For the first couple of days I found his hulking silent presence intimidating, but I soon got used to him. He preferred to communicate by e-mail rather than speech. Sometimes Guy and I would discuss something for half an hour, only to get back to work and find an e-mail waiting for us from Owen giving his views on the matter. Very strange. But it was quite possible to work a few feet away from Owen all day and ignore him completely, and he liked it that way.
He was making good progress on the architecture of the website. But, as Guy tacitly recognized, Owen had a people problem, so normally either Guy or I would accompany him to meetings. I quickly began to gain a basic understanding of the various components that would make up our website: the host servers lodged in fireproof, bombproof, high-security premises, the internet connections, the routers, the proxy servers, the firewalls, the databases. At this stage, it was all fairly straightforward, but once we started selling stuff over the web it would become much more complicated fast. Owen was wise to look ahead.
I spent a lot of time on the finances. One moment I would be worrying about whether the revenue in year five should be £120 million or £180 million. The next I would be figuring out how to save a few quid on printer toner. Guy had picked up a lot about internet businesses in a short time, but the money side had passed him by. I bought a bookkeeping software package and laboriously typed strings of figures into it. I set up files and simple procedures. I opened a company bank account. And I put a lot of thought into company structure, who owned what proportion of how many shares, how much to keep back for future key employees and how to value the company now and in the future.
I was concerned about the shareholders’ agreement. I wasn’t a lawyer, but it seemed to me that there were holes in it. As the number of shareholders grew, this agreement would become more important. Guy had used a law firm who specialized in film and TV contracts. They were difficult to pin down and when I did get hold of them, they waffled at my objections. We considered using some of the City firms I knew, but they would be far too expensive at this stage so we decided we would have to put up with Guy’s lawyers until we had proper funding.
Ninetyminutes wasn’t exactly going to be a ‘virtual’ company but it was going to be pretty close. Especially in the early stages. We didn’t have the time or the money to employ our own experts on everything: we were going to have to use consultants. The most important of these was the web designer. Guy had selected a firm called Mandrill, and they called us to say they were ready with our design.
Mandrill’s office was a large loft above a garment trader in one of the small streets just north of Oxford Street. Brick, pipes, skylights, precious little furniture, no internal walls. A folded-up micro-scooter rested against a cappuccino machine by the door. There were three islands of people working their computers around large curved black tables. We were met by two men and a woman. They intimidated the hell out of me. The men had tightly cropped goatee beards, carefully arranged combat trousers and T-shirts, hair cut just so. I had suddenly become an aficionado of shaven heads, but neither of the two men had had a simple ‘all over’ job. The woman, whose black hair was at least an inch longer than the men’s, sported an eyebrow stud and at least six rings in each ear. Against this, Guy’s all-black kit and inch-long blond hair looked so 1998. Owen and I weren’t even contenders.
We crowded round a small table bearing a projector. The leader, one of the goatees called Tommy, asked for the lights to be dimmed and switched on the machine. It flashed a search-engine page on to the screen. We watched as Tommy typed the letters www.ninetyminutes.com. A click and up it came, our new logo on a light blue background. Another click and we were into the site. It didn’t look anything like the other soccer sites on the web. Most of these resembled the contents pages of magazines transferred to the Internet. Mandrill’s site, or rather our site, consisted of a series of dark blue bubbles floating on a light blue background. There was something about it that invited you to click to see what was in the bubbles. We clicked. And clicked. And clicked.
‘Nice,’ said Guy. ‘What do you think, Gaz?’
‘Cool. Yeah, cool.’
‘Let’s take a closer look at the logo.’
Tommy clicked on the opening screen. The woman with the multiple earrings handed round a T-shirt with the new logo printed on it.
‘Obviously the real clothing will be better quality than this,’ she said. ‘But it should give you an idea.’
The T-shirt bore the figures nine and zero, with a few strokes suggesting a stopwatch within the zero. Next to it was a tiny football, and the word ‘com’ in forward-sloping lower-case letters. It looked good.
‘It’s like a kind of mixture between Ralph Lauren and Adidas,’ Guy said.
Tommy changed the screen. An image of a whiteboard splattered with scribblings appeared. I recognized Guy’s writing. Tommy zoomed in on the words ‘Adidas’ and ‘Ralph Lauren’.
Guy laughed. ‘You’re just giving my ideas back to me!’
‘Dead right,’ said Tommy. The lights came up. ‘Well? What do you think?’
Guy glanced at me.
Mandrill were charging thirty thousand pounds plus one per cent of our equity. At this stage in Ninetyminutes’ life thirty thousand was a lot of money. But a well-designed website was vital. I nodded to Guy. ‘OK with me.’
‘What do you think, Owen?’
‘Cotton candy. It’s, like, pink fluffy cotton candy.’
‘But do you think they understand the technical stuff?’
‘It’s like I always say. No one understands the technical stuff in this country.’
‘Well, thanks for not calling them morons, Owen,’ Guy said, flashing a reassuring smile at Tommy and his team.
‘No problem.’
‘Gaz?’
‘I like it. I think it’s cool.’
Guy smiled. ‘So do I. Tommy, we’ve got a deal.’
Saturday came. We all worked in the morning, but Guy told me I had a mystery meeting in the afternoon. We took the tube to Sloane Square and then grabbed a cab.
‘Stamford Bridge,’ said Guy, as we climbed in.
I smiled. ‘I didn’t realize you still went.’
‘Every home game, when I’m in London,’ said Guy. ‘And I intend to keep going. It is the point, after all.’
‘That’s true.’
As a small boy my loyalties had fixed on Derby County, and I had stuck with them until university, making the trip up from Northamptonshire a couple of times a year to see a game. But once I started working, there never seemed to be the time. My interest in the game, both as a player and a spectator, had quietly slipped out of my life, unnoticed. The last time I had been to a football match was seven years before, with Guy.
Then Stamford Bridge had been undergoing major improvements. There was still some work in progress, but I was amazed by the transformation. The ground was reached through the glitzy ‘Chelsea Village’ full of shops and bars. There were some families in the horde of people thronging the ground, but there were also some pretty frightening individuals. Thugs perhaps, but thugs with cash. Money was changing hands everywhere. I looked at my ticket. Twenty-five pounds. Extortionate. As we filed into the all-seater stadium and sat down in the warm spring sunshine with thirty-four thousand other people, all of whom were shelling out at least that much for their Saturday afternoon entertainment, I began to see that there really was a lot of money in football.