Harrods' food hall, the Paris Ritz, Neil Hamilton's house - any one of those prized assets of Fulham FC's celebrated chairman could have been the venue for the club's Christmas party.
Instead, it was held in the canteen at Motspur Park, the club's training ground. There are still touches of modesty about the moneybags leaders of the First Division.
The chairman, Mohamed al- Fayed, fresh from seeing Hamilton's Appeal Court bid fail, sent several hampers and plenty of champers. The players abstained, this being a particularly busy time. Having travelled back from Crewe last night, the first team will train today and tomorrow, making their preparations for a fortnight designed to examine closely their belief that Fulham are a Premiership side-in-waiting.
Watford and Birmingham City, two others chasing promotion, both visit SW6 within the next six days; al-Fayed's pacesetters then go to Stockport County on January 1 before their home tie in the third round of the FA Cup, when Manchester United are the opposition for possibly Craven Cottage's most glamorous event for 20 years.
The assumption that by this time next year Fulham will be keeping the company of the Uniteds rather than the Stockports receives cautious support among Fulham's players. "Everybody's very professional about it, but obviously it is a great position to be in and we'd be very disappointed if we didn't go up," says Steve Finnan, surveying the state of the First Division table. "We do talk about it. There's a long way to go, but all the top teams seem to be playing each other around this period. If we take six points from Watford and Birmingham, then that table's going to look even better."
So, too, will al-Fayed's substantial investment. When he bought into the then Second Division club in May 1997, he announced his intention that they should be in the top flight within five years. Five managers later, he appears to have hit on his most potent formula. The outlay has been massive by Football League standards, but Fulham may also be taking their first steps out of the red. Success under Jean Tigana's management has so far been achieved without massive expenditure on transfer fees; his team has blended existing experience, pure footballing instincts and a brigade of young players beginning to attract wider attention.
Finnan, 24, is a case in point. Since the summer he has been linked, with varying degrees of reliability, with interest from Leicester City, Newcastle United and Arsenal, the last of those the club he supported as a boy. "Flattering," he calls it, but insists he is staying at a club already "heading in the right direction".
Finnan has also won his first five caps for Ireland this year. Despite the accent - pure Sarf London - he comfortably passes the Cascarino test: he was born in Limerick, home to his father's side of the family.
His football passed the Tigana test straightaway. Finnan is playing at right-back for Fulham, which is something of a novelty for him. For most of his career, he has been a midfield player, or a wing-back, and occasionally operated just behind the strikers. That sort of versatility, Finnan says, has been one of the team's fortes: "We have a lot of players who can play in a number of positions. The manager likes all his players to be comfortable on the ball, to pass it around, and he really wants us to be playing the ball out of defence. He encourages us all to get forward."
Above all, Tigana's regime has allowed the players their sense of adventure, a quality sometimes scarce in the Football League. "We're not afraid to make a mistake," explains Finnan. "If you do, you just work hard to get the ball back. That's important, not being afraid to make a mistake. He doesn't moan or shout, so you try things and you keep trying to play in the right way. If you ask most players, they'll tell you they want to try and play it on the ground and try different things. Certain managers like you to play in a more direct way. There are not too many like ours who want to take the chance, especially with the players at the back."
Sitting so far ahead of the rest of the division has clearly helped, but Tigana's good principles were set out as soon as he arrived at Craven Cottage in July and called the squad in early for a rigorous pre-season. Tigana, fully acquainted with the scale of al-Fayed's ambition, brought in a French compatriot assistant, fitness coach and striker, Louis Saha, and they all swotted up on their English. "It was hard for them at the beginning," Finnan points out, "but now they try not to be speaking French around the British players, which is good."
Indeed, Tigana's fluency in his new language seems inhibited only by the proximity of a television crew or a reporter: a strange but not unique phenomenon among English football's many Frenchmen. At Fulham, the Scot John Collins - the other significant summer recruit, who played under Tigana at Monaco - still does some of the public speaking on behalf of his manager.
Not that Tigana is short of advocates. "I've improved and I'm learning a lot from a different approach," says Finnan, "and the older players say how much it's benefiting their careers. Confidence is high. A few players have come in, but there are still a lot who have been here over the past few years, so it's not just new players making the difference.
"The manager hasn't spent that much money. Louis Saha has scored 20 or whatever, and of course it makes a huge difference when you have somebody scoring that number of goals. But it's everything about the way the club's been run on the training field. The players realise they might not get any better anywhere else."
A reminder that Fulham would need to get stronger still to thrive at a higher level had been given to the players with this month's 3-0 defeat at Liverpool in the Worthington Cup - "mistakes get punished by Premiership teams," says Finnan - but the idea that promotion would mean wholesale changes of personnel was arguable. "We've got experience here and we've also got young players such as Sean Davis, who's doing a great job. Fabrice Fernandes is young, Louis Saha's still young. The club have done well with the academy and there are a lot of kids coming through. That will save a lot of money in the future. The more successful we are, the more young players will want to be a part of it."
Finnan looks back on his own past and appreciates the irony. His family moved from Ireland to southwest London, not far from Motspur Park, when he was a child; had Fulham's academy been the size it is now, he would have been in their catchment area. Instead, the teenaged Finnan had trials at Crystal Palace and Wimbledon. They both broke his heart. "I had been keeping my options open by going to both clubs, but in the end they both blew me out," he recalls. "I was 16. All I wanted to do was be a footballer, so I went to Welling United, which was really my last shout. I ended up playing quite a bit in the Conference - good experience because I got used to the physical side of the game."
At Welling, Finnan got noticed. Barry Fry, then manager of Birmingham City, signed him at 19 and quickly put him on the first team's right wing. He then spent a period on loan at Notts County, returning to Birmingham to find a new manager, Trevor Francis, in charge. Finnan was soon back in Nottingham, this time for keeps.
He enjoyed Notts County, but the offer to join Kevin Keegan at Fulham two and a half years ago prompted a swift response. Keegan and his chief scout, Arthur Cox, had done al-Fayed a favour. Finnan cost Fulham £600,000. Some of the "paper talk" of recent months has valued him at 10 times that much.
It was Keegan who pushed him into a defensive position, too. Finnan says he's still learning to be a full-back, still concerned about balancing his natural attacking instincts with the responsibilities of defence. But has any individual opponent thoroughly outwitted him this season? "I can't think of one," says Finnan after a long pause. "That sounds big-headed, doesn't it? I don't mean it that way; it's just that we as a team have been pushing forwards so much."
Not big-headed, because he knows the greater challenges are to come. In two weeks' time, Finnan could be marking Ryan Giggs.
Source thesundaytimes by Ian Hawkey