David Gold - Football
Blues Magazine
It's an unwritten rule of football - football fans and the people running football clubs never get on. The board never spend enough money; when they do they buy the wrong players; they appoint the wrong managers, then don't give them enough support, sack them too quickly or not quickly enough; they're in it for the money or 
the glory and well, they're just not football fans.But something went wrong at Blues. We seem to quite like our board. OK, there have been ups and downs, but they've delivered. And we're solvent. It didn't look too good at the start. Here were three cockneys, some would say cockney wide boys coming down to Birmingham to run our club. They were West Ham fans at that, and they had made their money from the Sport newspaper. It wasn't the Times, was it?
There were fears they were only here to make a fast buck, they'd get bored and push off back to London when the going got tough, and that it would all end in tears. And it got worse. The first thing they did was appoint a woman to run the club. A woman running a football club in the most male dominated industry in the country. It looked like nothing more than a publicity stunt.
"We were the two cockney geezers who no-one knew!"
"I was driving home in the car with my brother listening to the Tom Ross radio phone-in, this is a couple of years into the Blues and I'm driving along, and a Brummie came on and he said, 'Tom, Tom, before I talk about the match today which was fantastic, I just want to thank David Sullivan and those two cockney geezers for all they've done for Birmingham City Football Club'.
So, how did it all happen? BLUES Magazine joint publishers Ian Drew and Eric Partridge visited David Cold in his Surrey mansion, set in 55 acres, to find out more...So how did you first get involved in the club?
Oh, well David [Sullivan] and myself were actually shareholders at West Ham United. We had about 30% of the shareholding, but there was this reluctance of the board to accept us. Normally in football today, a 30% shareholder would probably be the chairman, but at the very least would be a director and yet there was this reluctance for us to come on the board. It was a surprise to us and also we were a bit hurt because there was no good reason for it.You reach a point in life where you don't want to be where you're not
wanted and clearly we were not wanted there.
Along came Terry Brown who bought our shares and we were out of football for a couple of years. That was our first foray into football but it didn't work out.
But it led on to David Sullivan calling me one day to say that he'd bought Birmingham City Football Club.The club was in a very poor state. Yes, it looked an enormous task.. I was already in business with David. He was a man that I respected, a man whose word you could trust and we said 'Yes' and we joined David, and took control. The club was bust. One of the first things that we received as owners of this football club, was a fine from the 
Football League because our floodlights weren't up to standard. Bulbs had been taken out to save money! But we felt that with our business acumen and our finances we would quickly get into the Premiership, but sadly that wasn't the case. Our plan was to turn this club round very quickly. You brought Karren Brady in, what was the thinking behind that! Everybody thought that Karren had been brought in as a publicity stunt. She was in her very early twenties, I think she told everybody that she was 27 but I think she was only 22, but she felt that by saying she was 27 she'd get a bit more respect. To bring in a 20 something year old young woman, it looked like a gimmick, but we knew her to be a competent businesswoman. She went in there and completely transformed the whole setup. In a football club you have to bring everybody on board but the people who were working at Birmingham City were really just coming in for their wages each day. There was no optimism, there was no enthusiasm, and of course Karren changed all that. Has it been a more difficult job than you anticipated! Yes. We thought that by simply buying two or three players, bringing in our own personal enthusiasm, we'd change it overnight. We were wrong.
It took us nearly ten years to get into the Premiership; we thought we could do it much quicker than that. We said five years, but we honestly thought, because of our own belief in ourselves, we could get this football club into the Premiership within three years. With David Sullivan, Karren Brady and ourselves, we genuinely believed we could do it, it was a belief in our business abilities.
What we discovered, of course, is that a football club isn't a business in the traditional sense - that was the first thing that we learnt.
Businesses as a rule don't have hearts and souls, but of course, a football club is different - it has a heart and a soul but at Birmingham this had gone. It had to be regenerated and rediscovered. The heart and soul of a football club is the fans. The fans, and the people that the fans touch, the people on the gates, the stewards, the kit man, that's the heart and soul of a football club. It's the people who have this great desire for success for their football club. Why don't you think it happened as quickly as you had anticipated it! I think the damage to the football club had been so severe. We thought the 'patient' had got a broken arm and that it wouldn't take too long to fix. What we didn't realise was that it needed major surgery. We had to bring the 'patient' back virtually from the dead.
And it wasn't just physical, it was emotional as well. The football club was so damaged emotionally. If you bumped into a Blues fan in the street, he had his scarf hidden inside his jacket, and there were the Villa fans with their scarves waving in the air.
If your club is down that's one thing, but if your serious rival is up, it makes it twice as bad, twice as painful. When we got relegated, after your sights were set on promotion, it must have been a pretty difficult time.
Well, at the time of course, it was the most disappointing thing that had ever happened to me. Here I am at a time of my life when I'm looking to achieve success. I could no longer be a player, I'm too old to run the 100 yards and be an Olympic champion, I can't swim for Britain, but I can be part of a successful football club.
As fans we'd rather be out there playing but we can't, so the next best thing we can do is to participate in it in some other way.
Here we were arriving at the club to become saviours and turn this football club into a great club again. You've been working hard in your business and suddenly you've got this opportunity. It's a great challenge. I can remember thinking, 'Wow! We can have an impact on this mighty football club,' and of course in the first year we were just getting to grips with issues but then came the dreaded 'R' word, relegation. Getting relegated was one of the worst moments in my life.
Coming home from Tranmere, having beaten them, I felt cheated because I believe Portsmouth put out their reserve team in the last game of the season, enabling West Brom to beat them 1-0 and West Brom stayed up, and we went down.
Everyone was distraught, especially the fans, they had all dressed up for the occasion and were fantastic.
You didn't think of packing it all in! No, definitely not. We were even more determined to get the club into the Premiership. Everybody played their part in the resurgence of Birmingham City Football Club. The Golds, David Sullivan, Karren Brady notably in the early stages, Barry Fry then Trevor Francis, Steve Bruce and so many other people behind the scenes.
Even when people said Barry Fry was never good enough for this and Trevor Francis was too dour for that, but they all played their part, they all left their mark.
Strangely, relegation was probably one of the most important moments in the history of Birmingham City Football Club. It was almost a requirement. What we had been doing was patching up the patient, we were sticking bits of slicking plaster over it and trying to say, 'OK this is a patient who can go into the Premiership'. What I now believe, looking back, it was almost a requirement to go down. We had to be put in our place. This is your penance, you've done all of these things bad as a club, you are relegated to the Second Division. But it really started the rebirth of the football club. What I realised was up until then we were just bumbling along in the First Division. What we needed to do was wipe the slate clean and start afresh. I can remember feeling terrible on that drive home from Tranmere and couldn't sleep that night, woke up at six o'clock in the morning, rang my brother and I said, "What I think we should do is give Barry a million pounds, win the division, win that trophy whatever it was called. (I couldn't remember the name of it at that time, it turned out to be the Auto Windscreens Shield).
We'll win the Second Division Championship, we'll win the Auto Windscreens Trophy and that will be the beginning of the rebirth of Birmingham City Football Club." "David, it's six o'clock in the morning," he said but I was genuinely excited. I put the phone down, then I called David Sullivan, expressed my enthusiasm, he was really down, we were all down and yet I suddenly felt that it was a fantastic opportunity.I saw it rather like the phoenix rising from the ashes. In my view it was the trigger for the rebirth of the Blues.
