Seeing Red (13 page)

I've got that off my chest, so where was I? You've met my mum and dad. I've introduced Julia and the junior Polls. You've seen me stepping onto the refereeing ladder and clambering up the rungs. So it's time to tell you, very briefly, about my other life – my ‘proper jobs' – and speak about a very good friend, Graham Barber. My work and my mate Barbs both had a big influence on my refereeing.

Very soon after leaving school I realized that I wanted to work in sales and my first chance at it was with Canon. That job brought my first company car – a beige Vauxhall Astra estate. It was all cold calling – there were no ‘leads'. I used to work my way around industrial estates, chatting up girls behind reception desks. I would ask, ‘What photocopier do you use? Is it reliable? Who is responsible for buying the copiers here? Can I have his/her number?' Then I would work the telephone. From fifty calls, I might talk my way to five appointments. Those might lead to two demonstrations of copiers lugged out from the back of my beige car. If I was lucky, two demonstrations might bring one sale.

Quite a few premises in the Ealing and Shepherds Bush areas of west London bought Canon products from young Graham Poll and I got even better results when my beige Astra estate and I moved to the area around Heathrow Airport.

Sales work is target-led and you have to be structured and methodical. I carried those ways of working into my refereeing life. For instance, in sales, if you have to get £50,000 of business by a certain time, that could seem very daunting. But you can break that target down and say to yourself, ‘Well, I know I always get an order of at least £5,000 from that customer, and I know I have three people who usually give me £1,000 of business.' Then you look at all the other calls you are going to make and say, ‘I have only got to average an order value of £200 from those.' That way, the big target seems much more attainable.

In football, I divided each game into nine ten-minute segments. That didn't mean I kept looking at my watch and taking stock at precisely ten-minute intervals. But I would have a plan for the first ten minutes – I might decide to be very strict if it was an explosive game, or I might plan to let the game flow. Then I would review things after ten minutes or so. I would think, ‘Right, how is it going? Do I need to calm the play down or let the tempo develop?' Then I would do a similar mental exercise about ten minutes later, and so on. Referees always find the final twenty minutes demanding physically, but I would think, ‘Seven segments done, two to go.' It worked for me.

After Canon came a job with Schwarzkopf. I began flogging shampoo. No, sorry, I began providing professional-quality hair-care products to selected retail outlets. Then after a couple of similar jobs, I landed a position with Nike
sportswear – but it led to the first real clash between my football career and my life as a sales person.

The refereeing was going well. I was enjoying myself in the good old Isthmian League and as an assistant referee in the Conference. But when I had been at Nike for about six months, they called a big meeting at one day's notice. It was for the UK launch of the Nike Air shoe – a significant day in their diary – but I had a football appointment: a Conference game between Welling United and Wealdstone. If I pulled out with less than twenty-four hours' notice then questions would be asked about my reliability and my commitment to refereeing. I begged Nike to excuse me from the meeting but they said I had to be there. From their point of view, the choice between Nike Air and Welling United was straightforward. They said, ‘It's the meeting or find a new job.' The choice was straightforward for me, as well. I had to find a new job. Nike were asking me to make a choice between reffing and repping, and it was always going to be football.

So I joined Oral B – ‘the brand more dentists use'. They were part of the Gillette empire and were based at Aylesbury, which was good, but selling toothpaste and toothbrushes seemed like a step backwards in my career. Yet, despite using samples to write love messages on the back of Julia's car, I did well at Oral B and enjoyed the work. After six months I became regional sales manager and eventually I became national sales manager.

I left in 1991 to become national sales manager of Coty – ‘the world's largest fragrance company and a recognized leader in global beauty' – and Julia and I moved to Reading. It was about that time that I started being recognized as a referee (although not, I concede, as a global beauty). A year after I joined Coty, the Premier League was formed. The new
competition signed a deal with Sky TV which ramped up the coverage of football and put the hype into hyperbole.

By the mid Nineties, Coty were talking about my becoming sales director, but FIFA were talking about my being promoted to the international list. Another choice to make. The same decision. Football had to come first. I could not commit to the demanding job of sales director and keep taking time off to travel the world to referee football matches, and I had no intention of shunning the opportunities which were opening up for me in refereeing. So I asked a friend who worked in recruitment to find me a job with some flexibility but he said, ‘Nobody will take you. At your level, employers want people with ambition. But all your ambition is focused on football.'

I quite expected Coty to lay me off because of my increasing football ambitions and commitments, but they did not. I stayed with them for almost a decade. But, eventually they, and I, had to make a choice. Football won again.

By Christmas 1998, there was increasing speculation that the Premier League wanted professional referees and my name was always mentioned in the stories. My boss at Coty called me in and said, ‘If this happens, you are obviously going to go.'

I said, ‘Well, yeah.'

Coty had to plan for the future without me and so they said they would move me out of my position but would keep me on doing project work for six months. Then I could leave and be a full-time referee. That was the plan, but then the Premier League chairmen voted by eighteen to two against professional referees. I expected to be out of work, but my boss at Coty, Ian Williamson, gave me three days a week consultancy work. That was a huge help but, like my dad
before me, I wanted to provide as well as I possibly could for the Poll family, and so Graham Barber and I set up our own company to try to generate additional income. It almost made us rich – almost.

Graham Barber – Barbs – and I first met on our way to a conference for all Football League officials at Harrogate in 1986. We were not paid travelling expenses, so a group of linesmen arranged to meet at Stevenage. We left our cars there and travelled in Barbs' car – because it was the best one. He was a successful salesman and had a company Mercedes.

