Brian Viner: Reynolds out to blow a hole in the top flight

Darlington's owner has the charm and the conviction... and a premier ambition for his unfashionable club

From my train hurtling across the North Yorkshire countryside, if GNER trains can ever be said to hurtle, I spot, gleaming in the winter sunlight on the edge of the austere Durham town of Darlington, a handsome white football stadium. It will be open for business next season but does not yet have a name. However, the man who picks me up from the station 10 minutes later – a business associate of George Reynolds, the chairman of Third Division Darlington FC – tells me that Reynolds has thought of a name. He doesn't know whether George will share it with me. But he does know that I won't catch the 13.36 train home, as planned. It is now 11.45. George, he says, likes to talk.

A further 10 minutes passes. I am now sitting in a portable office beside the gleaming, 25,000-seat stadium. Sprawled before me on a huge Kilim sofa, like some Middle Eastern potentate, is a 66-year-old man wearing an expansive shirt, monogrammed GR, over a considerable stomach. The man is chewing gum for all he is worth, which, for the record, he claims is about £40m, down from £300m in his heyday but still not bad for a former safe-cracker, born and raised in abject poverty in Sunderland.

Over the next couple of hours – putting paid, as predicted, to the 13.36 – Reynolds tells me his fascinating life story. It includes four years in jail, which is where he learnt to read and write. He tells me what he thinks is wrong with football and how to sort it out, applying the principles that, following his jail stretch, eventually made him the world's biggest manufacturer of chipboard. He talks, too, of his plans for Darlington, of how he rescued the club from bankruptcy, and complains about the disrespect he is shown by the local paper, the Northern Echo.

"I saved the club, I've built a fantastic new stadium, and they keep slagging me off," he says. I ask what name he will give his fantastic new stadium? "The Northern Echo called it a white elephant," he says. "So we're going to call it the White Elephant Stadium." I search his eyes, in vain, for signs that he is joking.

He is, it almost goes without saying, immensely charismatic. The small office barely has room for his personality, nor for his faithful right-hand-man, Ian. He keeps calling Ian in to write things on a board, to illustrate the points he is making to me. He also tells Ian to show me his old school report, which labelled him backward. At 13, he was said to have the mental age of a seven-year-old. But in jail they diagnosed his problem.

"They found I was dyslectic," he says, which reminds me of that old jokey slogan, 'Dyslexics of the world untie!'. He still has trouble reading and writing, and his speech is littered with glorious malapropisms.

"Three years ago," he says, "when I said that football clubs were spending far too much on wages and it was going to end in disaster, I got jeckled (sic). But it has. If you pay out more than's coming in, you'll get into trouble. If you give a housewife £400 a week and she spends £600, by the end of the year you'll be in trouble. And football managers are not businessmen.

"I've wasted a lot of money here by listening to managers. We've brought in some right crap. There's one fella, I'm not going to mention any names, on 70 grand a year. Hasn't kicked a ball all season. Not good enough. But don't misinterpretate (sic) me. Managers are not always wrong." He pauses, but only to remove a wad of gum. "I had a manager here who paid £1,000-a-week win bonuses. Now, the average surgeon earns 78 grand a year, and can spend up to 16 hours on his feet at a time, so how in the name of God can a Third Division footballer earn £150,000 a year working two hours a day? It doesn't stack up. At least they're coming to their senses now, the Football League, by saying that no club can spend more than 60 per cent of its turnover on wages. That's very good."

If he was running the whole of football instead of just Darlington, I venture, what further rules would he initiate? "I would stabilise ticket prices. I would have a maximum price of maybe £20 in the Premiership, £15 in the First Division, £12 in the Second and Third. That's what we're doing here. We're trying to give football back to the working classes. Arsenal and some of these are charging £35 and more for a ticket. It's too much. When this stadium opens, we'll have two prices, £12 and £6. And people with season-tickets this year will get two for the price of one next year. It's already set and dry." The Northern Echo, he adds, criticised him for spending money on the stadium before the team. It also investigated whether the development had met the 22 conditions imposed by the council. Reynolds seems genuinely perplexed by this apparent hostility.

"People will be able to come here and have a nice meal, there's a cocktail bar, an Italian restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, we're trying to get permission for a small casino. The executive boxes are absolutely mega. People will come here and have a good day out. They might stay until 11pm.

