Karren Brady On Various Subjects

[Thespence]

It is not hard to see why the 2018 World Cup bid team have sought to secure the services of Karren Brady. If a winning proposal is about forging alliances and putting in the hours, or the after-hours, whether in committee rooms or with the faces that matter at the bar, Brady is the uber-networker. There is a reason that, in her time as managing director, Birmingham City managed to secure the services of some of the most promising young players in the country, including Nicklas Bendtner, of Arsenal, on loan.

 

‘I was speaking to Phil Gartside at Bolton Wanderers about a player once,’ Brady said, ‘and he said, “Karren, I can hear your eyelashes fluttering down the telephone line”. I said, “No, Phil, I just think you’re sweet”. But, of course, it helped being the only woman in the room. Not just that, though, but a vocal woman, and an articulate woman.’

 

Brady did 16 years at Birmingham before departing after the Carson Yeung takeover. She had already made up her mind that it was time for a change, her final years in football soured by a corruption investigation by City of London police. Brady was arrested, twice, over tax and national insurance matters involving two players but, despite banner headlines and glaring publicity, a simple letter to her solicitor in August confirmed no action would be taken. By then, she had been through enough.

 

'I was in a very dark place,’ she said. ‘It was gut-wrenching. Nobody should have to go through that when they have done nothing wrong. The only reason I wasn’t shouting from the roof tops when it was over was because I thought the less I said, the quicker it would go away. I didn’t want to have to justify myself or remind people of it. I had always thought, “No smoke without fire”, but now I know there can be lots of smoke, great billowing clouds of it, and absolutely no fire at all.

 

‘I remember one morning there was a huge headline on the front page of a newspaper that had “Brady” and the word “bung” in the same sentence. I was physically sick. Actually sick. I was mortified. There was never any hint I had taken a bung, but the horrible shame that is attached to that suggestion, all the miscommunication, the false perception, it was very hard to take.

 

‘Anyone who knows me will say that, when it comes to agents, we are oil and water. I could never be accused of stealing anything from Birmingham City and that people might believe this broke my heart. You spend 16 years where your professionalism, your reputation, is above reproach and then, out of the blue, this happens. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t now.

 

‘It was a tax matter that would have been dealt with by the Inland Revenue in any other industry, but because it was football it became this big public saga. My kids were coming home and saying, “Mum, people keep saying you’re in prison”. And I would think, “Why am I putting my family through this?”

 

‘It drifted on and on, which I found really difficult. At the end, the feeling of relief was indescribable but I had no control over the process at any time, which is horrible.

 

‘I was utterly confused, really. I never knew what I was meant to have done wrong and, when it was over, I just felt the need to do something different. That, more than the takeover, was the catalyst for leaving football.’

 

It is perhaps this that has coloured Brady’s judgment that the fun is increasingly missing from the game. It is curious to hear this very focused, single-minded

business person talking almost wistfully about an era she would only have glimpsed as a 23-year-old starting her first major management job. Brady has sympathy for the new owners who come into the sport for pleasure and are quickly embroiled in a world more demanding than commerce.

 

‘When I started, the main thing was the match and every day was spent gearing up for it,’ Brady recalls. ‘Now it’s all business, politics, money — and, oh, by the way, there’s a game on Saturday. The emphasis has changed. All we talk about now is how you spend the money, do you break even, do you go into debt, are you a selling club, are you buying?

 

‘People get into football thinking it will be fun, and it’s not. I feel sorry for a guy like Mike Ashley because it seems a simple business when you are outside, the sort any business person can pick up. And the people who own these clubs are used to making decisions behind closed doors, never under scrutiny. Then they come into this environment where everything is on the table for discussion — who you buy, what you wear, the team, the manager — and the culture change is so difficult, they get it wrong.

 

‘Ashley paid a big price for Newcastle United. He put a lot of money in, he tried his best. He made one mistake: he didn’t realise they don’t like Londoners up there. It was the same for us at Birmingham. I can remember the day we took over, the headline in the local newspaper was “Cockneys Go Home”. I was thinking, “Cockney? I beg your pardon. I’m not a bloody Cockney”. So I feel tremendous sympathy for Ashley. It wasn’t as if there was this whole queue of Newcastle people waiting to buy the club.

