David Sutherland Interview

Charles Bannerman interviews Caley Thistle's principal shareholder and former chairman David Sutherland who gives his views on the past present and future of Caley Thistle.

The Tullochs Chief and the Thistle Park Freebies!

DAVID SUTHERLAND interviewed by CHARLES BANNERMAN

Caley Thistle's principal shareholder, David Sutherland, says he believes that a stay in Aberdeen of any longer than five months might have spelled financial disaster for the club and that the move back to Inverness in January didn't come a moment too soon.

Poor attendances at all but the most glamorous games combined with the cost of renting Pittodrie would very probably, he claims, have had the club seeking further injections of cash before long.

"I would say that if we had continued to play in Aberdeen we would not have survived and we would have been back to the shareholder base," he said. "There was some very intense lobbying on our part to get back to Inverness and when we did get permission that was a pretty defining moment."

That the club is back in Inverness, that Tullochs co-ordinated the upgrading of the Caledonian Stadium to SPL criteria in just 47 days and that for the first five real "home" games almost 30,000 fans have turned out are all now part of history.

David Sutherland, who returned recently as a director of the club, has also applauded this week's latest development - the placing of an advert for a Chief Executive. It's a move which he believes is essential to the future stability and smooth operation of Caley Thistle.

"We need a Chief Executive to run the day-to-day side of the club apart from Graeme Bennett on the football side. The time has come for someone to be responsible for the day-to-day running rather than have non-executive directors in there in certain parts of the equaltion during the run-up to matchdays." And the Tullochs chairman, who has revealed that "failure wasn't an option" with the stadium project, has highlighted team work on and off the park as the main reason behind Caley Thistle's current Premier League success which has confounded the sceptics and critics who had them relegated on the first day of the season.

"Craig Brewster has brought a new dimension on the field and Malky Thomson is a young man with great tactical skill," he said. "The contribution of the players goes without saying - especially the longer serving ones. And when I stood down as Chairman and passed the reins to Ken Mackie I handed over to a safe pair of hands and that safety and conservatism were the order of the day. I also picked Graham Bennett and paid Clach £10,000 to get him. He has been a very efficient bridge between the boardroom and the team and manager and Caley Thistle owe a lot to him."

Danny MacDonald and his staff are also singled out for their work in the community, culminating in the recently launched "Team ICT" initiative. Mr Sutherland claims that many of the origins of the current crest of a wave are in "The Road To Premier League Football", a document he drew up along with Graeme Bennett in 1999. "Everybody scoffed when we produced that but the Bank of Scotland now use it as a case study. It concentrates on balancing the books and managing the cost of playing football." Increased revenues since returning home in January should certainly assist that balancing act.

David Sutherland, 25 years now on the Tullochs board, initially as Finance Director then Chief Executive but Chairman for the last 10, is Inverness born and bred. He is proud to be a former pupil of Hilton Primary School and Inverness Royal Academy where he played only to what he admits was a modest level. He describes his approach to football as "cosmopolitan". So, while he is an ICT fan through and through these days, much of his youthful affiliations were to Inverness Thistle and Celtic. However his pursuit of variety also found him on the terraces at Caley and Clach and his footballing tastes remain wide.

"I learned early in the process that if you waited until half-time you got into Thistle Park for nothing," he remembered. "I could never afford to go to the stand but I enjoyed standing on the ash terracing at Kingmills Park." But the free football he contrived to watch as a schoolboy in the 1960s has certainly been repaid many times over through Tullochs' support of Caley Thistle. £500,000 in 2002 gave the company a 29.9% stake in the club. In response to the recent change from public to private limited company status, he has pledged up to £150,000 more - probably of his own money - with one further significant guarantee. "Our stake will not rise above 49%," he revealed. "It is our distinct intention NOT to end up in a situation where we have control."

Tullochs also contributed £600,000 of the £1.5 million cost of the stadium upgrade to SPL standards and currently carry the £500,000 payable by the club. The Chairman agrees that his company has inevitably gained a lot of goodwill from its involvement with the club in general and that project in particular. But he insists that there is no hidden agenda for Tullochs who have already written off the £500,000 they paid for their initial 29.9% stake. Gain has never been a motivating factor, he says."We've given a feelgood factor to the Inverness area but I didn't look for a return in the business sense. We are Inverness's largest Highland owned private company and I feel that putting something back into the community is a good thing. But the club has generated so much income to the city. There will be a spin-off from that and hopefully we will get our share." But as far as Inverness Caledonian thistle FC is concerned, there seems little doubt that David Sutherland will be intensively involved in the planning and execution of what now appears to be the certainty of SPL football next season.