"And with the money we'll get in from that, we'll get better players, which will lead to better football. I expect to see Darlington become Premier League. You might laugh, but where were Fulham five years ago? If Al Fayed can do it, I can do it. All he's got is a corner shop. And it's all my own money, you know. There's probably no one else in Europe who's built a stadium with his own money." Here he summons the ever-obliging Ian. "Write this down," he says. "When Sunderland played at Roker Park, they were getting [attendances of] 11,000. They went into the Stadium of Light and straight away, even though they were still in the First Division, got 37,000. Middlesbrough got 4,000 in their old ground, that went to 35,000. Hull were getting 7,000, they're now averaging 17,000. Rushden & Diamonds used to get 180 people, built a new stadium and got 6,000. I could go on. Now why is that? It's because times have changed. The days have gone when people don't mind standing on the terraces getting drenched, with no toilet facilities. If there's an old grocery shop next to a brand-new Asda, I know who's going to do the most. We've got to move with the times."

He ended up buying Darlington, he adds, having gone out to buy a car. "I took my daughter to buy a car for her 21st, and one night we were looking in the window of Sherwoods [a local Vauxhall dealer]. The next morning we get a phone call from [Sherwood's managing director] Alasdair MacConachie, who's seen us on the closed circuit TV. He says: 'Are you interested in buying a car from us?' I said we'd already bought one from someone else. So he says: 'Then would you be interested in buying a football club?' Turned out he and the directors had been scouring the North-east to find someone who could raise some money."

Reynolds, who had tried to buy Sunderland a few years earlier, duly met club representatives, and asked what the debts were. "They said they owed £2.2m. That was about 11 o'clock. By the time it got to three o'clock it was £3.8m, and by five o'clock it was £5.2m. I'm still digging the worms out now."

Speaking of worms, I say, what about the Colombian, the former Newcastle United star Faustino Asprilla, who last summer was wooed by Reynolds and seemed on the verge of becoming a Darlington player before doing a 5am flit from Newcastle Airport? "Ah," he says. "I was absolutely gutted about that. It was disgusting, that. It was a terrible trick he done us. I'd put weeks of hard work into it, ringing Colombia, getting him over here, wining and dining him, and there was always a charade (sic) of people around him, wanting the best champagne and whatnot. We agreed terms but then at the last minute he tried to double the money. I said 'no'. We'd already agreed to 200 grand a year plus 20 per cent of the gate. But I still thought we were friends. Then he turns up late for his medical, and I'd told him he needed his passport, but he says he's left it in a restaurant. So he goes away to get it and that's the last we saw of him. I'd fought the case for his permit, too. Grovelled like hell."

Here, a glib analogy springs to mind. Just as Reynolds thought the Asprilla deal was safe, so, once upon a time, did certain companies think their valuables were safe – until Reynolds came along and pinched them. One might say, in other words, that a former safe-cracker should always step gingerly on to the moral high ground. But, to that, Reynolds would say, I suspect, that he has paid his dues.

Moreover, society forced him to become a criminal, he asserts. "Me and a lad called Jimmy Connolly were the last people sold into slavery," he says. "I mean it. From the time I was eight years old, I was made to work eight hours a day. From 12 until 16, 12 hours a day." Although his parents were alive, his father was away at sea and his mother was unable to look after him, so he was sent to an orphanage where he was treated, he says, like an animal.

"Now, if you have a lion in a cage, and the zookeeper treats him badly, then if the lion ever gets the chance, it will eat him. Fact. It's the same with these kids. They get treated terrible in these places, then get chucked out on the street with nothing, and what does society expect? That they're going to become brain surgeons, solicitors, accountants?

"I got into bad company and then I was like a hamster on a wheel, going round and round. I worked down the Monkwearmouth pit, next to a shot-firer, who was a lazy bastard. He kept going for cups of tea and leaving me to blow up the rocks and coal. And I'm learning all the time, and I thought: 'I've got a better use for this explosive'. So I started blowing safes up, never in private houses, mind, or small companies. I did plcs, because there was no difference between them and me. They robbed people with Parker pens instead of sticks of gelignite, that's all.

"Do you know what I've always wanted to do, I've always wanted to go on television and blow a safe, let people see how good I was. I was the third-best in Europe, you know." This conjures up an irresistible image, of the European Annual Safe-Cracking Awards, with gold, silver and bronze sticks of gelignite handed out by buxom young women on a podium. But I sensibly keep my images to myself. Who, I ask, were the safe-crackers better than he was? "John Reminsky from Scotland, he was the best. In World War Two they flew him out to Germany to blow the safe in Gestapo headquarters. He was wonderful. The other one was Eddie Chapman, who was a treble-crosser in the war, got caught at Scotch Corner.

"But I was very good, too. I used Unigel, a new process made by ICI. They used to sell it to the Coal Board, and I 'borrowed' it from the Coal Board. The trick was using the right amount of gelignite with the right combustion. When I was done with a safe you could still close the door, except for one I did when the door went through the roof. It'll all be in my hortobiography (sic), which is going to be called 'George Reynolds: Cracked It'."

Whether he has cracked it in football remains to be seen. But I'm pretty sure that football, unlike those plcs, is the richer for having him around.