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For most people this will no doubt be a Comedy; for some of us though it will be a Tragedy:
From today's Athletic
Part 1
The Fawaz Al Hasawi tenure at Nottingham Forest was the catalyst for plenty of frustration and, at times, even fury. It has also been the inspiration for a planned television comedy.
Arsher Ali, the Nottingham actor and star of Four Lions, Line of Duty and Doctor Who, was prompted to use what unfolded between July 2012 and May 2017 as the broad outline for a script called Fit and Proper Persons, which he hopes will get picked up by a major broadcaster.
It is ultimately a work of fiction, but some of the stories that inspired it will have needed little in the way of embellishment. Not that many Forest fans were laughing at the time as they felt like the proud reputation of their club slowly eroded.
Al Hasawi arrived in Nottingham with good intentions. He was desperate to restore the fortunes of the club. His heart was always in the right place. The issue was that the same was not true of his head.
Talk to people who know him or worked with him and they describe a charming character with enough drive, passion and indeed money to make Forest a success. But a picture also emerges of a man who developed a habit of listening to the wrong people. It ultimately ends up as a tale of personal misfortune with Al Hasawi at least £60 million out of pocket.
This is the story of Al Hasawi’s five-year reign — with eight permanent managers — at Nottingham Forest…
The pattern of leaping from one seemingly knee-jerk decision to another began immediately. Steve Cotterill, who had gamely guided Forest to safety in challenging circumstances the previous season, was the first who could claim to have been harshly treated by the new regime in the summer of 2012.
“I was summoned to London,” Cotterill tells The Athletic. “I spoke to them about the players who I would like to sign permanently. They said, ‘yes, yes, yes’. Then the following morning I was told that I had been sacked. But even then they still asked me to put together a synopsis of the players at the club ahead of their own press conference (to present them as the new owners) so that they would look like they knew what they were talking about.”
Kuwaiti tradition dictated that, as the head of the family, it was down to elder brother Abdulaziz Al Hasawi to do much of the talking as the Al Hasawi family — including Fawaz and their cousin, Omar, faced the cameras for the first time. But it was always going to be Fawaz’s project. He arrived believing he was already well-equipped to flourish in English football, having achieved success in Kuwait where he had a long affiliation with the country’s most dominant club, SC Qadsia, including being president from 2010 to 2012.
There was an air of modesty to Fawaz’s initial statements. But a subsequent discovery, in one of the back offices at the City Ground, painted a different picture. Several large boxes contained copies of leatherbound books titled Fawaz Mubarak Al Hasawi, Godfather of Kuwaiti Sports, which told the story of his glorious affiliation with SC Qadsia. One day perhaps there might be another book: Fawaz Mubarak Al Hasawi, Godfather of Nottingham Forest.
Al Hasawi arrived in Nottingham as a man used to having his efforts heralded. His father, Mubarak Abdul-Aziz Al Hasawi, established the FAWAZ company, which initially specialised in refrigeration and air conditioning but quickly expanded into commercial and residential property. This background eventually led to some labelling Al Hasawi a “fridge magnet” rather than magnate.
Al Hasawi was born into vast wealth, with the family owning palatial properties in Kuwait and London. Those who visited his home in Mayfair would be greeted by a butler whose only job seemed to be to carry around a bowl full of mini chocolate bars. And his vast wealth excited Forest fans at first, given the cloud hanging over the club.
The decision by Nigel Doughty, a lifelong Forest fan, to step down and put the club up for sale as criticism of his tenure reached a crescendo in October 2011 already felt like a real shame. Worse was to follow when Doughty died suddenly in February 2012 at the age of just 54, with the club’s future still in the air and a buyer still to be found.
The arrival of the Al Hasawi family represented fresh hope. But even as the trio moved out into the City Ground car park to meet the hundreds of fans who had gathered to meet them, their first problem had arisen.
The new owners were desperate to appoint a big name. Fortunately, they started by making a good decision. Forest approached Sean O’Driscoll, who had been a coach under Cotterill but was by then Crawley Town manager, as a way to get to Steve Coppell.
“I’d taken the manager’s job at Crawley,” O’Driscoll tells The Athletic, “and I’d had a conversation with (Forest chief executive) Mark Arthur because Forest were interested in Steve Coppell, who was director of football there. The Kuwaitis were Manchester United daft and Steve’s connection with United sparked their interest. I was asked if I could sound out Steve about the job.
“They arranged to meet and I ended up going with him. He eventually said that it was not for him because he had business interests in China that he was looking after. Steve said it would be a really good job for me… but they didn’t want me, they wanted him.
