David Conn, multi-award-winning journalist, delivered an enthralling and entertaining insight into the world of football scandals at Milim, the Leeds Jewish literary festival. Elliot Landy went along.
A packed hall at Etz Chaim enjoyed an enthralling presentation from award-winning newspaper journalist and author David Conn. David discussed his background and gave insight in to some of the sporting scandals he has investigated through the years from the Premier League big bucks to the Hillsborough disaster and of course, FIFA.
Introduced by long-time friend and Phil Goldstone, David began with an account of a trip to Abu Dhabi while working on his last book Richer Than God: Manchester City, Modern Football And Growing Up. David discussed how religion has been so intertwined with football in places like Manchester and Leeds: “Football is a stronger religion than religion” he joked, as he lamented on his days growing up in Salford 7 in the heart of the Jewish community of Manchester. Son of a solicitor father and a journalist Mother, Gita, who still writes for the Jewish Telegraph, he talked about his early family life, supporting Manchester City and attending Bury Grammar School before studying English literature and politics at the University of York.
It was sport, and particularly football, that he enjoyed writing about, although it was while working at a business magazine when football finances were starting to increase as a result of the breakaway Premier League deal that David was first asked to do a piece about the business of football. In it David talked about how owners of the bigger clubs were able to cash in on the huge TV money invested by Sky, and from that he got a feel for investigative sports journalism.
Reading excerpts from his first book, The Football Business: Fair Game in the ’90s?, David remembered how it all came about: “I’d always wanted to write a book, but it was actually Terry Venables who inspired me in to action. I attended his book launch for what was a really average book. The FA had a grassroots system in place where the smaller clubs took a share of the bigger clubs profit and the money was shared. Then the top clubs in England set up the Premier League and Sky invested millions and the clubs could keep all the money. I played football at Chorlton fields, it was more a community centre of despair than a theatre of dreams! Clubs were no longer clubs and I wanted to write about it. Terry’s book was that bad it inspired me to have a go!”
It was around that time David first contacted Andy Burnham, Labour MP and then administrator for the government’s Football Task Force in 1998 which was set up to look in to football revenues, and the government eventually agreed that 5% of all the TV income should go to grassroot schemes, leading to development grants still being awarded today to clubs like Leeds Maccabi FC through the football foundation. But it was the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989 that catapulted David in to the limelight as a journalist.
The first coroner’s inquest into the Hillsborough disaster, completed in 1991, ruled all deaths on the day as accidental. Families strongly rejected the original coroner’s findings, and their fight to have the matter re-opened persisted, despite Lord Justice Stuart-Smith concluding in 1997 there was no justification for a new enquiry.
“I’d been covering the disaster all the way through the Taylor Report which changed the game. I got to know the people involved who’d lost family members, like the Hammonds, who’d lost their son Philip, a 14 year-old lad that was going to his first away game in the days that kids could afford a ticket for a semi-final. It was inconceivable that he could have carried out the terrible things the police had talked about the fans doing”
His 2009 article for The Guardian, detailing the bereaved Hillsborough families’ continuing campaign for justice, prompted the then Labour ministers Andy Burnham and Maria Eagle MP to press for all official documents relating to the disaster to be released, leading to the original accidental death verdict to be quashed, naming South Yorkshire Police as fully responsible and a new coroner’s inquest to be created. At the second coroner’s inquest, its April 2016 verdict was that the supporters were unlawfully killed due to grossly negligent failures by police and ambulance services to fulfil their duty of care to the supporters. The inquest also found that the design of the stadium contributed to the crush, and that supporters were not to blame for the dangerous conditions.
David, who now lives in the Yorkshire Dales with his family, then took questions from a captivated audience desperate to discuss all things Massimo Cellino and Leeds United. David admitted to having a “soft spot” for the mighty whites and his career included a BBC documentary that looked into the ownership issues of the club in the Ken Bates era. David promised to come back again to discuss FIFA, as time with writer eventually ran up: “We’d have needed at least another two hours for FIFA,” he said, and teased the audience with a couple of lines from his upcoming fourth book, The Falls of The House of FIFA, which should be another enthralling read.
File
Name: David Conn
Day Job: Sports writer for The Guardian
Twitter: @david_conn
Awards: UK’s sports news reporter of the year three times – Sports Journalists Association
Sports journalist of the year three times – British Journalism Awards
Football writer of the year 2013 – Football Supporters Federation.
The judges said: “He delves beyond the glitzy veneer of modern football to hold the game’s gilded elite to account.”
Bibliography:The Football Business: Fair Game in the ’90s? (1998)
The Beautiful Game? Searching the Soul of Football (2005)
Richer Than God: Manchester City, Modern Football and Growing Up (2012)
Ghost-writer of the autobiographies of the 100m hurdles world-record holder, Colin Jackson and former Manchester United player, Lee Sharpe.