Jon Smith OBE | Extraordinary Life Stories

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0:37Hello, my name is John Reynolds. Welcome to Extraordinary Life Stories. On this episode, I'm talking with John Smith, OBE. John is referred to as the original super agent, renowned for his pioneering role in the football industry. He founded the first ever football agency, significantly transforming the business of sports management. He's looked after some of the sport's greatest talents, including Diego Maradona and the entire England football team for years. All of this is even more impressive when I tell you he couldn't even speak until the age of 17 years old due to severe confidence issues.

1:14I'm really looking forward to talking with John, so let's get into it. John, thank you so much for joining me. You're very welcome. My pleasure. Tell me, who is John Smith, OBE? Wow. I guess I'm the product of 70 years of life in the sport and entertainment market. And actually, during a period of time when the world evolved and did some amazing things, and I'm trying to defy gravity at 17, I've given myself another at least 20 years of this kind of energy level. You look phenomenal. I didn't throw it out there for that, but thank you. No, you did. You've got a twinkle in your eye and it's full of purpose and presence.

1:54and you've been a big part of mixing it in terms of what you were saying in the last 70 years but take me back to a young job starting out career-wise what and who were the early influences for you? I can't ever remember being able to communicate because as a young kid I couldn't talk in fact my real name's Jonathan and I could never say it so people would say I was introduced with my parents and people would say, hi, and your name is, and I'd go, and eventually, John would come out, and they'd be so relieved to get something out, they'd go, oh, hi, John. I never got the Atham bit, I couldn't say Atham.

2:35So I became John Smith. But you would never know that, and of course, the career you've had with communication at the forefront, so tell me, was that an emotional thing? Was that a physical thing? Because stamina stamina is one thing, but getting your words out? Or were you just literally tongue-tied and almost afraid of talking? It started as no communication. My brain at the time just didn't log on to speech. And I think there is a physicality in there. I'm actually one of the patrons of the British Stammering Association. We call it Stammer now. S-T-A-M-M-A. A great charity. And we found out that around about two years of age your brain gets its pathways in certain physicalities and one of them is fluency.

3:25Nine and a half times out of ten it hits the right path and off you go. Mine didn't. And in people who are disfluent very often that's the case. It is a physical neurological thing, which is really curable, except in circumstances it's dealable with. Okay. We'll talk about that maybe a little bit later. But, so I can't ever remember talking normally. And of course, the more you become disfluent or incommunicative, the more you become less confident. Yeah. So I became less and less confident. Growing up, you know, influences and not being able to articulate yourself. What changed then? That's a key part of life up until obviously you were cured.

4:15What led you to being cured and what cured you? Okay, two or three things are embodied in my answer. The first is God tends to, if something is taken away, tends to give you something back. So I found that I was physically, as a young kid, very, very quick as an athlete. So I ended up, fortunately, I couldn't talk until I was about 17, 15, 15, 16. But at 14, I ended up running for Great Britain. So that had given me my self-respect back, although I couldn't talk about it if I won. So that was part of it. And that came with its own issues. the coaching staff at the time were of a different caliber, shall we say, than what they are today.

5:06So there were things that went on in those days that perhaps, not perhaps, that were very wrong, very bad and wouldn't happen today. And then I kind of managed that and then my mum who was my interpreter sadly got cancer and died and my dad promised her that he would find a cure for my speech which was her biggest problem. So there was a pledge to that? Yeah and bizarrely there was something in the Daily Express action line about six months after mum died about this miracle speech cure happening in the island of Jersey with a guy called Bill Kerr and we managed to get on Bill Kerr's or my dad managed to get me on on Bill Kerr's speech cure and off I toddled to Jersey for two weeks which was a whole story because his cure which was very effective could never be allowed today because it involved It involved taking the fear of words and giving you a bigger fear that if you didn't speak, something would hurt you more than you not speaking and therefore hiding away.

6:28So he physically hit me. There were eight of us in the class and he was about, as I remember him, he was about eight foot twelve. He was huge. An old ex-army Scottish guy. big. And this is something you paid for? We paid for it, yes. To get beaten up? We paid for it and we all sat there and he made a stand. He said you're all meek, mild guys and forget the meek inheriting the earth in the mind, well it's a lot of old crap that is. He says you know you've got to defend yourself and he made a stand bolt upright and nodded head to every syllable and pursed your lips, nearly impossible to stammer.

7:01My name is John Dundersmith. But if you did stammer, he physically hit you. So you were more afraid of that? I got hit in the stomach. I remember lying on the floor hurting and then he kicked me and got up, did it again. Didn't stand at that time. And that's how dramatic it was. And all eight of us couldn't talk and within a week we were all cured. Wow, that's compelling. It's astonishing. It's also frightening. Yeah. How do you take... That was 1969. How do you take that cure and transpose it to 2024, 2025 and make it work? No one's managed to do it. Bill Kerr and I spent the next two weeks, I was there for two weeks, and he taught me all sorts of tricks of the trade of how to speak, how to pause, how to negotiate, how to do this, how to do it.

