If Sir Alex Ferguson is to be believed, Peter Kenyon was the man who questioned whether staying back an extra night in Lisbon to sign an 18-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo was actually worth it.
‘Is he that good?’ Ferguson recalled the one-time Manchester United chief executive saying, after the player in question had so tormented United’s John O’Shea in a 2003 friendly game that the manager wouldn’t leave Portugal without a deal done. Ferguson also expressed doubts that Kenyon, currently leading a consortium hoping to buy Everton, had actually carried out his instructions to phone Arsenal and ask if Patrick Vieira could be signed.
There was never any love lost for this chief executive, where Ferguson is concerned, because of his defection from United - ‘the only football club I would work for’, as he had earlier proclaimed them to be - to Chelsea, which doubled his salary and made him an utterly loathed figure around Old Trafford for over a decade.
Every move Chelsea made in the early years of the Roman Abramovich era raised United suspicions about Kenyon, who was born ten miles east of Old Trafford, at Stalybridge, and it was hard to avoid the sense that he delighted in fuelling the fire at times.
There were United’s suspicions that Kenyon had poached John Obi Mikel and was planning something similar with Rio Ferdinand, when the two were twice pictured dining in London restaurants. His proclamations that Chelsea would ‘paint the world blue’ and that the 2005/6 Premiership title would be contested by a ‘select group of one.’
A disdainful Ferguson condemned this as trash talk; proof that Kenyon was ‘not a football man.’ But it was a measure of the threat United’s manager saw in him that he was provoked into such a public response. The pantomime villain Kenyon became for a while obscured how, after leaving the chief executive’s seat at Umbro to join United in 1997, he transformed their brand and established a near-hegemony in far eastern markets which the club are dining out on to this day.
When Abramovich subsequently told agent Pini Zanavi to ‘find me the best man’, having given up on buying United and picked up Chelsea, there seemed little doubt about it. Kenyon was discreetly approached during a meeting at Mayfair’s Les Ambassadeurs club, on the very the day the Russian moved in at Stamford Bridge.
His apparent immunity to all the heat caused by his vaunts about making Chelsea profitable and self-financing created a sense of something cold and corporate about Kenyon. His sanctioning of the removal of the words ‘football club’ from the Manchester United crest, having asked a creative agency to look at the design, was seen in retrospect as a measure of a grey corporate figure, who trained at Courthaulds and then Umbro. When Ed Woodward was installed into Kenyon’s old United job, he restored the words to the jersey.
Yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Everton, a club entering the most complex stage of a relatively benign history, could sorely use an individual like Kenyon, now. Their plunge into chaos, disorder and the brink of relegation has been a product of owner Farhad Moshiri’s utter lack of focus, discipline and basic competence. Few actually seem sure what Everton’s current philosophy actually is.
The world of football might have moved on in the 13 years since Kenyon left Chelsea. Chief executives no longer get late night phone calls from managers like Ferguson, ordering them to ‘sign Ronaldo’. But those who have worked with him describe a clear-sightedness and ‘an absolute sense of direction.’ Everton have a £500million stadium to build and a rag-tag squad to reassemble under the leadership of Frank Lampard, a coach who has by no means yet proven himself the man for the job. And the tap of Russian cash has also inconveniently just been turned off. If Moshiri sells, the new proprietors require experience and intellect.
Since Kenyon left Chelsea, his company, Opto Advisers, has been involved with the takeovers at Paris St-Germain and Wolverhampton Wanderers and he has advised the board at Atlético Madrid, among others. He was also involved in a failed attempt to bring Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth to a takeover of Newcastle United.
He has connections - with Jorge Mendes dating back to the Ronaldo deal, as well as Zahavi - and knows Lampard well from their time together at Chelsea.. Comparisons can be made with the Everton squad and the one he inherited at Chelsea. ‘Some good players, some big players... but a disparate band with nothing bringing it together,’ was how he recently described the Chelsea inheritance.
But above all, he would lead. Ferguson’s irritation with Kenyon for ‘taking too much on’ at Old Trafford seemed to stem from the fact that this executive did not always take his commands as gospel. He knew his own mind. Goodison could do with some of that.