Jeremy Peace’s incredible journey at the Hawthorns as West Bromwich Albion chairman
West Brom chairman Jeremy Peace reflects on his highs and lows in a rare interview – and hints that he may sell the Premier League club
Jeremy Peace has strong principles forged watching West Brom from a young age, growing up admiring Jeff Astle, whose photograph adorns his office. He enjoyed the pioneering and buccaneering play of Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham and Brendan Batson. Albion’s owner now revels in the sight of the Academy graduate, Saido Berahino, speeding through opposing defences. Peace is very aware that a chairman should be a custodian.
So he looks forward to hosting Manchester United on Monday. He takes pride in finishing the season in the Premier League and the financial year in the black. Peace determinedly defends Albion’s good name which is why he was so angry with Nicolas Anelka following the striker’s infamous anti-semitic Quenelle gesture last season.
The Anelka incident provides an insight into a club and a chairman trying to operate with a conscience in modern football. When the FA charged Anelka, Albion were forced to delay their own disciplinary measures and were unfairly perceived of shirking responsibility. “The ‘Jewish Chronicle’ were interesting,’’ said Peace. “They were quite supportive, saying West Brom are in a difficult position, waiting behind the FA. We tried to deal with it as speedily as possible and hopefully try to preserve the reputation of the club.’’
Once the FA found Anelka guilty, West Brom acted. “We couldn’t be strong until that point because the FA were leading us, and then we could have our own internal inquiry, reach our decision, and it was such a huge issue for the club in terms of our standing,’’ said Peace, sitting in his Knightsbridge office, in the downstairs conference room where Anelka’s club fate was decided
“We got Nicolas in here with his advisers,’’ said Peace. “Richard Garlick (Albion’s technical director at the time) was dealing with him. I was in my office in the room next door. I said I want him to say: ‘I am sorry to all these people’.’’ They tried to draw up a statement. “There was a mealy-mouthed paragraph and I said (to Garlick): ‘He hasn’t apologised, get him to apologise.’ It was quite clear he wasn’t going to so – bang – out. Right, sever the contract, cut it. That’s highly unusual in football for a player to be severed. It was gross misconduct. Because of the damage he’d done. You cut it on a point of principle.
“It struck me that he was a man of few words, but an intelligent man. We were disappointed. We didn’t shake hands. I didn’t say anything to him. He should have apologised. I feel extremely strongly about that because of the damage (he caused) to everyone. To the community he affected, the embarrassment he caused to the club.
“It was absolutely everything we don’t stand for as a club. We stand for diversity. I watched that team (of Regis, Cunningham and Batson). I know Cyrille and Brendan. Hopefully in the round we have been seen to deal with it properly.’’
A man of principle, Peace is also a man of few public utterances so when he does open up, it’s a fascinating story. He attended Shrewsbury, a great football school involved in the early codification of the national game. “Much to my regret, I never played for the first XI,’’ reflected Peace. “I wasn’t a footballer. I was a runner.’’ Football was still a passion, especially West Brom, his home-town club. “I went with my father to my first game in 1963, against Blackpool, when they had a good team, I remember the tangerine shirts and Jimmy Armfield playing.
“My father passed away when I was 16, when I was boarding. It was all rather traumatic at the time.’’ He completed his A-levels and then headed down to the City to make his fortune in finance. “When I came down to London, you had the 80s with Heysel and Hillsborough and a lot of people fell out of love with football. I still went to games, Loftus Road, Highbury, Stamford Bridge, Millwall. I went back and watched the odd game at the Albion. The club was in a bit of a mess. They knew I was a fan, so they approached me.
“There was a big emotional pull but when you’re looking at investing in a business, whether football or widgets, you do look at it as ‘is this sensible?’’ He joined the board in 2000 and “18 months later I ended up chairman”, he smiled. “It morphed from being fleetingly, flirtingly involved to a major interest. It was relatively daunting. In our first game (in the Premier League in 2002-03) we had Man United at Old Trafford. Our captain, Derek McInnes, got sent off, and we lost 1-0. The second game we lost 3-1 at home to Leeds, who had a really good team. Third game we were at Arsenal, lost 5-2. Golly, this is going to be really tough. Then we won the next three 1-0, West Ham, Fulham and Southampton. I thought: ‘This is not bad, nine points after six games”. We got relegated with 26 points.”
Gary Megson eventually left in 2004 and Peace made his first appointment as manager, Bryan Robson. “Bryan is Bryan, a very nice guy, very good when he first came. We had the ‘Great Escape’ season (of 2004-05) when we stayed up on the last day. Bryan was a great boost to the team. Players like Neil Clement would say he made them feel 10 feet tall before they went out. Short term he was fantastic. We stayed up but we got four points from our last 13 games the next season and got relegated. That was fairly acrimonious.
