HERE’s a first — Keith Edelman sits down to interview with not one, not two, but three glamorous PR women round him. A fourth brings in coffee. Oh, it’s a hard life in football.
Edelman, managing director of Arsenal and formerly boss of Storehouse, the retail group, probably likes the support. Soccer chiefs, even with World Cup fever around, have a wary relationship with the press. “In fact I try not to talk to journalists at all,” he says.
He’s joking, I think, but sometimes with Edelman it’s hard to tell. Everything here is not quite what you expect. For starters there’s his Highbury stadium office, modestly proportioned but lined in dark mahogany like a dusty Victorian museum.
Then there’s Edelman himself: slightly bouffant hair, chubby cheeks, jumbo watch and shiny cufflinks. He looks more Bond Street auctioneer than backroom football boss, only his nasal north London accent betraying his Edgware roots.
And let’s not even start on the division of responsibilities at Arsenal — an admired footballing side but with an unconventional executive team.
Chairman Peter Hill-Wood runs the board but is rarely heard from. Vice-chairman David Dein is perceived to run everything but actually handles only playing matters.
Danny Fiszman, the principal shareholder, has no title but seems to call many of the shots. And Edelman, the highest earner and former right-hand man to Carlton chief Michael Green and Ladbroke boss Cyril Stein, just keeps his head down and runs the business.
And right now at Arsenal, that involves borrowing large sums of money, building a new stadium close to Highbury in north London, then profitably converting the old stadium into hundreds of posh flats.
Nobody has ever tried to do anything remotely like it on such a scale. And Edelman, aged 55, hired by Arsenal in 2000 to oversee the immensely complicated project, is handling it all himself. Is he mad? No, he says. Just cost-conscious. If he pulls it off, without crippling the club with a mountain of debt, he will have masterminded one of the smartest business coups football has seen. He will also have redeemed a career that hit the heights but then slumped at Storehouse, where he resigned as chief executive after a profits decline.
“It will be a unique development,” he smiles, gesturing round at the old Highbury. “I don’t know of any other major stadium that has been converted into a residential complex.”
Edelman will present further details of the £150m development in a City roadshow starting this week. Arsenal’s plans include the building of 649 modern apartments using two of the old stands, the conversion of the old pitch into a communal garden, adding a car park and health club underneath, and social housing elsewhere.
And all that after Edelman has built the £390m, 60,000- capacity Emirates stadium that will give Arsenal the biggest match-day revenues of any soccer club in the world. The venue is due to open in two months.
“A lot of people have said to us that what we were trying to do was so large that we must be...” he pauses for effect, “very brave.”
The City roadshow, displaying models of the Highbury redevelopment to potential purchasers, cranks up the tension another notch. Edelman already claims to have been overwhelmed by interest from buyers, yet you suspect he wouldn’t be appearing here, or embarking on roadshows, if the demand was so comprehensively outstripping supply.
It also throws up some questions. Why develop Highbury themselves? Most clubs would sell it to a developer. And where’s the expertise? Nobody at Arsenal — group turnover £138m — has ever developed anything on this scale. “Well,” smiles Edelman, “we got a lot of experience quickly, and I handled property at Ladbrokes and Storehouse.”
In contrast to the Football Association’s problems with the new Wembley, the building of the Emirates stadium seems to have gone smoothly. Edelman puts that down to his project managers and contractors, and to the fact that decision-making was streamlined.
“Stadiums are complex and not everything can be planned. You have to make decisions quickly — we’ve been able to do that.” And unlike Wembley, Emirates is not pushing design and engineering to the limit.
Arsenal fans will be more worried about the financial effects of Edelman’s plans. There were rumbles last season that money was being diverted from playing resources, and Edelman admits that initially it looked like the club would never raise the funds to build the stadium.
Eventually a series of long-term sponsorship deals, with cash up front, made it possible to get the loans. “And now the incremental value we get out of the new stadium — about £40m a season — far exceeds the debt repayment,” says Edelman.
Can they afford not to get into the European Champions League? “Yes, the issue we faced was that under the Highbury business model, not getting into Europe two years running would have been very serious financially — not so under the Emirates model.”
Others are more sceptical about the burden Arsenal is now under, especially filling the premium-price seats at Emirates, but if Edelman has any doubts, he conceals them well. That steady ability to unpick the complicated, and defuse the tensions of working with strong characters, has been a trademark of his career.
“Keith’s very good at getting people to work together, and at picking through complex paths involving lots of elements and time deadlines,” says Lord Tugendhat, who first met him on the board of Eurotunnel.
Even so, some were surprised that Edelman went to Arsenal. He is not a diehard football fan. The son of a north London accountant, he preferred rugby when young, and rose up the ranks at blue-chip companies, including Bank of America and Grand Metropolitan.
No doubts about football? “Arsenal was always run in a very safe way,” says Edelman.
Well, hang on, wasn’t George Graham found guilty of accepting bungs while manager of Arsenal? Edelman doesn’t blink. “At institutional level we had always run to the rules very carefully.”
Another perception is that he was installed by Hill-Wood as a brake on the ambitions of Dein, a former sugar trader, who was in the news again last month over a loan that Arsenal had made to the backers of an ailing Belgian club.
Edelman shrugs and says their roles are clearly defined. If there is any friction, he isn’t telling me. The question then is, if Edelman does pull off the Emirates move and Highbury conversion successfully, will he stay in football? He says yes. “I am enjoying this too much to stop. This is a fantastic business.”
But like a match-winning striker at the World Cup, Edelman could find himself in demand again. He lost his job at Storehouse, he says, because the economic cycle went against him.
A top job in the FTSE 100 might look just the ticket, especially if he can make the leap before Arsenal start to falter on the pitch.
Vital statistics
Born: July 10, 1950
Homes: Watford, Algarve
Car: black BMW 6 series
Last holiday: Jaipur
Keith Edelman's working day
THE Arsenal managing director wakes at his home near Watford at 6.30am. It takes Keith Edelman 45 minutes to drive to his office at Highbury.
“I grab a coffee and then it’s straight into meetings,” he says. He splits his time between the Emirates project, the Highbury redevelopment, and refinancing Arsenal’s loans.
At the new stadium he also oversees seat sales, concentrating on “club-level and box”, while Danny Fiszman handles its elite Diamond Club.
The only downside to his job is the anger vented by disappointed fans. “One friend I had known for 30 years wrote me the most disgusting letter because he couldn’t get Champions League final tickets. Way over the top.
If you’re in retailing and you sell out, you don’t expect shoppers to get all emotional about it.”
Downtime
KEITH EDELMAN relaxes by playing tennis. “I play singles every weekend. I used to be quite good. I am not any more,” he laughs. “I also play Maurice Watkins at the Premier League meeting every summer.” Who wins? “Me.”
Edelman spends his money on collecting Georgian antiques. He is particularly keen on clocks and coffers. His last significant purchase was another oak coffer. Yet he also loves up-to-the minute mobile phones. “Look at this,” he says, pulling a slim black unit from his pocket. “The latest Bang & Olufsen.”
He doesn’t watch a lot of football outside work. “I am not blindly passionate, though I do get as bad as anyone else about a high-profile match. The Thursday after Arsenal lost the Champions League final I was so gutted. My wife’s a big fan, so we just sat there, thinking, this feels rotten.”