7:56We came back really super confident individuals. and we loved this guy and he loved us and he kept in contact with us for 10 years till he died maybe 15 years till he died and it was a real you know from being I guess if you're kidnapped and you fall in love with your kidnappers it's one of those isn't it but this was just a hate love relationship but it ultimately worked he actually cried when we all gave him a hug goodbye you know he was just it was just intense how did you I don't know where you learn that practice for her to be able to put it into into practice but it clearly worked yeah and he gave me all these wonderful little tricks that's silly things like um you know if i'm sitting in a in a one-to-one with someone especially when i was a bit young when i was looking for a job and you're being interviewed and you look at somebody and it's very disconcerting for somebody if you just look at them most people when they're talking tend to you know tend to look away and you talk down here or you talk with your hands.

8:57I'm very good at sitting there just looking at you. I'll never blink because you talk to me, so look at the bridge you wouldn't own. All right. It looks like I'm looking in your eyes. Yeah. But I'm not. And I can do this all day long. I'm learning now. And I pause. And the other guy has to wait for me. The other person has to wait for me. So all of these things sort of help me do what I do. So you learnt communication in a crash course because ultimately by 15, 16 you'd probably learnt how to be a very good listener because you weren't communicating but then you've had an incredibly unorthodox journey including like you say things that couldn't happen that wouldn't happen now you'd hope they wouldn't happen now in context of what you touched on with the coach.

9:38Could I ask you something there? Yeah. If you couldn't talk and I'm not advocating one way or the other John but if you couldn't talk and in a world of words other than emails which also worked in another form, and I gave you that option, I'm going to beat the crap out of you. It's going to hurt, and you're going to come away two weeks' time as a whole new, invigorated human being, set up for the rest of your life. Or you don't. You can just carry on the way you are. What would you do? Yeah, it's difficult to imagine, but I'd do it. I think, isn't there a message there about facing your fears or doing something that isn't going to be fun?

10:18I mean, I can't believe I'm going to say this in context of your question, but the cold shower. I have a cold shower in the morning and I hate it. I'm not being punched, but I hate it. But I know I feel good for it. And it actually fires me up for the day where I've done something really I didn't want to have to do. I can't believe I brought it up in the context. But yes, I see what you mean. And that was a fundamental problem for you where look at what you've done and let's come to that. Because I imagine you were like a coiled spring. you've come back from something that has cured something that has stifled you held you back what did you then do because you talk about looking for a job and so on but i know sitting here what you have done you you became the first kind of super agent you know you have i've worked at all levels of sport at the very top and so on but how much of that suppression fired you to then be even more ambitious than perhaps someone else at 17 18 Yeah, I had a lot of catch-up to do.

11:12Yeah, exactly. When I got to 16, there was a whole lot of life that I'd missed. But you embraced that? Yeah, I just wanted to run at everything. So the first thing I did is leave school. That I wasn't happy about. And I went to drama school because I could talk. I thought it was the obvious place to park myself. I was a really crap actor. I mean, you know, learn how to use your... If you had the confidence to do that, you wouldn't have had... Yeah, absolutely. So I tried that after three months and then I'm not going to be an actor. So I just, my next love was actually sport and music and I went into music and I was fortunate enough to meet some people who were involved at the time in Northern Seoul music.

11:57And it was starting to be a trend anyway. Long story short, I embraced Northern Seoul. and we had a period of probably eight years of recreating American R &B in fast beat, what was then called disco music. We had all these all-night raves in places like Wigan. Wigan Casino became the heartbeat of it and the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, mainly in the north. And it became a big movement and we had eight, nine, ten hit records and suddenly I was on the map and I was a late teenager and ran all that through the 20s in the music business and I sold out. And that was another bizarre story because I was very happily married then to a lovely lady called Leigh and sadly she contracted leukemia.

12:57We thought there was a cure. It was then a very early, so bear in mind this is 40 years ago. Sure. We thought she had a cure called a bone marrow transplant, and she was a bone marrow match with her siblings. So we thought, oh, she's going to be fine. And she wasn't. The cure didn't work and she died, sadly, a horrible death at the time. Isn't that bone marrow transplant much better 40 years on and had drugs that suppressed the rejection of the bone marrow. But they didn't have them in those days. And so bizarrely I sold out when I was 29 for a million pounds, which in 1981 was a lot of money now, but it was a lot of money then.

