Steve Kavanagh takes a moment to compose himself. He turns away, slightly choked up, and gazes briefly out of his office towards the car park of The Den, Millwall’s home ground, which, a fortnight earlier, had been covered in floral tributes, shirts draped over railings and messages of condolences.
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Kavanagh, Millwall’s chief executive, is recalling how he learnt of the death of the club’s American owner and chairman John Berylson in a car accident on July 4.
For Kavanagh, the shock was magnified by the knowledge that he was the last person to talk to the 70-year-old before his Range Rover left a road in Falmouth, Massachusetts and crashed into a ravine.
Minutes before the accident, Kavanagh had been on the phone with Berylson. The pair spoke three or four times a day, discussing the club’s plans to kick on from last season’s charge to the Championship play-offs and target promotion to the Premier League.
“I was talking to him when he left the house,” Kavanagh tells The Athletic. “He got in the car and we were talking but thankfully he’d hung up. It was the last conversation (he had). I said, as I always do, ‘I’ll speak to you later’. Then I was on another call and my phone started pinging.
“I had a text from James (Berylson, John’s son) saying, ‘Steve, please call me’, and then another one saying, ‘Dad’s had a terrible accident. He’s passed away.’”
The shock at Millwall is still palpable when The Athletic visits in late July. Yet, amid the grief there is also a sense of purpose as a new football season draws near — a determination to ensure that while Berylson will never be forgotten, the coming campaign will not be defined by a tragedy nobody could have foreseen.
Every football club likes to consider itself unique, but in Millwall’s case, it’s unarguable.
Squeezed into a defiantly ungentrified corner of south east London, and yet just a couple of miles from some of the UK capital’s plushest postcodes, Millwall have always been fuelled by a siege mentality.
Their fanbase is small in comparison to other London clubs — the stadium holds just over 20,000 and is rarely full — but what they lack in numbers they make up for in atmosphere. “No one likes us, we don’t care,” has become the club’s unofficial anthem, a nod to both the club’s poor relation status when set against nearby powerhouses like Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham and also the reputation of hooliganism which has dogged them for decades.
Despite that chequered history, Millwall have won awards for work in the community, being named EFL family club of the year in 2017, and achieved Family Excellence status for the 2021-22 season, for exemplary work in engaging families on match days.
Those behind the scenes at the club repeatedly reference that word ‘family’, and it is that sense of communal strength which has held them together amid the tragedy of losing Berylson.
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Over 1,000 fans and many members of staff, past and present, gathered to pay their respects to the New York-born businessman, who had been the club’s owner since 2007. Together they filled 42 books of condolences which had been laid out from 7am the morning after news of his death had broken. Over 5,000 tributes were paid in a digital version.
Berylson’s background was not typical Millwall. A Brown and Harvard Business School graduate who became a multi-millionaire by setting up the venture capital fund Chestnut Hill, his background was the kind of New York city slicker who would ordinarily be viewed with suspicion by English football fans.
Yet his legacy at Millwall is undisputed. Over 16 years he oversaw the club’s transformation into an established second-tier side, on a financially stable footing and with aspirations to reach the Premier League. And more than that, he established a close and genuine bond with those who worked for him, and in the club’s wider community.
“Seeing how much the club meant to him, even when I first signed (in 2016), was contagious,” says captain Shaun Hutchinson. “If the club means so much to the chairman, it filters down and has a massive impact on everyone.
“When we won promotion (to the Championship in 2017), John came down, he was smoking a cigar and we were jumping around celebrating with champagne and beers. You could tell he was buzzing. He celebrated promotion but then he was straight on to working out how to be better.”
“John was an extremely intelligent individual,” Kavanagh adds. “He was extremely worldly wise and had a phenomenal history knowledge. I regularly told people: ‘Do not take on John on English history, even if you’re English, because he will destroy you’.
“You can’t get beyond what a fantastic man he was. I met with the under-21 side one time and explained to them how he loved watching the youngsters come through into the first team. I said, ‘If you can be one small part of John Berylson, you’ll be brilliant people’. He was an inspiration, but he was tough.”
He also knew his own mind. Before Millwall’s final game of last season, when victory over Blackburn Rovers would have sealed a place in the Championship play-offs, Berylson asked Kavanagh how he should approach dealing with the players. Kavanagh was clear: don’t enter the dressing room or shake their hands during the warm-up.
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“So John handed me his coat and I turned around to put it on the seat, and when I turned back he was in the centre circle shaking the referee’s hand. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, jeez, what do I do now?’ I couldn’t chase him.
“He carried on going and the whole ground stood up and gave him an ovation. But he wasn’t doing it for himself. He was trying to get the crowd up, to take pressure off the team.”
Berylson’s bond with the club stretched way beyond the boardroom. At the club’s training ground, kit manager Adrian Wisson wells up as he recounts his own memories of the chairman, stretching back to when he was first considering investing in the club and he drove him around Bermondsey in a vintage Rolls-Royce.
A few years ago, Wisson was on the waiting list for a double lung transplant and was fretting about the future.
“I didn’t know how long I was going to be off work,” he says. “I was hoping that the club would look after me while I was off. The chief executive and manager spoke to John and he said it was fine and I would be on full pay for 12 months and hopefully by then I would be back. But then Covid struck. The club looked after me with John’s wishes and made sure I was off so I didn’t catch it.”
