On a rainy Saturday afternoon in February 1996, the Craven Cottage scoreboard read Fulham 2-2 Hartlepool. The draw left the home side 91st in the Football League, in serious danger of going bust. London’s oldest professional football club – once home to such luminaries as Johnny Haynes, Alan Mullery, Bobby Moore and George Best – was now on the brink of oblivion.
There may not have been a less alluring proposition for a billionaire investor. That’s precisely why Mohamed Al Fayed, an Egyptian businessman who had risen from selling Coca-Cola on the streets of Alexandria to owning Knightsbridge department store Harrods, was talking to Chelsea and Manchester United instead. When it transpired that their owners were seeking only minor investment, he headed back to the drawing board.