David Gold - Football
Blues Magazine, November 2004
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 tips and downs, but they've delivered us to the promised land - it might have taken a little longer to get there than we hoped, but we're there and we've stayed there and we look like making a decent stab at doing pretty well. 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', I looked at my brother, and we had to laugh."
Now, though, twelve years on, things have fallen nicely into place. We're in the Premiership with one of the best young managers in the game and, probably, the greatest squad in our history.
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 be a dominant shareholder, 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. It was very, very sad because it was West Ham United Football Club, which was my football club as a boy. I lived literally across the road from the ground. You want to play for your football club that you've been a fan of, so there's a sadness at failing to play for West Ham United, but then suddenly to become a director, that was great excitement.
Sadly that didn't materialise, 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,