“We stuck with Bryan but we weren’t really firing on all cylinders and that’s when Tony Mowbray came in October, 2006. He had a very expansive style, all-out attack, players with soft feet, but we defensively weren’t as tight as we should have been.’’Albion still got promoted in 2008, but then demoted, still attacking. “There was the very rare sight of us getting relegated and the team got a standing ovation. Tony said it was very humbling. The fans could see what Tony was trying to do, and they enjoyed watching the football. Then he got poached by Celtic.
“When Tony left we had Robbie Di Matteo for a couple of years and he was great. He was short on experience but he was a really, really nice guy who had that magic dust.’’ Not for long. He was dismissed in 2011. “He left us and where did he end up? Winning the Champions League with Chelsea! An amazing story. Brilliant. I was really pleased for him.”
At the time, Albion were looking to change their structure, employing more a head coach like Di Matteo in conjunction with a sporting director. “I said we have to change the way we operate. I’d sat with Gary and Bryan, and they’d say: ‘I want that one’ about a player. We’d say: ‘What about this lot over here?’ ‘No, I want that one.’ We’d say: “If we are in a market of one, where’s the price going? Where are the wages going? They are going to get bigger. If you have four or five all the same from a footballing perspective for one position, at least you can then see what offers the best value. I can’t run this business like this any more, we’ve got to have choice.’
“I spent time going around Europe, went to Porto, Udinese, Rennes, and had a chat about how they were structured. Germany was interesting. They have a supervisory board that sits over the top of the football operation. That’s the way we are evolving. We appointed Dan Ashworth (as technical director). He was in the Academy. Dan has integrity. Our technical director now, Terry (Burton), reports in to the board.”
Peace has never pushed or picked a player. “I’d probably get the wrong one! Anything to do with the football side, I’ll leave it to the people who know what they’re doing. Steve (Clarke), Roy (Hodgson) and Alan (Irvine) have always had their input. If you bring a player in they don’t like they aren’t going to play him. The head coach is very much part of the process, but we’ve done the research, we know the (financial) packages on all of them and the transfer fee, so we have an idea of value when we come to do the negotiations. When you have the options you can do a better deal for the club.”
After Di Matteo, Hodgson arrived in 2011. “Roy came in and did extremely well for us. He had a point to prove. It was short and quite brutal for him at Liverpool. I talked to him about it. He wanted to get back in and carry on his career. The good managers are always trying to prove a point, always battling.
“He was the previous season’s Manager of the Year and I was delighted to get him as our head coach. That was a real win-win: good relationship, good results. Roy was brilliant, very thorough, his preparation was great and he knew how to dig out a result when he needed one.
“We were talking to Roy about a new contract (in 2012), then England came calling and the rest is history. David Bernstein (FA chairman at the time) called me. I said: ‘Oh, no. I don’t want to take this call, David!’ Because he left slightly early, they (the FA) took over his contract, rather than us keep paying him. It was extremely amicable. I was delighted for him.
“We were very sorry to lose him. It’s a challenge they all want to take, to be the manager of the country. Roy has done OK. We’ve seen some young faces in the team, all good really.” The sight of Hodgson and Ashworth, the FA’s director of elite development, shaping England’s future pleases Peace. “We take great pride. It’s good for the club. I just hope they don’t nick anybody else!”
Proud of Albion’s England contribution, Peace has certain concerns during international week. “We have this club v country thing. It’s fantastic to have people representing their countries. I completely understand why they want to do. Ben (Foster) as England No 2, Joleon (Lescott) who has played for England and Saido in the Under-21s is a good reflection on the club.
“I do worry about the international breaks. It’s not a ‘break’; it’s international playing time. Daniel Sturridge was out for six weeks. I can sympathise with Liverpool. We pay their wages, don’t we? We do have this worry, when foreigners go abroad what shape they’re going to come back in. Going down to Argentina, Chile or Japan puts an extra strain. I read about Sir Alex Ferguson letting a certain number out, but not the whole lot. I can understand it.”
In the wake of Hodgson leaving for England, and Albion going through Clarke, Keith Downing and Pepe Mel in 24 months, Peace is hoping his current head coach, Alan Irvine, excels. Irvine impressed Peace during a previous interviewing process that ended up with Di Matteo appointed. The Scot now won out over Tim Sherwood, a decision that disappointed many Albion fans. “It’s interesting!’’ said Peace, who understands the fans’ concerns. “Crikey, we didn’t select him when we were in the Championship and now we are selecting him in the Premier League so what’s all that about?
