OTD: THE FAN WHO GOT SAFC PROMOTED

On this day in 1990 Sunderland were promoted as a result of Swindon cheating financial regulations, despite a defeat in the play off final between the two sides. This decision resulted in furious protests from third-placed Newcastle United and relegated Sheffield Wednesday. Here's an account from Bill Bradshaw, who was a journalist at the time as well as a fan of Sunderland, whose investigative journalism was the reason the rule-breaking of our opponents was brought to the attention of the authorities.

The manner of our eventual promotion in 1990 has become shrouded in the mists of over thirty years of football time. The basic facts are there, like a piece of string hanging from that mist, but the detail is on the other end of the string. Perhaps the person who broke the story that led to our promotion should pull that string and reveal all... Bill Bradshaw takes up the tale.

The way that the story unfolded was, from my point of view, a little bit like a perfect storm, because of the coincidences that happened along the way. To put it in context, at the time I was the sort of news investigative reporter if you like, on the Sunday People. I'd been down in London, having been initially on the People in the Manchester office, when all these papers had Manchester offices, since about '85. And it began with something I got from somebody close to the club, to Swindon, in the very early days of '89. I thought Swindon - well, is this really much of a story though? They were a relatively small club, in Division Two, now called the Championship. And I thought, is there any legs in this? This was before I'd even been able to uncover what was involved. I thought well, no, I'll stick with it.

But, if you'd told me that the story would involve Sunderland Football Club, and then to a reasonable degree also their biggest rivals, Newcastle, you could have knocked me down with a feather. So, it developed into this sort of perfect storm. But to begin with, I got a call at the Sunday People office in London, from somebody who I didn't know. They called me because I used to do the football stuff for the People, I was the man pulling together this Sunday transfer gossip column, which was called Hotline. It used to pull together all the tittle tattle that all the Sunday papers did, and still do, to some degree, but in those pre-internet days it was the main source of gossip. It was this very nice-sounding woman who rang and she just said we think you should investigate the goings-ons at Swindon Town Football Club, because there's all sorts of stuff going on in the finance department, and the commercial department that you should look at as well. You can't just say, yes, I'll do that. I needed a little bit more than that, to, you know, start some sort of investigation, to travel a hundred miles to Swindon from London to see what was what. Anyway, she wasn't prepared to give me much more than a tease.

I didn't have much going on, and I thought, well it's worth a look. In those days, and it's even worse now but in those days, Sunday papers used to have a fairly small permanent staff. Then there was probably about seven or eight of us, I mean it's much worse these days as the Sunday papers, basically, are run by the same people who work for the daily titles, you know, spread across all seven days. But in those days, we had a pretty strong, but small, staff. So, the sports editor at the time said, “well go and have a look but don't waste any time on it if it's not going to produce the goods.”

Well, I went out there and it became apparent that there were very concerned people in the commercial department and administration. Below the very highest levels, I'm not talking about directors, but below the very high levels they were concerned about some of the things going on. And the thing that they came up with first that made me want to investigate was “what would you say if we told you that the chairman and the manager bet against their own team in a big game?”

Well that would be astonishing. Anyway, the ball was rolling, and I was interested and I convinced my sports editor to let me run with it. And it was just me. A couple of meetings later it became apparent that the game we were talking about was the FA Cup fourth round game, in January 1988. Swindon, who were doing well in the Second Division at the time, were playing Newcastle, who weren't doing that well in the top division. So, it wasn't a cut and dried match at all. This would have been the Newcastle team of Gazza, Neil McDonald, Paul Goddard and people like that, you know.

So, they had bet what at the time would have been a lot of money, thousands of pounds, on Newcastle to beat Swindon. Newcastle won the match five nil, which raised a few eyebrows at the time, but nobody thought much more about it other than it was a high scoring FA Cup win. Anyway, the people involved were the chairman, a fella called Brian Hillier, and the manager, Lou Macari. They'd won £5,000, so I worked on the back end of the story, but for ages I couldn't really get the evidence to stand it up. I believed the sources, that they'd had the cheque and banked it, but I needed proof.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, and this was after I'd been basically lied to by the Ladbrokes PR machine, they'd tried to put me off and tell me there was nothing in it, eventually from inside the club, and I'd built up the confidence of the people inside the club that I was dealing with by this stage, I got what I needed. They had somebody there who had photocopied the actual winning cheque. They got it to me and that was game, set, and match.

