Fifteen minutes on television, that’s all it took for Leeds United to set themselves on a collision course with a volcano of hubristic fire and ash. In September 1998, one man at the helm of his local club found himself in the glare of publicity and realised that he loved it. This was the moment when Leeds stepped out of its sensible shoes and embarked on a journey to within spitting distance of the top, before a long, heavy fall through two divisions and at least two generations of lost local talent.
Peter Ridsdale had been chairman of Leeds United for a year when his manager, George Graham, decided that the chance to manage Tottenham Hotspur – the archrivals of his great love Arsenal – was more appealing than remaining in Yorkshire. During his two-year reign at Leeds, he’d recognised a world-class defender in the South African Lucas Radebe, until then a fringe defensive midfielder, while discarding flair players like Tony Yeboah and Lee Sharpe. A team that was tired and sixth when he took over from his old friend Howard Wilkinson, he left unspectacular, but solid. It wasn’t just the Leeds defence he rebuilt in that time. Before slipping into Wilkinson’s seat, his reputation as a serial winner and training ground general had been buried under lurid stories of bungs.
Perhaps Leeds fans should have sensed that something was not quite right when in the drawn-out wrangling between their club and Tottenham over Graham, Ridsdale came out of the boardroom and presented the club’s case to the media, and by extension to the fans. It was a surreal sight seeing him hold court on the BBC’s Saturday morning Football Focus show. Leeds rarely made it into the game’s neon lights then, just six years after winning the First Division title, and here was the little known chairman predicting confidently that the club would be able to keep Graham. That they would fight to do so, implying an ambition and trajectory that groundout results and unspectacular signings had done well to hide.
Later that afternoon, Graham’s two teams played out a 3-3 draw at White Hart Lane, with both sets of fans chanting for the man in the middle to “f- off”. Despite the six goals and Tottenham’s fightback from 3-1 down, match reports of the game devoted most of their space to the off-field intrigue and manoeuvres. “Stand up if you want the truth” rang out from the Leeds supporters throughout the first half. Ridsdale must have believed his own bluster on the BBC earlier that Saturday. The chanting unnerved him enough to approach the Leeds fans at half-time and plead with them to get behind Graham because, as The Guardian reported it: “if they didn’t George would certainly go; if they did, he might stay. Few believed this was the truth, but the gesture – and can you imagine Alan Sugar doing such a thing – was appreciated. And his words respected by the Leeds fans who avoided the subject of Graham for the rest of the game.”
His words and gesture duly appreciated, Ridsdale had made his mark in the media and, more importantly, with the fans. Only a year in the post, the Leeds fan and former Top Man managing director was left stunned at Graham’s lack of loyalty to the club that, as he saw it, rescued him from the bung-ridden scrapheap. If he really expected loyalty, then he was in the wrong racket. This strand of naivety was to weave a disaster the next summer.
It’s funny how painful events can still influence our decisions and behaviour. Ridsdale had been hurt by Graham’s assertion that in Tottenham he was joining a bigger club. For the rest of that season the team flourished and buzzed as Graham’s erstwhile assistant David O’Leary gave youth team players, whose progression had been stalled by Graham’s mistrust or disinterest in the academy, their chance to usurp journeymen and veterans such as Robert Molenaar, Clyde Winjaard and Gunnar Halle. Leeds’ fourth-place finish (which in 1999 did not equal a Champions League place), their highest since winning the title in 1992, encouraged the board that they could push on. Did Graham’s parting words echo in Ridsdale’s mind as he secured the first round of sharp loan deals to underwrite an uncharacteristically busy summer of spending?
In the first months of O’Leary’s reign, Leeds United also experienced something profoundly new for the club; national popularity and praise. Here was a fearless team full of young talented players undaunted by anything put in their way. Alan Smith scored at Anfield with virtually his first senior touch, Arsenal’s title hopes crashed in May on the elegant defensive rock of Jonathan Woodgate and Harry Kewell painted sunsets with his left foot. Running through this exuberance was Nigel Martyn’s agile reactions in goal, David Batty back patrolling the Elland Road centre circle, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink’s athletic brawn settling games in a turn and burst. And then there was Lucas Radebe, captain, Chief, Nelson Mandela’s hero and the darling of every Leeds fans, even before he turned down Alex Ferguson.
It was intoxicating. One year and over twenty million borrowed pounds later (half of that on Michael Duberry and Darren Huckerby, players whose roles never exceeded rotating in for tired legs), and the team were being talked about as challengers to Manchester United’s domestic throne. The squad now had depth in numbers – after spending most of the club’s £37 million turnover for the previous season on transfers – and experience. They reached the UEFA Cup semi-final that spring and, in a grim portent of how the good times would be overshadowed, two Leeds fans were stabbed to death in Istanbul ahead of the match against Galatasaray. Leeds crashed out and the Turkish side beat Arsenal on penalties in the final.
The board spent more of the eager lenders’ money in the summer of 2000, initially on Mark Viduka, Olivier Dacourt (for a record £7.2 million) and Dominic Matteo, giving the side more muscle, guile and experience in key areas ahead of their Champions League campaign. By November the league form was patchy, injuries depleting the team, including the strike pair of Michael Bridges and Kewell that had taken the club to third the previous season, and yet they were through to the second group stage of the Champions League at Barcelona’s expense. So Leeds broke the British transfer record by paying West Ham £18 million for Rio Ferdinand. Ridsdale later joked that he wasn’t worried about making such a large bid, until it was accepted.
