Irving Alan Scholar (born November 1947)[1][2] is a British property developer and former investor in football clubs, most noted for his time as chairman of Tottenham Hotspur and as a director of Nottingham Forest.
[7] As chairman of Spurs, Scholar worked closely with fellow property developer Paul Bobroff and they diversified the club into other areas such as computing and the clothing firms Hummel UK and Martex, merchandising as well as floating on the London Stock Exchange,[4][9] with Spurs becoming the first sports club in the world to float on any stock exchange.
[13][14] Broadcast rights would later become a significant part of the income of English football clubs in the Premier League era with deals reaching several billions.
Scholar spoke a couple of weeks later to writer Alex Fynn and predicted that the Sugar-Venables marriage would last a short time, stating "The first year will be the honeymoon, the second will be the divorce".
Venables was thrown out of Spurs exactly two years later, in the summer of 1993, contributing to a highly public slanging match and bringing a court case against Sugar, which he lost.
Irving would go on to sell some of Nottingham Forest's players behind the back of manager Dave Bassett, which led to Dutch forward Pierre van Hooijdonk going on strike.
In May 1999 Nigel Doughty gained control of Forest after the club's flotation on the Alternative Investment Market, following which Scholar resigned from his directorship in June 1999, accusing other board members of a "farcical lack of professionalism".