–09 season came to an end, the fanbase was still waiting for signs of that fresh start to emerge. The supporters’ trust was keeping the club alive and that was still cause for some cheer, but there really hadn’t been anything else to shout about for a long time. Younger supporters like Matt Lawson, who was twelve the last time Notts even managed a top-half finish, were desperate for something to happen – just anything to get excited about. So when he answered Peter Trembling’s call, it couldn’t have come at a better moment.

‘The club’s survived but only just, and it’s a shadow of what it could be. So everybody was desperate for something,’ he said. ‘You kind of straightaway want to believe that something might happen. You know, there might be some money because it was the sort of club where the carpet was attached in the office by Sellotape … a big ground but a shadow of what it should be. So there was just that feeling of excitement – that something might happen.’

The man in day-to-day charge of Notts County was John Armstrong-Holmes, a lifelong Notts fan and local businessman who had been chairman of the club since September 2007. Soon after Trembling’s initial call, the pair met up in Nottingham and things got off to a good start. They both ran businesses in the East Midlands, John said their children had gone to the same school and, more impressive still, Trembling had recently been commercial director at Everton FC. Things became even more intriguing when Trembling began describing the people he was representing: ‘He told us a consortium from the Middle East were interested in the football club. We had this quite wide-ranging discussion. “Who are these people?” Well, we’re given the indication that royalty was involved.’

The precise identity of this royalty was not made clear, but it certainly piqued John’s interest, not least because just eight months earlier Manchester City had been bought by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a senior member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, who was splurging vast sums of money on transforming the club.

‘The next thing we knew: “They’d like to meet you in Bahrain.”’

Within weeks, John Armstrong-Holmes and Roy Parker, who was vice-chairman and a shareholder, were touching down in Bahrain’s capital Manama with, John admits, not the slightest idea about what lay ahead.

‘We’re in the baggage hall and the strangest thing happened. We were collecting our bags and all of a sudden this guy appears: “Come with me.” So no one’s picking up these bags and we walked straight out of the airport. No passport control, no nothing. We were going, “Have we been arrested?”’

Rather than being bundled into an interrogation room to be quizzed about their duty-free, they were ushered straight out of the airport into a waiting limousine, where they were reunited with their luggage before gliding into the bright lights of the city. John and Roy had been well and truly thrown off their stride.

‘I never experienced anything quite like that. We thought, There’s something here way above our heads.’

And that was before they arrived at their destination for the weekend: the seafront Ritz-Carlton hotel, one of the most prestigious hotels in a city that takes luxury very seriously.

The following morning, John and Roy were whisked off in a golf buggy to a nearby office suite to open discussions. They were met by Peter Trembling, who introduced them to his associate Nathan Willett, representing a company called Munto Finance Ltd, which it would later be explained was backed by a group of unnamed wealthy Middle Eastern investors.

Over a full day of intensive discussions, a vision was presented to Armstrong-Holmes and Parker of a Notts County completely and unrecognisably transformed. No longer would they be labouring away at the bottom of League Two. Should the takeover go ahead, the new owners’ short-term aim would be two promotions to the Championship, English football’s second tier, with as much money as was necessary to make that happen. But in exchange for this huge investment, the supporters’ trust would be required to hand over the club, which everyone had fought so hard to rescue, for nothing.

In many ways it was a terrible responsibility to bear, and Armstrong-Holmes and Parker had lots to think about, including why on earth people with this much money would bother with a struggling side whose only major success (apart from the Anglo-Italian Cup) came in the late 1800s? If they had more money than they knew what to do with, why not go straight for a Premier League team?

John says that there was a ready answer: they didn’t just want to own a successful football team; they wanted to capture the imagination – and that made Notts County the only choice.

‘You could buy the oldest football league club in the world, Notts County, and all the history associated with it at a peppercorn in the scheme of things,’ he said. ‘By comparison, buy somebody who’s in the Premiership where you’ve got to spend hundreds of millions of pounds just to acquire the club. And where do they go? There’s no guarantees of anything. But just imagine if you can invest £5 million or whatever [over] a period of time and take this club with that history to that level. That was the carrot.’

