White rat on the run

This is the strange world of Steve Archibald, erstwhile player and manager, sometime ashen-faced supremo of west central Scotland’s equivalent of Neasden FC, a "translator" and agent-manqu.

These days, he’s long gone from the First Division club in Lanarkshire that’s so penniless their footballers were asked last week to do community service in lieu of a fine that could have been imposed by the sheriff court. Instead, the man who might have been king of Airdrie is brokering mega-bucks deals for players from Spain.

And yet it is less than two years since Archibald, 45, attempted to gain control of one of Scotland’s famous old clubs - "the Diamonds" are past winners of the Scottish Cup, and finalists as recently as 1995 - two years in which he has been transformed from knight in shining armour to his persona of old, the "white rat".

Archibald’s arrival at Airdrie in the spring of 2000 came under the guise of Pacific Shelf 956, a company in which he was listed as sole director, and through which he intended to run the affairs of a club then, as now, in liquidation.

Within a week, he had signed nine overseas players, the first flood of an apparently endless tide of southern European and South-American footballers. Out went the Sandisons, the Dicks, the Jacks, the homebred players who had kept the club going through thin and thin. In came a rich assortment of unfamiliar names: Broto, Alfonso, Aguilar; Moreau, Capin and Sanjuan; Zahana-Oni, Pilvi ... it went on and on.

In all this time, however, Archibald never managed to convince the club’s liquidators, KPMG, that he had sufficient finance to purchase the club. They demanded big, thick financial documents; for the most part they received just words, delivered, often irascibly, by a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad.

"He couldn’t go into a shop and buy a packet of crisps without falling out about it," says one former associate. "He is an incredibly difficult man, who would argue black is white about anything. He is a miserable, dour, difficult character."

Even among football’s agents (those "dogs, worms, vermin" according to Joe Kinnear, the former player and manager), Archibald is derided. One of his rivals says he would like "to rip off Archibald’s head". Perhaps it’s just jealousy. What is certain is that all of his enemies delighted in his failure.

Last week, a little over a year since he was kicked out of Airdrie, Pacific Shelf 956 was revealed to have debts of 760,000, owed to 38 creditors. Chief among them is Archibald himself, owed 275,000. It is probable the former manager ran up the substantial debts by putting his own money into the company to cover players’ wages and other overheads.

But for all his business failures in Scotland, no-one could seriously question Archibald’s sporting talent, nor his knowledge of the game. This, after all, is the former international footballer who made it big with the mighty Barcelona; he is the manager who brought scarcely credible success to minuscule East Fife.

Yet, from the outset, he was notoriously bolshie. As a youngster, Archibald started at Clyde before moving to Aberdeen, where manager Alex Ferguson’s guile and Archibald’s goals helped the club initiate the most successful spell in its history. But even at Pittodrie, the club’s home, he spent so much time arguing in the manager’s office that Ferguson eventually named a chair after him.

Later, towards the end of his playing career, when Archibald came back to play with Hibs in Edinburgh, he caused a stir by advising players on their contracts (to the consternation of management) and by turning up for training in a Rolls-Royce - team-mate Paul Kane gave other players a lift in his Lada.

In between these Scottish excursions, the player made his name on a bigger stage, although that characteristically difficult streak came through. At Tottenham Hotspur he went through an entire season without speaking to Keith Burkinshaw, the club manager, who had accused him of feigning an injury. The striker scored 33 goals in that fourth and final season at the club, though. It was enough to earn his 1.2 million transfer to Barcelona. This was the most daring move of all, initiated by the club’s new manager, Terry Venables, who takes up the story in his book, Football Heroes.

"I was told Steve Archibald could be a problem, so best not buy him," says Venables. "Steve is his own man, and that is something people cannot come to terms with. But it doesn’t make him a bad footballer and that was my first concern."

