Peter Ridsdale, Leeds United and the struggle to forgive – 20 years on - The Athletic 23/3/23
Daniel Taylor and Phil Hay
This is part of a series of articles
inspired by questions from our readers. So thank you to Adam S for the
inspiration for this piece after he asked us to reflect upon Peter Ridsdale’s
Leeds United, two decades on.
Would it be asking too much, all these
years on, to think there might ever come a day when the supporters of Leeds
United can reflect on Peter Ridsdale’s role without putting him in a little
pair of devil’s horns?
Maybe it is simply impossible given the
history, the sequence of events that means ‘doing a Leeds’ has its own
Wikipedia page and the depth of feeling that was stirred when this proud old
club was brought to its knees.
Ridsdale has always been held responsible
for creating a dream that turned into a nightmare. So, yes, don’t count on too
much forgiveness any time soon. Far more likely, the typical response would be
that he deserves all he gets, that he left Leeds financially shipwrecked and,
bloody hell, just look at how long it took them to recover.
At the same time, it would be wrong to
assume every Leeds fan holds a serious grudge now it is 20 years since the man
in question removed himself from their club.
There are plenty of occasions when Ridsdale
meets Leeds supporters who are perfectly civil to him. Many want to thank him
for some of the best memories they ever experienced following their team.
Usually, these tend to be older fans (it’s the younger ones, he says, who tend
to be more abusive). They tell him they know he was a genuine bloke who did his
best and, no matter what went wrong towards the end, they understood he had
good intentions.
“I met somebody the other day in London.
‘Just to let you know I’m a Leeds fan’, he said. My first reaction was, ‘Oh,
where’s this going’,” Ridsdale puts up his hands defensively, “but he said,
‘No, no, no, I will never forget the journey we went on. Some of my best
memories in football are from when you were chairman’.
“I was chairman for five years. Every
bloody year we were in the top five (five consecutive seasons). We were in the
semi-final of the UEFA Cup and then the Champions League. I was on the board of
the FA, elected by my fellow Premier League chairmen.
“If you’re asking me, ‘Do I think I deserve
absolute hate from people thinking I destroyed Leeds United?’, the answer is,
no. Do I think I’m useless? No. Of course I made mistakes. But the mistakes I
made weren’t the ones I get labelled with.
“I’m not trying to absolve myself of blame.
As chairman, you have to take accountability. But if I were to write down a
list of my mistakes, a list to destroy Peter Ridsdale, I would write different
stories. One of them wouldn’t be the financial meltdown because that was
largely caused by relegation and I had left the club a year before.”
Others find it hard to forgive and, after
20 years of reflection, Ridsdale knows that will not change. Attitudes have
hardened. A generation of Leeds fans will never forget those sweet-scented
nights in Europe when David O’Leary’s team reached the 2001 Champions League
semi-finals. But the fall was spectacular and, with every fall, there is blame.
Ridsdale, now 71, was reminded of that
before the final of Euro 2020 when he and his wife, Sophie, caught the train to
Wembley and, on a packed carriage, he was confronted by a Leeds fan threatening
violence and calling him every name under the sun.
When Ridsdale asked him how old he was, the
guy said he was 19. “So, if you’re 19, you weren’t even born when I left
Leeds,” Ridsdale told him. “What do you actually know about it?” But it made no
difference: more insults, more expletives, more evidence that the short-term
hero had morphed into a long-term villain.
Another time, Ridsdale was in Baker Street,
central London, when three men walked past and there was another jarring
reminder that, whatever else he does in this industry, he will always be
associated with the most dramatic, traumatic and talked-about period in Leeds’
history.
“Three guys in suits, business people,
walking past. One of them looked at me. ‘You’re a c—’, he said. I walked back
pretty quickly, stood in front of them and asked him to repeat it.
“To their credit, the other two guys said
they were embarrassed and asked him to apologise. ‘Well, sorry’, he said, ‘but
you have to know how I feel’. It turned out he was a Leeds fan. So, yes, there
is a human cost, even now.”