13:51And I sold out on the Tuesday, Lee died on the Thursday. And it meant absolutely all the money and stuff meant nothing to me. It just, you know, I didn't quite know what to do really. So I spent, we had a home in Los Angeles at the time. We were doing some music stuff over there. I just parked myself there, probably the bottom of a whiskey bottle, I think.

14:21Did you have anyone around you at that time? I had some wonderful people around me who cared enough to party with me to try and get me out of this. Did they see the side you put on? Did you put on a facade at that time? No, they were very caring. There were two guys from New York, Alan and Peter, who I remain very, very close to these days. They've become part of my, they're like my soulmates because they carried me through it. But a lot of the other guys are probably dead now because it's a bad lifestyle. But I needed to go through that. And while I was there, in my more sober moments, I went and watched a lot of sport.

15:00LA Raiders and things like that. It was all good fun. And I loved what they were doing in sport. Because back in the 80s in England, you know, it was people dying in stadia. I mean, they had Heysel and Bradford Fire. I don't know, I want to make this entertainment. So I came back with this idea in 1985, 86, that I could do football, which was the big thing. And I'm going to do it like America. I'm going to make it fun. So more entertainment. Yeah. That was the basis of how we started Post Artists. Yes. You need to tell me about that. But what I love about this is there's real innovation. there's real entrepreneurial drive through this and continues through everything you've done instilled in me but part of it was Bill Kerr who just gave me this drive I'm going to give you a toy it's going to be a toy to begin with I wrote a whole document thing about my new toy called Speech but it then became more of a than a toy, it became my toolbox for my future and he helped steer it I phoned him every Sunday 10-12 years every Sunday night so he was like a mentor walked through us with me every week gosh so with that toolbox that you absolutely utilised talk me through what talk me through why there wasn't a kind of sports agent and then how you were able to ultimately it was 400 the biggest names it's all Diego Maradona England football team I mean you just you went stratospheric yeah I got very lucky I was I was very friendly before I left with a guy called Paul Mariner, who was a footballer who used to play for Apeswitch Terrell and was ending his career at Arsenal, but he'd just come out of the England team.

16:51And he and I had this idea that we'd manage the England team like they managed their players in America. So I came back and met with the then England manager, Bobby Robson, who was wonderful and encouraging and just became a really dear friend of mine over the years. and Bobby allowed me to introduce these silly ideas that I'd learnt in LA and I brought in companies like Coca-Cola and the Mars Corporation and we had all these fun things and the players loved it because it was the start of them earning proper money. I was just going to say, so that actually points to you. Yeah, I was there at the beginning.

17:30So we did these stupid things like I'd get Coca-Cola to put advertising boards because the FA didn't want any of this. You can have a little bit of money, but our big sponsor is Umbro, so don't go anywhere near us. But they allowed me to do it. So we'd put all these advertising boards around the ground with the players where the England games were. And Bobby would allow me to tell the team the day before the game where the boards were going to be. So if you score, lads, we need to celebrate in front of the boards. And if you look back at some of the old footage of England in the 80s, late 80s, you'll see them score and go yeah yeah yeah and then they're like where's the way we're going to run to oh there it is look and they all charge off down there they celebrate from the board so there was me going back to cacocombe and saying well that's worth you know it was another half a million quid and then whatever and then they said yeah yeah it is but the problem is that you're obscuring the board we can't see the head but so paul gascoigne said to me when we talked about it to the england team he said oh i'll tell you what i'll do i'll dive on the floor and all the lads could dive on top of me.

18:34And that's how diving in football sounds. I did not know that. I love that. And actually, talking about players like Paul Gascon, there's so much injection of money that's come into the game in different ways. And again, instrumental to you. I loved it when we were talking pre-filming about your, again, entrepreneurial innovation that has sort of led to the power of the football boots and the branding. And in your own words, you must tell me how you kind of manipulated that, if you like. because we were making quite a lot of noise I caught the eye of a rather entrepreneurial guy called Rupert Murdoch and when the whole discussion started about the Premier League there was Rupert Murdoch, David Dean, Philip Carter, a whole bunch of people and me sitting over here somewhere as the agent saying well I can do this and we can do that And so I was part of that journey.

19:26And we wanted to make football fun. So we got them to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things, the team. And for instance, when they ran on, if they didn't have boot deals or whatever, we got them a boot deal. And when the team substituted a player, in those days, there were like three or four cameras at the ground now there's about 40 odd maybe even more um there was nothing else for the director to point as opposed to because we let the player come off and then our player would run on the players stopped as well right so all eyes are on yeah it was a plan stop there's nothing else for the cameraman to shoot and the director shoot and we say right just run on the field just tighten up your boot laces so there was the nighty flash or the added or whatever it might be.