When O’Leary became manager, indeed when Ridsdale became chairman, the club’s record transfer was £4.5 million for Lee Sharpe. Before that it had been Tomas Brolin, his weight as overblown as his fee. When they won the title in 1992, Howard Wilkinson celebrated by spending a then high £2 million on David Rocastle, who watched that season as understudy to an evergreen Gordon Strachan while the team defended its crown from the bottom quarter of the table. Leeds United and big money buys had an uneasy relationship, it’s as though the stereotype of the club’s countymen infused itself into the fate of the players, ensuring native scepticism would never let them feel welcome. The truth is more prosaic: Leeds tended to waste money on high-profile players whose heart was more set on the nightlife (Sharpe) or whose careers had reached their shelf life (Brolin). At the same time, the club’s supporters had grown used to the disappointment and hurt of watching their most recent heroes Batty, Gary Speed, Eric Cantona and Gary McAllister leave. The European nights, public acclaim and big name signings were rocket fuel for dreams the supporters hadn’t dared to entertain.
In the smoke of the excitement the right questions weren’t being asked loud enough. No one was now chanting for truth. Leeds failed to follow up a run to the Champions League semi-final by qualifying again, and yet the 2001/2002 season started without any cutbacks to the team. O’Leary continued to talk about his “babies” to the media, an increasingly ridiculous habit that oozed the stench of an insincere man clutching for an excuse. He appeared to be defending his players from pressure or criticism, but really he seemed to be making excuses for failing to make progress.
If they had been flying close to the sun in previous seasons, at least there were some golden nights and memorable performances in exchange for the heat. Now the board decided to cool down the immediate debt by taking out a £60 million loan from financial institutions in America and London. With this they paid off the club’s £25 million overdraft, made improvements to the training ground and bought Robbie Fowler and Seth Johnson for a combined £18 million. The loan was a record for a football club and as security Leeds offered the fans’ loyalty and the club’s future. Season ticket sales for the next 25 years would be used to cover the annual repayments.
As well as pulling the final plug on Leeds United, the loan and how it was spent shine a light on the recklessness of the board. A quarter of a century of season ticket sales, inferring the board either took the loyalty of fans for granted or assumed the team would continue to draw them in, guaranteeing a loan to pay off mounting debts – a large hole dug for half of its soil to fill a smaller one. A third of that soil was then thrown on Fowler and Johnson. A little over a year and 24 league starts later Fowler was sold to Manchester City for just £6 million. With Kewell, Viduka, Smith and Robbie Keane in the squad, Fowler’s signing was presented as a statement of intent. The real statement being made was that the manager didn’t know how to best use the talented squad assembled for him. Johnson stayed until his contact expired, having made 43 league starts in an injury-ridden spell. With an eye like that, no wonder O’Leary always claimed the team was two or three players from the finished product.
That season was a microcosm of the good and bad. The team were top of the table after beating West Ham on New Year’s Day, and then fell away, their slide down the table greased by a vicious crime and then some stupendously bad judgement. In December 2001, Woodgate was convicted for affray and Lee Bowyer acquitted following the savage beating of Sarfraz Najeib, an Asian student, in Leeds city centre in January 2000. Two days after the verdicts, O’Leary’s book Leeds United On Trial was serialised in The News of the World. In it he mixed the banal with sensationally naive as he lifted the lid on life at the club while it was being viewed behind the huge stain of an alleged racist attack. O’Leary’s book broke all codes of trust and solidarity that bind a team together, especially important when challenging for the title against a backdrop of public outrage.
Subsequently “there were claims he had lost the dressing room,” reported The Independent, musing in the same article that “it can be no coincidence that the spiral which ensured they failed to qualify for the Champions’ League, a competition upon whose riches Leeds, financially overstretched by O’Leary’s spending, needed desperately, began then.” A drained and frayed Leeds finished that season fifth and O’Leary was sacked.
At a press conference in February 2003 to present a way through the club’s £49.5 million debt – a record at the time for a football club – Ridsdale tried to diffuse the rising fury of fans and disbelief of the media by remarking that Leeds had “lived the dream”. Woodgate and Fowler had just been sold at the wick end of the transfer window and the current manager Terry Venables had no answers for the noisy distractions and frequent on-field capitulations he was witnessing. Less than five years after asking the fans not to voice their displeasure at Graham, the fans woke up and turned on Ridsdale. In March he stepped down.
Behind him he left £100 million of debt and a vicious cycle of selling players at depressed prices leading to broken morale resulting in worsening performances bringing about relegation, Ken Bates, administration, a Bahraini bank and tax-fraud Massimo Cellino. Ridsdale did take with him, though, a lesson that might explain his surprising career since then as trouble-fixing chairman at Cardiff, Plymouth and Preston. “I would challenge the manager more, run things tighter,” he later told ESPN. “I still don’t regret taking the amount of debt on we did but I regret spending the amount of money on footballers.”
Since “doing a Leeds”, far less popular and more reviled men have run the club. Another generation of talented academy-trained players have been scooped up by clubs flush with the millions that come just by being functional enough to remain in the Premier League. The next transfer window will be a chance for Lewis Cook, Alex Mowatt and Charlie Taylor to follow Sam Byram out of there and ply their trade where their talents deserve. The fans are now more preoccupied with protesting Cellino’s ownership of the club than cheering the team. And a suitable epitaph to the team that once allowed them to dream comes from Ridsdale, who in 2014 said: “I was far more responsive to supporters’ needs and reactive to managers’ demands than perhaps I should have been.”
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