Today is the 20th anniversary of his final
game: a 3-1 defeat at Liverpool when in the last few minutes the Kop broke into
a chorus of, “There’s only one Peter Ridsdale”. That stung, too: Anfield was
laughing at him. Ridsdale could feel himself shrinking into his seat, smouldering
with embarrassment.
A week earlier, when Leeds played
Middlesbrough, Ridsdale left at half-time because the abuse was so vicious. One
fan near the directors’ box spat at him. Ridsdale could see the distress on his
wife’s face. “For the first time in my life, I walked out of a Leeds match and
drove home.”
The reason for all this malevolence is that
Ridsdale had overseen the period of overspending that left the rest of the
football world rubbernecking in Leeds’ direction. History will remember him
behind the wheel when they lost control. No matter how much he argues there are
other layers to this story, Ridsdale’s time at Leeds will always be synonymous
with a culture of indulgence.
As one sport-finance specialist, Dr Bill
Gerrard, said at the time: “They reacted like a gambler on a losing streak in a
Las Vegas casino. They went out and gambled more. It was a triumph of vanity
over sanity. The whole future of the club has been put in jeopardy to fund a
dash for glory.”
The legacy for Leeds was a mountain of
debt, a fire sale of players, a whole world of pain under future owners and,
for Ridsdale, a stain on his reputation that he has never been able to wash
out.
“I was Peter Ridsdale: traitor, Judas,
disgrace, club-wrecker, the enemy within,” he wrote in his 2007 book, United We
Fall. “It’s why they chanted ‘Ridsdale out’ week in week out; why home-daubed
slogans, held aloft behind each goal, screamed ‘Ridsdale is full of s—’ or ‘Go
now Ridsdale’ or ‘Lies United’, and why pockets of mobs hung around outside the
Elland Road stadium, as if waiting for the accused to be smuggled from a
courthouse on bail.”
Gerald Krasner, who fronted a six-man
consortium of Yorkshire-based businessmen to buy the club a year after
Ridsdale’s departure, tells The Athletic today that, as far as he is concerned,
the former chairman deserves no forgiveness.
Leeds, according to Krasner, were paying
one player more than Sheffield United were paying their entire squad. It reeks
of exaggeration. But Krasner, like many of Ridsdale’s critics, has never been
shy when it comes to putting the boot in.
“When I looked at the numbers,” says
Krasner, “I worked out that if we had won the Premier League, the FA Cup, the
League Cup and European Cup, we would have only broken even. And we didn’t win
any of them.”
David Richmond, one of the directors in
Krasner’s consortium, describes Leeds at the time as “the ultimate basket case.
I don’t know how many bank accounts the average club has, but Leeds had well
over a dozen, all with no money in them”.
And, two decades on, it can feel like a
trick of the mind that one fans’ website had acclaimed Ridsdale just a few
years earlier as “chairman, friend of the fans and superhero”.
We meet at Preston North End’s training
ground. This has been Ridsdale’s place of work for 11 years and, though there
will always be supporters with gripes, he is entitled to consider it a period
of relative calm and success.
The club were in League One when he took
over as chairman. They were promoted within three seasons and, despite having
one of the lower wage bills in the division, have not finished lower than 14th
in the last seven years. They are also debt-free, which feels relevant bearing
in mind everything that went on with Leeds.
“If you watch me at Preston games, nobody
could ever tell you I’m not emotionally invested,” says Ridsdale. “I can’t
bulls— and say I’m a lifelong Preston fan. But like every job I’ve ever done,
they get 100 per cent of my commitment.”
With Leeds, though, it was different.
Ridsdale was a Leeds fan through and through. He was at Wembley when Don
Revie’s team lost to Liverpool in the 1965 FA Cup final. His son, Matthew, was
the mascot when Leeds won promotion at Bournemouth in 1990. Ridsdale’s office
might be decorated with framed Preston shirts but the drinks coaster on his
desk offers a clue: “Born and bred in Yorkshire.”
