He put in £5m, his heart and his soul, and now he has that picture for an epitaph...
Shame of naked photo ended bid to revive League’s oldest club
ALAN HARDY is sitting in a meeting room at Meadow Lane, talking about all the dreams he had for Notts County. A flip-chart in the corner sets out the five ‘Strategic Imperatives’ he mapped out for the world’s oldest professional football club when he bought it and saved it from liquidation two years ago. He made its fans a promise then. ‘A new world starts today,’ he wrote on Twitter.
There are red ticks against his initial targets. Off the pitch, the club has been revitalised. But on it, it has withered. So mainly Hardy talks about mistakes and regrets and failure. His failure. And about an altercation with a fan on Boxing Day when the club he has tried to rebuild slid closer to the end of its unbroken stay in the Football League with a calamitous defeat at home by Macclesfield Town.
‘What are you going to do about it Hardy, what are you going to do about it?’ Hardy recalls the man yelling at him as he sat in the directors’ box. ‘And I thought: “I can’t do any more. I’m giving it all the time I have, the finance, my heart’s here, my effort. Please, what else do you want me to give? I’ve given my all”.’
When he bought the club, Hardy thought it would be simple: he’d throw money at a dire situation and watch Notts rise. He had a five-year plan. He’d save the club from relegation from League Two in the first season and get them promoted in the second. Round about now, he figured they’d be pressing for the play-offs in League One. By the end of the 2019- 20 campaign, he believed, they’d be in the Championship.
IT hasn’t worked out quite like that. The error Hardy regrets most was making an enemy of Nottingham Forest when, during a radio interview, he criticised their decision to recall a loan player. The supply of loans from Forest’s academy dried up. Hardy says he sacked Kevin Nolan as manager too soon at the start of this season. Harry Kewell, Nolan’s successor, was a bust. Now, with Neal Ardley in charge, escape from relegation looks unlikely.
Last Sunday, with his club eight points from safety, Hardy was still smarting after reading a newspaper article that was sharply critical of his tenure when he became involved in a Twitter argument with a man who was also less than complimentary. ‘He should sell up and **** off,’ the man advised. ‘Absolutely ruining Notts County. Cost them league status. I’ve no idea how that egghead dare go out in public in Nottingham.’
Hardy, who admits t o being over-sensitive, noticed the same man had taken the trouble to wish him well on Christmas Day. The juxtaposition of the messages, a month apart, highlighted how fickle fans can be. So he set about posting both messages on Twitter to make his point. And that’s when technology bit him. One of his screenshots inadvertently included his camera roll. And among the photographs on the roll was a picture of Hardy’s penis, taken while in the bath. Social media fell upon the gaffe with glee. This is what football and the spotlight, can do to a person.
Hardy tries to explain. He and his golf mates have a habit of including a picture of where they are and what they are doing when they message each other, he says. Hardy was in the bath, he says. He got a message from a mate, asking him if he fancied a beer. He meant to take a picture of his legs and feet in the water, he says, but got his angles wrong. He realised his error and just sent a text, he says. But the picture remained on his camera roll and the rest is history. And so now he has a d**k-pic for an epitaph. And now he has put the club up for sale. And now he says he will be gone by the end of February. And now he is saying fans are planning to bring blow-up dolls to the home game with Lincoln (when it came to it, they brought blow-up penises instead). And now he is saying that for the first time he doesn’t want his three kids to come with him in case he gets so much abuse it upsets them.
Lots of people are still having fun with what happened. When you call yourself Big Alan H5 on Twitter and your friends call you Big Fella and you mistakenly post a picture of your penis, a certain amount of hilarity and a glut of double entendres are inevitable.
But the more you know about what Alan Hardy did for Notts County — or, rather, what he tried to do — the more poignant the story becomes. Football is full of unscrupulous owners, who seem to take a perverse pleasure in destroying a club, loading it with debt and then disappearing. Hardy is the opposite of that. Hardy, who started from nothing, building racking for his father and now owns companies as diverse as Paragon Interiors and The Nottinghamshire, a golf club, wedding venue and hotel, poured his heart and soul into the club, neglecting his other businesses, lavishing money on Notts, taking fierce pride in its history and doing everything he could to try to push the club up the league pyramid. In return, football chewed him up and spat him out. ‘I’ve invested £5m in losses,’ Hardy says. ‘ That’s five million of mine that’s gone. You get a bonfire and throw it on the bon- fire. It’s gone. There’s no value left at the end of it. It’s just ashes. You are paying to keep the club afloat.
‘ That’s fine as long as your businesses — I have got upward of a dozen businesses — are all successful and profitable and can fund it. The problem I’ve got is that I have given my absolute heart and soul to Notts County. I never intended to be here six days a week. I thought it was a one day-a-week job. I would rock up, have a meeting with the guys on a Monday morning, maybe a Friday afternoon to make sure everything is OK for matchday and then I’ll see you on Saturday. But in essence, it has sucked me in. Football is like that. You can’t dip in and dip out. It just swallows you. Those businesses that were all very successful, aren’t quite as successful now because the leader isn’t there. Because the leader is away doing something else. I can’t justify or afford to keep injecting £3m year after year.’
There is some disillusion about what he has encountered. ‘ In a million years, I would never have guessed it is as cut-throat as it is,’ he says. ‘I have had several amazing conversations with agents where a deal broke down because they weren’t getting their appropriate cut in a nice big brown paper bag. I’m a humble builder from Nottingham who has tried to swim his way through this shark tank.’
The sharks tore him to pieces. There were occasions he didn’t help himself. There were times he was too cocky, times when his ambition for the club carried him away,
Htimes when he thought he was joking with rival fans on Twitter only to see his words reproduced as if evidence of arrogance. He has deleted his account now, too late.
‘We went for it this season,’ he says. ‘We had triple the playing budget that Accrington had and they got promoted. Our playing budget is over £3m. We should get promoted. What the hell are we doing at the bottom of the league? I would make a great business study at the Harvard Business School on the subject of how throwing money at something is rarely the answer.’ E hopes he will not feel any guilt when he walks away from Meadow Lane for the last time. ‘You can only have guilt if you haven’t given your all,’ he says. ‘I have given everything but I have made errors of judgment. It’s like you becoming a doctor or a nurse tomorrow. I was thrust into it two years ago and I’m an apprentice. I rely on the people around me.’
He hopes, too, that he returns to being the man he once was before he leapt into football’s bottomless pit. ‘People say I’ve changed as a person,’ Hardy says. ‘I’ve become more cynical, more sarcastic, more suspicious of people. And I find that really sad.’
Forget that Twitter picture for a second and take this as his football epitaph instead: Notts County will be lucky if their new owner cares as much, and gives as much, as Alan Hardy did.