By Sunday afternoon, John and Roy had got the gist of what this consortium had in mind for the club and were impressed by the detailed planning that had gone into it. John had told the would-be investors that he had long held what seemed a vanishingly unlikely dream of seeing Notts County in the Championship in time for their 150th anniversary in 2012. Before any of this had come about, the club’s chairman had done his own calculations and concluded that an investment as modest as £5 million would be enough to achieve the goal. Suddenly it wasn’t seeming like such a pipe dream. The crucial next stage, from their point of view, was seeing some proof that this vast well of money existed.

‘Towards the end of the day, we were talking and it seemed we were quite close. I said we need a bank guarantee and I’m going, “This will test their mettle,”’ said John.

At the back of the office suite a man introduced to them as Russell King heaved up and out of his chair, and, using a cane to steady himself, slowly lumbered out of the door and away. King wasn’t a man you’d forget in a hurry: vastly overweight, with a half-hearted goatee beard and a demeanour that was impossible to read. He’d been in the background throughout the negotiations, but John says had played no part in them, to the extent that they’d barely registered his presence. Until now.

‘Sure enough, before we head off for dinner – the bank guarantee [was] produced by Russell King. But it was a Sunday night, right, and we’re going, “Well, there’s clearly some very powerful people involved to be able to do that.”’

A bank guarantee is a type of financial backstop that commits a lending institution to pay up if an investor fails to deliver whatever they’ve promised, whether it’s an investment or the supply of goods and services. This guarantee was from First London, an investment bank based in the City of London. The letter said the bank would guarantee, on behalf of its client Munto Finance Limited – a company registered in the British Virgin Islands and whose office was in Zurich, Switzerland – any sum short of £5 million not invested by Munto. Here was a guarantee for the very amount John had calculated would be required to get Notts County to the Championship in time for the club’s big 150th birthday bash.

With the deal now all but done, someone else joined the meeting. Dressed in a perfectly cut Savile Row suit, this man was young, sophisticated and spoke perfect English, and, more than anything, he exuded power.

He was introduced to them as ‘the Prince’. John now watched in something approaching awe as people ‘bowed and scraped’ to this man while he wandered around the hotel corridors. John recalls that this man even reprimanded restaurant staff who told John to put out his cigarette.

The Notts County chairman had a £5 million bank guarantee in his hands, a head full of promises of what was to come and, to top it all before they flew home, the so-called prince made clear that they could also now count on royal connections.

‘His parting words to us on that Sunday night, he said, “You’re nowpart of the family. You’re now part of the family.” It felt as if it was beyond our wildest dreams, to be honest. All I can say is, “Wow, have Notts County done a Man City?”’

On 24 June, a matter of weeks after Armstrong-Holmes’ surreal weekend in Bahrain, the chairman and other senior club figures were sitting before an expectant crowd packed into the supporters’ bar. It was supposed to be a chance for the 1,025 shareholders, who owned a combined 60 per cent of the club, to scrutinise the panel about the proposals, before voting on whether to relinquish control of Notts just five years after they’d rescued it. But in reality the vast majority who attended had made up their minds before they even set foot in the bar. Matt Lawson was on shift pouring pints that night.

‘It was a really raucous atmosphere,’ he said. ‘Literally 99 per cent of the questions were – we’ve got to go for this. And I remember just one supporter who said, “Isn’t this all a bit too good to be true?” And he was just shouted down, to be honest.’

Also present was the BBC’s long-time Notts County correspondent Colin Slater, who was himself a shareholder in the club. He was also struck by the mood of euphoria in the room. Everyone present was in no doubt that the takeover would be going ahead. ‘For me the most dramatic moment came when Armstrong-Holmes thrust out an arm in the direction of the Forest ground and proclaimed: “Over there they are quaking in their boots about what’s going to happen at this club,”’ said Slater.4

Armstrong-Homes felt he had good reason to appear a little giddy, because since he and Roy had got back from Bahrain at the end of May, things had moved at a whirlwind pace. He says numerous enquiries were made of First London, which revealed it boasted a prestigious City of London address and a stellar line-up of establishment figures on its board.

