Scardino and the Notts County bottom line

MARJORIE SCARDINO is the most powerful woman in Britain, after the Queen. The head of the £5.5bn media conglomerate, Pearson group, is more powerful, according to a recent survey in Management Today magazine, than Prime Minister's wife Cherie Blair and Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt.

Mrs Scardino - she was made a Dame early this year - has everything: camera-friendly looks; good humour; sassy intelligence; three children; a house in Kensington; a £1m-a-year package; and a 'five-star hotel and first-class travel anywhere in the world' lifestyle.

Plus, in her husband, Albert, she has a loyal rock who has followed her through thick and thin - he describes himself as a 'trailing spouse' - and has been prepared to sacrifice his own successful career as a journalist to manage the family home and devote time to the children while their mother was away.

There is, though, another side to the Scardinos. While England mourns World Cup defeat, Mr Scardino is involved in another form of football agony, in the distinctly non-cosmopolitan setting of Nottingham. He is fighting to save Notts County, the club he runs. While one Scardino is immersed in billion-pound deals, the other is in crisis talks with administrators appointed to oversee the club's finances. His wife's business may be able to raise hundreds of millions easily on the world's capital markets, but Mr Scardino's club cannot pay a local businessman the money he is owed.

The agreement by Mr Scardino, which he made when he bought the club from Derek Pavis, its owner for 14 years, is now being dealt with by lawyers. 'They've not got a lot of time for each other, you could put it that way,' said Mr Pavis's solicitor, Nigel Blackwell, of the two men.

That is putting it mildly. Mr Pavis is livid at what he sees as Mr Scardino's reneging on a promise to pay him for control of his beloved club. It is an unedifying row which brings into question Mr Scardino's judgment in plunging into football in England's cash-strapped lower divisions. It does not sit easily with the image of the glamorous, media power couple about town.

As the children have grown up, the need for Albert's house-husbandry has lessened. But, rather than return to his first love, newspapers, Mr Scardino, an American like his wife, did something bizarre: he took control of a second division English football club. Blessed with a rugged physique and affable manner, he comes across as laid-back, prone to self-deprecation - just as well, considering his decision to buy Notts County.

The contrast between the Scardinos' jobs could not be greater. Not only has he got Mr Pavis to contend with, but Mr Scardino is trying to persuade the local city and county councils to each supply a £1.7m financial guarantee for the club. Marjorie Scardino once paid £1.7bn for educational publisher, National Computer Systems. So far, Mr Scardino's efforts have come to nothing and last week the failure of the councils to stump up the guarantees pushed the club into administration.

Mrs Scardino presides over a group which makes profits of £300m a year. When she took charge in 1997, her no-nonsense style wooed the City which saw her as a breath of fresh air. She took tough decisions, focusing sprawling Pearson on media and education and selling Lazards, the bank it owned, and Madame Tussauds, the waxworks. She said she would double the share price from 666p within five years. It was £23 within two and a half years.

But since then, Mrs Scardino has not had such a smooth ride. Pearson has not been immune from the media downturn, and while she has demonstrated an ability to pull deals out of a hat and still charms the big City institutions, the share price has slumped to 814p (at one stage it was 683p).

Despite the blip in her fortunes, the contrast with her husband's new career could not be more stark. 'I don't even get expenses, I may get a plate of pasta now and again,' says Mr Scardino.

How he came to be operating in the lower reaches of our sporting life is a long story which can be abridged. In the Seventies they were living in Savannah, Georgia. Marjorie was a partner in a law firm, Albert ran the weekly newspaper. Albert took the paper on a different tack from most local US papers, running campaigns and crusading articles. His investigations won him the Pulitzer Prize but not many readers. By the time the Scardinos sold the paper, to a company which then closed it down, their journal had a sale of just 2,600.

They moved to New York where Albert worked for the New York Times and the city's mayor, and his wife started her rise through Pearson. In 1993, they came to Britain, Albert as a home-maker while his wife was chief executive of The Economist group. Four years later, she landed the plum job of overseeing Pearson, The Economist's parent. Mr Scardino thought about buying local papers, but found them owned by large groups who were not in the business of selling. He then latched on to football.

Disenchantment

IT WAS A response to his disenchantment with watching professional sport in America, where competitive spirit had been removed by the demands of big business, and to the eagerness of one of his children. The son, in a school full of Arsenal supporters, decided to follow Manchester United and also play out his football fantasies with a computer game called Championship Manager.