 

‘The supporters think the chairman sits around saying, “Here’s a plan — I’m going to buy the worst players I can think of”. They do! They think we’re picking names blindfolded with a pin out of a book, saying, “Right, I’m going to spend £20million on that one”.

 

‘The reality is football becomes a black hole. You buy a player, it doesn’t work out. Now you need another player in that position, but you still have the first one on the wage bill. So you have two of them, same position. You want to get rid of the first one, but you can’t, because you bought him thinking he was going to be a success and his wages are too high for the sort of club that is now looking at him. Then the second player gets injured. Now you need a third player. The first one you can’t sell, the second one is on an absolute fortune but he isn’t playing either, now you’re in the market for a third.

 

‘And managers will say anything to get you to buy. I can remember Barry Fry asking for the money for Ricky Otto from Southend United. He said he needed a forward. David Sullivan said to me, “I’m sure he’s a winger”, but, no, Barry insisted he was a forward. So we bought him. A month or so later, Barry was in again. “We’ve got a problem with Ricky Otto”. What’s that? “He’s more of a winger than a forward. We need a forward”.

 

‘David Dein said to me, “Never believe them when they say just one more player. It’s never just one more player”. I don’t blame managers. They are protecting their livelihood. But every time I read that Harry Redknapp is down to the bare bones, it makes me laugh.

 

‘At 23, I had skin as thick as a rhino. I didn’t know anything about football. I still don’t really. I used to phone up my counterparts and they’d be off watching a reserve match. I always thought, “Why?” All these executives wearing tracksuits. I still had to put the address of our training ground into my sat-nav because I didn’t know where it was. My time was better spent making money to give to the manager rather than watching training.

I wasn’t a wannabe, coming on scouting missions or wanting to sit on the bus. That must drive the manager mad. Then again, maybe he would have liked a managing director whose eyes didn’t glaze over at the mention of midfield.

 

‘So I wouldn’t go back into football, not full time. I’ve been there and I’d like to do other things now. I did my job well for 16 years. I had to make ends meet because we had no sugar daddy and that is much harder than having someone give you £100m every season. But I did it and the club were sold as a result. So I’m done now.’

 

Not entirely. Brady will be part of the World Cup bid team even if her appointment to the main committee was a less-than-auspicious beginning. She found out from the back page of this newspaper, and no sooner had she accepted than she was told she had been demoted in a reorganisation, without attending a meeting.

 

‘They asked me to step down. I said it was going to be difficult as I hadn’t actually stepped up yet,’ she said, tartly. Now she chairs something known as the advisory committee, although she is still waiting to offer her first advice. For the record, here it is.

 

‘Stop bickering, stop resigning and get the public behind it because this is our big chance and we have to show FIFA that we, as a country, will support a World Cup brilliantly. We should have an ambassador in all of the countries that have a vote, a national who can put our case, because there is no point having hundreds of ambassadors over here and nothing abroad. We know why we should have the World Cup.

 

‘And stop rubbishing everything because, if we go much further down this line, it will be impossible to stop.’

 

n form like this, it is easy to forget that Brady might not have been here at all, were it not for an operation to prevent the rupture of an aneurysm in her brain, detected by chance in February, 2006. Like the City of London Police investigation, it is something else she has chosen not to dwell on, to bury bad memories.

 

‘The only way I could deal with it after was to shrug it off,’ she said. ‘Even talking about it now makes me upset, and if I had thought about it too much it would have driven me mad. I was given two choices: coiling to break the aneurysm up or a full craniotomy. With coiling they have no idea how thick the aneurysm is, so there is a risk of it ripping and the patient dying on the operating table. With a craniotomy there is a very high chance of having a severe stroke.

 

‘And these are your choices, but you have no gut instinct because it is a predicament you could never expect. Family try to advise you, but they don’t know either. And all I kept thinking was that I would kick myself if I picked the wrong one and ended up dead, which is daft in itself. So I called the two doctors and said, “I have no intention of making this decision, I want the pair of you to get in a room, discuss my case, come up with a unanimous verdict and I’ll do whatever you say”.