This was months later, I think it was in the early part of November 1989, and we were doing the first story which was Macari and Hillier betting against their own team in flagrant disregard of FA rules, Football League rules, all the rest of it. And that was that. Had that that been the end of the story I would have been delighted. It was a great scoop. As a Sunderland supporter, though, the bonus was that it had involved Newcastle, so I didn't think anything more than that. But by that stage we were ready. I had the evidence, the facsimile of the cheque. I was digging on a new lead that there was more to this than just a dodgy bet.

The aftermath of that was that Macari and Hillier were charged with breaches of FA rules, betting, and betting against their own team, you know, which made it a lot more serious. Over the Christmas and New Year, I was working on the next phase of the story which involved an awful lot more digging into what was basically Swindon also breaking all manner of Football League rules to do with recruitment and contracts.

A heck of a lot of clubs, particularly lower league clubs, used to take advantage of the transfer system at the time, which was that you could sign a player and leave the transfer fee to be decided by a tribunal. They would use what was called a multiplier system, which considered the player's experience, age, performances, goals… and also, crucially, how much the club that he was contracted to at the time were paying him. So that if for example, player x, that you wanted to buy, was on £800 a week, the transfer fee would inevitably be a lot more than for a player on £300 a week. That would go into the multiplier system and basically if a player was being paid more he would cost more. Together with all the other things like age, goals, and all the rest of it.

What Swindon were doing, and this is what I discovered through my sources at the club, was that they were deliberately not particularly wanting to agree terms with clubs. They would sign a player, let's call a spade a spade, they would tap up a player, possibly go through the agent, or they might go direct but they would say “come and join us, and we'll pay you £500 a week”, which at the time was reasonable money for that division. “But what we're gonna do is we're gonna submit to the tribunal that we're paying you £300 a week, and we'll give you the rest in a brown paper bag every week. And we'll give you a side contract, that doesn't go in front of the League, to cover that.”

So, that would be unofficial, undeclared earnings, and the long-term effect of that was that Swindon put together quite a good little team under Macari, because they were able to assemble a team as good as, if not better than, everybody else in the league, for a fraction of what it would have cost their rivals, because they were signing good players at knockdown fees. That is why they were eventually found guilty of all these financial irregularities. It took me weeks and weeks and weeks to build this up, and find out which were the players involved, etc. The other thing, of course, which became a big factor later on as well, was that by doing this, they were defrauding the tax people. The Inland Revenue were not getting as much tax from the player’s earnings as they should have been because a good proportion of the player’s earnings were not being declared. They were being paid on the side, on the fiddle, cash in hand.

So, it was building to be quite a big story, a big, big story. And I was ready to go again, around January of 1990. I wrote the story, and it went in front of the sports editor, who loved it. But he said, “You know, this is dynamite, but you've got to wait until we get the nod from the lawyer”, and the lawyer looked at it and he said, “I'm happy, but only if you get a quote from Lou Macari.”

I'd had what I could get from Hillier, but we hadn't spoken to Macari, who by that time was no longer at Swindon. On the back of the success that they'd had the previous year, he'd got the West Ham job and Ossie Ardiles was at Swindon. So, I think it was the middle of January, I went down to West Ham's match at Plymouth, and I door-stepped Macari at the team's hotel and all I had to do was give him the opportunity to say something. So, I sort of hit him with it as he got out of the lift, and he sort of looked at me and said, “I've got nothing to say.” Which was fine, I'd given him the opportunity and we were ready to publish.

We ran the first of the stories about the financial irregularities the next day. And then the blue touch paper was well and truly lit as they were already a club of interest because of the story that I'd broken about the FA Cup bet. Once we'd run that story, we did a lot more after that sort of ramming home the point and explaining further irregularities. By then Swindon were under investigation by the FA and by the Football League, and also, by early spring, the Inland Revenue. By the time the end of season play offs came around, the story was still happening. The investigation still hadn't been settled, but very shortly after that of course we had that classic Sunderland v Newcastle play off semi-final as well.