We hit it off straight away. He was five years older than me, but a year behind me in refereeing terms. But in his sales career, he was way ahead of me. So we had a mutual admiration and respect. We had similar personalities and shared a similar sense of humour. We had a hoot. Over the next few months we built a friendship which was to prove lasting and important. We began to meet socially and we watched each other referee. The first time I watched him referee was at a pre-season friendly at Kingstonian. I remember thinking, ‘Thank goodness, he is not crap!' If he had not been any good at refereeing, it would have affected our friendship. As it was, we discussed things that happened in games and helped each other – without it ever being competitive between us.

Barbs was living in Surrey when we first became friends, but then he met Wendy, a girl from Tring, and ended up buying a house fifty yards from where I lived with Julia. He was best man at my wedding; I was best man at his. If anything happened to me he would look after my children. I would do the same for him. He is a top guy.

The company we set up together was called Arbitro (Spanish for referee). One of our schemes was for the two
Grahams to host ‘Men In Black' evenings. We would wear black tracksuit bottoms and black polo shirts and we would talk, deliver a few well-rehearsed ad-libs and answer questions from the audience.

Audience? What audience? For some inexplicable reason, the public were not overwhelmed by the notion of a night out listening to a couple of referees. On our debut, at Aylesbury Football Club, as we changed in the referees' room, Tony Barrie, a friend of Barbs who helped ‘promote' the event, came and warned us that business was not brisk. He said, ‘There's been a bit of a slow start.'

We asked, ‘How many?'

He said, ‘Twelve. But that includes your families. So ten are complimentaries and only two have paid.'

That meant takings of £10. Tony's cut was a third. We were just about covering our petrol costs. We were sure it hadn't been like that in the early days for Morecambe and Wise. We decided we couldn't go on if there were fewer than thirty in the audience. So, although Tony cajoled another ten people to join the throng, we adjourned to the nearby Kings Arms and said farewell to show business.

The next scheme for the two Grahams was an internet site – and this one would have worked. It was inspired by driving home from matches, listening to radio phone-ins and realizing that fans often completely misunderstood refereeing decisions and issues. So why not have a website on which referees explain and discuss? Our idea was to persuade top referees, from England and abroad, to write exclusively for our site. We signed up Pierluigi Collina, Anders Frisk and leading Premiership officials and we received a letter from the FA giving us permission to pursue the plan. Then we pitched our idea to companies with existing football websites.
TeamTalk, based in Leeds, liked the idea of adding RefTalk to their portfolio. The deal they offered us would have meant Barbs and I sharing £1.45 million. They were offering us £250,000 each up front, £250,000 each in shares and a salary of £75,000 each per annum for a minimum of three years as consultants.

All that remained was the final and formal blessing from the Football Association, the Premier League and Football League. But Ken Ridden, who had given us the go-ahead to pursue the idea, had been replaced by John Baker as the FA's head of refereeing. He and Joe Guest, another FA official, sat down with us at a meeting. The others there were Mike Foster, secretary of the Premier League, Brian Philpott of the Football League and Philip Don, who was pencilled in to take charge of the soon-to-be professional referees.

Joe Guest and Philip Don backed us; the others did not. They could not stop us launching the website but we were reminded that our position as National List referees was reviewed every year – we got the message. When Barbs and I had set up Arbitro we had agreed that we would not let it jeopardize our refereeing, so we backed down. When we got home from that meeting, the contracts from TeamTalk had arrived in the post that day: we could not sign them.

That was so frustrating. We had worked so hard developing the idea and selling it to other referees and to TeamTalk. Richard Scudamore, chief executive of the Premier League, and Nic Coward, company secretary of the FA, agreed to pay us £20,000 each as compensation. It was a gesture, but it was not the £1 million-plus we had been promised.

Then, on Monday, 13 June 2001, the BBC website reported:

Referees in England will be professional from next season, the Football Association confirmed.

The FA, working alongside the Premier League and Football League, will overhaul the management, training and development of all match officials.

The new scheme will enable officials to go full-time as a result of the financial incentives on offer, and they will also be more accountable regarding their performances in matches.

The referees' National Review Board is to be replaced by a new organization, called the Professional Game Match Officials Board.

The group will consist of the three governing bodies' chief executives and refereeing managers in addition to the FA's head of refereeing.

The restructuring, aimed at improving the overall standard of refereeing in the professional game, will see match officials categorized into two groups.

The select group will officiate in the Premier League and other competitions and comprise of 24 referees and 48 assistant referees.

Referees in this group will receive an annual retainer of £33,000 plus match fees of £900 for their commitment to training and development over several days each month in addition to their match commitments. Assistant referees in the select group will receive an allowance for their time dedicated to training.

This group will be the responsibility of referees' manager, Philip Don.

Outside of the Premiership, the national group will officiate in the Football League and other competitions, with 50 referees and 188 assistant referees.

The revolution had begun. If I am honest, most of us would-be Ché Guevaras had doubts and misgivings. I was among the leading advocates in the campaign to go pro, but there were real benefits about having an ‘ordinary' job as well as refereeing. It meant that you could not think too much about football matches beforehand or afterwards. You would referee Arsenal against Manchester United, starting at 4 pm on the Sunday, and then by 6 am on the Monday you would be up, showered and ready to drive off to manage a big sales force. The Sunday game had to be cleared from your mind. You did not have time to get bitter and twisted if someone else was appointed to referee the match you wanted. You had your job to think about and it was good to focus on an interest outside football.

On the other side of that coin, however, I can remember driving home from Liverpool after a night match and pulling into a service station for an hour's sleep because I was so tired. I needed to get home because of work commitments the next day.