 

‘Apparently, nobody had done it like that before. So they decided on the coil, and the funny thing with that is they go up through your groin so you have no visible scars. It is almost as if you have had nothing done, just a couple of little stitches that nobody can see. And I wanted a big bandage around my head, you know. Something that told people: “Look, I’ve had brain surgery here. Bit of sympathy, please”.

 

‘The worst thing was they said if you survive the first 24 hours you’ll probably be OK, so you lie in intensive care just watching the clock, tick, tick, tick for a whole day, trained on that wall. I was terrified to sleep just in case I didn’t wake up. Paul (Peschisolido, Karren’s husband, the manager of Burton Albion) was with me but about halfway through I heard him snoring, and he had gone off in the chair.

 

‘Then he said he was going to the room to have a lie down, so the moral of this story is never marry a footballer. Luckily, I had a lovely nurse who chatted to me for 24 hours and told me it was nothing whenever the machines made a funny noise. I understood instantly, though, why people who’ve been through that horrible world come out of it and go back-packing or travel to the North Pole or whatever, because it makes you realise life is so bloody short.

 

‘I went from not having a GP because I was never ill, to having to confront the fact that my children might grow up without me, get married and I wouldn’t be there. My husband could marry someone else and that someone would live in my house and bring up my family. I thought, “I’ll crawl back from heaven if that happens”. I just couldn’t bear it. And all that time I’m also thinking about the times I’ve stood on the touchline texting when I should be watching my son play football and the stress I gave myself over things that didn’t matter. I had sleepless nights when our pitch was underwater. Can you imagine that? What was the worst that could have happened? We play the game another time? Big deal.

 

‘So I stopped taking my BlackBerry everywhere, took more holidays, got a bit of perspective. I started distinguishing between the stuff that is really important, and the stuff that you make important, but isn’t. It changed me, definitely. If Birmingham

had been sold five years ago I would have been terrified at losing my job.’

 

nstead, she will look forward. She is the sidekick to Lord Sugar in the new series of The Apprentice, there is the 2018 World Cup bid, non-executive directorships at Channel 4 and Mothercare plc and a wickedly indiscreet newspaper column, which she writes herself in the form of a diary.

 

It made additional headlines last year when a barbed comment about the size of Birmingham’s squad angered manager Alex McLeish, but the devil is in the details, the little asides, the boardroom pillow talk, the WAG with ‘the personality of a Dover sole’, swingers’ parties, condoms in the boardroom and the Premier League director who emerged penniless from a Moscow hostess bar, having spent big on two up front. Surely, a degree of licence is taken with some of the spicier items, for entertainment purposes?

 

‘Actually, it’s the opposite,’ Brady said. ‘It’s what I leave out that would make your hair curl. People tell me stuff. I don’t have to invent it. More often than not, I’m thinking, “Nobody’s going to believe that”. Like the director with the new house where on the last Friday of every month all these strangers kept turning up because the previous owners used to hold swingers’ parties. He phones me and says, “You won’t believe what I’m looking at here, there is this big parade of people in all these different get-ups queuing outside. They say they’re here for the hot sex. What do I do?” I mean, how am I supposed to know?’

 

So what is her favourite?

 

‘Oh, I think the condom in the Birmingham City boardroom,’ she said, airily. ‘I found it, floating in the toilet. And there was a woman in there and she said, “Oh, I saw you looking at that”, and I said, “Yeah, I’m looking all right”. And it became this big whodunit. I mean, in the boardroom toilet of all places. I suppose it was a dull match. Well, obviously for somebody it wasn’t.’

 

And at least somebody had fun at football that week.

 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1232479/Karren-Brady-tax-rumours-swingers-parties-England-MUST-host-2018-World-Cup.html#ixzz0YixcGBP9

 

 

[Keefaz]

Oh, fuck off. Ridiculous.

[Guest GAMMELL]

Has a gash the size of a clowns pocket, f*cking whore

[Guest Heneage]

We don't like Londoners Karen?

 

Steven Taylor, Les Ferdinand, Rob Lee, Warren Barton.

 

You daft slag, stick to appearing on the apprentice you rubber faced bint.

[BlueStar]

Yeah, we fucking hated cockney bastards like Robert Lee, couldn't wait to see the back of them.  Conversely, everyone loved Geordie hero Freddy Shepherd.

