Latest Articles
16 Conclusions From The Champions League Final
76 comments
Is parking the bus such a dreadful thing? Nick Miller wonders why defensive tactics are considered lesser forms of winning, and salutes the extraordinary Didier Drogba...
The Great West Ham Gamble Pays Off. Just
7 comments
Given the resources at Sam Allardyce's disposal, the playoff were the absolute minimum for West Ham this season. But Sam gets results, & they're bloody glad he did...
All Articles
It apparently took a fair bit of cajoling to persuade Nigel Doughty to invest some of his rather large fortune into Nottingham Forest. After all, Doughty was a successful businessman, used to getting his own way and not making decisions on the basis of sentiment.
There's a story about when Doughty sold Umbro to Nike. Negotiations were underway, and he had a price in mind, but Nike were offering less, so Doughty flew to New York for a meeting with the Americans, where they still offered below his asking price. He politely got up, walked out of the meeting and flew back to England. He got the price he was looking for.
It was presumably this keen business sense that prevented him from immediately diving in when, thanks to years of serial mismanagement, Forest found themselves in serious financial trouble in 1999. Indeed, for the first couple of years he didn't even want to relinquish his seat in the Brian Clough Stand, on the other side of the City Ground to where the top brass sit. He was a fan helping out.
But dive in he did, and some 12 years and upwards of £100million later, Doughty finally decided that enough was enough. If ever there was a man unappreciated by his own fans, it was Doughty. Without him there could well have been no Nottingham Forest. Administration was a real possibility in 1999, and the money poured in saved the club from serious trouble then, and enabled players to be bought in the intervening years. Yet perhaps more pertinently Doughty realised that keeping the club from going into administration, with all the very many victims that comes from it, was the right thing to do.
Of course, he made mistakes, not least giving David Platt massive piles of that cash, the mis-spending of which informed the relative parsimony of the following years. Replacing Billy Davies with Steve McClaren last summer obviously looks like an error now, but Davies had been making noises about leaving for around a year. A good manager though he was, Davies always gave the impression that he was doing the club a favour by being there, and if stability was what Forest wanted, Davies wasn't the man to provide it.
While much of the frustration from the Forest support was misunderstood and misreported (the real target of much of the ire was Mark Arthur, the chief executive), it was hardly surprising that Doughty left earlier this season, such was the lack of gratitude from his own support.
Doughty was one of the last of a breed of owners who are genuine fans. Most clubs are either bought by speculators looking for make a bit of coin, or the fabulously wealthy after a hobby, and the fans who ignore logic and financial sense by running a club at a loss because they love it are disappearing. Dave Whelan does it at Wigan, but there are few genuinely altruistic owners in football today.
Doughty's appallingly early death at the weekend leaves Forest in an uncertain position, for much of the cash invested in the club was in the form of a loan, meaning they technically owe him £75.6million. However, in life Doughty made it clear that he had no real hope of recouping that money, a decision that makes absolutely no cold, logical sense at all - it was one driven by emotion. With Doughty and that emotion gone, it remains to be seen what those now in charge of his estate will do.
And having put so much money into the club, do you know what the most frequent criticism from a certain section of the Forest support was? That he didn't invest more.
Doughty made mistakes. He wasn't perfect, but as The Nottingham Post said, 'Forest are unlikely to ever be blessed with a more dedicated or more committed supporter.'
Every Forest supporter should be eternally grateful for what he did for the club. This one certainly is.
Nick Miller - he's on the Twitter machine
Post Comment