“But three days later I got a call from Mark asking if I would be interested. If they were going to wait for somebody with Manchester United connections to take the job, they would be waiting a long time.
“I knew the players, we had finished the season really well. Rob Kelly, Jimmy Floyd (Hasselbaink) and the rest of the coaching staff were still there. It just felt like a good fit.”
O’Driscoll’s initial problem, he claims, was talking Al Hasawi out of impulsively spending big money on players.
“We had every agent under the sun touting us players and it got to the point where we would just have been accumulating players for the sake of it,” O’Driscoll says. “We signed a couple I felt could help to settle things down. Simon Gillett was really important for us. I had a hard time persuading Fawaz that he was a good signing because he cost a fraction of what he was thinking of paying for signings (a free transfer from Doncaster) — and he probably hadn’t heard of him.
“We also tried to sign George Friend (from Doncaster) and we were close to getting it done, but Fawaz was not keen. He went to Middlesbrough instead and, when he played against us — and was outstanding — Fawaz was asking, ‘Who is that left-back?’ I had to explain that we could have signed him, but you didn’t want him!”
O’Driscoll also recalls feeling under pressure to sign several players from Kuwait, most notably striker Bader Al-Mutawa and goalkeeper Khalid Al-Rashidi, who were already on trial when he arrived.
“They were all really nice fellas but that they were not good enough for the Championship,” says O’Driscoll. “It was also Ramadan, so they were fasting. They had been dragged away from their families in Kuwait to try to get through pre-season at an English Championship club. They were getting injured constantly and generally struggling.
“We had to go to a tribunal in London to put forward a case for work permits. It was a bit of a disaster. I remember David Pleat was on the panel and he was asking all these questions we could not answer.
“‘Have you ever seen these players play before?’
“‘Erm, no I haven’t.'”
O’Driscoll told the Al Hasawis he did not know anything about Kuwaiti football. They responded by flying him out to watch a game.
“Fawaz seemed to have got the best players in Kuwait and won everything out there,” he says. “If that was his model out there, it was always going to be his model here, I guess. But I felt that was never going to work.”
There was already discontent within the Al Hasawi family. The seriousness of a fall-out between Omar — who had been installed as chairman — and Fawaz only became clear when several pictures disappeared from the walls around the main building at the training ground. The images — largely from the day of the unveiling of the family as the new owners — returned shortly after with Omar erased from them as if he had never existed. Fawaz officially took over as chairman in November 2012.
From today's Athletic
Part 1
The Fawaz Al Hasawi tenure at Nottingham Forest was the catalyst for plenty of frustration and, at times, even fury. It has also been the inspiration for a planned television comedy.
Arsher Ali, the Nottingham actor and star of Four Lions, Line of Duty and Doctor Who, was prompted to use what unfolded between July 2012 and May 2017 as the broad outline for a script called Fit and Proper Persons, which he hopes will get picked up by a major broadcaster.
It is ultimately a work of fiction, but some of the stories that inspired it will have needed little in the way of embellishment. Not that many Forest fans were laughing at the time as they felt like the proud reputation of their club slowly eroded.
Al Hasawi arrived in Nottingham with good intentions. He was desperate to restore the fortunes of the club. His heart was always in the right place. The issue was that the same was not true of his head.
Talk to people who know him or worked with him and they describe a charming character with enough drive, passion and indeed money to make Forest a success. But a picture also emerges of a man who developed a habit of listening to the wrong people. It ultimately ends up as a tale of personal misfortune with Al Hasawi at least £60 million out of pocket.
This is the story of Al Hasawi’s five-year reign — with eight permanent managers — at Nottingham Forest…
The pattern of leaping from one seemingly knee-jerk decision to another began immediately. Steve Cotterill, who had gamely guided Forest to safety in challenging circumstances the previous season, was the first who could claim to have been harshly treated by the new regime in the summer of 2012.
“I was summoned to London,” Cotterill tells The Athletic. “I spoke to them about the players who I would like to sign permanently. They said, ‘yes, yes, yes’. Then the following morning I was told that I had been sacked. But even then they still asked me to put together a synopsis of the players at the club ahead of their own press conference (to present them as the new owners) so that they would look like they knew what they were talking about.”
Kuwaiti tradition dictated that, as the head of the family, it was down to elder brother Abdulaziz Al Hasawi to do much of the talking as the Al Hasawi family — including Fawaz and their cousin, Omar, faced the cameras for the first time. But it was always going to be Fawaz’s project. He arrived believing he was already well-equipped to flourish in English football, having achieved success in Kuwait where he had a long affiliation with the country’s most dominant club, SC Qadsia, including being president from 2010 to 2012.
