THE ODD COUPLE
They drive each other mad but the Barnet chairman has hired Martin Allen for a FIFTH time...
SOME football club owners think they’ve cracked it after gettiing through five managers. Tony Kleanthous has just hired the same one for a fifth time and is still no closer to understanding why things never seem to work out without him.
‘He’s like an artist. He sees a picture that others can’t. I don’t think there’s an equivalent on the planet,’ Kleanthous, the Barnet chairman, says of Martin Allen, who saved the club from relegation in his second and third spells at Underhill and who accepted a rescue mission like no other on Sunday night.
Barnet are propping up the Football League, seven points from safety, with a trip to second-placed Luton today.
Neither member of this improbable duo denies that Allen has left for a better offer in the past — heading off to Brentford in 2004 and, more surprisingly, big-spending non-League side Eastleigh just 15 months ago.
‘I’m not going to fudge it. It was a fantastic package [at Eastleigh],’ says Allen, whose ‘ Mad Dog’ nickname doesn’t come close to encapsulating one of the most colourful individuals in management.
‘Yes, it’s always money that takes Martin away from us,’ says Kleanthous. ‘We’re not rich here. I can’t seem to keep hold of people who do well.’
You sense that there are also times when the two of them drive each other mad — though each has a different perspective on why.
‘The intensity is right up on the scale and he likes to works very closely with a chairman,’ Kleanthous says. ‘The problem with that is that becomes very labour-intensive for me. I’ve got so much other work to do. I don’t have time.’
Allen says he likes the way Kleanthous leaves him alone but says their conversations can be brief, adding: ‘I go to see him ask for something and eight times out of nine he says no!’
In more than 20 years as Barnet owner, Kleanthous has made it an article of faith that football people should make the football decisions. ‘To me it’s just a name on a bit of paper,’ he says of the player acquisition business. ‘They could have two left feet, for all I know. There aren’t any right or wrongs — there are just opinions. You just have to be right more than you are wrong in your opinions.’
He instead channels his time and money into his areas he knows about — establishing and running businesses which make money while benefiting his beloved club.
He has ploughed £31million into the impressive stadium complex, The Hive, where Barnet have played since 2013. A £2million sponsorship deal with Toshiba Medical Systems — struck when the club were in the fifth tier — was the biggest financial partnership in non-League history. A medical scanning facility rivalling any in the Premier League officially opens next month.
The complex is about as far removed from the foot of League Two as you can get. Brazil and Germany trained there before the 2014 World Cup.
Finding someone to run the football side of the business has been infinitely more complicated.
Kleanthous has hired several technical directors, who usually wind up temporarily taking over the team after recruiting managers who fail. The total number of managers including caretakers, stand-ins and rescue missionaries comes to a staggering 26 in the 24 years since Kleanthous first hired Ray Clemence, who went off to work for Glenn Hoddle and England. ‘I’m a bit embarrassed now you put it like that,’ he says of the tally — and it says everything about Kleanthous’ essential decency that he does not mind being tested on whether he can name them all.
HE just about succeeds, though there is some confusion about Tony Cottee, whose fivemonth tenure from October 2000 led to Barnet being relegated from the Football League the following May. It was Cottee’s only foray into management. ‘If you look through it, I’ve not had that many managers,’ Kleanthous ventures to add, when he’s been through the list.
That’s an understatement, yet a few hours in his company explain why former managers lsuch as Paul Fairclough and John Still have wanted to return to help.
Strictly speaking, Kleanthous has essentially sacked seven of the 26: Cottee, Ian Hendon, Mark Stimson, Lawrie Sanchez, Kevin Nugent, Graham Westley and — technically — Edgar Davids, although the parting of the ways with the Dutchman was cordial. Kleanthous simply had to point out that it was not appropriate for Davids to be fulfilling other professional commitments when he was supposed to be in the dugout.
When Allen left last season, Kleanthous decided to throw extra money at a League Two promotion push, bringing in Mark McGhee as the umpteenth technical director and installing youth coach Rossi Eames as manager. It was chaos. Eames stood down for personal reasons, McGhee temporarily took over and then hired Graham Westley, who the fans haven’t liked.
The various managers have left Kleanthous with a squad of 43 players. ‘I should have stopped spending,’ he admits. ‘If you look at our match programme, the team runs almost to the other side of the page. We’ve got so many players.’
Allen is astonished by what’s happened in 15 months. ‘I’ve no idea why they’ve collected that number of players,’ he says. ‘We had an 11 v 11 standard training game the other day. There were 18 subs!’
He’s cut the number of players he’ll work with from 43 to 20. The other 23 have been told they can go, though Kleanthous, needless to say, is still paying up their contracts, many of which run until the end of the season.
Naturally, Allen is up for the fight. ‘There are eight games in seven weeks, we’re miles adrift and everyone thinks Barnet are going to be relegated,’ he says. ‘Well I can’t wait. Come back and talk to me seven weeks from now.’
Chastened by the interminable struggle for football success, Kleanthous is circumspect and non-committal when asked why on earth he doesn’t just pay Allen an awful lot more money to stay around for years.
‘It was carnage when we dropped to the non-League last time,’ he says. ‘We just have to wait, see what the next few weeks hold and then start again. Let’s just see.’