Step into my office, baby
I was at Darlington’s ground two weeks ago and was struck by the fact that the Chairman’s office is right in reception. In most organisations, the more senior your post, the further you get removed from contact with the public – you pay people less senior to deal with that. In football, the passions aroused tend to make this a pretty iron law – the admin offices might be out front, but the Chairman’s office most certainly isn’t.
So when Chairman George Reynolds approved the plan, what was he thinking? Was this an unprecedented degree of openness and transparency? I doubt it, as he wasn’t the kind of guy who did transparency.
It seems to me that he wanted to know everything. Who came into the club, who was talking to whom, how long people would take for lunch. Every employee was potentially about to take the mickey, and every senior employee was potentially about to conspire against him. No-one then could come in without him knowing.
I’d heard that Reynolds used to buy houses and cars for employees so as to own them body and soul, so this fits. He’d probably have loved to wire the whole place for CCTV like in the film Sliver if he’d had the money…