Free Harry's Games by John Crace

Redknapp’s house – where cars line up for the Poole–Swanage car ferry. It’s not most people’s definition of glamorous and exclusive.
    â€˜I love the area,’ Dredge continues, ‘but it’s not the sort of place where you buy a property if you’re looking to make a big “I’ve made it” statement. A couple of miles away from here there’s an area called Branscombe with large detached properties that are not overlooked and are surrounded by woods, which much more clearly fits that description. That’s much more the kind of place I would expect to find a successful football manager.’
    Redknapp likes his creature comforts: the sea views, the fine wines, the beach to walk the dogs. But he’s not so obsessed withstatus that he would go and live somewhere just for the kudos. He has no anonymity and he isn’t that bothered. The police aren’t the only people who know where he lives. Almost everyone in Sandbanks does, and, on the mornings Redknapp is in the news, there are a dozen or so newspaper reporters and TV crews parked outside his home. More often than not he will come out with a pot of coffee for everyone and a chat. And on those days when there’s nothing going on, he’ll nip out to the shop for a paper. The
Sun
, usually.
    This isn’t the lifestyle of someone who values his privacy or uses his wealth to keep the world at arm’s length. Redknapp is a part of the Sandbanks furniture, as much of an attraction as the sand dunes. Neither is it the lifestyle of a man who wants to shout his success from the rooftops. If that was what money meant to Redknapp, then there are plenty of other much flashier places he could have chosen. It is, undeniably, though, still the lifestyle of someone who can afford to live in an £8 million house; there’s no getting away from that. Making sense of the Redknapp finances is as tricky as making sense of the man himself.
    There had also been a great deal of talk about loyalty and friendship at the trial, how Redknapp was a great family man, how his players loved him and how he and Mandaric had been the best of friends, their relationship transcending the normal formal boundaries of club owner and manager. Even his bulldogs adored him. There didn’t seem much doubt about Redknapp’s closeness to his family and his dogs; his marriage to Sandra has been one of the few in football that has remained rock-solid and his devotion to his sons – and them to him – has always been self-evident.
    But loyalty to all his players? That seemed a bit of a stretch. Just take Peter Crouch, a player whom he had bought and sold on several occasions while manager of both Portsmouth and Spurs. The transfers might have been in the best interests of the clubs– and they were certainly on at least one occasion in the best interests of Redknapp – but were they always in the best interests of the player? Crouch had definitely appeared less than thrilled at being transferred to Stoke from Spurs at the beginning of the 2011/12 season.
    Every footballer enters the game knowing he is a tradeable commodity, so perhaps sentiment shouldn’t come into it. In which case, why does football so often still insist on priding itself on old-fashioned values, such as loyalty? Most modern players have as little sense of loyalty to the club they are playing for as the club does to them. Loyalty is strictly a market transaction that holds good for as long as it financially suits both parties, as Redknapp himself made clear when he said of Crouch, ‘I’ve done all right by the boy. I’ve made him a lot of money.’ And so he had, as Crouch had made millions in signing-on fees and contract renegotiations. But did it count as loyalty? For Redknapp – possibly even for Crouch, too – the answer was yes. Yet it wasn’t necessarily a description of loyalty anyone outside football would