Profile: A man with down-to-earth charisma – but questions over earlier brush with football

Despite a job as a venture capitalist and a comfortable cushion of millions that allows him to indulge in his passion for horse racing – and spend £1 million of his own funds on his bid for the club – he insisted he was no “Eton-educated toff”.

His introduction to the world of work meant leaving school on a Friday and “heading down the pit on the Monday”.

The 59-year-old, who has been divorced twice, has come a long way since the last time he scrubbed coal dust off his face. Over the years he has made his fortune through companies ranging from property and finance to medical science and biotechnology and, in the process, accrued a wealth of affluent contacts and investors.

Yet it is Mr Green’s previous involvement with a football team that concerns not only the Rangers fans, but manager Ally McCoist. When it became clear Mr Green and his consortium were set to buy the club, McCoist called his former teammate Nigel Spackman, who resigned in protest as manager of Sheffield United when Mr Green, the then chief executive, suddenly sold the team’s two top strikers to reduce costs. As the Rangers manager said in an interview yesterday: “I did speak to Nigel, but, to be fair, I spoke to a few people about the potential purchaser.”

Sheffield United fans have already taken to the internet to warn the Scots, with one fan posting: “Charles Green bids for Rangers! They are ****ed now!”

Mr Green was appointed chief executive of Sheffield United in 1996 after the club was bought over by Conrad, a leisure group based in Manchester. The club was turned into a public limited company and floated on the stock market with the influx of funds used to buy players.

Dean Saunders, the Welsh Internationalist, said of him: “I had options to go to a Premier club but after speaking to Charles Green I felt I was signing for Real Madrid.” However, the warm relationship between charismatic chief executive and fans did not last. Despite the fact that attendance to games rose by 33 per cent and sales of merchandise at the club shop rose by 300 per cent, the company which now owned the club made a pre-tax loss of £5.88 million in 1997 compared with loss of just £59,000 the previous year.

Mr Green’s career at the club struck its nadir in March 1998 after he was verbally abused by fans in the car park after a home defeat against Ipswich. Shortly afterwards it was announced that he was “given a move away from football affairs” and replaced as chief executive. He stepped down from the board a few months later.

Pete Whitney, chairman of the official Sheffield United supporters club, yesterday described his record as “varied”.

In the previous 14 years Mr Green had held at least 39 directorships in firms, several of which have been dissolved. He also served as chairman of Kingsbridge, a company which offered financial services to wealthy sports stars and entertainers. In 2000, the company bought Murray Management Group, then described as an “officially appointed adviser to the Scottish Premier League and Scottish Football League”.

As evidence of his successful track record, Mr Green said he was invited back to run a Yorkshire sports education company, Proactive Sports, at a time when it was in crisis.

He said in an interview: “Proactive wanted me back because things were not looking so good. They owed people like Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand and Thomas Sorenson something like £40 million. They were going to lose the lot, but in February I got every penny back for them with interest. I then resigned, so you cannot say there is anything untrustworthy about me, or they wouldn’t have wanted me back.”