They checked the identity of the man who signed the guarantee and sent it off to the FA and Football League. With every hurdle passed, they got more and more confident that Notts County were on the cusp of something remarkable.

In advance of the supporters’ trust meeting, a sixteen-page brochure was produced for the shareholders in which prospective new owner Munto Finance set out its stall, described itself as a special purpose acquisition company of a Middle East-backed investment fund based in Switzerland (called Qadbak Investments) and stated its advisors were a UK-based merchant bank, First London Group PLC.5

They might not have been very forthcoming about who exactly was putting the money up, but they were much clearer about how it would be spent, saying they intended to make Notts an established Championship club ‘within four to five years’.6

For a fanbase desperate for something resembling ambition, this was all they’d needed to hear in the run-up to the meeting.

‘I can remember it ended with the Wheelbarrow song,’ recalled Matt. For the uninitiated, this is the club’s signature chant, which goes: ‘I had a wheelbarrow, the wheel fell off; I had a wheelbarrow, the wheel fell off,’ followed by a vociferous volley of ‘County’ combined with rhythmic clapping. Numerous theories exist as to its origins, but it’s safe to say the chant is only deployed when things are going well.

John Armstrong-Holmes was in no less buoyant a mood a week later when he revealed that the supporters’ trust had indeed voted in favour of the takeover. Of the 1,025 shareholders, 814 voted in favour and 55 against. The membership was also asked to vote on whether to write off loans the trust had in the club, which also passed with a huge majority.

‘This deal has made us the envy of clubs up and down the country,’ he said. ‘Although it has been proved many times before that money doesn’t guarantee success in football, we are on the brink of a situation that will surely be unique in this club’s history. Plans can actually be made to do things – on and off the field – without having to worry about whether we can afford it. I firmly believe Munto are the people to transform the fortunes of the club that we all care so deeply about.’7

For supporters like Iris Smith, who for decades had sacrificed so much to follow her beloved team and fought so tirelessly to help keep the club alive, this moment was overwhelming. To know she and everyone else who held the club dear no longer had to worry about the future, and instead they could look forward to it, was almost too much: ‘When it actually came over the radio, I have to admit, I just sat down and cried. I just cried with relief. We were going to have all these millions of pounds pumped into the club. We were just jubilant – the club had been saved.’

While Iris was quietly taking stock of the magnitude of what had happened, others had a somewhat more frenetic response to the news. Among them was Tony Walster, a newspaper delivery driver who moonlighted as ‘Mrs Magpie’, one of the team’s two matchday mascots. Like so many closely involved with the club, it was very much a family affair. When Tony wasn’t dressed up as a giant magpie or following the team around the country, he would be stopping in at Meadow Lane on his way home from his rounds to see his wife, who worked in the catering team. He also lays claim to a record for being the dad of the youngest ever Junior Magpies member, after Tony whipped down to Meadow Lane to register his son Daniel just three hours after he was born. And don’t get him started on the Notts County-themed shed in his garden.

‘You always hope that your club might be one of these lucky clubs that gets taken over by somebody with millions and millions, but nobody seemed bothered about Notts County,’ he said. ‘I was near Meadow Lane at the time and my wife was at work. So I drove straight in, shot straight upstairs to the kitchen and asked her if it was true. And the wife’s response was, “Oh, you’ve heard, have you?” I said, “What, you knew?”

‘So blimey, I rang my son, told him, rang my daughter, told her, and rang as many people as I knew were Notts fans, telling them, honestly, I’ve heard it on Radio Nottingham, I’ve had it confirmed Notts have been taken over. I was stunned.’

By the time Tony stopped to draw breath (and perhaps to charge his phone), a nagging doubt had begun to surface. It was a trigger, a little reminder of the false dawns, broken promises and disasters he and every other Notts County fan had lived through.

