‘I'm still called a gold-digger. Men look at me like I'm stupid'

Times

3 hours ago

Carolyn Radford arrives in her sizeable back garden, fresh off the family helicopter, with suitcases, her millionaire husband, John, and two dogs — Bo, a teacup Maltese terrier, and Casper, a weimaraner puppy — in tow. It's a whirlwind — and not just thanks to the still spinning rotary blades on the seven-seater chopper out on the lawn.
The couple met when Radford, a lawyer, applied for a personal injury job at the insurance firm John founded. 'I think I'm still being interviewed,' she quips. 'It's my probation.'
If so, it is a comprehensive trial period. Along with three sons (ten-year-old twins Rupert and Albert, and eleven-year-old Hugo, who are boarders at Ludgrove School, where alumni include Princes William and Harry), two dogs and three homes — one in the Algarve, Portugal, one beside the Thames in Eton, Berkshire, and this one, 19th-century Barnby Moor Hall in Retford, Nottinghamshire — the Radfords own the sprawling Doncaster-based business One Call Insurance. Oh, and a football club.
'I didn't quite realise what I was getting myself involved in,' Radford says wryly.
As CEO of Mansfield Town FC, one of just a handful of female chief executives in English football, 43-year-old Radford has taken the Stags from the non-league doldrums — when John, 59, bought the club in 2010 for £1, the team no longer had a ground, but trained in the local park — to League One, where last season they played alongside Wrexham, Reading, Bolton Wanderers and Birmingham City.
Being blonde and glamorous, the comparisons with Rebecca Welton, the wealthy, fictional owner of the equally fictional AFC Richmond, are inevitable, but, 'It's not like Ted Lasso,' Radford says firmly, before I have even asked.
In the ten-bedroom manor house, complete with gym and swimming pool plus vast chandeliers, indoor pillars and several grand pianos, Radford and I settle in the very white lounge/dining room. Up in her top-floor office, alongside shelves of law books, is Karren Brady's novel, United, set in the world of football and politics. Radford doesn't know Brady, the first female managing director of an English football team, who was appointed at Birmingham City at the age of 23 and who now sits in the House of Lords as well as being Alan Sugar's wingwoman on The Apprentice and vice-chairwoman of West Ham United, 'but she's been incredible in showing what can be done. I respect what she's achieved massively and hopefully it inspires other women, not just to aspire to the title of CEO, just to go and feel supported and ignore the noise.'
When Radford, then Carolyn Still, was appointed CEO at 29 — at the time the youngest CEO in English football — there was no shortage of noise. She and John, who are worth an estimated £184 million, had been dating for a while but were not yet publicly a couple and, while some branded it a 'publicity stunt', Radford was subjected to sexist abuse from the stands and online.
'It was overwhelming,' she has said. 'Being young, relatively attractive and female, all those things counted against me. I was made into this caricature and had the most horrible things you can say about being a woman [said about me], people calling me a bimbo.'
'Nobody knew anything about me, or cared,' she says now. 'I didn't realise, especially back then, what the title means or how it worked, that it was generally for people — men — who had been in football or had played or they'd been around football clubs before.'
Almost 15 years on, things are not much different. 'I'm still called a gold-digger,' she says. 'They still just look at me like I'm stupid.'
The best riposte, of course, is the recent success of the club, but the low-level sexism persists, even among fellow executives. 'On match days you go into each other's boardrooms and a lot of the time they'll direct conversation to my husband, and it's not just me being paranoid,' she has said. 'There are lots of casual comments like, 'Hope you're behaving yourself today,' or, 'Oh, look at you. You look absolutely gorgeous,' in a leering kind of way. Just not things you would say to another man.
'But I don't have to read my CV out to everybody,' she says. 'I work hard, so think what you want. I'm not desperate to prove people wrong. I just want to do the best that I can possibly do.'
It is not all casual. She has had rape threats and death threats 'constantly' since being in the job, online and in the post. 'Now, I just don't want to even know what any of it says,' she says. She thinks it is probably the case that 'all women in public positions get that sort of thing'.
As the club's owner, her husband is not immune to criticism either. 'If we win, we're local heroes. If we lose, we're some kind of villain,' Radford says.
She jokes that her husband, a Mansfield native, 'went to the pub and came home with a football club', but it's not entirely a joke. The club's previous owner and CEO, Keith Haslam, had run it into the ground and, according to John, had plans to sell off the ground — the oldest in the football league, built in 1861 — to build houses, claims denied by Haslam at the time. 'We rescued it, really,' he says.
'We had no fans, nothing. The club was literally just some football players that we'd inherited,' Radford says. 'Nobody wanted to go and watch their team lose again.'
Last season, its most successful in 50 years, was Mansfield Town's first in League One — 'and almost our last', says Radford. But the club narrowly escaped relegation. And the 10,000-seat stadium is sold out every match day.
Lee Anderson is one of those regularly in the stands. The Reform MP for the nearby constituency of Ashfield, he represents the political vicissitudes and shift to the right of the region in recent decades: Red Wall (and in Anderson's case, National Union of Mineworkers) to Brexiteer to Boris Johnson era Conservative to Reform.
Mansfield ranks in the top 15 per cent of the most deprived areas nationally, with some neighbourhoods in the top 10 per cent. 'It's a tough town,' Radford says.
'For John, the choice was either go down the pit or go into the army [he chose the latter] and that is reality.'
'But people in Mansfield have a smile on their face now,' John says of the club's contribution.
The couple have ploughed an eye-watering amount of their own money — a reported £100,000 a month — into the club to get there. 'I don't even want to think about that,' Radford says. 'And then there are the tangible assets we've done.'
John bought the stadium back for £2 million, 'then spent another couple of million to get the stands right', he says. They have built a new training ground, which cost another £1.5 million.
