I found myself despising and admiring Simon Jordan in equal measure and, paradoxically, often for the very same reasons. Like so many of Britain’s self-made men, Jordan is full of himself and his sense of self-importance. Alan Sugar comes to mind in this respect as does Barry Hearn. But in each of their cases there is no doubting their achievements. Anyone can set out in business to get to the top but only a handful actually make it. Does that make them special or just lucky? Were they simply in the right place at the right time or did they bring to the table some magical alchemy of skill, determination and foresight?

It’s probably impossible to ever accurately answer these sorts of questions, but my own philosophical prejudice on this matter tends for me to back luck over skill. However, having once myself been a big fish in a very little pond, I would never want to totally dismiss the component of individual endeavour in the making of success.

The thing that kept me reading Jordan’s story was the hope and expectation that he would have learnt some wisdom from his rapid rise and equally rapid fall. In this respect I was to be left empty handed. I gained very little sense that Jordan was a more humble, more philosophical character at the end of his journey than when he started. Just listen to Jordan’s closing remarks to get a feel of the man at the end of his turbulent adventures:

I don’t walk through life like a Monty Pythonesque character whistling, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. But I do have an absolute resolute determination to get myself back to a position where I can buy back my football club.

The key revealing word here is my. Since when did any football club belong to any one individual? I always supposed, naively of course, that sporting clubs belong to their respective communities. Thank you Mr Jordan for putting me right on that one. Though to be a little self-critical, I’m sure there were many times during my twenty year managerial tenure at London Progress Table Tennis Club that I behaved as if the club was somehow my property, fiefdom or plaything to manipulate and promote at my whim. I guess it is impossible to totally separate personal ego from genuine community endeavour. It’s just a matter of which one predominates and in Jordan’s case I get the sense that it was very much the former.

This is not to say that Jordan didn’t have a thoroughly genuine love of Crystal Palace just like his father before him. I don’t know enough about the characters that Jordan fell out with to know whether Jordan was a force for good or ill when it came to Palace’s long term fortunes. Of course reading Jordan’s own account we are led to believe that he and only he had the best interests of the club at heart. All the others were lazy opportunists and crooks and he was the white knight riding in to save the day. It may just be true but I very much doubt it. As Jordan himself says right at the outset, Football is the national game and means so much to so many, but it’s mostly about money now, not passion. As an outsider I suspect Jordan fits nicely into that definition.

What sort of man is Jordan? Who can ever really know another person but we do know that he liked to hold hugely extravagant parties and he liked to surround himself with the so-called beautiful people. If he was such a champion of the community why not pump all those squandered millions into community football rather than swanning around on the Costa Del Sol. We also know that in his business mode he would hire and fire people like they were cattle. We are meant to feel a little sorry for him when in the end he gets screwed by bigger financial forces but from what I can make out he only received what he had been dishing out during his spectacular rise in the mobile phone industry. He was as ruthless as he was daring and in the end, like all gamblers, he ran out of luck. In fact, it is the very same mentality that has led the global economy to the brink of destruction. As I happily read Jordan’s very readable account of himself I desperately wanted him to come out the other side a more thoughtful, a more social animal, but not a bit of it. He is ready to do it all again, sweeping aside all those that stand in his way. Maybe I’ve got it wrong about our man, but that’s the impression we’re left with. He didn’t take up the offer to be a dragon on the Dragons Den, but if he had I’m certain he would have been absolutely ruthless.

Jordan’s ruthless capitalist persona aside, the book provides many useful insights into the professional football world, including the parasitic nature of football agents and the ineptitude of the football governing body. Jordan provides a super passage regarding football agents that really ought to be circulated as wide as possible. If you ever wonder why a ticket to a Premier League match is so damn expensive this will give you the ugly answer:

Firstly you have sign on fees, a golden hello every year for the player agreeing to be paid a basic wage. Then there are appearance bonuses for the player turning up but isn’t that the very thing his basic wage and sign on covers? Then you have goal bonuses for forwards but hang on, surely that is what you pay them a weekly wage for. You also have the same for clean sheets for goalkeepers. The list goes on. Agents ideally like to write in staged increases so if you sign a four year contract with a player they want a pay rise every year irrespective of performance and, if they can, a pay rise after a certain number of games. Then there are loyalty bonuses, typically paid annually, which are for the monumental thing of the player turning up for a year, and on top of that they want win bonuses. P90

This is Jordan at his best, combative and resolute. His attitude to the blazer brigade at the FA is no less compromising. You can’t help but admire his disdain for the status quo. Jordan, and tens of thousands of thrusting entrepreneurs like him are what made capitalism such a vibrant historical phenomenon but what Jordan probably isn’t aware of is that the days of small talented entrepreneurs is coming to an end in the face of a faceless and ruthless finance capital. Only the very biggest will survive and to do so will involve a ruthlessness that comfortably slips over into criminality. Just look at the drug money laundering by HSBC or the Libor rate manipulations by Barclays and other leading banks. I wish you well Mr Jordan but I suspect your time has passed. Now watch him prove me wrong.