Yes it does. I have the figures somewhere, so I'll dig them up and post them on here. I'll also post a longish monologue about when Chris Williams set up an OUFC based business meeting for me with Glenn Hoddle.
So, here's the Glenn Hoddle story.
It was at the time when Ian Lenagan owned the club, but was looking to get out, probably 11 or 12 years ago now. Chris Williams contacted me, and said he'd had contact with Glenn Hoddle, who'd had a successful soccer school in Spain, associated with a professional club there (Jerez I think, but can't remember exactly) but had moved it back to England and wanted to create a tie up with an English club, preferably a League Club. Chris asked, as I was friends with Stewart Donald, (who was interested in purchasing OUFC from Lenagan and the stadium from Kassam), would I be interested in setting up a meeting for me and Stewart with Hoddle?
I asked Stewart, and we both thought it was worth exploring further, and if nothing else came from it, it would probably still be an interesting meeting to have. It's not every day you get asked to set up a meeting with a footballing legend and ex England manager. So, I was given a mobile number to ring. It was really quite surreal. I rang the number, and the person answering it was quite clearly Glenn Hoddle and he answered by saying "Hello Colin, I've been expecting your call" It was unreal!
So I arranged things with Glenn, and Stewart and I met him at a hotel just outside Maidenhead. With him was a guy called Ian Duncanson, who was his Commercial Director, and in the vicinity were some of his coaches, (the soccer school had just finished training) including Dave Beasant and Graham Rix. Glenn was exactly as he is when you see him on the TV doing punditry work. Really easy going, friendly, and quite eloquent for a footballer.
He had done his homework on OUFC and knew all about the club, the stadium situation, and the off field set up. He also did an appraisal on our squad and claimed that four or five of his players were ready to go straight into our first team. He did identify that a certain Yorkshire football manager (Wilder) would be paranoid about any tie up and be convinced that Glenn was after his job! We talked through a few possibilities and it was decided that OUFC would be the ultimate perfect destination for the Glenn Hoddle Soccer School, but that it was not possible to tie a deal up at that time as none of us owned the club. However a longer term plan was put into place, that would involve Stewart buying a Conference, or Conference South, club within about a 50 mile radius of London, and the soccer school would then become a part of it. It needed to have the potential to grow and we identified a few possibles. I remember Woking being one of them. Once established, and if Stewart was able to buy OUFC, then the soccer school would move across to Oxford.
It was as a direct result of this meeting that Stewart eventually bought Eastleigh, although ironically they weren't one of the clubs we initially targeted. With further irony the GlennHoddle Soccer School never did move to Eastleigh either. I remember setting up another meeting with Stewart several years later, with some stadium architects that I knew, and Stewart joked "The last meeting you set up for me, Colin, ended up costing me about £10m!!!"
One last thing that was amusing, at the meeting, was that I said to Glenn that it might be a problem as he had worn the red shirt, in relation to his time as player manager with Swindon. He replied that he thought this might come up and joked "Well at least they got relegated after I left"
Thanks Chris for taking a risk at the time (his job would have definitely been under threat if Lenagan had found out) and for doing so in the best interests of OUFC. I've never told anyone other than my closest friends about the meeting, so as not to put Chris into a difficult situation, but now he's left OUFC feel it's time to share the story. Cheers mate, you'll be missed.