20:16And nobody ever asked us, why didn't he tie his boots up before we got on the field? So we kind of got away with it until one day we had, we were in Norway, and we were playing Norway, and I decided it'd be great fun if there was a player, it was a friendly game, so we didn't do, in the heavy competitive stuff we didn't do very much of this, but it was a friendly against Norway. And we had Treeboar as a sponsor, and so we thought it'd be really good, When the kit man comes on, when there's an injury, the physio runs on, he puts his bag down, he's got his little sponge, ice bucket, whatever, and we put adverts on his bag, because again, that's the list of players badly hurt, that's the picture you're going to be getting.

20:58And we put in Norwegian, we put in English, one side of Norwegian on the other, and it was supposed to be the extra strong mint, and we got it translated in Norwegian on one side of the bag, but someone gave us the wrong translation, and it came out as suck on the hard one. And so we got caught out a little bit by that and so we had to behave. By that time, of course, everyone was having fun with it. Yeah, of course. And it was the way forward. That's the style of how we were dancing girls before the games of Premier League and some of those sorts of things didn't work. No, but again, probably from America.

21:33Some cultures were. Do you know what I love though? Again, that entrepreneurial trait. You're trying, you're failing, but failing fast. moving on and enough of the things that you did try there's plenty of other stories you could tell me have changed fundamentally how we watch football and what we know all the boards around the ground the boot deals they're huge huge money now and also it's become um i mean other than george john george paul and ringer this is the biggest emotional export britain's had sure ever yeah i mean a fifth of the world's population watches the premier league every weekend it's massive isn't it's huge i mean you're talking two billion people but just because we're on that and things have moved so much now with Saudi Arabia and these leagues that are what are your thoughts on where the game's at because sport is so intricate in people's lives there are people that will never kick a ball that are working in a factory but football's everything to them their club is everything they support that country do you think that kind of loyalty and that that kind of what's always been a legacy with football is changing slightly with so much money that's come into the game.

22:39You can sometimes see a player that, dare I say, isn't trying as hard as they should. There's politics behind the scenes because there's so much money. Do you think that's something you need to be aware of and careful of? Again, it's a very, very good question because it does worry us a little bit. I mean, I'm very proud of what we do and I don't have a problem with the fact that the big investment funds and now nation states want to own Premier League clubs. Now, how do you manage that going forward because technically Man City owned by UAE or Newcastle owned by Saudi Arabia they can outspend everybody yeah and so there's got to be some sort of cap that works the cap doesn't really work at the moment it's it's very I won't say it's badly thought through it's it's it's thought through with every good intention but it's not functioning the way it should do so So somehow, take Saudi Arabia, I was in Saudi Arabia last week, and they love their sport.

23:40I think it's great, but what the government's doing essentially is saying, socially, we're not overly acceptable yet on the global stage. So we'll engage with the sports lovers. I can remember, you know, I was advising the then Secretary of State, Oliver Dowden, during the pandemic when he was Culture Secretary. And I remember being in Downing Street and saying to the people around, we have to bring back football. We just got into lockdown. The repository of the emotions of our nation largely sit in sport now. You know, years and years ago, national disasters, you'd go to church, synagogue, mosques, wherever you went.

24:19That's not the case now. It's, you're stuck at home. You need to just shower the television. And it brings people together. Exactly. grandparents, kids all watching a game. I think football is, and I think nation states like Saudi have realized that, that they can actually influence the world's public by buying into and buying up golf, tennis, football, boxing, and encourage people to look towards Saudi Arabia as a future partner, and which is exactly what is happening. Now, the only downside of all that is how do you regulate it so that money doesn't become the determining factor and sport and competition remains at the top of the agenda.

25:06Yeah, well said. And actually sort of on that similar kind of trend where so much of this ultimately culminates in success, sitting here now, there's so many things you've done that have been successful. And actually, rightly so, you've been awarded the OBE for services to football. sitting here now how would you define success on a personal level being of senior age there are if you asked me that 20 years ago I'd say success is I've arrived at the railway station now I'm at my destination I want to make the destination better more exciting more vibrant all this or that i think sitting here in my 70s i i kind of think i stand on my balcony my home in spain and look at the ocean and being able to smile with the contentment and and just i think that was very important actually in a in a somewhat rabid goofed up world to have contentment in your mind and your physicality i mean i'm fortunately i'm still physically able to do stuff Yeah.

26:18And I said at the top end of this, being able to be energized for the next 20 years is now my ambition on the personal level. For longevity. Yeah, I want to keep it going. But yeah, I think it's the ability to be able to be contented. I think that is such a powerful word. Unless you have the physical ability and mental strength, is that the right word? Probably not. But the mental capacity. Mindset. a mental mindset to sit back and be contented, then life will always be a problem. It's been an absolute pleasure to end you. I could talk to you for a lot longer, John. It's been a great pleasure.

26:55Thank you very much for joining me. More than but.