Wisson’s last memory of Berylson came on the final day of last season, before that game against Blackburn.
“He walked down the tunnel, saw me and said ‘Adrian, you’re looking so well’ and gave me a big hug. I didn’t see him after that.
“I was with him at the start and then that embrace on the final day. He was so pleased to see me.”
Millwall’s management and players were on their pre-season tour of Spain when news began to filter out from the U.S. that Berylson had died.
The manager, Gary Rowett, had been informed by Kavanagh, who also informed the other directors. That night, at around 10pm, Rowett called a meeting of players and staff at their hotel. First, there was shock, then the emotion came as they tried to process what had happened.
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“In a situation like this, everyone’s probably in the same position where you don’t quite know the best way to break that news,” Rowett says. “You know the format of a team meeting and most interviews, but this is different. You want to do it in the right way but it’s actually quite difficult to know what that is.”
Then there were the logistics. Should the squad stay in Spain, or return home? They did, after all, have a Championship season to prepare for. The decision, following consultation with the Berylson family, was taken to stay put.
Staff at the club’s training ground and stadium were informed by email moments before a public statement was made. The intention had been to do so in person, but there was an acceptance that the news wouldn’t hold. Upon their return to the UK, players and staff laid flowers and wreaths at The Den and a moment’s silence was held at the training ground with the players around the centre circle.
Millwall players and staff pay their respects. pic.twitter.com/lwIW3ek0wq
— Millwall FC (@MillwallFC) July 10, 2023
“When we went to The Den it was emotional because you could see how many people he touched,” says Hutchinson. “Everyone there was giving each other cuddles, asking ‘How are you?’ It’s kind of brought us closer together.”
But for all the grief, it was only a month before the start of a new season. The squad needed to be bolstered, gaps filled, administrative matters taken care of. That process was helped by a remarkably smooth transition from John to James Berylson, who inherited his father’s shares in Chestnut Hill, the group that owns Millwall. As a result, there was no need for Millwall to provide the English Football League with proof of funds or clear other administrative hurdles. The morning before he died, Berlyson had also signed a document, which is required each year, to allow Kavanagh to sign player contracts.
“John’s gone higher in my estimation because of the ease of that transition,” Kavanagh says. “The legacy that he’s left within the family has allowed us to move forward quickly but respectfully.”
“It’s a new start, a slightly different way forward,” Rowett adds. “Everyone wants to build on what, undoubtedly, has been a really positive last four or five years. I’m sure James will have learned many tricks and idiosyncrasies from John, but he will be his own person.
“That is going to be refreshing and different for us. We’re really excited to see how the next season works.”
They might have looked to Nottingham Forest, whose owner Nigel Doughty died in 2012, or Leicester City, whose chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha was killed in a helicopter crash just outside the club’s stadium in 2018.
Forest chairman, Nicholas Randall, called Kavanagh to pass on his condolences while a letter was received from Leicester, reproducing a staff memo sent from the manager of the Dallas hospital where President John F Kennedy had died in 1963.
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“It says, ‘the president died here, we were the White House for so many hours’, and it went through the world-changing events that happened to them,” Kavanagh says. “It was about crisis management, really, and respecting the staff for what they’ve done.
“On Friday, July 7, I wrote to staff and used the paragraph from that letter and I changed one word — ‘hospital’ to ‘club’. The words were as meaningful for what we’ve been through as they were back in that day. John would have loved it because of history and American politics.”
Kavanagh has not had to work alone — he praises his “fantastic” football secretary Jessica Newman — but believes the club has achieved the right balance between grieving and maintaining ‘business as usual’.
Deals to sign defender Wes Harding from Rotherham United and midfielder Casper De Norre from OH Leuven have been completed, while Kavanagh is working with James Berylson to educate him on areas such as player contracts, bonuses, sell-on fees and the other intricacies of transfers. That is done not out of necessity, but to offer him the opportunity to “grow and see where his interest lies”.
It is, Kavanagh notes, a “steep learning curve” and football is “a very intricate business”. It is effectively, he says, giving Berylson an MBA (Master of Business Administration) degree in football.
The plan was always for James to become vice-chairman and in the long-term succeed his father but, although some groundwork had been laid and conversations had taken place, it was never a formal arrangement.
Even so, this is a club which means business. They believe the best way to honour the memory of John Berylson is to push forward, work with the family, and hopefully win promotion to the Premier League.
A committee has been set up to sift through the hundreds of suggestions from fans to commemorate Berylson, including renaming a stand and building a statue, or establishing an educational scholarship run through the Millwall community trust. The decision will be made with input from the family.
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Millwall’s new era begins formally tomorrow with the trip to Middlesbrough but the first home games — in the EFL Cup against Reading on Tuesday, and a week on Saturday when Bristol City visit The Den — are sure to be highly charged as the club’s community of players, staff and fans gather to remember the American businessman who became one of their own.
“So many people have said it but it’s so true that he was such a caring man,” Wisson says. “Not just the players but with all the staff and fans. He had time for everybody.”
(Top photo: Action Foto Sport/NurPhoto via Getty Images)