Ridsdale to Radrizzani: Leeds United in the 21st Century

Phil Hay, long-time Leeds United reporter at the Yorkshire Evening Post, tells the story of the club’s calamitous decline after it flew too close to the sun at the start of this century. A club with huge local and international support, this is a case study of financial mismanagement and the long and winding road back to former glories.

September 2018

Peter Ridsdale

This story starts with former Leeds United chairman Peter Ridsdale and the men around him in the club’s boardroom. It starts with Ridsdale even though he would rather his management of Leeds United bore no relevance to the state of the club today. Fifteen years on from his resignation as chairman, they remember him in this gritty Yorkshire city as the grey-haired risk-taker who condemned Leeds to a generation of lower-league football. He was back in town for a League Cup match this August, as advisor to the owner of Preston North End; a non-executive position since Ridsdale is banned from acting as a company director until 2020 over tax affairs unrelated to the chaos he left behind at Elland Road. Videos on social media showed Ridsdale taking abuse from the crowd around him, persona non grata after all this time.

Ridsdale was himself a Leeds supporter who, it is said, spent a night outdoors in a sleeping bag to guarantee himself a ticket for the club’s first ever FA Cup final appearance in 1965. At the age of thirteen he paid for it by saving the pittance he earned from a newspaper round. In the late 1980s, a job as managing director of local clothing chain Topman – a firm which, at Ridsdale’s behest, served as Leeds’s shirt sponsor – created a business relationship with the club and promptly gave Ridsdale the opportunity of a seat on their board. By 1997 he had been appointed chairman, a lifelong fan with his finger on the buttons controlling a famously emotive institution: the lightning rod for a devoted fanbase in England’s biggest one-club city.

Leeds’s position at the end of the 1996-97 Premier League season was mediocre; eleventh of 20 teams and almost thirty points behind champions Manchester United. Ridsdale aspired to better, to a team capable of running their rivals across the Pennines close, and for a time he got his way. In the space of four years Leeds contested a UEFA Cup semi-final, finished third in the league and reached the last four of the UEFA Champions League in 2001. Then, in one of the most sour and deep declines ever seen in English football, they blew it. In 2004 Leeds were relegated. In 2007 they were relegated again and rapidly declared insolvent. For almost two decades the club have taken their medicine, trying in vain to find a way back.

Some still think that the failure to qualify for the 2001-02 UEFA Champions League, thereby foregoing a share of the competition’s cash pot, was the point of no return. Closer analysis has shown that Leeds were probably damned regardless, already in debt to an extent they could not manage or control. When the club (under different ownership) entered administration in 2007, they had only just finished paying wages due to Robbie Fowler, Ridsdale’s last major signing and a player who had moved to Manchester City in 2003. Full-back Danny Mills – like Fowler, long since departed to the blue side of Manchester – was owed almost £220,000. Leeds lived the dream, to use Ridsdale’s oft-quoted phrase, but had financed it on the never-never.

Transfer fees during Ridsdale’s tenure as chairman increased spectacularly. His willingness to meet or exceed the most hopeful of salary demands made him a favourite amongst players and agents. It was a classic case of a board speculating in order to accumulate. England defender Rio Ferdinand, at a cost of £18m from West Ham United, still ranks as Leeds’s record transfer. Fowler cost £11m from Liverpool and midfielder Seth Johnson £8m from Derby County, two deals which came to embody the policy of a club pushing their resources too far. To fund the recruitment, Leeds began taking multimillion-pound loans from financial institutions, tying themselves to strict repayment plans. Before long they had neither the cash nor the promise of future funds to diminish their liabilities or continue fighting at the top end of the Premier League. The gamble caught up with Ridsdale in January 2003 when he reluctantly sold Jonathan Woodgate, Leeds’s talented homegrown centre back, to Newcastle United, telling Newcastle chairman Freddy Shepherd that he would not survive the controversial transfer once the news broke. Two months later, with the pressure unbearable, Ridsdale quit. Leeds were fighting relegation and faced debts of £79m, driven up by some exorbitant expenditure: £600,000 a year on company cars, £70,000 on private jet hire and, in the defining revelation of an indulgent regime, £20 a month to hire a tropical fish tank for Ridsdale’s office.

George Harker, a Leeds fan who followed the club through that era, says the extent of the crisis was slow in reaching the public eye. “The beginning of that spectacular slump only became apparent as we approached January (when Woodgate left) and the fire sale opened its doors,” he says. “Finishing fourth in 2001 was disappointing purely because it meant missing out on those wonderful Champions League nights we had thrived on in the months before. I’m not convinced the financial implications of missing out on that competition were obvious to the general public at that time, let alone the huge gamble the club had taken.”