Eriksson: How I was conned at Notts County
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Sven Goran Eriksson, the day after he walked away from his job as director of football at Notts County. Photograph: Tom Jenkins
Sven-Goran Eriksson revealed for the first time has the full story behind his chaotic seven months at Notts County and the bizarre sequence of events that began with hopes of a multi-million-pound revival for the Football League's oldest club only to end with it on the brink of financial collapse.
Twenty-four hours after cutting his ties with the League Two club that has been his employer for the past seven months Eriksson opened his heart to the Guardian. In a candid interview the former England manager has laid bare:
• How he was promised the players and facilities to guarantee Premier League football
• How he entered negotiations to help run North Korea's national team
• The circumstances behind the England defender Sol Campbell's abrupt departure from Meadow Lane
• When he had his first doubts about Munto Finance, the club's offshore-registered parent company
• His anger at the vanishing act that left the club with vast debts and the threat of winding up
The strangest experience of Eriksson's football career began last June when he received the first contact from Russell King and Nathan Willett, two former Jersey-based financiers who claimed to be representing a wealthy consortium of investors from the Middle East and Europe, via a third party. They met at the Dorchester Hotel, where King was a regular resident, and gave a "very clever, very convincing" pitch to Eriksson about moving to Notts County.
"I met these two guys and they were very enthusiastic about what they said," Eriksson said. "They had already bought the club and they wanted to take it to the Premier League. There were a lot of promises about players, about the training ground, the academy; they said they would fix the stadium, that they would buy feeder clubs."
After initial reservations about joining a struggling club in English football's fourth tier Eriksson was persuaded by the prospect of taking the world's oldest league club to the top of the football pyramid and promptly signed up. "I liked the idea of the project, the challenge to do it. It was like a dream to me. And if all their promises had been true, we would have done it."
Soon King's and Willett's promises were backed up by the arrivals of Kasper Schmeichel and Sol Campbell, fresh from contracts with the Premier League clubs Manchester City and Portsmouth, deals that were also negotiated by King and Willett.
"I had no doubts about it in the beginning," he explained. Eriksson's faith in his employers was not shaken even when Campbell quit the club after a single game. Nevertheless, the circumstances of Campbell's departure were consistent with the surreal nature of events at Meadow Lane.
"He played that game away [at Morecambe] and asked the manager if he could go to stay for two days in Newcastle," said Eriksson. "He got permission and left on Saturday evening. Then he called [the chairman] Peter Trembling. Peter called me the next morning and said Sol wants to leave. I called Sol and said could we meet when he came back. We had an agreement to meet after training on Tuesday.
"He started training and in the middle of training he went. I don't know if he told the manager he had some small problems. I thought that after training we would have a meeting but when I came back he was gone. He knew the conditions at the club, I'd shown him the ground and the training ground. Of course there were promises from Willett and King that we would fix it, that they would make the stadium and dressing rooms better and everything. But nothing happened and Sol was concerned about that. We have never spoken since but I guess he felt cheated by them too."
Eriksson says he was still being sold the grand vision of the club, not least by Nathan Willett's father, Peter, who had joined the Notts County board. Eriksson said he believed Peter Willett was the actual owner. "He came a couple of times and said he would fix the stadium and would make the training ground better and then he suddenly disappeared. He never came back."
But still Eriksson was living a life more suited to the director of football of a Champions League club than one in the lowest division of the Football League. Indeed, some elements of the project were truly unique.
"I went on 19 October to North Korea, together with Russell King and Nathan Willett," he said. "When I went home from there I started to have doubts because of what I saw in that country and what happened after that."
They were accompanied by a member of the Hyat family, which the club had stated has "extensive business interests" across the Middle East and Asia; Eriksson says this man was projected as the "big guy" behind the investment in County. However the Guardian later tracked down Anwar Shafi, the acknowledged head of the Hyat family, who disavowed his relative's claims.