 

Did she miss the bit where everyone welcomed him to the club, mobbed him when he went into bars etc and only started calling him a fat cockney bastard when he started destroying the fucking club?  Do you think that could have something to do with it, rather than simple xenophobia you daft bint?

[Guest Alan Shearer 9]

Get your tits out and shut up, that goes for the one off 'The Football League show' as well. Failing that get in the kitchen and do something fucking useful for a change.

[bigfella]

'course we all hate Cockneys up here...

 

...I mean just look at that  bastard Malcolm Macdonald and as for those twats Robert Lee, Warren Barton and Les Ferdinand....

 

Tell you what, go and make me tea luv and keep your nose out of something you know nothing about.

[Guest Alan Shearer 9]

‘At 23, I had skin as thick as a rhino.'

 

Put more fucking make up on then you ugly twat. In silence preferably. You can multi task as well and get my fucking breakfast too.

 

How did they ever get the vote, beggars belief.

[Guest Roger Kint]

'Wasnt as if there was a big queue of people wanting to buy the club'

 

When Ashley bought it the deal came out of nowhere thats why you stupid bint, fuck off!!

[Interpolic]

Pretty gobsmacked at that like.

 

He made one mistake: he didnt realise they dont like Londoners up there.

 

Seriously, what the fuck? He's made about a million mistakes and that's not one of them. Karen, I think you'll find that the North East is generally very welcoming to people from elsewhere in the country, hence the reason why so many go up there for Uni or work or whatever and fall in love with the place.

[Doctor Zaius]

At 23, I had skin as thick as a rhino. I didn’t know anything about football. I still don’t really.

 

 

Aye and thats why you should shut the hell up about something you know nothing about.

[Dave]

Pretty good how she explains she's not a cockney but forgets Ashley isn't a Londoner.

[Danh1]

Hopefully she burns her face off in a chip pan fire incident the fucking slag.

[tmonkey]

I guess the tribunal findings that essentially declared Ashley's regime to be a bunch of odious, lying, slimy c***s went right over Brady's head.

 

As the article says, she's good at keeping the right people happy, which is how she managed to become a football director at the age of 23, despite having no formal qualifications and by her own admission, "I didn’t know anything about football". This is just a further exercise in sucking up to someone with a decent amount of wealth/power who probably operates in circles she wants to keep happy.

[Thespence]

I guess the tribunal findings that essentially declared Ashley's regime to be a bunch of odious, lying, slimy c***s went right over Brady's head.

 

As the article says, she's good at keeping the right people happy, which is how she managed to become a football director at the age of 23, despite having no formal qualifications and by her own admission, "I didn’t know anything about football". This is just a further exercise in sucking up to someone with a decent amount of wealth/power who probably operates in circles she wants to keep happy.

 

The Ashley-Green-Sugar loop

[Superior Acuña]

Oh, f*** off. Ridiculous.

 

All that needs to be said.

[Guest elbee909]

Stupid brain tumour bitch

[Mowen]

brummie'll be jizzing it when he sees we also hate Brady now.

[Oakie Doke]

she always makes ridiculous statements when she's on The Apprentice: You're Fired as well.

[Interpolic]

she always makes ridiculous statements when she's on The Apprentice: You're Fired as well.

 

Bring back Margaret.

[SEMTEX]

Some of your reactions are ridiculous. Yes she says 1 vaguely annoying thing to NUFC fans "1 thing wrong, is londoner", but it's not like she says he's done amazingly, far from it. She basically says he's jumped into something he knows fuck all about, which is true. Nowt much more to see imo.

[Oakie Doke]

she always makes ridiculous statements when she's on The Apprentice: You're Fired as well.

 

Bring back Margaret.

[TRon]

She's right about one thing, there isn't a queue to buy the club and there wasn't back then either. No one with serious money has made a bid, all we've had are mystery consortiums with dubious PR spokesmen and Barry Moat.

[Mike]

Is she hot?

 

She's talking shit, btw. Don't think anyone in the thread noticed.

[Mowen]

Is she hot?

 

She's talking shit, btw. Don't think anyone in the thread noticed.

 

pedro would.