David Gold - Football
Blues Magazine, November 2004 Part Two
was a fine from the Football League because our floodlights weren't up to standard. Bulbs hail been taken out to save money! But we fell 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, well, surely we'd be able to turn this club round very quickly.You brought Karrcn Brady in, what was the thinking behind that! Everybody thought that Karrcn had been brought in as a publicity stunt. She was in her very early twenties, I think she told everybody that she was about 27 but I think she was only about 22, but she fell 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 finances, the day to day finances, and 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 Karrcn 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 a couple or three years.
Two to three years! Yes, we believed that. 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 ride 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 sold of a football club basically 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. You could mend a broken arm in a relatively short period of lime, but we had to bring the 'patient' back virtually from the dead.
NOVEMBER 2004