“We met Alan first in 2009, he came through our interview process very strongly, and we decided he would be a good fit for us. Tim’s got a lot of strengths but we thought with Alan’s coaching, given the way we are now structured, with Terry at the top, that he’d fit in very well.’’ The respected Downing and the popular goalkeeping coach, Dean Kiely, were in situ. “It’s a good coaching environment.”
The only arrival with Irvine was Rob Kelly who came in as joint-assistant head coach alongside Downing. Sherwood wanted to bring a whole new backroom staff. “We wouldn’t have had a problem with that, but we felt the fit with Alan, Rob, Keith, Dean and Terry was a good one for us. We made the appointment, got a frosty reception from the fan-base but Alan’s very thorough. His preparation is very good. I just hope he gets the rub of the green and we can get the results, because it’s all so marginal.’’
Sherwood would have cost more, but not markedly. “The fans understand the way we operate. It’s a badge of honour to them that we are sensibly run and can stay in the Premier League. I’m sure they’d like us to spend bigger transfer fees, and more money on wages to get the right people, but they’ve seen there are enough cases where people have done that and not worked out.’’
Albion’s wages have increased 10-fold in the 12 years that Peace has been in charge. “The top-paid player was on £4,500 a week in the Championship at that time, and that was big for us then.’’ Now Albion’s best-paid player is on £50,000 a week. “No problem. More than that if you chuck a load of bits and pieces in. We performance-orientate them. You have some appearance money. They are players – they like to have appearance money. We have a retention-of-status bonus so we stay up, they get a certain amount per point, and that’s healthy. There’s a common cause then.
“We have ‘flex-downs’; if you get relegated, you have the downside covered on the commitment on the wages. We started that the first season I was in, that if you are in the Championship players have to accept a decrease in salary. ‘Oh, they won’t accept that,’ people said. We put it in and it stuck. Probably every club now does it. It could be up to that amount (50%). There is a tendency amongst certain players to think: ‘Well, if the side gets relegated, I’ll be able to get out, so I don’t need to look too much at the salary down there.’ We’d have to get a price for them, though.
“The players we’ve got now are a very good group. They do receive a lot of money, and if the next media rights deal goes up again, there’ll be even more money going to the players. But they’re quite grounded. They realise the responsibility that they’ve got, that they are role models.
“Saido does now. He was thrust into it last season. His goal at Old Trafford announced him on the scene, He’s been through quite a sharp learning curve over the last year but he’s now very settled, impressively so. Saido’s been very good this season. He’s come back a changed boy. You see him praying before games. Somebody’s talked to him and said: ‘If you want to get on, you’ve got to focus’. Chalk and cheese from last season. I’m not saying he was ever a bad lad; he let himself be a bit misled. He’s got a responsibility on his young shoulders and so far he’s rising to the challenge which is fantastic. I’m seeing his agent, Rob Segal, for lunch in early November.
“It’s brilliant for us having somebody coming through our Academy into the first team. The others can see it. We had the big example of Izzy Brown who went to Chelsea. Izzy played against Wigan when he was 16 for us, and we lost him the following year; he just didn’t come back for pre-season. It’s the carrot dangled in front of the parents. Izzy would have been in the first team, Premier League. Now he’s in the Under-21s at Chelsea, I think doing quite well. Because they (Chelsea) need to buy ready-made players it’s obviously more difficult to get into their first team. It will be interesting to see who ends up furthest (Berahino or Brown).”
Albion briefly considered closing their Academy. “With EPPP we’ve done what we were asked to. We’re a Category One club, we’ve invested in it. Gross expense on it is £3m a year and we have a subsidy of £800,000. So £2.2m net. Up until last season you’ve had Liverpool knocking on our door saying: ‘We’d like Jerome Sinclair please, we’d like Yan Dhanda please. How much? £200,000? There you go.’ Hang on a second. We are spending £2.2m net and these players are going for £200,000 plus add-ons if they make it into the first team. The add-ons aren’t good enough.
“You should be getting a lot more for the player and then clubs have to take a real risk on it, rather than ‘if we buy five and one comes good, it’s only cost us £1m and he could be worth £10m’. We are training them up for somebody else to take them. We said: ‘What can we do? Can we completely disband it?’ That’s too radical. We are regarded as the No 1 in the area in the Midlands in terms of the Academy right now.’’
There seems to have been some soul-searching at The Hawthorns in the summer with a desire to communicate better with a loyal support. “When we stayed up in 2014, it was ‘cataclysm’, ‘crisis’. There was definitely a wobble. We were running out of steam as a club. I said at the end of the season: ‘Let’s see how we can improve’.’’
