[nas] OT: A legitimate female soccer story

[<big_dog@fastmail.fm>]

Title: OT: A legitimate female soccer story

Why Andy fantasizes about WUSA players, and holding  Charity shields hostage here's a nice legitmate story about a female in soccer. I have included the text for those who do not wish to take 60 seconds to sign up at NYT.com

INTERNATIONAL/EUROPE   |  September 14, 2002

Crashing, and Saving, the Old Lads' Front Office

By WARREN HOGE (NYT)
Karren Brady had to do some kicking of her own as the first person of her sex to run a big-league soccer club.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/14/international/europe/14FPRO.html?tntemail1

BIRMINGHAM, England
THE front offices of English soccer teams ‹ not to mention the stands of the stadiums where they play and the milling crowds outside on game days ‹ have never been welcome places for women. So Karren Brady had to do some kicking of her own as the first person of her sex to run a big-league club.

She once dragged her manager from the shower to chew him out, wet and naked, for an offensive comment he had made at a postgame interview. She climbed into the bleachers to tear an abusive sign from the hands of one of England's infamous soccer hooligans. And she turned her locally legendary lip on the directors of another team who told her she should be grateful they had let her into their owners' box, or boardroom.

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"I said, `The day I have to feel grateful for half a lager and a pork pie in a dump of a little box with a psychedelic carpet is the day I give up. Keep your boardroom.' "

Then there was the hunky goal scorer who greeted her on the team bus with a leering reference to how much he liked her blouse because he could see her breasts through it. "I turned around and said, `Where I'm going to send you, you won't be able to see them from there.' " The player found himself sold the next week to a lowly club 100 miles away.

"That happened in my first year here," she said. "I was only 23 and I had to take it seriously to let them know I meant business." She related the incident while seated in the paneled chief executive's office of the Birmingham City Football Club that has been hers ever since. 

 
THE season that has just started is triumphant for her because the Blues, as the team is known, are graduating from England's second league and joining the Premiership, the 20-team major league. It will bring the club tens of millions of dollars of new revenue from television and promotion, and it is the culmination of a sustained effort of hers that has taken the team from the edge of bankruptcy to its current position as one of the game's most impressive performers, both on the field and in the executive suite. 

Ms. Brady, 34, regularly wins businesswoman-of-the-year awards. Her fellow executives, known as managing directors, recently named her to represent all of the clubs in critical negotiations with a television network that provides much of the revenue they need to stay in operation.

Soccer is big business in England, and she has leveraged the Birmingham Blues name with products like credit cards, mobile phones, savings accounts, mortgages, insurance policies, a travel service, gas, water and electricity supplies, and even a funeral company. In her decade with the team, promotions have attracted more women and children to games, increasing the average attendance to 30,000 from 4,500, and raising revenue to $53 million from $1.5 million.

Still, stories about her start like this recent one from a British newspaper: "Every inch the modern woman, she totters into the room on high-heeled strappy sandals and a short and sexy black suit." Ms. Brady said she remained perplexed at the press's fascination with her appearance over her achievement.

"I came here to run a business, to put right a dilapidated, rundown operation with a series of business solutions," she said. "But the media, with the combination of my age, the way I look, and obviously the fact that I was a female ‹ the first in a male-dominated world ‹ went into a frenzy. It was unbelievable. I'd be in press conferences, and journalists would actually ask me my vital statistics." 

She remembered coverage of a court case in which she defended Birmingham City against charges that it had tried to poach a rival manager. "It was the time that everyone was talking about that scene in `Basic Instinct' where Sharon Stone crosses her legs during a police investigation, and she has no underwear on. Well, the chairman of the other team said I'd probably go to the tribunal and `do a Sharon Stone' to get my team off. The Mirror ran a full-page picture of me seated in a short skirt under the headline `Sex Shooter.' "

When she began going out with one of the Birmingham City players during her first year at the club, photographers with a local newspaper hid in her front-yard shrubbery to get pictures of him leaving in the morning. "It was completely public, my board had been informed, we were both single, and we weren't trying to keep it secret," she said. The player, Paul Peschisolido, later became her husband, and the couple have two children, 6 and 3.

 
MS. BRADY was born in Enfield, a suburb north of London, the daughter of a printer. She knew early on that she wanted a career in sales and marketing, and she went from high school directly to her first job at the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising firm. A year later, in an early demonstration of the restless ambition that was to mark her speedy climb up the executive ladder, she left.

"They had a policy whereby you had to be there for x amount of time before x, y and z happened, and for me, I felt I was ready to move on," she said. 

She was 18.

She got a job at a London radio station selling ads for a show called "Asian Hour" that was broadcast at 3 a.m., but she used the chance to peddle other programs to mainstream advertisers. One of them was David Sullivan, the tough-talking owner of the Sunday newspaper Sport. "He came on the line," she recalled," said, `Radio doesn't work,' and slammed the phone down."

So, uninvited, she went around to see him and made him a bid that she had no authority to offer but that was too good to refuse. "I said, `Look, take the advertising. If it doesn't work, it's free, but if it does, you pay.' " Within six months, he had become one of Britain's leading radio advertisers, spending $3 million. He told Ms. Brady she ought to come work for him. 

In 1993, Mr. Sullivan bought Birmingham City and installed Ms. Brady as its managing director. She rolled her eyes at the memory of the bush-league franchise she inherited. How bad was it? "The chief scout was also the catering manager," she deadpanned.

She said she didn't grow up in one of those English homes where the women are banished to weekend housework while the men sit glued to soccer on the television. But as she went about turning the business around, she grew to love the game. Still, she said, she never meddles in sports decisions.

"We have a clear system that works very well," she said. "The manager says, `I want a midfield player, and here's my list of three players, from my favorite option to my least favorite, and can you go out and get them for me?' Subject to them being within budget, we go and get them."

This hands-off arrangement has forced her to buy and sell her own husband, a forward, twice. How tough was that? "We've actually made over one million pounds on him, which is quite good," she said.