David Sheepshanks’s beloved club used to be run by those colourful _bon viveurs_ John and Patrick Cobbold, the brothers who said their idea of a crisis was running out of white wine in the boardroom. Sheepshanks has shared his memories with _The Times_ as he publishes his autobiography. He has survived bowel cancer.
When Sheepshanks took over as chairman in 1995 he ended decades of the Cobbolds’ benign dynasty. He tells a story of a game against Arsenal when the Portman Road boardroom was stocked with six bottles of gin, six bottles of whisky, six bottles of white wine, six bottles of red wine, and six sausage rolls. By the end of the day most of the booze was long gone but there were still five untouched sausage rolls. “And Patrick Cobbold held an inquest as to who the hell had eaten the one sausage roll.”
“Ipswich was a beautifully run club. But if I draw an analogy in the nicest possible way, it was sort of like a golf club. It was all quite staid and traditional. It needed modernising and professionalising.”
He was chairman from 1995 to 2009, a period in which the club became one of many buffeted and marginalised by the turbulence and unpredictability of football finance and the nascent Premier League. There were promotions and the thrill of taking on Inter Milan in Europe. “We took 9,500 fans to Milan. I’m standing in Piazza Duomo, where the cathedral is, with thousands and thousands of Suffolk people.”
But also relegations and worse. The collapse of ITV Digital contributed to the tailspin of £54million in debts and voluntary administration. “That was humiliating and awful and took a lot out of all of us.”
Ipswich spent 22 seasons outside the top flight and even dropped to League One. Clubs of comparable status overtook them and consolidated in the Premier League. “I look with envy today at the amount of interest in investing in English football from the American market and the Middle East and so forth. It’s huge. It just wasn’t there then.
I spent four years searching for investors. Luckily the community backed me. I said I will take responsibility for what’s gone wrong and I will take responsibility for trying to put it right. And I think we did.” Eventually he struck a deal with the businessman Marcus Evans.
“We could have established Ipswich as like Brighton, Brentford or Bournemouth today. I mean, hats off to them, they’ve all done well. But they’ve got a lot of money behind them, all three of them. It does feel tough. We could so easily have gone on and established ourselves like them, as I think we will now.”
ive years ago, Evans sold his controlling stake to the American investment fund ORG and the ownership was then split around other mainly American consortia.
“We won’t mention any names, but there are a few pundit tossers who just say, ‘Well of course they’ll go down.’ They say it about us without having a clue about what we’re doing. The difference now is you’ve not only got a massive windfall for being in the Premier League you’ve also got an equally massive capitalisation of the club, or funding of the club, which is probably just as big if not bigger. That is what is separating Ipswich out from some of the other promoted clubs.”