‘I was very torn between the fact that this is brilliant, this is fabulous and also this can’t be happening,’ he said. ‘This isn’t true for Notts County. I was dubious, but at the same time I couldn’t keep my feet on the ground.’

Any doubts Tony and other supporters had about whether Munto Finance was the real deal were utterly wiped away on 22 July 2009 when, to the amazement of the footballing world, former England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson was unveiled as the new director of football at Notts County. BBC Radio Nottingham’s Colin Slater had been covering the Magpies for more than 40 years by this stage and thought he’d seen it all: one or two highs fading in the memory, plenty of lows he wished he could forget and more dalliances with self-destruction than pretty much any other club still in existence. That was until he found himself jostling for position amid a frenzied media pack at Meadow Lane for Sven’s maiden press conference. Slater, who had already clocked up around 2,000 Notts County matches in his career, was more accustomed to cutting a somewhat lonely figure in the press box, such little interest was there in a struggling League Two team in the East Midlands. No longer.

‘The scene could best be described as a rugby scrum,’ he said. ‘Scores of journalists and photographers from most parts of the world jockeyed, either for the best camera angle or for the opportunity to question Sven, who looked and sounded just about the coolest man in the room faced, as he was, by a battery of microphones.

‘Radio Nottingham carried it live and what Sven said deserves to be part of County’s folklore: “It’s the biggest challenge of my life to take Notts County back to the Premier League …”’8

Just weeks before announcing himself as the most high-profile arrival in Notts County’s history, Sven admits he knew absolutely nothing about the club: ‘My agent phoned me and said, “There are people from Notts County who want to talk to you.”

‘I said, “Notts County, what division is that?”

‘He said, “It’s League Two.”

‘And I said to him, “I don’t like to take a job in League Two.”

‘And then he went on phoning me, once, twice, three times, and in the end he said, “Can’t you at least listen to them when you’re in London?”

‘So I listened.’

Sven was invited to the opulent Dorchester hotel in London, where he met Nathan Willett, one of the men who had been involved in the negotiations with Armstrong-Holmes in Bahrain, and Russell King, the man who had produced the bank guarantee that helped seal the deal. Apart from having not a clue who these people were, Sven’s first impression was that ‘they did not look like football people’.9

King, Sven noted, was extremely overweight and needed a stick to help him get around, and appeared more interested in Formula One than football. Not a great start. Willett, who also cut an imposing figure, did at least seem to know about football and ‘was talking about players in the lower divisions whom I had never heard about’.10

Despite their somewhat incongruous appearance for footballing frontmen, Sven soon warmed to them, finding them ‘charming and well spoken, obviously educated men’.11 And they became more interesting by the minute. They told him they ‘represented the royal family of Bahrain and explained that their company, Munto Finance, was indeed going to invest large sums of money in Notts County’12 to transform the club – and they badly needed his help.

‘They told me: “Sven, you will have a contract, five years, and in five years you’re going to take us to the Premier League and we have the money to bring you players to do that job.” And I said, “What do you want me to do?”

“Whatever you want, the club is yours and you do whatever you want. If you want to be their coach, the manager, the sporting director, president.”’

Sven’s imagination was captured. This was a man who had done pretty much everything you could in football. Since his managerial debut in 1977 he’d managed eight clubs spanning Sweden, Portugal, Italy and England, picking up eighteen major trophies along the way.13 Not to mention leading England to the quarter-final stage in two World Cups and a European Championship. But what King and Willett were laying out before Sven wasn’t just another team to lead for a season or two before being shuffled off to the next gig. This was something very different. Being dangled before him was the chance to hoist the world’s oldest league club from the bottom of the professional football pyramid right to the top, with a seemingly unlimited well of money to do it. This was his chance to take a step back from management, settle down and create a real legacy to sign off his glittering football career. It was the stuff of dreams.

‘I thought this is a great job, fantastic job,’ he said. ‘They give me more or less a club and they give me five years and take them up in the system and I can do it in my way. And I thought, this will be my last job and this will be some fantastic things.’