There was an air of modesty to Fawaz’s initial statements. But a subsequent discovery, in one of the back offices at the City Ground, painted a different picture. Several large boxes contained copies of leatherbound books titled Fawaz Mubarak Al Hasawi, Godfather of Kuwaiti Sports, which told the story of his glorious affiliation with SC Qadsia. One day perhaps there might be another book: Fawaz Mubarak Al Hasawi, Godfather of Nottingham Forest.
Al Hasawi arrived in Nottingham as a man used to having his efforts heralded. His father, Mubarak Abdul-Aziz Al Hasawi, established the FAWAZ company, which initially specialised in refrigeration and air conditioning but quickly expanded into commercial and residential property. This background eventually led to some labelling Al Hasawi a “fridge magnet” rather than magnate.
Al Hasawi was born into vast wealth, with the family owning palatial properties in Kuwait and London. Those who visited his home in Mayfair would be greeted by a butler whose only job seemed to be to carry around a bowl full of mini chocolate bars. And his vast wealth excited Forest fans at first, given the cloud hanging over the club.
The decision by Nigel Doughty, a lifelong Forest fan, to step down and put the club up for sale as criticism of his tenure reached a crescendo in October 2011 already felt like a real shame. Worse was to follow when Doughty died suddenly in February 2012 at the age of just 54, with the club’s future still in the air and a buyer still to be found.
The arrival of the Al Hasawi family represented fresh hope. But even as the trio moved out into the City Ground car park to meet the hundreds of fans who had gathered to meet them, their first problem had arisen.
The new owners were desperate to appoint a big name. Fortunately, they started by making a good decision. Forest approached Sean O’Driscoll, who had been a coach under Cotterill but was by then Crawley Town manager, as a way to get to Steve Coppell.
“I’d taken the manager’s job at Crawley,” O’Driscoll tells The Athletic, “and I’d had a conversation with (Forest chief executive) Mark Arthur because Forest were interested in Steve Coppell, who was director of football there. The Kuwaitis were Manchester United daft and Steve’s connection with United sparked their interest. I was asked if I could sound out Steve about the job.
“They arranged to meet and I ended up going with him. He eventually said that it was not for him because he had business interests in China that he was looking after. Steve said it would be a really good job for me… but they didn’t want me, they wanted him.
“But three days later I got a call from Mark asking if I would be interested. If they were going to wait for somebody with Manchester United connections to take the job, they would be waiting a long time.
“I knew the players, we had finished the season really well. Rob Kelly, Jimmy Floyd (Hasselbaink) and the rest of the coaching staff were still there. It just felt like a good fit.”
O’Driscoll’s initial problem, he claims, was talking Al Hasawi out of impulsively spending big money on players.
“We had every agent under the sun touting us players and it got to the point where we would just have been accumulating players for the sake of it,” O’Driscoll says. “We signed a couple I felt could help to settle things down. Simon Gillett was really important for us. I had a hard time persuading Fawaz that he was a good signing because he cost a fraction of what he was thinking of paying for signings (a free transfer from Doncaster) — and he probably hadn’t heard of him.
“We also tried to sign George Friend (from Doncaster) and we were close to getting it done, but Fawaz was not keen. He went to Middlesbrough instead and, when he played against us — and was outstanding — Fawaz was asking, ‘Who is that left-back?’ I had to explain that we could have signed him, but you didn’t want him!”
O’Driscoll also recalls feeling under pressure to sign several players from Kuwait, most notably striker Bader Al-Mutawa and goalkeeper Khalid Al-Rashidi, who were already on trial when he arrived.
“They were all really nice fellas but that they were not good enough for the Championship,” says O’Driscoll. “It was also Ramadan, so they were fasting. They had been dragged away from their families in Kuwait to try to get through pre-season at an English Championship club. They were getting injured constantly and generally struggling.
“We had to go to a tribunal in London to put forward a case for work permits. It was a bit of a disaster. I remember David Pleat was on the panel and he was asking all these questions we could not answer.
“‘Have you ever seen these players play before?’
“‘Erm, no I haven’t.'”
O’Driscoll told the Al Hasawis he did not know anything about Kuwaiti football. They responded by flying him out to watch a game.
“Fawaz seemed to have got the best players in Kuwait and won everything out there,” he says. “If that was his model out there, it was always going to be his model here, I guess. But I felt that was never going to work.”
There was already discontent within the Al Hasawi family. The seriousness of a fall-out between Omar — who had been installed as chairman — and Fawaz only became clear when several pictures disappeared from the walls around the main building at the training ground. The images — largely from the day of the unveiling of the family as the new owners — returned shortly after with Omar erased from them as if he had never existed. Fawaz officially took over as chairman in November 2012.
