Cellino's first interview at Leeds: Elland Road is my Highway to Hell!
Mail 10/4/14Guitar player, dishwasher and convicted fraudster... Sportsmail meets the man who wants to save the ailing giants By RIATH AL-SAMARRAI
Massimo Cellino scrunches up his face as he considers the question. He’s spent more than an hour talking about music, his band, buses and washing dishes and now he is thinking of the best song to describe the basketcase, sometimes called Leeds United, that he took over in a £35million deal this week.
Knocking on Heaven’s Door is suggested to him. He smirks because he sees potential in the ruins, but then he starts laughing. ‘AC / DC is better,’ he says. ‘Highway to Hell’. With that, the man who the Football League wanted to ban raises his hands in the air.
One of his legal staff ponders if the comment should be struck from the record, but the convicted fraudster, the new ‘bus driver’ of Leeds, is having none of it. He is Massimo Cellino and he says what he wants.
Just as he did last month when a stranger called his phone and the 57-year-old Italian responded with a rant about Leeds striker Noel Hunt’s wages and the ‘f****** devil’ David Haigh (Leeds managing director), among other things. Turns out the stranger was recording the conversation for an online broadcast.
‘I was a bit drunk and depressed,’ he says. ‘It was mean and embarrassing that he published it. But after I thought maybe it wasn’t so wrong - that was me.’
And ‘me’ is complex. He is the guitar-playing, chain-smoking charmer who kept Leeds from administration and fought off a winding-up order this week. He is the man who says of his new club: ‘Leeds has potential to be a Ferrari. Now it is a Cinquecento, or a bicycle.’
When asked what is top of his huge to-do list at Leeds - a club he thinks can be in the Premier League within two years - he looks down at a sheet of paper, looks up and says: ‘Kill myself.’
He knows how to raise a laugh. But he is also a convicted fraudster; a man recently convicted for not paying import duty on a boat and who has two previous convictions, including one for deceiving the Italian Ministry of Agriculture out of £7.5m in 1996. Cellino on being hands-on...
‘I spend a lot of time at the club, I am an unusual owner. I look after everything - the grass, the cooking. I want to know what they eat, they drink, where they go on their night out, I want to know everything about the players. If they need something, if they need help I must be there.’
In football terms, he has proved his commitment to a club, but in 22 years at Cagliari, which is he now trying to sell, he has sacked 36 managers. He also sacked Leeds boss Brian McDermott in January before the club reinstated him because Cellino’s takeover had not actually gone through.
All in all, it’s why the Football League were disappointed that he won an appeal against their decision to keep him out. Now he has arrived, one of the most controversial and bombastic figures in the British game.
Over the course of more than an hour, he delivers on the funny stuff but skirts around the gritty particulars. He talks about his first forays into this country, back in 1975, the year Leeds made it to the European Cup final.
‘I was a waiter in London, I did washing up. I came here when I was 18 years old and didn’t have any money. I came here, rock and roll, I was playing guitar but it wasn’t going to earn enough money so I had to wash plates and glasses. I worked in the Regent Palace Hotel in 1975 for eight months.’
Cellino on sacking McDermott in January...
'When I fired the coach at the beginning, not because it was his fault but because I was told so, I was worrying for Leeds to stay in the Championship. I still now, if you ask me what happened that night, I don’t know.'
In time he became the ‘King of Corn’, inheriting his father’s successful agricultural company. How much is he worth?
‘I have never been able to find out how much money I have. I can keep an engagement.’
He is adamant he is not a criminal. ‘I’m not dishonest. I didn’t make any contraband, the boat belongs to an American company and I paid the tax in America. I’ve got nothing to hide. Today in Italy there is a big mess.’
There is also a fairly big one to clean up at Leeds, where they do not own the training ground or Elland Road, and whose 2012-13 losses were revealed this week to be £9.5m. The club are currently losing £1m a month, with staff and players deferring 35 per cent of their wages last month.
Cellino has promised to settle the salaries this week. But buying back Elland Road, which is rented for more than £1m a year, is described as ‘a first priority’.
Cellino on McDermott...
‘He is a good guy. Have you seen Brian in a match? What is he doing with the water? He drinks it every 10 seconds and he throws it to the floor, 420 times a match. Bang, he throws it down. When I see him I say, “Here is a bottle of water for the next game”.’
On the club’s worrying Football League financial fair play position, one of his associates says vaguely: ‘I think the losses this year will be substantial. We have reviewed it (FFP), but because of the way the (takeover) deal is structured, some of the expenses that create the losses are getting written off as part of the deal, so we should qualify for the FFP in 2014.’
For his part, Cellino had not read Leeds’ financial results for 2012-13, which were released the day we met. ‘Please, I am too weak,’ he said.
He is more forthcoming on his plans. Gulf Finance House, from whom he bought a 75 per cent stake, retain 25 per cent but will likely be marginalised, as will Haigh. ‘They have not done a good job running Leeds,’ he says.
‘The people who lose money at clubs don’t do it on purpose. But they don’t know that when you take a club you take fans, you take emotions - they are not just numbers. I’ve seen people crying after games - kids, mothers.’
Cellino on divisions of labour...
'There is a big misunderstanding in my point of view between manager and coach. For me, the coach runs the team, the players. The coach has to look after the players and we have to make the team together. "I like that player. Can we afford him?" "OK, let’s do it".'
He adds: ‘They were running the bus, now the bus is ours. The other driver is not my problem, he can sit on the bench, he can go fishing, it is not my problem. We run the bus.
Then there is McDermott. He’s lost eight of the past nine games. ‘A nice guy,’ Cellino says. But in Italy they call Cellino a mangiallenatori - a manager-eater. By his own admission he is hands-on.
‘I like to give Brian the chance to find out if it is good or not,’ he says. ‘If it is not good I have to change. I hope not.’ All being well, he says: ‘Season 2015-16, if we don’t go (to the Premier League) I failed.’
With that, he’s off. His band - he is friends with members of KISS - will soon be playing in front of 25,000 in Sardinia. Before then he has to ‘get to work’ cleaning up Leeds and ‘involving the fans again’.
Whatever the outcome of all this, it will be some bus ride.