All of which makes it easier to understand
why there will always be sadness on his part about how everything at Leeds
ended so acrimoniously.
Ridsdale could not keep count of the number
of threats he received, but it was enough to call in the police. One message
pinned to his gates read, “We know where you live.” Another was pushed beneath
the windscreen wipers of his car: “We hope you die.”
Even when Ridsdale took his family to his
sister-in-law’s house in Suffolk, 260 miles away, there was no hiding place.
Minding his own business in a gift shop, another customer recognised him,
grabbed him by the throat and pinned him to the window. “Ridsdale,” came the
hissed message, “you’ve f—– up my football team.”
Ridsdale had been looking for a Mother’s
Day card to give to Sophie from their daughters, Charlotte and Olivia, then
seven and six. Both girls, in the worst times, would cry themselves to sleep
because they had found out their father was a hate figure and that people had
been to their house to find him.
“They are both, I should stress, absolutely
fine now, super girls in great jobs, but they both had counselling in their
teenage years and they put it down to the trauma of what was happening to me at
the time.
“I never shared it with anybody, I was
taking it all on board myself. ‘But we were kids’, they said, ‘and you were
getting death threats, people writing to you saying: “We know where your
children go to school”.’
“I tried to laugh it off at the time
because I thought that was the only way, being brave and standing up to it. But
then you find out 10 years later that your kids have been damaged.”
In happier times, he was the popular,
approachable, widely respected kingpin of a club that was threatening to change
the landscape of English football.
Leeds had become unfashionably likeable,
taking on all comers at home and abroad. And Ridsdale, formerly the managing
director of fashion chain Topman, was at the heart of it. “People hate
Manchester United because they are so successful,” Jonathan Woodgate, the Leeds
centre-half, said in 1999. “People will hate us in a few years because we shall
be winning everything.”
Everything changed when the truth finally
emerged: Ridsdale and his colleagues on Leeds’ PLC board had allowed
expenditure to get out of hand. The club had accrued so much debt they had no
option but to flog their most valuable assets.
Rio Ferdinand was sold to Manchester United
for £30million ($36.8m in today’s conversion rates). Robbie Keane went to
Tottenham Hotspur for £7million. Robbie Fowler moved to Manchester City for
£6million. Olivier Dacourt signed for Roma on loan, and Lee Bowyer joined West
Ham United for a paltry £100,000 because he was nearing the end of his
contract.
Woodgate was the next to leave, signing
with Newcastle United for £9million, and that was the tipping point for many
supporters. Woodgate was regarded as the club’s future. Ridsdale had publicly
stated the player would be sold “over my dead body” and, having broken that
promise, had to face the consequences. It was, says one former colleague,
speaking to The Athletic on condition of anonymity, the “trigger for the
groundswell against him”.
One of the worst car-crash moments was the
day Ridsdale arranged a televised news conference with Terry Venables, who had
replaced the sacked O’Leary, to explain Woodgate’s transfer and supposedly put
on a united front.
In a show of subtle yet excruciating
mutiny, Venables folded his arms, stared at the ceiling, complained that
everything was all out of his control and exhibited the general body language
of a man who had just found a key mark scratched down the side of his car.
Against that kind of backdrop, nobody
should realistically think there would not be a backlash. Ridsdale understands
that, too. He knows he will always be held responsible for an unravelling that
led to the News of the World, Britain’s biggest-selling Sunday newspaper at the
time, declaring: “Post-war Iraq is better run than Leeds.”
But he will also make the point — several
times, in fact — that he was the chairman of a PLC board and that meant every
significant decision, Woodgate included, had to be signed off by all the
directors, not just him.
So why, he asks, has the blame always been
pinned on one man?
His belief has always been he was the
victim of a “PR hatchet job” and some ferocious politics involving boardroom
colleagues who were colluding against him. It was “an orchestrated campaign
from within”. And ultimately, he says, it worked.
“The other thing I feel frustrated about —
and some people would say I’m arrogant to say this — is that we wouldn’t have
been relegated had I been allowed to stay.