"They cheated," Eriksson said. "I was invited there to talk football and I met the president of the Football Association there, coaches of the national team, I saw games and the training and I had a lot of meetings.
"They wanted help with a lot of things. They wanted footballs and boots and coaches and for us to take care of teams in North Korea. They wanted the team to come to Europe and they wanted help with the scouting and help with friendly games, analysing opponents, etc.
"Of course this would have cost money and they [King, Peter Willett and their associates] said everything was OK. When we came home the days went on and I contacted Nathan Willett and I said I needed a contact number for the people in Korea to start to do it. So I prepared places in Europe for them to take their teams for six months and we contacted sponsors to help out about everything.
"But I never could contact anyone in Korea and nothing happened. And I felt sorry for them because I'd promised on behalf of these guys and I never could contact them so I wondered what was going on."
While the party was in Pyongyang, Willett and King and their colleagues went to meet officials at the ceremonial Mansudae Assembly hall. "I was there for football and they went to visit people at the palace," he said. "I saw them handing out share certificates in Swiss Commodity Holding [the company whose corporate logo was incorporated into Notts County's club crest] to people. These were not for millions but billions. I tried to joke: why don't you put some of that into Notts County? And they said, 'Take it easy, Sven, you'll have your players and you'll go to the Premier League.'"
But when it emerged that the club was running up huge debts as bills went unpaid, with the taxman even issuing a winding-up order in November, Eriksson's perspective began to change. "Then the club had problems with money, bills not being paid. So, of course, I started to be doubtful and they never paid me what they promised," said Eriksson. "In my initial contract I was promised 10% of the club but I never received anything."
Eriksson has been hit in the pocket by this experience. Though he refused to go into details of his financial arrangements club sources say that inagreeing to leave Meadow Lane after the takeover by a consortium led by the former Lincoln City chairman, Ray Trew, on Thursday, he has waived a £2.4m pay-off, accepting instead two months' wage arrears. Trew, now County's chairman, has described the Swede as an "absolute gentleman".
"I signed the agreement to leave because there was never a question I should stay here," said Eriksson. "I told the players and staff today and the people in the office: that's it."
Eriksson accepts that his decision to place his faith in King and the Willetts might have damaged his reputation. "I don't know if it's affected me like that," he said. "All I can say is I've gone in with open eyes and I liked it and it went wrong. Maybe I should have had suspicions but I didn't have that in the beginning."
At the height of the roller coaster Eriksson did not want to hear others' suspicions about Munto. When I confronted him on the issue at the Leaders in Football conference early last October, Eriksson appeared irritated, referring me to Trembling without hearing me out. But County's crash has been so alarming, the gap between what Willett and King said and reality so wide, that now Eriksson feels compelled to break football's omerta and tell one of the most extraordinary stories that has befallen the game in decades.
"Sometimes things go wrong in football," said Eriksson. "You can lose games, own-goals, you can buy the wrong players. But you do it in the right spirit and you do it honestly. That is not how it went wrong at Notts County. If you are not trying to cheat people, it is very easy to come out and say that it went wrong. People will not like it but they will understand. But when they disappear like that: it's morally very, very bad. This is why I am talking about it.
"I did feel personal responsibility. I know some of the players wouldn't be there if I was not, of course I feel that. I feel very sorry for the players and the fans. I tried as hard as I could to find people who could help us, I've been to Norway, to Sweden, to Spain, to London many, many times to find investment.
"But what's disappointing about these people is that they just disappeared without saying anything. Without any message to the players, to the fans, to the staff. Just gone."
Now Eriksson will look to rebuild his career, putting the experience of the past eight months behind him. A man with league titles in Sweden, Portugal and Italy and two World Cup quarter-finals on his resumé will not want for work and he has been inundated with calls from agents, although he has received no formal offers.
So when all is said and done and he looks back on the past eight months, what has he learnt from the experience? "Maybe I trust people too much."