Profile: Soccer sugar daddy tastes a bitter side to benevolence

John Madejski, the millionaire publisher who finances Reading FC feels let down, writes Antonia Feuchtwanger, but the fans keep him going

JOHN MADEJSKI, the multi-millionaire publisher who chairs First Division Reading Football Club, might be forgiven for feeling a certain malicious glee these days. Leicester City's fortunes turned for the worse after Mark McGhee, the manager who took Reading from the Second Division to the brink of the Premiership, defected to the Midlands club just before Christmas.

Madejski felt McGhee left him with egg on his face, and is furious. Though the bust-up does not compare with Alan Sugar's tribulations at Tottenham, it does underline the problems successful entrepreneurs have in understanding the strange ways of soccer.

It also suggests professionals should not push their sugar daddies too far. For Madejski, the experience was so disillusioning that, he has now revealed, he considered abandoning the club.

It took Madejski, 53, fewer than 20 years to build his Hurst Publishing into a company that will make about £11.5m pre tax this year, giving him a fortune of £100m to £150m. The hub of his empire is Autotrader, a magazine that, with a circulation of morethan 400,000, is the deceptively neat, grey face of the second- hand car market, and a bible for private and trade buyers.

The man himself is also neat - despite the salivary attentions one of his horses has paid to his suit. We are sitting on fat, white sofas in the spotless but soulless living-room of his mock-Tudor house near the Thames. The door chimes play Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

Madejski would prefer a more "space-age" home, he grumbles, "but I would not want the upheaval of moving." He lives alone now, though on the mainly bare walls there is a portrait of his two adored teenage daughters, whose mother, Jane, he never married and who do not share his surname. His garages house eight exotic cars - though one of the stars, a Ferrari 328, never goes out on the road. That is because it is sitting in a spotlit display area by the gym. He buys cars "to drool over", he says .

He was born in Stoke-on-Trent, but when he was seven his family moved to Reading, where his Polish stepfather had a number of restaurants, shops and other small businesses. The young Madejski worked in America, returning to work as an advertising salesman for the Reading Evening Post.

In the mid-1970s, he set up in business. Along with a colleague, Paul Gibbons, he decided to develop a magazine for buyers and sellers of houses and cars, based on a model he had seen in the United States.

Thames Valley Trader differed from established competitors such as Exchange & Mart by being local, conveniently sized and full of pictures.

"A picture is worth a thousand words when it comes to cars. I, like a lot of women, and men too, can't remember exactly what the different models look like," says the man who now owns a Bentley, a Ferrari 328, a Jaguar XJ220, a Rolls-Royce Silver Spur III (registration JM1) and a bright yellow Cobra (registration BI BYE).

In 1977, he split car adverts from home adverts and founded Thames Valley Auto Trader. In 1978, with the backing of the Guardian and Manchester Evening News Group, the magazine went national. There are now 12 regional editions, four owned outright by Hurst Publishing. The company, still based in Reading, employs more than 1,000 people and has started a similar publication in South Africa. It is still two-thirds owned by Madejski, chairman, and a third by Gibbons.

Madejski spends much of his time on his other interests. According to his secretary, Bev Johnson, most of his social life revolves around business. Besides his car collection, his involvements include Goodhead Group, a printing firm he appears to be bringing back to profitability, a local building firm and Reading Football Club.

He bought Robert Maxwell's stake in Reading FC in 1990 and now owns most of the shares. He has lent the club £1.2m against its ground at Elm Park and unpaid interest of £287,000 has since accrued.

"I was led to believe that the club would go under if I did not step in," he says, though he is now doubtful that he was the only person who could have saved it. He says he is not a football fanatic, "just a supporter", but he felt the club gave a nondescript town an identity.

"I consider Reading as where I'm from," he says. "Having lived in California and travelled the world, I know what it's like to find a newspaper in a far-flung place and see the football results. Just to see the name of Reading in print, it's a reminder, it's like a suck of the thumb."

"Reading has never been much of anything; it's too close to London for that. If you want to do something for the town, you can help the hospital - but the football club really touches a lot of people."

So it's soccer as social service? "If you speak to medical people, they say everyone needs the feel-good factor. It's almost the ambrosia of the masses."

He admits that his investments are "a bit philanthropic. It's not like `here's £50m, just put it where you can and make sure it earns a lot of dosh'."

That is why he says it is a good thing he was given only 24 hours to decide whether to invest in the club. "If I had investigated for longer and thought more about it, I would have realised the shortcomings."

Many fans long for Madejski to ape Jack Walker, chairman of Blackburn Rovers, who once swore to make Manchester United look "cheap" and has spent millions on players to propel his club to the top. But they long in vain. The publisher is outspokenly critical about the money mania affecting British football.

With the petulance characteristic of the rich when other people try to tell them what to do with their money, he says: "I have to remind people that unlike Jack Walker, I haven't sold my business and don't plan to. What he's done is somewhat grotesque. By fuelling expectations and salaries he makes it more difficult for existing clubs.

"We have seen stupid things happen in America like lock-outs [when a pay dispute between management and players wiped out last summer's entire baseball season], and that would be the logical conclusion of what's happening here."

Madejski is deeply frustrated by the trials of chairing a football club. "I spend far too much time on footballing matters - the phone calls, the meetings."

Just before Christmas, the job became more difficult still. One Tuesday night he was drinking champagne with Mark McGhee, architect of Reading's success on the field, after having persuaded him not to leave for Leicester City. On Wednesday morning, Madejski confidently told the papers and local radio McGhee was staying, only to find at lunchtime that he had decided to leave the club after all. "I couldn't believe it. I was so disillusioned," Madejski says.

McGhee, who hasn't spoken to Madejski since leaving, says: "What happened showed how naive he is in footballing terms." He accepts he kept changing his mind and so embarrassed his former boss.

But he also says that when Leicester City asked Madejski whether it could approach McGhee, a more savvy club chairman who did not want to lose his manager would have said no, and would have made sure he had a contract that discouraged him from leaving.

McGhee adds: "John's very honourable and very honest in business. He enjoys the game now but in some ways he doesn't know much. A friend of mine said to him, after I let Martin Hicks [former Reading captain] go, that Hicks had been playing like a donkey.John said: `Is that good or bad?' "

Madejski, meanwhile, was so disgusted by McGhee's departure that he thought, not for the first time, about ending his involvement with the club - though the £2m-plus he has sunk in it and the potential legal liabilities he could face would make that extremely expensive.

At least one insider says: "He will not be chairman for ever." But down at the tiny ground at Elm Park, patient fans in grey anoraks are queuing up for souvenir mugs - already sold out - and Seventies-looking fixture lists still carrying the name of MarkMcGhee. Madejski knows that he cannot trifle with the hopes and dreams of the loyal followers.

As he says, a little abashed: "I did not want Reading to lose its football club in my generation." As millionaires' aspirations go, it's worthy enough. But British football would be unwise to assume all its millionaire followers are as soft-centred.