“I left in March 2003 and it was the
following summer, not the same summer, we were relegated. Then, of course, the
financial crisis really hit home.
“Was that, in part, because we hadn’t put
relegation clauses into the players’ contracts? Absolutely. But when you’re
signing Robbie Fowler, Rio Ferdinand, Robbie Keane and people of that stature,
they aren’t going to sign for you ahead of Manchester United, Liverpool and
Arsenal if you put in relegation clauses.”
The truth, he says, is that he did not even
want to resign and intended to “brazen it out”. His intention, he says, was to
regain control of their finances and turn it around.
“I had a meeting with members of the board.
‘We’re worried about your health’, they said, ‘have a think about whether it’s
getting to you’. That was 8am. I returned at 5.30pm to be introduced to the new
chairman. Did I initiate it? No. Would I have willingly gone? No. It was a fait
accompli. I was essentially told by the non-executive directors they thought
for my health I should stand down.
“I was shell-shocked. Two years before,
people were saying I should be the next chairman of the FA.
“I stood for re-election (with Leeds) in
December 2002 and got the highest vote because all the institutional
shareholders voted to re-elect me. All of them phoned me up and said, ‘We know
you’re being undermined from within, you’ve got to stand up to it’. Three
months later, I was out.”
His replacement was John McKenzie, a
bespectacled and white-haired professor of economics who held the role for the
next nine months and, in a devastating interview with the Yorkshire Evening
Post, caused irreparable damage to his predecessor’s reputation.
“I was stitched up,” says Ridsdale. “It was
very deliberate to say it was a one-man problem, not a company problem. And, of
course, it deflected attention from anybody else. It was all presented as my
fault, as if I was signing players without anyone knowing, just because I
fancied it. It was nonsense.”
Ridsdale, according to the professor, had
overseen a culture of “irresponsible and indulgent” excess involving overblown
salaries, private jets, a fleet of 70 company cars and, infamously, a
£20-a-month rental for a tropical fish tank in the chairman’s office.
“It’s like an oil tanker heading straight
for the rocks,” said McKenzie. “The problem with oil tankers is they are two
miles long and they don’t turn around in two minutes.”
A succession of other stories, often
apocryphal, added to the perception, to use Krasner’s blunt analysis, that
Ridsdale’s success “had gone to his head”.
One was that Ridsdale’s generosity in
contract negotiations had earned him the nickname of Father Christmas from
staff.
Another had Seth Johnson arriving from
Derby County in a £7million transfer and entering contract talks in the hope
that his previous weekly salary, reputedly £5,000, might go up to £13,000.
Legend has it that Ridsdale’s opening gambit was £30,000 and, when this was met
by a stunned silence, that he raised his offer to £37,000.
A classic story, yes — but also pure
fantasy, as Johnson has previously stated himself.
“Seth was on £13,000 a week less than what
was quoted,” says Ridsdale. “I knew what he was earning at Derby. He’d made his
full debut for England. And he probably got an increase of £2,000 to £4,000 a
week. It’s one of many myths.”
The truth, says Ridsdale, was that Leeds
had a wage structure in place and, contrary to the popular narrative, did not
just pay the players whatever they wanted. Leeds, he accepts, signed too many
elite players and ran into trouble — having budgeted for the Champions League —
when they missed their targets. But, to be fair, he does not sound very Father
Christmassy.
“We actually lost players because of money.
Frank Lampard was one. We wanted Frank from West Ham but he went to Chelsea
because we couldn’t afford what he was asking.
“We lost Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink because I
sat down with his agent and said, ‘Look, our highest paid player is on X
amount, you’re asking for 50 per cent more, I can’t justify that’. So Jimmy
went to Atletico Madrid.”
McKenzie, incidentally, never returned to
football after his brief spell with Leeds and was criticised for paying himself
£380,000 despite the club being massively in debt and in danger of
administration.