After the meeting Sven got to work doing his own due diligence on the new owners. Among other things, he had enquiries made of Munto Finance, which confirmed it did indeed have the backing of First London bank. The takeover of Notts County hadn’t yet been ratified but Sven says he personally called a senior figure at the English Football League, who told him ‘it was just a formality’.14 He says he also called Sir Dave Richards in his capacity as a board member of the Football Association, who he says told him the same thing. In short, everything seemed to be in order. Sven signed the deal and the circus came to town.

As soon as Sven started speaking at that most remarkable of press conferences, hundreds of Notts County supporters dropped whatever they were doing and made directly for Meadow Lane, as if drawn by a hypnotic force. Matt Lawson, who only weeks earlier had picked up the phone to the new chairman, Peter Trembling, watched on as this impromptu celebration unfolded.

‘Suddenly fans start flocking to the ground, and it’s a Wednesday afternoon, people are at work or school, but somehow they must have got out of all of that because there was an awful lot of supporters turned up and they funnelled into the Family Stand. And Sven’s going over clapping and waving at them and doing autographs, and they’re singing “Sven-Göran Eriksson”. It was just brilliant.’

‘That was the moment it became real in the eyes of Notts fans.’

Paul Mace is a fourth-generation Notts supporter who can trace his black-and-white lineage right back to the founding season of the Football League in 1888. He’s followed the club from the bottom of the football league pyramid right the way to the top and back down again, watched his team play at over 178 grounds, has written two books charting the club’s rich and turbulent history – One Flew Over the Magpies Nest and The Magpie Redemption – and hosts a weekly podcast debating and dissecting all things Notts County. For Paul, Sven’s unveiling was one of the biggest moments in the club’s long history. Not only did it bring the world’s media onto Notts County’s doorstep, but in the course of one extraordinary press conference it immediately captured the imagination of a whole new generation of would-be Magpies supporters.

‘Suddenly a huge flash of blinding light is shone down on Meadow Lane and hey-ho we’re now off to the promised land,’ he said. ‘So everyone rushes to buy the kit. Huge queues out of the club shop. For young people especially, Notts county, in fashion parlance, has gone from being Primark, it’s now Armani.’

Which was all great news unless you were Lynn Lawson in the club shop, looking at a queue of fans snaking all the way down Meadow Lane desperate to get their hands on the new Nike-manufactured Munto-era shirt and meet Sven, who was on hand for selfies and signatures, as he officially reopened the club shop ahead of the new season. As was tradition, her son Matt was roped in to help out, and this was like nothing he’d ever seen before.

‘Sven spent an awful long time, once he’d cut the ribbon, talking to the people that were queuing right down past the Trent Navigation pub,’ he said. ‘There were literally thousands of fans came down that day. There was just a feeling of real, tangible excitement that something massive is happening – you know, a kind of real genuine belief. Everybody got caught up in it.’

In the weeks that followed, the club seemed to exist in a constant state of euphoric party mode. It was a bit like the last dance after a particularly generous wedding, but on a loop. On a Friday afternoon, as many staff as could be rounded up would head to one of the pubs near the ground for a good old booze-up. Lawson remembers one gathering in particular, when he and his mum were invited to the Trent Navigation, right next to the stadium, to raise a glass with Russell King.

‘Willett and King are in there and they’re just buying everybody drinks,’ he said. ‘“What do you want?” Oh, I’ll have a pint of lager, please. “Do you want another drink?” Everybody was there and you’re thinking, This is all on a tab, this is an endless tab. We’re only sat in the Navigation next to the ground, but the rounds of drinks being served were endless and that was probably my first understanding of, well, these guys are spending money like there’s no tomorrow.’

