Alan Carr's dad played crucial role in British billionaire making £55m in double deal

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Alan Carr's dad made former Newcastle owner Mike Ashley millions from his football scouting. Alan , 49, is currently taking part in the hit BBC series Celebrity Traitors , where he has so far managed to avoid detection as one of the Traitors on the show.

The comedian is well known for having hosted his own popular TV show, Alan Carr: Chatty Man. But, some may not know that his dad, Graham Carr, was once a successful professional football scout .

Graham, 80, had a journeyman career as a midfielder and played for Northampton Town in the 1960s, before managing the likes of Weymouth, Dagenham & Redbridge and Blackpool.

But he found even greater success as a scout for Newcastle , Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur, working closely with David Pleat and Sven-Goran Eriksson .

From February 2010 to June 2017, Graham was in charge of recruitment at Newcastle. After being handed a lucrative contract by former owner Mike Ashley, he operated as more of a Director of Football than a Head Scout.

He held more influence than managers like Alan Pardew over player transfers at St James' Park, implementing a strategy of discovering unknown talents in the French market, signing them to long-term contracts and then selling them for a profit.

The scouting criteria seemed to focus on French nationality, an age profile under 26 and a fee ideally less than £10million, with the potential for a significant profit on resale.

This approach seemed to work for a while. A squad featuring Carr's signings Hatem Ben Arfa, Yohan Cabaye, Sylvain Marveaux, Papiss Cisse and Cheick Tiote finished fifth in the Premier League in the 2011/12 season, earning them a spot in the Europa League .

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The high-profile super scout was given the job of turning Newcastle into the ultimate selling club. Two successful examples of this were the £30m sale of Moussa Sissoko to Tottenham and Georginio Wijnaldum's £25m transfer to Liverpool in the summer of 2016.

A large portion of that combined £55m was profit for Ashley, who owned the Magpies from 2007 to 2021. Such dealings helped increase the wealth of the then-hugely unpopular Ashley, who later sold the club to Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.

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As of 2025, Ashley boasts a net worth of £3.2billion, according to The Sunday Times Rich List , making him the 52nd richest person in Britain.

However, relegation at the end of the 2015/16 season showed that Newcastle's transfer strategy under Carr ultimately reaped more failures than successes. And, after Rafa Benitez arrived, Carr left Newcastle by mutual consent, three years before his 75th birthday, before retiring from football permanently.

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