Later — while piloting us to the club in the helicopter — John says, deadpan, 'You don't really realise how much of a money pit a football club is until you're doing it.'
Money has also gone into myriad initiatives, both at the club, such as academies for local youngsters and walking football teams for older people, and via their charity, the Radford Foundation, which funds and supports leisure facilities and services in Mansfield and the surrounding areas, including for children, disabled people and the elderly.
Their roles, CEO and owner, 'are just titles, really. We're a husband and wife team,' Radford says. So do they ever truly switch off? 'Not really. And if you are losing four games in a row, it's brutal. Every match hurts.
'I've had to reframe it. I've started listening to all these podcasts, learning how to manage our world and not take it too personally, because I start to blame myself, but sometimes it's nothing to do with you.'
Growing up in Chorley, Lancashire, Radford's father owned a building company and her mother was a PE teacher. 'I'm from quite a sporty background,' she says. 'My aunties ran for England and one was CEO of Sport England. My cousins played netball for England and I grew up watching a lotof football, so I have always understood it. But it wasn't necessarily something that I ever thought I'd be dealing with on a daily basis for ever.'
Her first job, at 13, was on Saturdays in a pie shop. When her sons are old enough, 'I'll be getting them working in the kiosks at Mansfield, that's for sure. Showing them how to cook a pie. I think it's important,' she says.
She studied politics at Durham University and, 'I am massively interested in politics, but I don't like to show it too much or I might get stoned — football is bad enough.
'I've always been quite malleable in my way of thinking, and I think that's being able to pivot and having conviction of what I think is right and wrong,' she says. 'I liked New Labour, Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell and Things Can Only Get Better. I was on that bandwagon.
'Post-university, I was then Tory. I've always liked Thatcher and I liked Boris Johnson. Are you allowed to say that?'
She is confused as to why Kemi Badenoch has been made leader of the Conservatives — 'It seems like they put them there to be … It's like a game' — but neither is she convinced by Sir Keir Starmer's government so far. 'Perhaps by actually talking to business owners, maybe you'd get a better way of doing things. It definitely needs a shake-up.'
One of her best friends at Durham was Lucy Rigby, now the Labour MP for Northampton North and the solicitor-general. 'I don't think you have to be politically affiliated to one particular party — I think that's where we've been going wrong. I'd definitely vote for Lucy.'
Radford was a lawyer for Gucci group, working on brands such as Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen, before moving to One Call. She and John, who has been married once before, began dating after he hired her. I imagine there was some commentary around that.
'John was still building a business. He wasn't … One Call wasn't what it is now. I fell in love with John for his mind, his business acumen, his intelligence.
'Then we've got an age gap, but lots of people have age gaps. I didn't think about it. And you don't know how a relationship's going to work out anyway.
'I guess I'm about the same age now as John was then. And we're still here, touch wood. We built our world together. I like to think and hope that my hard work and a bit of business acumen and whatever else has helped create our world.'
The Radfords were both state school educated, but it is likely that their three sons will attend one of the UK's top public schools, perhaps Eton or Marlborough. 'I sound so northern when I'm cheering them on at matches,' Radford says. 'But they are very down to earth. They're not really materialistic, and they just like their friends and playing football.' All three want to be footballers when they grow up.
But the Radfords' lifestyle has made them tabloid fodder, with stories of paying decorators to transform Barnby Moor Hall at Christmas, flying in Santa Claus on the helicopter and spending £10,000 on a birthday party for their sons.
'The boys are very lucky and blessed, but often they don't even have birthday parties. That was for a particular show that was on TV [Billion Dollar Babes],' Radford says. (For a while, though, the family did own three racehorses named Rupert, Albert and Hugo, after them.)'Often in these kinds of situations, I say yes because I'm trying to fly the flag for the football club, and that was part of that process.'Does she feel that her actions are sometimes deliberately misinterpreted?'Yes, I think so.'Does she think it would be the same were she a man?'No, I don't think so.'
John is back from refuelling the helicopter, so we hop in to fly the seven minutes to the football ground. We land behind the stadium, beside a brand new padel court complex the club has built and an AstroTurf pitch heaving with kids playing football. Our unsubtle landing inevitably attracts a lot of attention, though all of it feels positive. For all the sexist abuse she has endured, Radford has also been dubbed 'the first lady of Mansfield'.
It is Friday night, not a match day and out of season, but people are drinking in the stadium's bars.
'That's what our strategy is — to make it a destination every day, not just on match days,' Radford says. 'To make it a hub, really part of the community again.
'It's taken 15 years and we're not there yet,' she says, as we stroll through the blue and yellow-seated stands. 'It's a labour of love, but we're proud of what we're doing.'
By the time we've finished touring the stadium, where a fourth stand is under construction, I check my train times back to London to find they've all been cancelled. The Radfords — heading south to pick up their sons for the weekend — generously offer me a lift in the helicopter. I sit with Casper, the weimaraner puppy at my feet as we soar over a lush, green early-summer England, landing just before sunset at an airfield in White Waltham, near Maidenhead, where Prince George is rumoured to be learning to fly.
They would love to take Mansfield Town all the way to the Premier League, Radford says. 'We want to take it as far as possible, without being stupid.
'We're also big manifesters. I didn't know there was a name for it until recently, but we kind of talk about things, John and I, as if they're going to happen. We're always talking about our plans for the future, always pushing forward.'