Ridsdale to Radrizzani: the tale of Leeds United's fall and their rise again

It is testament to the reverence football people have for the game’s history that Leeds United have always maintained their status as a truly big club despite years of barely believable indignities, relieved finally now by promotion back to the Premier League. Andrea Radrizzani, the Italian TV rights mogul whose cash, knowhow and landmark appointment of Marcelo Bielsa have finally heaved Leeds back up, has said his interest was sparked by Kenny Dalglish mentioning to him during a lunch that Leeds were a “sleeping giant” with passionate support.

Infamously, Leeds “lived the dream” when they over-borrowed after David O’Leary’s thrilling side reached the Champions League semi-finals in 2001 and, after their financial implosion and relegation three years later, their sleep was beset by nightmares. Briefly they had seemed to be reascending to their 1970s heights, becoming a modernised version of the club built by Don Revie and the team he assembled after becoming manager at Elland Road in 1961. It has been a moving marker of time that Norman Hunter and Jack Charlton, Revie’s fearsome centre-half partnership, have died just before the triumphant return of their former club to the top flight.

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Many fans whose loyalty was bred by the greats of that generation will have checked themselves to realise quite how long ago it all was: 46 years since Revie’s farewell league title in 1974, when he left to manage England. Leeds did come back after that, winning the last Football League championship in 1992 before the breakaway of the First Division clubs to form the Premier League. Dashing and reinvented under O’Leary, they became flag-bearers for the revitalised English game, before the board under Peter Ridsdale took on those borrowings in their eagerness to keep up and instead crashed to relegation.

As the Premier League powered on into global TV mega-fortunes, Leeds supporters experienced modern football’s flipside: administration, points deductions, thwarted hopes, while still singing songs rooted in Revie’s glories. After the crash, Gerald Krasner, an insolvency practitioner who has become prominent again as the Wigan Athletic administrator, took over with partners to try to keep Leeds out of a similar fate. Shipping out star players did not bail out the club and they took the desperate measure of selling and leasing back the stadium, but still found themselves short of ballast.

Ken Bates, the former Chelsea owner who had sold to Roman Abramovich in 2003 and semi-retired to Monaco, took over as Leeds chairman from Krasner’s consortium in 2005, with ownership held by an offshore company administered in Switzerland. Two years later, Bates slashed the club’s debts, which were then £38m, by putting Leeds into administration, with the automatic 10-point deduction having no material impact because they were already relegated to League One, the club’s first fall to the third tier.

The Forward Sports Fund, the same Cayman Islands-registered company that had owned the club before, bought Leeds back from the administrators, again with Bates as the chairman and Shaun Harvey retained as the chief executive. But they began the season deducted 15 points, at the bottom of League One, for failing to agree a company voluntary arrangement with creditors. The offshore structures came under intense scrutiny after that and Harvey, pressed by Damian Collins MP during a parliamentary inquiry into football governance in 2011, said that even he did not know who the owners were, as Forward Sports Fund was owned by discretionary trusts with unnamed beneficiaries.

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The then Premier League chief executive, Richard Scudamore, told the inquiry that if Leeds made it back to the top flight, they would be asked for more detail about their ownership than the Football League had been given. Shortly after that, Leeds announced that the anonymous owners had sold and Bates himself had bought the club, via a company registered on the Caribbean island of Nevis, another tax haven.

In 2013, with Leeds back in the Championship but finding it hard going, Bates called time on his ownership and sold to the Dubai-based, Bahrain-owned Gulf Finance House. They struggled with the Championship’s punishing finances and sold a year later to Massimo Cellino, the owner of the then Serie A club Cagliari.

Even before Cellino took over, he was convicted in Italy of evading import duty on a yacht, and the Football League sought to ban him, as its owners’ and directors’ “fit and proper persons” test prohibits people with unspent convictions for crimes involving dishonesty. But with a full judgment not yet issued, Cellino succeeded with a legal argument that his kind of tax evasion was not necessarily committed dishonestly. He then took over, in April 2014, and was duly banned when the written reasons came through citing dishonesty. Once the conviction was spent in Italy, he resumed control, overseeing a period of turmoil, serial managerial turnover and some serious ignominy. That included his sacking of the academy welfare officer Lucy Ward, who was later awarded £290,000 compensation at an employment tribunal for unfair dismissal and sex discrimination.

Yet throughout all these tribulations, the essential stature of Leeds United, hewn in the Revie era, somehow remained intact, as Dalglish fatefully mentioned to Radrizzani almost in passing. He had sold his TV rights company MP & Silva to Chinese investors for a reported $1bn, and he bought the club from Cellino, first 50%, then the other half in May 2017, via his Singapore company, Aser Group.

The inspired appointment two years ago of Bielsa, who has demonstrated his coaching genius, has been instrumental in driving the team up, but Radrizzani has also bought back Elland Road, reuniting Leeds with their home and with their sense of pride. In the unequal, billionaire-owned Premier League, success is much harder to attain than in the old First Division when Revie won promotion in 1964 with Charlton, Hunter and the core of the team who won the title five years later. But at least Leeds have woken up and the nightmares are over.