By the time we went to the final at Wembley, when Swindon comprehensively beat us in one of the most embarrassing one nils ever, there was already a feeling. I'd already been tipped the wink that even if Swindon won they may not go up. Of course, it was all subject to the deliberations of the Football League, and eventually, within a few days of Swindon being promoted after that one nil Wembley match, they were demoted. Initially two divisions, as they were in the old Third Division when they began the irregularities.

It was modified to just a one division relegation on appeal, so they were relegated from their promoted status back down to where they'd come from, the Second Division. And of course, it was decided after a few sweaty moments that Sunderland would go up as the beaten finalists. That didn't please everybody, and it certainly didn't please Newcastle and a few of the other clubs. Sheffield Wednesday, a relegated club, were furious and they thought there shouldn't have been any promotion at all.

And it was just one massive, massive story by that time and it was one of those occasions where people wondered, I wondered, because I'd put my neck on the line and I was getting a lot of grief from people in the game. I wondered if the football authorities would have the cojones, you know, the balls, to actually see this for what it was, which was a flagrant abuse of the rules, and team-building by deceit, and do something about it. Thankfully, for once they did.

In the end, on the initial FA Cup story, both Macari and Hillier were found guilty, and fined. And then, of course, the most serious in terms of crime, criminal breaches, the tax implications and the football side of the financial irregularities stories, Hillier was found guilty and Macari was found guilty. There were then criminal charges. But on the football side, Hillier was banned from the game. It started as a six month ban and ended up being three years. Macari was also censured.

In the criminal court case that followed, Hillier was found guilty and sentenced to twelve months in jail, which was later reduced to six months on appeal. The club accountant, a guy called Vince Farah, was also found guilty and got a conditional discharge. On that charge, a criminal charge on the financial irregularities Macari was acquitted but was a very lucky boy as the chairman was basically seen as the fall guy.

So that's the story as it unfolded. And of course, retrospectively, that Sunderland side remains a very popular Sunderland side, put together after the McMenemy disappointment. Dennis Smith's team was a very popular side, but historically they enjoyed a huge stroke of fortune in the sense that they got up on the back of this enforced relegation that I guess I'd been somewhat responsible for.

That's it basically. It was nerve-racking for me, I'd spent the whole year, on the story before the first story came out, and that was the story of the FA Cup bet. That was a long slog, but in the end I was just like a dog with a bone, and it was it was one of the best pieces of investigative journalism that that I've been involved with and it was satisfying because I was pretty much a one man band, but very well supported by my sports editor Neville Holtham, he really did let me run with it. Coincidentally, he was a big Sunderland fan as well, and a good friend of Len Shackleton. He was partly responsible for Shack's time at the Sunday People donkey's years ago.

Gordon McKeag, chairman at Newcastle, would have had an inkling what might unfold at the time of the play-off semi, because he was a Football League executive himself. There was talk, a few of us knew that Swindon were on dangerous ground. From my point of view as the guy who broke the story, I didn't have an axe to grind with Swindon. People looked at the story and doubted the veracity of it, which was disappointing when I'd put so much into it. You know the sort of thing “oh, it's the Sundays, they'll print any old stuff.” Especially when I was making such serious allegations.

I guess I wanted to be upheld and vindicated and so I was delighted with the way that it turned out. Enough that it benefited the team that I've supported since I was a kid, you know, it was just an astonishing turn of events because at the beginning of 1989 when I first started looking into the sketchy claims by people when they came to me, you know, how could I possibly know all of the implications?. And also, that it would be at the expense of Newcastle United.

I exchanged pleasantries with Bob Murray shortly afterwards, but he's yet to buy me a drink! I did pretty well out of it, you know, I got to be sports editor, and it's one of the few occasions when it wasn't fans shrugging their shoulders and saying “ah, typical Sunderland”, it was Lady Luck smiling on us for once.