Telegraph | Sport | Leeds players probably resent being martyrs

By Paul Hayward (Filed: 24/01/2004)

At the end of a carnival of mismanagement - for which you are not to blame - your boss strides into the office like David Brent, fiddles with his tie, throws one leg over the corner of a desk and invites you to agree to a 30 per cent wage deferral.
He asks you to forget five years of corporate history: the £20 a month on tropical fish for the chairman's office, the £600,000 yearly bill for the fleet of 70 company cars, the £70,000 tab for private jets for directors and senior management. Amnesia is also requested when it comes to the £5.7 million splashed out on compensation packages for sacked managers and the £500,000 still being paid to an employee who has long since left (Robbie Fowler).
This is no time either to be raising the subject of the £1.75 million that went to the Norwegian agent, Rune Hauge, after Rio Ferdinand's transfer to Manchester United, or the £1 million in severance pay for three directors - Peter Ridsdale, David Spencer and Stephen Harrison.
And let's not dwell on the fact that only £3 million of Harry Kewell's £5 million transfer fee from Liverpool ended up at Elland Road. There is nothing to be gained, meanwhile, from asking why Max Clifford, the publicity guru, was paid an estimated £120,000 a year by Ridsdale when Leeds already had a communications director.
David Brent concludes his speech and raises an eyebrow as if to say: "All agreed?" Not surprisingly, Leeds United's players didn't agree - not on the spot, at any rate - and I, for one, don't blame them. The Ridsdale years are ancient history only to people who aren't being asked to take a pay cut.
The question in the dressing room must be: can we entrust around a third of our wages to a club who managed to lose £51 million in 18 months - and whose debt was greater after the sale of Rio Ferdinand for £29 million than it was before?
It's important to emphasise here that Trevor Birch, the chief executive wrestling with the club's Hydra of debt, is beyond reproach in this latest tragic episode. Birch, who was unjustly dropped by Chelsea when Roman Abramovich seized control, is simply trying every trick he knows to raise the £5 million Leeds need to keep trading until the end of the season without having to sell the team's last remaining stars. It falls to him to clear up everybody else's mess.
Denial, though, is still a persistent feature of the Ridsdale years. In an interview with The Guardian this week, Barnsley's new chairman complained: "I was a hero for five years. They put me on a pedestal and nine months later knocked me off." Now, why would that be? The answer is not to be found in the documentary on Ridsdale's life, which was billed as "the story of the most popular football club chairman ever".
Sadly, Birch and his good intentions are not the issue. Not for the players. They inhabit a burlesque. The latest emergency measure is to scythe away the loan signings brought in by Peter Reid to replace the household names disposed of in what some people are wrongly calling a fire sale.
To have an insurance sell-off, the fire needs to be out. There are no smouldering embers at Leeds. It's an inferno, which Birch is fighting with a soda siphon. Roque Junior, one of the loan signings who had his contract cancelled on Thursday, will leave Elland Road with an estimated £1.2 million from five Premiership appearances. That's £240,000 per game.
Roque Road - sorry, Junior - was acquired when Professor John McKenzie, who took over from Ridsdale, was preaching the need for financial realism and ridiculing the extravagance of the previous regime. Seven games into the present campaign, the good professor was already flirting with the idea of sacking Reid.
To give himself courage, he conducted a vox pop, asking fans, shareholders and Uncle Tom Cobley whether Reid should keep his job. He didn't, and bang went another £850,000.
The reason I recite this litany of fiascos is to provide some context to the reluctance on the part of the players to agree to the proposed wage deferral, though David O'Leary and Reid appear to be more flexible on the question of compensation.
Their instincts must be telling them that brinkmanship is being practised by potential purchasers of the stricken club. One supposed saviour who loves a brink is Sheikh Abdul Rahman bin Mubarak al-Khalifa, whose name is apparently longer than his pockets. In this climate of false dawns, the Leeds players probably resent the suggestion that they should martyr themselves for an organisation in which so many others have filled their own boots.
If Sheikhs from Carry On films and bankers and creditors are playing games with an ailing club, it's asking a lot to expect the players to pick up the bill for five seasons of awful management. They must feel they are being asked to give whisky to an alcoholic. They aren't traitors or cowards or mercenaries. They are listening to a voice that tells them not to trust what they are told. In the average office or factory, the rest of us would hear it, too.

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