IT WAS different then. Fathers would hide their sons’ eyes as they trudged past the The Pompey Hotel just outside the quaint main gates of Fratton Park. It was bulging with beery supporters, spilling out on to the pavement clutching pints of Mr Brickwood’s finest. These days, youngsters are dragging their parents in to spend their cash, not on pints, but on shirts, mugs, pens, scarves, ashtrays, beanie babies and tracksuit bottoms.

It’s the Pompey Shop and it is making a fortune. This week, Tara Snowden, who runs the place, was able to tell her boss that the profit has rocketed from £800,000 last year to £2 million this. OK, it’s not exactly a financial bedrock that will guarantee survival in the Premiership next season, but the sale of 41,000 team strips — yours for £39.99 — gives a glimpse into the commercial revolution that has hit the old place.

Tara’s boss is Peter Storrie, the chief executive, a long-time mate of Harry Redknapp from West Ham United days, when they were chief executive and manager respectively. When Storrie took the job at Portsmouth two years ago, the club’s wage bill was rising — in 2001 it was 64 per cent up on the previous year — and the pre-tax loss over the two years was about £10 million.

“I had a sneaking feeling we might be able to do something,” Storrie said. “Harry persuaded me to come here, but when I first walked in the door it was like stepping back in time, like it had been with West Ham in 1989, with an old stadium and old ways of working. There’s a saying in football: ‘People have always done it that way’, and that was the attitude here.”

He found a staff that had been “pushed under” and not allowed to manage. One of his predecessors insisted on overseeing every detail, even down to cancelling an order for new envelopes because they had a stock of A4 ones.

“I found there were people with a lot of good ideas, and many of them have blossomed, but there were a lot from the ‘freebie club’. Whatever it was they were doing it was for themselves, not for the football club,” Storrie said.

This season, with capacity crowds and more TV money than before, the club has just about matched its hugely inflated wage bill. But what about next season? Will promotion be the worst thing that could happen to the club? Can it avoid the financial catastrophes that have befallen Ipswich Town, Bradford City and Coventry City?

“This is the best possible time to go up,” Storrie said. “Wages and transfers are spiralling down and I have negotiated contracts with a differential written into them so that the players get more for playing in the Premiership and less in the first division.

“The secret is to be sensible, to set budgets and abide by them. I think of the Premier as three mini divisions. There is Manchester United at the top, a middle batch and then there’s the bottom eight and that’s the ‘division’ we have to win. If we can finish sixteenth, that’s an achievement. Just think, finishing fourth from bottom is worth £17 million.

“We are going to buy about five or six players to strengthen the squad and because of what is going on in the game at the moment, there will be a lot of players available here and in Europe. “Harry and I are quite a team, we don’t lose many once we have decided to get them. Harry chooses them, I do the deal.”

The big gap in Storrie’s plans is the lack of a Premiership-size stadium. By squeezing in seats wherever he can, the capacity will reach 20,000 next season, still one of the smallest in the first division, let alone the Premiership. Success on the pitch has stifled criticism of how the club has yet to announce definite plans for a new ground. “We’ll have a stadium,” Storrie said. “But I can’t do anything commercially until it is built. We have only 250 executive seats.”

The grand plans may be far ahead, but at least Snowden plans a limited-edition promotion strip and a new range of blue and white babywear. As the saying goes: “Give me a child for the first seven years and you have a Pompey fan for life.”

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