Sven-Göran Eriksson was a man known to enjoy a healthy social life, and he was also determined to make the most of this new opportunity he’d embarked upon – in particular where it came to Nottingham’s vibrant nightlife. It is a tradition among most professional footballers that they make at least cursory efforts to try to conceal nights out on the town from senior management, but Sven and his long-time assistant Tord Grip, who had followed him to Meadow Lane, became regular fixtures in the city’s bars, especially The Living Room, where he took up residence in the VIP area to enjoy a cold glass of champagne. Rather than admonishing the players for having a night out, on occasion he seemed to actively encourage it, which midfielder Neal Bishop discovered to his cost when he went out for what he’d planned to be a quiet meal with his partner ahead of a midweek game.

‘I wasn’t drinking and I drove the car with the game Tuesday, trying to be professional and not having a drink,’ he said. ‘The next thing you knew I could see two bottles of red wine got dumped on the table. I said to the missus, “Have you ordered these? I can’t be having this, I’ve got a game Tuesday. I can’t recover from that.” And I looked round and there’s Sven in the corner waving, and I went, “Oh, Christ,” but if it’s alright with him we better get pouring.’

Having seen off the two £100 bottles of wine, a somewhat unsteady Bishop got up to arrange a taxi home, only to be intercepted by Sven, who insisted the couple joined him and Tord at the bar downstairs, where he had an area reserved.

‘So we went and sat with him and it was champagne getting poured. I was legless, absolutely legless by midnight, by the time I left,’ Bishop admitted. ‘He goes, “It’s okay, you’ll be okay for Tuesday. I was thinking, Christ, I won’t. Luckily enough we won on the Tuesday, and I didn’t have a bad game because I thought if this gets out Chas [manager Ian McParland] will put me through the wall.’15

Not everyone was in the mood to celebrate Notts County’s newfound fame and fortune, however. Simon Goodley went to his first Notts game aged six in 1978 and had ‘been stuck with them ever since through some thick but mainly thin times’.

Goodley was an experienced financial journalist covering the City of London for a number of national newspapers. When the takeover first happened he was as shocked as everyone else, but while the rest of the fanbase became ever-more excitable, Goodley’s mood soon turned to suspicion. In particular, he was drawn to statements being made by the new owners regarding their relationship with First London bank. To him, it just didn’t add up.

So Simon began having a dig to see what he could find out about Munto Finance and the people behind the takeover. But the journalist had very little to go at. Trembling was the chairman and Peter Willett was named as a director, but there was absolutely nothing in the public domain concerning who the financial backers were, beyond their being a consortium from the Middle East. All very vague, opaque, barely even crumbs for Goodley to follow. Then he got a break. Of sorts. A contact told him to forget about the people who had been named in the takeover and start looking for one who hadn’t. They gave him a new name – Russell King – and told him to find out all he could, because he may well be the man who was running the show.

Goodley got to work calling contacts, scouring company records, the electoral register, searching Google, social media and anywhere else he thought he might get a hook onto his man, but came up with nothing of use. Next a search was made of the newspaper archives, spooling back through the decades – until he got a hit: a number of press cuttings dating back to 1991, which reported a 32-year-old man called Russell King, from Weybridge in Surrey, had been found guilty of falsely reporting his Aston Martin Zagato stolen, to claim £600,000 on the insurance. The reports said King had been staying at the London Churchill hotel in January 1990, when he reported the car, one of only 50 ever built, stolen. It had in fact been in the garage of an associate and King planned to sell it. The press reported that his fiancée Paula had ‘collapsed sobbing’16 as King was jailed for two years.

If Goodley’s contact was right and this was the same person, it would mean a convicted fraudster was at the heart of the most high-profile chapter in Notts County’s history.

2. THE INTERVIEW

Meadow Lane, August 2009

The start of the new season could not come around soon enough for most fans, and on Saturday, 8 August 2009 it was finally here: Notts were about to begin a whole new era at home to Bradford City.

No matter who you support, those hours before the first game of the season are unique. There’s excitement and anticipation, mixed with a sense of the ever-so slightly unfamiliar, like being reunited with an old friend you haven’t seen for too long. It’s a first chance to look at new signings, a clean slate to dream that this might be your year and even half a chance that the sun might be out.