Old Suffolk class and hospitality is alive and well. David Sheepshanks, the lifelong Ipswich Town fan and long-serving former chairman, sends a text detailing all the trains and connections I need to reach the quaint station nearest his rural home. Then he is waiting there to pick me up before a few hours of chat and a lunch of homemade salmon sandwiches. When we’re done, and filled with coffee, he drives me back to the station and waits to make sure the train pulls in on time.
Something feels quintessentially Ipswich about this sort of warmth. Sheepshanks’s beloved club used to be run by those colourful bon viveurs John and Patrick Cobbold, the brothers who said their idea of a crisis was running out of white wine in the boardroom. When Sheepshanks took over as chairman in 1995 he ended decades of the Cobbolds’ benign dynasty. He tells a story of a game against Arsenal when the Portman Road boardroom was stocked with six bottles of gin, six bottles of whisky, six bottles of white wine, six bottles of red wine, and six sausage rolls. By the end of the day most of the booze was long gone but there were still five untouched sausage rolls. “And Patrick Cobbold held an inquest as to who the hell had eaten the one sausage roll.”
Happier, carefree times, when glasses could be raised to Ipswich Town winning cups at home and in Europe and regularly finishing in the top three. You feel the Premier League is richer for having them back this season. Sheepshanks, 73, was smitten by his first game, a 3-2 home win over Leyton Orient in 1966. “Once a blue, always a blue,” he says, six decades later. “Ipswich was a beautifully run club. But if I draw an analogy in the nicest possible way, it was sort of like a golf club. It was all quite staid and traditional. It needed modernising and professionalising.”
He was chairman from 1995 to 2009, a period in which the club became one of many buffeted and marginalised by the turbulence and unpredictability of football finance and the nascent Premier League. There were promotions and the thrill of taking on Inter Milan in Europe. “We took 9,500 fans to Milan. I’m standing in Piazza Duomo, where the cathedral is, with thousands and thousands of Suffolk people.” But also relegations and worse. The collapse of ITV Digital contributed to the tailspin of £54million in debts and voluntary administration. “That was humiliating and awful and took a lot out of all of us.”
Ipswich spent 22 seasons outside the top flight and even dropped to League One. Clubs of comparable status overtook them and consolidated in the Premier League. “I look with envy today at the amount of interest in investing in English football from the American market and the Middle East and so forth. It’s huge. It just wasn’t there then. I spent four years searching for investors. Luckily the community backed me. I said I will take responsibility for what’s gone wrong and I will take responsibility for trying to put it right. And I think we did.” Eventually he struck a deal with the businessman Marcus Evans.
“We could have established Ipswich as like Brighton, Brentford or Bournemouth today. I mean, hats off to them, they’ve all done well. But they’ve got a lot of money behind them, all three of them. It does feel tough. We could so easily have gone on and established ourselves like them, as I think we will now.”
Ipswich returned to the Premier League in 2024, but they were out of their depth. After only four wins they fell straight back down. In May their manager Kieran McKenna secured promotion again before stepping down. Gary O’Neil will be in charge for Saturday’s opener at home to Sunderland. The club’s ownership and resources strike Sheepshanks as the difference-maker this time. Five years ago, Evans sold his controlling stake to the American investment fund ORG and the ownership was then split around other mainly American consortia.
They have gone big this summer and splurged £152million on new players, second only to Chelsea when it comes to net spend. The £26.5m deal for the 21-year-old Brazilian Emersonn was a club record, and Julio Enciso followed for only slightly less. Sheepshanks approved. “The club is unrecognisable because of the amount of money that’s being invested thanks to these American syndicates and [chairman] Mark Ashton’s efforts. I applaud Mark for maintaining standards. They have strong dress code standards in the boardroom and they uphold the traditions. They’re not the same. When you go to the club, you don’t feel it’s the same. It looks different, feels different. But it’s modern and it’s still very well done. And I’m proud of them for that.”
People will still rush to write them off. In Sheepshanks’s new autobiography he tells the story of his great pal John Dennis, the former Barnsley chairman, being cock-a-hoop at promotion. Ken Bates, his opposite number at Chelsea, dismissively pissed on his chips: “Well, John, enjoy your year.”