His highlights included conducting a poll
asking supporters if Peter Reid, who had replaced Venables, should be fired
after three defeats in a row. McKenzie’s expertise was questioned after Harry
Kewell’s £5million transfer to Liverpool — a deal in which Leeds somehow
received only £2.5million — and he was reported to be leaving on a two-week
safari with his grandchildren on the day Reid was sacked.
Eddie Gray, a two-time league champion in
the Revie era, was appointed as Reid’s replacement but could not stop Leeds
sliding towards relegation, 14 months after Ridsdale’s departure. “I regret
taking the job,” says Gray. “I took it for the right reasons. I felt like I
should help. But there were too many problems, too much wrong on the financial
side. I couldn’t turn it around and I felt a lot of responsibility for us going
down.”
As for the next manager, Kevin Blackwell
invoked the spirit of Baldrick, from the BBC comedy series Blackadder, in
trying to make sense of the club’s perilous finances. “You wonder how someone
could have come up with a plan straight out of Blackadder. You can see
Baldrick: ‘I’ve got a cunning plan that will take us further into debt’.”
Elland Road was the scene of its own
tragicomedy, not least given that McKenzie’s shoes were so decrepit the joke in
the offices was that he fixed them with a bicycle repair kit.
Ridsdale can also remember the professor —
an elusive, slightly mysterious figure who lived in a modest bungalow just
outside Ilkley and who gave the impression of dozing off in one Premier League
meeting — being guilty, allegedly, of some pretty breathtaking double
standards.
“We had about 30 company cars,” says
Ridsdale. “He exaggerated the numbers by 100 per cent. I didn’t have one — but
he did. In fact, he had a company car and a chauffeur.”
And the goldfish? Oh yes, the goldfish.
Nothing came to symbolise the profligacy more than the presence of those
tropical fish, described by one wordsmith as being “as much a symbol of a
failed regime as Imelda Marcos’ shoe collection or Marie Antoinette’s cakes”.
Ridsdale, unlike the goldfish, has never
forgotten the hysteria.
“If you go to the Professional Footballers’
Association headquarters in Manchester, or the South Yorkshire Police
headquarters in Sheffield, what is in the reception of both? A goldfish tank.
“It cost us £240 a year. So what’s the
issue for a club that was turning over £79million a year at the time?
“My background was in fashion retail and I
had spent a lot of time sourcing products in China and Hong Kong. Over there, a
lot of offices had aquariums because it was considered good luck. So I thought,
‘What a great idea’.
“I bought two tanks — John McKenzie forgot
to mention the second tank was in the boardroom — and what happened? We got to
a Champions League semi-final, the UEFA Cup semi-final and we were top five
every year.”
Unfortunately for Ridsdale, it has always
been easier in football to get a bad name than it is to lose one. “All I was
trying to do was a job and I would still argue we did a pretty good one,” he
says. “My biggest mistake is that if I had gone the previous summer, having
just finished fifth, I would have been a hero.”
The reality, however, is that few people
were willing to stand up for him when everything started to go spectacularly
wrong.
Peter Lorimer, a Leeds legend of the 1960s
and 1970s, did at least try in his column for the Yorkshire Evening Post,
writing that it had been a “gamble worth taking”. Ray Fell, the supporters’
club chairman, also went public to defend Ridsdale while others behind the
scenes offered support.
“There were big machinations in the background
to make Peter the fall guy but nothing (at board level) was ever decided by a
single person,” says one senior figure, who has asked not to be named.
“Everything was collective. Woodgate’s sale was the trigger for the groundswell
against him. The abuse got worse and, in the end, he didn’t want to put up with
that any more. That was my impression.”
But these are lone voices of support and
they tend to be vastly outnumbered. The brutally forthright Krasner, for
instance, could hardly be less sympathetic when it is put to him that most
Leeds fans have never forgiven Ridsdale.
“Quite right,” are Krasner’s precise words.
“He did it with other people’s money. He didn’t use any of his own money, he
used everybody else’s money. Ask him how much of his money he put into the club
and lost.”
Ridsdale’s firmly held belief is that
“Gerald Krasner, and that lot, got them relegated. He took them down… I’d been
out for almost a year when he took over”.