Archibald was signed as a replacement for the world’s best player, Diego Maradona. The Scot was unprepossessing, unsmiling and unknown to the local football supporters, and initially unpopular. But he scored as freely at Barcelona as at Spurs and helped the side win the Spanish league in his first season .

Venables is clear about the reasons for Archibald’s success. A loner by nature, this player could succeed where his more clubbable contemporaries did not, and his former manager contrasts the Scot’s easy acclimatisation in Catalonia with the fates suffered by other leading British players, such as Mark Hughes and Ian Rush. "[Hughes and Rush] had always conducted themselves with a straight bat. Unfortunately they found it very difficult living in a foreign atmosphere and they eventually had to repack their bags and go home.

"Steve, on the other hand, will take any situation and try to make it work for him - and you can’t ask for more from any man. As a result, he loved his time in Barcelona, took to the life, learned to speak Spanish fluently and his game flourished. "

When Archibald finally appeared in football management, it seemed his career might be as golden as his playing career. True, the setting was humble enough, but after one full season as manager of East Fife he had won them promotion to the First Division. But within weeks of the beginning of the next, he had spectacularly fallen out with the board over funding ("the club’s ambition did not match mine," he said). He was sacked.

Since then he has remained a businessman in football, although the exact nature of his business is obscure. Curiously, he has never posted the 100,000 bond required by FIFA, football’s governing body, to work as a player’s agent, but he has been closely involved in a number of transfer deals.

He acted, for example, for a Spanish agency, Bahia Productions, when Gabriel Amato signed for Rangers from Real Mallorca, and apparently played a similar role towards the end of the 1999/2000 season, when Javier Artero, Jose Mesas and Francisco Luna signed for Dundee. He was, he insisted, "consultant and translator, nothing more".

In a court case in February last year, it was even revealed Archibald had played a part in the 1998 transfer of Alex Cleland to Everton from Rangers. Bahia was revealed to be acting for the English Premiership club in the transfer, and were paid 60,000 for the transaction. Archibald, in turn, received 35,000.

To those of a cynical disposition, his arrival at Airdrie was the natural extension of his involvement in the shady but lucrative world of the football transfer market. It’s plain, for example, that agents have a huge stake in the large numbers of footballers from southern Europe and South America who have been arriving at clubs like Airdrie, Dundee and others in Scotland. Here, footballers can be "shop-windowed" for wealthier clubs and, if a player can be sold on to the cash-rich English Premiership for a substantial fee, the agents will take their cut of either the transfer revenue or the player’s signing-on fee.

Exactly where Archibald fitted into this commercial chain is unclear, but it was evident, even in 2000, that his career at Airdrie was hardly about winning trophies, although in November of that year they won the Bell’s Challenge Cup. At the height of the financial crisis at the club, in May 2000, this interviewer asked him what on Earth kept him going at the club.

"Many things," Archibald replied. "There’s good business in it. Obviously, my family is first and foremost, but all business aspects of my life revolve round football. It’s always been that way; I’m a footballing man. Why not? That’s my life.

"Airdrie is an ideal opportunity. The stadium is complete, our intention is to take the club into the Premier League as soon as we can. It can be done and we have a stadium which meets the standards required by the league. It’s not easy, but we think we can do it; there lies the business opportunity."

The opportunity, in Airdrie at least, has been lost. Among Pacific Shelf 956’s creditors are HM Customs and Excise (43,000), eight overseas players (together owed 210,000), a taxi firm (for 83) and a bill to Claymore Dairies, worth 877. These days, if you ring to ask Archibald whether he still has the milk money, his phone has a continental ring to it. Can he talk about Airdrie?

"No not really. It’s something I’m not ready to discuss at this time. It’s a complicated affair. There’s a liquidator and lots of people in the middle."

Perhaps he could talk in the next couple of weeks? "In the next couple of weeks? I wish. Sorry I can’t help."

Be fair. Barcelona is lovely at this time of year, and the man’s probably got business to attend to.