Invited to describe his relationship with Niall Quinn as “bittersweet”, the former owner of Sunderland Sir Bob Murray demurs. “Four sweets and a bitter” is how he puts it.
The sweet is the easy bit. Six years as a Sunderland player when the North East club had two consecutive top-seven finishes in the Premier League and Quinn formed a brilliant attacking partnership with Kevin Phillips. Murray, a fanatical supporter of the club all his life, was suitably wooed. Quinn would refer to it as “a magic carpet ride” and while it was bumpy at times, it was one that took him all the way to Spain, with Murray and his wife Sue for a holiday.
“One big thing about Niall was that he moved to the North East as soon as he moved to Sunderland,” says Murray, 77. “He embraced the North East and he could identify with it. He is the only player I have been away with socially abroad, with him and his wife Gillian. Besides being beautiful I love her character. I know Niall’s two children. His daughter came to stay with us in Jersey.”
On another day out, at a race meeting in Thirsk, Murray pulled Quinn and told him he would be happy for him to have a testimonial at the club. It happened shortly before Ireland went to the World Cup in 2002 and more than £1 million was raised, split evenly between hospitals in Sunderland and Dublin.
“He is a very personable and affable guy,” says Murray. “He is very generous and obviously he was a great player. The only thing I have with Niall is those two appointments.”
The two appointments?
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Around that time Murray was looking to sell the club, with debts mounting from poor transfer acquisitions during Peter Reid’s time as manager, and the club also set back by the disastrous appointment of the abrasive Howard Wilkinson as manager. Murray travelled to New York to speak to venture capitalists, but his heart was not in it. Quinn was at a loose end back in Ireland, trying to cope with retirement.
“In an ideal world, I would have sold Sunderland to a Sunderland fan who had stood on the terraces as I had done,” Murray says. “But there was no significant interest from anybody who either possessed the funds or the business acumen. The next best option was Quinn. “Niall rang and said ‘I want to buy £1 million of shares’ and I said ‘You don’t, Niall, you want to buy the club’. He went away and got his consortium.”
The consortium was called Drumaville, a motley, mostly Irish crew of sports-mad hoteliers, publicans and property developers that Quinn had assembled from his trips to Cheltenham and elsewhere. “The only problem with the consortium was that they were like a box of monkeys,” says Murray. “We didn’t know who was in and who was out when we were doing due diligence.
“They ended up with eight of them. I was going to Canary Wharf to see construction owners and I was going to Dublin to meet people. I was all over the place. I couldn’t keep them in the box. Niall’s an immensely popular figure but when it comes to writing a cheque — that’s the test. However difficult to pin down he could be, Niall remained the vital link and I wanted to sell the club to him.
“He got the club for £10 million which was a gift. And he tried to chip me too — to knock a bit off the price. I don’t know which of the fellas put him up to that but it wasn’t going to work. The club had very low borrowings and no mortgages on its assets. Both the Stadium of Light and Academy of Light [training ground] were freehold and unencumbered. A few years ago, West Bromwich Albion changed hands for £180 million, but Sunderland was never about the money for me.”
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The good times rolled for two years, but Murray kept his distance and never got to meet the new manager Roy Keane. A disgruntled opposition owner did tell him about some of the celebrations in the directors’ lounge after a last-minute win against Hull City in that incredible 2006-07 season when Keane guided them straight back to the Premier League.
“Everybody was jumping up and down and celebrating, which is generally not good form,” he said. “You can do that after they’ve gone, but they have just been beaten.”
The economic crash of 2008 brought a premature end to the Drumaville party and Murray understands the reason why the consortium had to sell, having been on the sharp end of the recession himself as he tried to keep his kitchen manufacturing business alive. Quinn had met Ellis Short, the Texan with the Irish passport, at Cheltenham and persuaded him to buy the club.
“Niall had a moment of really bad judgment when he sold the club to Ellis Short,” says Murray. “That was a game-changer and one with cataclysmic consequences for Sunderland. Especially given that he was handed the club for £10 million on a plate. He couldn’t have made a worse call if he’d tried. He [Short] had just bought one twentieth of the Premier League. He had some friends at other Premier League clubs and I can only guess he fancied a bit of that for himself.”
Short sold the club in 2018, ten years after buying in, and a year after the team was relegated.
Quinn remained on as chairman for a period and Murray says that Short tried to have him excluded from the stadium, but Quinn wouldn’t carry out that task. Quinn’s other disastrous move, in Murray’s book, was bringing in the young Irish lawyer Margaret Byrne as club secretary.
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Later she became chief executive and is best remembered for her poor handling of two big controversies which blew up — the appointment of Paolo Di Canio as manager in 2013, which went down badly because of his fascist leanings. and the decision later to allow Adam Johnson to keep playing for the club, even though he had privately confessed his guilt to grooming charges. “She was way out of her depth,” says Murray, who says Di Canio should never have been allowed near the club and Johnson should have been removed from the club much earlier.
Murray watched on from his role as Sunderland Life president and also head of the Sunderland charity Foundation of Light, of which Quinn was also a trustee — at least until Quinn left the club in 2012. “We would gladly have had him stay on as a trustee but he wanted to go and he looked not his usual self. There was baggage between him and Short.”
Sunderland were relegated from the Premier League to the Championship and then League One in two seasons, but are back in the Championship and, Murray believes, in safe hands with a local manager, Tony Mowbray. Quinn remains a much-loved and highly respected figure on Wearside. Murray hasn’t spoken to him for a while, but doesn’t rule out another holiday in the sun.
I’d Do It All Again, published by VSP, is available at sirbobmurraybook.com. All proceeds go to the Foundation of Light charity.