Ipswich are familiar with the sentiment. “We won’t mention any names, but there are a few pundit tossers who just say, ‘Well of course they’ll go down.’ They say it about us without having a clue about what we’re doing. The difference now is you’ve not only got a massive windfall for being in the Premier League you’ve also got an equally massive capitalisation of the club, or funding of the club, which is probably just as big if not bigger. That is what is separating Ipswich out from some of the other promoted clubs.”
His life has had sliding doors moments. He was Football League chairman for two years and stood unsuccessfully to lead the FA. The former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith asked him to stand in a safe Tory seat, which he considered before declining. In 2008 he lost out to Ivan Gazidis when Arsenal interviewed him to be chief executive. “I’m sure they made the right decision. When I look back on it, I’m not sure I went for it wholeheartedly because I was reticent about ever working for another club. But if there was ever going to be another club, it was Arsenal. I always look for the Arsenal result second after Ipswich.”
The title of the autobiography is Man on a Mission. It might be said he has had three missions in his life and one of them — the most important he will ever have — came too late to make it into print. Firstly, Ipswich. Then the second love of his sporting life, England’s national football centre at St George’s Park. Along with Howard Wilkinson he was a key driver of the Burton-upon-Trent project and remains its biggest supporter.
“I’m immensely proud of St George’s Park and what it is today. To have the chance to do something for your nation, for England, was an enormous honour and privilege. I think St George’s Park has been an enormous catalyst for the promotion of best practice and high performance. The facilities are phenomenal. When you go there you feel, and other people tell me this, it’s not just me, you do feel it is a special place.”
In his view, it has been central to England going the distance in international tournaments now. “Sarina Wiegman, two trophies. Gareth [Southgate], two finals. Now Thomas [Tuchel] a third place. We will get there. I am biased, but I think St George’s Park has been essential to that. I think it’s unthinkable that a major international team would function to its maximum potential without it. On a personal note, Gareth became a very good friend and I wished for him that he could have won. The world’s unfair. He deserved to win.”
Sheepshanks has always imagined “SGP” as the Oxford or Cambridge of coach education. But it has been open for 14 years, so if England’s national coach is German, does that mean it has failed in its remit to produce outstanding home-grown leaders? “No, it’s absolutely not a failure. It’s work in progress. We are only 14 years in, so arguably the coach education thing will be 20, 25 years.
“In a perfect world we would have an English coach, but it’s not a perfect world. There wasn’t a best candidate who was English so they appointed the best candidate that they could find in world football and they appointed Thomas. I back it 100 per cent. Thomas is an exceptional manager and leader of people and I applaud the FA.”
He was OK about Greg Dykes’s “countdown clock” idea which ticked down to the imagined culmination of England winning the 2022 World Cup. “Greg was being bold and came in and just said I think we should win the World Cup in 2022 and so he created his countdown clock. I thought it was a bit of a gimmick. But it didn’t worry me. I quite like ambition. I quite like holding yourself accountable and making a target. I said make it 2026 so I’m wrong now too.
“I love St George’s Park. It’s just sensational. The last time I was there was last year. I must go again soon. I get hairs bristling on the back of my neck.”
Sadly there is a reason for his recent absence. For years he made the 350-mile round trip from Suffolk to Staffordshire every week, but he has not been there since chairing a meeting of the FA’s technical advisory board last year. And so to the third mission of his life: surviving. In February, too late to be included in the book, he was diagnosed with bowel cancer.
For a couple of months an NHS testing kit lay untouched on a sideboard at home because “like an idiot” he thought there would be no issue after successful previous tests. His wife Mona pestered him to get on with it and the results showed blood in his sample. Surgeons found a tumour and said if only he had come in two months earlier, everything would have been routine. Instead, he had to be cut open and had 90 staples inserted after a six-hour operation. A foot-long section of his colon was removed. “I had to put my big boy pants on, you know. It was quite frightening.” The cancer had spread to his stomach and he was given three courses of chemotherapy pills. They tire him but otherwise he has responded well. The prognosis is good.
“I have been ill basically all of this year. It’s such a strange feeling and I still can’t get used to the idea that I’m sitting here telling you I’ve got bowel cancer. I just want to say, I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m going to get through it.”
His book title works better than ever.
Man on a Mission, by David Sheepshanks. Pitch, £25. |  |
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