But Leeds, according to Krasner, were
“impoverished” when his consortium took control in March 2004.
Was it as bad as he had imagined? “Worse.
They owed over £100million. We had done due diligence before we went in. We
thought they (the debts) were £98m, they were £105m at the end. And, in those
days, that was a lot of money, probably (the equivalent of) half a billion now.
“It was a labour of love and a lesson in
life, and I don’t regret it because we saved the club from disappearing. But
you couldn’t enjoy it because every time we let in a goal it was, ‘That’s
another million down the drain’. Every time we scored, it was, ‘That’s a
million we’ve gained’.
“I always said after buying Leeds that if
we had told the full story in a blockbuster film we could have paid off all the
debts.”
That film had no happy ending: Leeds were
relegated in May 2004, accelerating the long and painful descent that saw Ken
Bates take control, leading to administration, three years in League One,
points deductions and a new generation of fans being brought up to believe
Ridsdale was public enemy number one.
At one stage, the souvenir stalls outside
Elland Road were selling T-shirts with the message: “2004 Premiership, 2005
Championship, 2007 Sinkingship, 2008 Abandonship”.
As for the Krasner regime, that lasted only
nine months before the deal was done with Bates to change owner again.
“My memory is that when we took over, there
were four people employed full-time to do daily bank reconciliation; four
people simply for that job,” says Richmond. “When we went in, Leeds United were
untouchable, completely untouchable. The consortium we had was a crazy
consortium, everyone with their own agendas, and in normal circumstances, we
wouldn’t have been anywhere near it.
“There wasn’t a single part of the club
that wasn’t a mess. It was a toxic club and, in many ways, it stayed toxic
until very recently. That’s the damage that had been done to the finances and
the reputation.”
Richmond, a Leeds season ticket holder, is
the son of Geoffrey, the former Bradford City chairman, who acted as a
consultant for Krasner’s takeover.
“Were we good owners? No, I openly admit
that. But the thing I also say, even if people don’t want to hear it, is that
we did our bit in saving the club,” says Richmond. “I remember finding out
early on that 10 young lads who were never going to get near the first team were
on £10,000 a week each. It must have been done as an investment but it was
unbelievable.
“There was one first-team player whose
contract terrified Gerald — and he was the one person in that consortium who
understood everything about finances. Even he wasn’t sure how to deal with it.
“The only thing we could do was try to keep
the club afloat. The club couldn’t go into administration because that costs
money and there was none, zero. All the revenues had been sold and, as far as
we were concerned, administration would mean closing down and starting again
low down the leagues.
“We tried to terminate every contract there
was. It was the biggest fire sale. People looked at the fees we got sometimes
and said they weren’t high enough, but the wages the players were earning were
the problem, completely unaffordable and killing us.”
When all the finger-pointing stops, maybe
there is one point that everyone can agree upon: that some people went too far
in their vilification of the one man whose reputation was left in smithereens.
Exhibit A: the column that former
Conservative MP David Mellor wrote in London’s Evening Standard. “A man half as
decent as Pious Pete always claimed to be wouldn’t have asked for money, just a
glass of whisky, a revolver and the loan of a lockable room,” he wrote.
Sophie was so appalled she wrote to Mellor
to explain how hurtful it was. She never received a reply.
Her husband, meanwhile, was trying to
adjust to a new life in which the fishy stories from Leeds — literally —
counted against him with potential employers.
Ridsdale’s career since then has taken him
to four different clubs, all in the EFL, and the irony is that in three of
those cases, his job spec involved helping them out of financial hardship.
At Barnsley, for example, where he was
asked to steer the club out of administration. At Cardiff City, where they were
“days away from being closed down” and ended up with a new stadium and training
ground. Or Plymouth Argyle, where “the administrator tried to liquidate them
and I told him three times he was not going to bloody do it”. Ridsdale can reel
off a list of achievements at every club to justify his belief that he is a
more skilled administrator because of the Leeds experience.