Peace seeks to engage more with Albion fans. “I used to visit all the supporter club branches, did it for a couple of years, but often you would find there were 20 people and a dog. Then we had fans’ forums a couple of times a year at The Hawthorns – we’d have 200 for that. So how can we get to the 28,000-30,000 wider audience? We had a consultation group which we ran for a few years, head of supporters club, and we’ve run that for a couple of years. We are going to revamp that now.
“Fans write into me, almost Edwardian letters, very nice letters, sensible letters, making good points, so I write back. Social media seems to have killed the supporter clubs. All the talk is on Twitter. It’s more immediate. With Alan Irvine, half the complaints came through social media, and half through formal letters. Ten years ago it would have all been letters. I won’t go on social media. I won’t touch Twitter. It can be pretty vile, can’t it?”
Some fans voiced disapproval of the new all-white home shirt. “The shirt is our best-selling shirt!’’ replied Peace. “Record sales! But it’s for one year. Next year we’re going back to traditional blue-and-white stripes.”
Peace also addressed suggestions that Albion were slow supporting the Astle family’s campaign for proper research into concussion after the legendary No 9’s death was linked to heading a heavy ball. “It started March time, coming to the end of the season, and I said: ‘When the season ends, we’ll get Laraine (Astle’s widow) in with (daughters) Claire and Dawn, have a meeting, find out exactly what they want to achieve.’ We saw them three times over the summer. It helped them to focus on what they really wanted to do. It was very constructive.
“I watched Jeff play. I’ve got a picture of Jeff in my office. I said: ‘Laraine, I’m not going to be doing anything against Jeff, there’s his picture, you gave it to me.’ She said: ‘I know Jeremy, I know you wouldn’t do that.’ We said we’ll give them a (match) day so they can launch the foundation and ‘Justice for Jeff’ can be launched properly. We thought the (concussion) campaign ‘If in doubt, sit them out’ was a good motto to put up with the picture of Jeff in the ninth minute. I speak to Laraine, Claire and Dawn, and you think it’s the heavy old balls, put them in the bucket of water overnight, make them extra heavy, the old laces, but apparently it can be low impact heading of any ball.”
Keen to address fans’ concerns, Peace understands that he needs to be more public which does not come naturally. “We are very low profile. We are modest people, the club and me personally. We like to be below the radar. I don’t really talk. This (interview) is unusual for me.’’ But it’s worth celebrating that West Brom are a model club in many ways. “We don’t want to be anybody’s ‘model’. Look at Swansea great, fantastic. Swansea say: ‘We followed you!’
“We have to keep thinking how we change it, make it better. If you stand still, you’re dead. We are plugging away, trying to compete in the most high-profile, difficult league in the world, punching way above our weight.” Peace talks as if he’s ready to sell. “Maybe it has a shelf life. Maybe that’s your time, and somebody else comes along and carries on the journey. If you asked three-quarters of the clubs in the Premier League, they are for sale, if someone comes in.
“Every season it is getting tougher competing in the Premier League. You’ve got the huge clubs and the rest of us.” Yet Albion make money, reporting a £6m profit for the year ending June 2013. Peace, though, looks to the future, wondering whether a wealthier patron can take Albion on. “When it gets handed on to whoever comes in it will hopefully be in a lot better state than when I found it.
We’ve invested in it, in the training ground, tried to keep the stadium up to scratch, invested in the Academy.
“The West Stand is something we have looked at before, adding another 6,000 to take us to 33,000.’’ Is there the appetite? “Not really.” 25,000-26,000 always seemed an achievable figure for The Hawthorns. “Correct. The season-ticket prices are almost the lowest in the league. Season-ticket holders get a good deal, they are very loyal. We have 18,000 of them. But the prices are very low so if we created more capacity we might have to hold or reduce the prices again to attract the people in. It would be a very slow burn on a big capital investment. Does it make any sense? But people would like to see the club progressing. If there was a big investor who put more money into the club generally, into the local community, it would be great.
An oligarch? “It depends what they say about the future of the club. That’s important. If we had somebody who got the right plan. It’s finding the right person. It’s West Bromwich Albion, not very fashionable. It’s not in London.’’
Peace knows he will miss the role and such memorable days like United’s visit in May 2013 for Ferguson’s final game. “We did a special cake for him with a model of Alex looking at his watch with a glass of wine in his hand!” The icing on the cake was an amazing match. “5-5! Great occasion!” Peace’s love for football has never dimmed.