Then, father and son met Wimbledon boss Sam Hammam, and dad became hooked. Listening to Hammam expounding the place a club holds in the local community, the way it is a focal point for thousands of people, Mr Scardino saw an ideal substitute for owning a newspaper. The more he looked into it, the more, too, he was thrilled with the prospect of taking on Manchester United in the egalitarian FA Cup - a David versus Goliath battle unthinkable in America.

Mr Scardino was introduced to Peter Storrie, then the West Ham chief executive, and together they drew up their criteria for choosing the right club: large enough stadium; a large population on its doorstep; and no debts. The pair looked at Plymouth, Wolverhampton, Stoke and Portsmouth before settling on Notts County (Mr Storrie has since moved on to Portsmouth).

The oldest league football club, County were bumbling along in Division Two, attracting crowds of 5,000 and making a bit of money from letting out conference and banqueting suites. But there were prospects: the Nottingham area has a population of 750,000 with only one football rival, Nottingham Forest; thousands of children participated in the club's school and youth schemes and the 20,000-seat stadium, built in the mid-Nineties, was superb.

That is one way of looking at it. There is another way, which is that people in the city are either County or Forest and you can't persuade them to swap. Forest fans have enjoyed great triumphs in the past, in Europe and are unlikely to switch to non-achieving County.

Locals pour scorn on one notion of Mr Scardino's that they may one day merge. And Nottingham, for all its size, is not one of our most football mad cities.

Derek Pavis owned 93% of Notts County. He was looking to retire to the warmer climes of Spain. He was happy to sell - but, not unnaturally, he expected to be paid. Mr Scardino said he would pay him, for 51% of the club and the loans Mr Pavis had made to the club - a total of £2.3m in three annual tranches, starting 15 November 2000. The first instalment of £565,000 was paid but the second, £958,000 never materialised.

'He got zip, absolutely nothing , because Albert Scardino said he hadn't got the cash to pay us,' said Mr Pavis's solicitor Mr Blackwell. 'We said to him: 'You've had a year and now you're telling us we're not getting it.''

A claimed cash injection from GMAC, the financing arm of General Motors, the giant US car corporation, never came. Neither, too, did money from banks, which ran a mile whenever funding football was mentioned. It was a rude awakening for Mr Scardino: 'I got an audience, because of my wife, with three different bank chairmen, who all said the same thing: 'Please don't talk about us backing football.''

A manager from one of the four big High Street banks told him: 'We don't want our name on your cheques because sooner or later it will get us into trouble. You will blow money on the transfer market and the money will dry up. I don't want 10,000 supporters accusing us of not helping the local team.'

Coincidentally, the fear of popular protest, says Mr Blackwell, is what has prevented his client from heading for the courts. 'Suing costs money. And we have to ask, will it yield the cash? And Albert Scardino will say: 'Here I am trying to raise money for the club and Derek Pavis isn't being patient waiting for his money, he's petitioning to wind up the club.' Then we'll get a lot of aggravation from the supporters and Derek will get his windows put in.'

On a wing and a prayer

HOW DOES Mr Blackwell rate his client's chances of ever seeing the cash? 'At the moment, he's not got a bloody prayer,' said the solicitor.

Mr Scardino's mistake was to agree to buy the club without having the funding in place (Mr Pavis's was to cede control without receiving all the money). Mr Scardino admits to having no association with Nottingham. He says he bought the club, not to make money but because football is such a central feature of British life. He had to settle for a small club, he admits, 'because I didn't have £20m'.

Whether he serves the local community or not, Mr Scardino may be sitting on a goldmine: there is speculation in Nottingham that Meadow Lane, County's ground, could be snapped up by developers wishing to regenerate the area alongside the nearby River Trent. The stadium, said one expert, could fetch between £8m and £12m.

While his wife moves from meeting to meeting, world financial centre to world financial centre, Mr Scardino can be found two or three days a week at the club's ground. He goes to all the home games and most of the away matches in the south of England.

Currently, he is meeting the administrators at Kroll Buchler Phillips, fending off Mr Pavis, trying to plug a £184,000 hole caused by the ITV Digital collapse, drumming up season ticket sales and sponsorship for the new season, and pushing the councils to come up with financial guarantees.

His wife rarely visits a game - 'she is not in the UK often enough' - but she does keep abreast of the performances. Her corporate cuttings service includes any mention of the Scardino name, which invariably covers Notts County. 'She keeps asking: 'Why can't we win?'' mourns Albert.

At a stroke, his wife's firm could solve all his problems by funding the club so it can move out of administration and Mr Pavis can be repaid. There again, pigs might fly.