Freddy Shepherd
Chairman of Newcastle United who was a ‘no-holds-barred’ negotiator but was devoted to the club
FREDDY SHEPHERD, the multimillionaire former chairman of Newcastle United, who has died aged 75, was once described as “the oligarch of the North East”.
He and his younger brother Bruce built their fortune, estimated at £120 million, chiefly through Shepherd Offshore, which provides engineering and logistics support for North Sea oil, gas and wind energy operations and has extensively redeveloped the shipyards and quaysides of the Tyne. But Freddy was best known for his rumbustious boardroom leadership of the football club which is the iconic centrepiece of Newcastle life – and to which he was warmheartedly devoted.
The Shepherds were among a consortium of investors led by Sir John Hall, the developer of the Gateshead Metro Centre, who took control of the club in 1992. The new owners provided financial firepower to buy players and expand the St James’s Park stadium, and were rewarded with promotion to the Premier League under the management of Kevin Keegan. As Hall’s deputy, it was Freddy Shepherd who nailed the Newcastle-born Alan Shearer’s transfer from Blackburn Rovers in 1996 for a then world-record fee of £15 million.
When Hall retired to Spain in 1997, Shepherd succeeded as chairman, at a salary of £500,000 a year, and effectively ran the club in tandem with Hall’s son, Douglas. The euphoria of Newcastle fans in the early Hall era had by then given way to frustration at their team’s failure to bring home major trophies – to which Shepherd responded with repeated and usually acrimonious changes of manager.
Keegan had already been succeeded by Kenny Dalglish; after a 2-0 defeat by Arsenal in the 1998 FA Cup final, Dalglish gave way to Ruud Gullit, who was in turn replaced by Bobby Robson, the former England manager. Robson lasted almost five years in the job, but – following rumours of dressing-room unrest – Shepherd replaced him with Graeme Souness soon after the start of the 2004-5 season, declaring the sacking of the then 71-year-old elder statesman Robson to have been “the hardest thing I ever did in my life; I didn’t want to be known as the man who shot Bambi.”
Robson, in his memoirs, criticised Shepherd’s regime and offered a sharp vignette of his deal-making style: “He’s a mean, tough, no-holds-barred negotiator. When it came to transfer bargaining, Freddy Shepherd shoved compassion to one side. If he could screw the other guy, he would.”
But Shepherd’s lowest reputational moment had already passed in March 1998, when he and Douglas Hall featured on the front of the News of the World, having been filmed in what was said to be a Spanish brothel talking to the Sunday paper’s “fake sheikh” investigative reporter Mazher Mahmoud, who they thought was an Arab businessman interested in a deal with the club. Shepherd was recorded saying “Newcastle girls are dogs, England is full of them,” while the pair also disparaged the clean-living Alan Shearer as boring (“we call him Mary Poppins”) and Newcastle fans as “mugs” for spending £50 a time on cheaply manufactured replica shirts.
Both men were forced to resign from the board but since they controlled two-thirds of the club’s shares, they were able to vote themselves back within four months, after sending a personal letter of apology to 34,000 season ticket holders. Shepherd reclaimed the chairmanship and held it until 2007 – by which time he had also sacked Souness, replacing him first with Glen Roeder and finally with Sam Allardyce.
When the Hall family sold their shareholding in Newcastle United to the Sports Direct retailing tycoon Mike Ashley in the spring of 2007, the Shepherds (who held 28 per cent) swiftly followed suit; later rumours that Freddy might lead a bid to buy the club back came to nothing. “It was a lot of grief,” Shepherd said of his decade in the spotlight, but “it never bothered me; it went over my head at the end.”
William Frederick Shepherd was born on October 29 1941 and spent his childhood in the impoverished East End of Newcastle. His grandfather dealt in scrap metal and his father advanced from lorry driving to running his own haulage firm from a disused brewery site beside the Tyne – the foundation of a Shepherd property portfolio that would eventually cover 150 riverside acres. The teenage Freddy was apprenticed as a marine engineer at Swan Hunter’s Nepture shipyard, delivering plans from the drawing offices to the yard’s bustling workshops.
In the 1960s he and Bruce began to build the family business, which took off as the North Sea oil boom gathered strength. On the property side, they cooperated with the up-and-coming John Hall in developments of industrial units.
Among the Shepherds’ later acquisitions were the Nepture yard itself, which became a “renewable energy park” geared to the manufacture of offshore wind turbines, and Mitford Hall, a Georgian mansion in Northumberland with a 5,000 acre farming and shooting estate.
Freddy Shepherd was also founder chairman of Triple S Sports & Entertainment, a management agency which looked after the interests of, among others, Wayne and Coleen Rooney.
Freddy Shepherd married Lorelle Sumner in 1975. After his encounter with the “fake Sheikh”, Lorelle stood by her husband, declaring that the exposé was “all just too ludicrous to be true” and that “when this is all over I’m going to book him a cruise”. She survives him with their three sons.