Still, though, he finds himself as such a
pariah at Elland Road that a security operation has to be put in place every
time he goes back.
“The first time was with Cardiff,” he says.
“I remember Shaun Harvey (Leeds’ chief executive at the time) phoning me to
say, ‘The police want to know if you’re coming to the game’. I said, ‘Of course
I’m coming to the bloody game’.
“They insisted I came the night before,
stayed at the team hotel, and the next day we had a police escort to the
ground, including a helicopter flying over the team bus. Dave Jones, our
manager, said to me, ‘You get off first, we’ll be five minutes behind you’. I
got a bit of abuse, but just as many people came up to shake my hand.”
The following season, Cardiff won at Leeds
with a late goal and Ridsdale, mindful of his surroundings, made sure to remain
in his seat, restricting himself to a clench of his fists and a loudly
whispered, “Yes!”
When he entered the boardroom at the end of
the match, Ken Bates shouted across the room: “You can f— off — get out of here
now and don’t come back.” Ridsdale thought it was a boisterous joke at first,
but Bates was deadly serious. “You know exactly what you’ve done, your
behaviour in the directors’ box was unacceptable.” Ridsdale could not leave the
stadium by himself. So he went downstairs to the dressing rooms to wait with
the players.
One of the saddest things, perhaps, is that
he has lost a lot of the goodwill that had been generated for the compassion he
showed after two Leeds fans, Chris Loftus and Kevin Speight, were stabbed to
death in Istanbul on the eve of their 2000 UEFA Cup semi-final against
Galatasaray.
That was arguably the best of Ridsdale and
it was evident again, many people felt, when Leeds had to deal with the fallout
from the street attack on Sarfraz Najeib, a 19-year-old student, and the court
proceedings involving Woodgate and Bowyer.
That was the trial that drove a wedge
between Ridsdale and O’Leary and the bad feeling still lingers. Ridsdale
wonders whether he might have been “too soft”, at times, when it came to
O’Leary’s requests for expensive players on high salaries.
He also remembers the time Ferdinand signed
for Leeds from West Ham in 2000. The fee was £18million, a staggering amount
for that time and O’Leary, according to Ridsdale, refused to attend the news
conference.
“We had just broken a world record for
signing a defender. The board had approved it and David had said yes. But I had
to take the press conference with Rio because the manager refused to be there
and later said (publicly) that he thought the fee was obscene.”
Ridsdale still talks, at times, like a
Leeds fan — note the frequency with which he refers to the club as “we” — but he
still seems torn about whether he is one of the victims in this story, one of
the guilty parties, or both.
Sometimes, Ridsdale can sound filled with
regret, wishing he could turn the clock back and owning up to naivety. At
others, he appears affronted by the criticism, insisting he feels misunderstood
and misrepresented and, for the most part, considers it wildly unjust.
Is it really fair, he asks, that he was
blamed for every year, from 2004 until 2020, that Leeds were outside the top
division?
“I’d left Leeds with a squad of full
internationals: Mark Viduka, Harry Kewell, Nigel Martyn, Paul Robinson, Danny
Mills, Alan Smith, Ian Harte and many others. The week I left, we won 6-1 at
Charlton. The following month, we went to Highbury and won 3-2 to stop Arsenal
winning the title. How did that squad get relegated 12 months later?”
To ask this question might be interpreted
by some critics as a shifting of the blame. Yet he might also be entitled to
point out that, apart from the pre-agreed deal for Dacourt’s loan at Roma to be
made permanent, there were only two high-profile departures in the 14 months
between Ridsdale resigning and the team’s relegation — Kewell to Liverpool and
Martyn’s free transfer to Everton.
“They put in Eddie Gray as manager,” says
Ridsdale. “Why? Because it was emotional: the history. I like Eddie, and I’ve
worked with him closely, but he’d already failed once as a manager.
“I was watching from afar thinking, ‘I
can’t believe what they are up to’. How the hell is that team getting
relegated? Because relegation caused the financial meltdown, not what happened
before.”