Massimo Cellino on Leeds: 'We can survive … now I'm driving the bus'
Guardian 10/4/14The controversial new owner of Leeds United says he is determined to transform the club after years of trauma – and assures supporters the journey will not be boring James Riach
For Massimo Cellino and Leeds United it has been just another tumultuous week in a tumultuous decade. Both Cellino and Leeds have lived dreams, drama and despair in recent years, entwined since February amid the most tangled and turbulent of takeovers, yet the controversial Italian has finally started the rebuilding process at a club where such change has long been overdue. Be prepared for fireworks along the way.
"We are not sick, we are not in the hospital, we can survive. We can heal, it's a cold," says Cellino of Leeds' current plight, in abysmal form and with accounts for the 2012-13 financial year reporting annual losses of £9.5m. "Now I'm driving the bus. Now the bus is ours and we have to run the bus. The other driver [before] is not my problem – he can sit on the bench, he can go fishing."
Cellino arrived in England as an 18-year-old in 1975 – the year Leeds reached the European Cup final only to be denied by Franz Beckenbauer and Bayern Munich – working in London's Regent Palace hotel washing dishes and playing guitar on the side. Almost 40 years on and with Leeds in dire straits, he has targeted the Premier League by the summer of 2016, after a deal worth more than £30m.
This week the Cagliari owner and agricultural magnate known as "the king of corn" flew into London after Saturday's successful appeal before an independent QC against the Football League's decision to block his takeover. According to his lawyer, Cellino completed a 75% buyout of the club on Tuesday.
The League discussed the matter at a board meeting on Thursday and cleared Cellino to be a club director, at least until a Sardinian court publishes written findings in June on a case last month that found him guilty of illegally evading €388,500 (£321,000) import duty on his yacht, the Nelie. The League will then decide if Cellino acted dishonestly but the Italian claims: "I'm not a crook. I've got nothing to hide. I'm not dishonest."
Cellino, whichever way you look at him, is one of the more maverick characters to have entered the English game for years. Now living in a city-centre Leeds apartment as well as in Miami, he has a suspicion of the number 17, like many in Italy, and the colour purple – at the IS Arena in Sardinia there is no seat 17, only 16 and 16b.
On Tuesday he asked a member of the press, sincerely, if he would like to play with him in his rock band Maurilios in front of 25,000 people. On Wednesday he was chatting with supporters at a pub near Elland Road and later in the evening was spotted strolling around town talking jovially with passers-by. What next?
Despite his eccentric and at times wild nature, Cellino has already injected significant funds into a club left precariously positioned by the previous owners, Gulf Finance House, the Bahrain-based investment bank which bought Leeds from Ken Bates in December 2012 and is now a 25% shareholder. Having bankrolled Leeds for two months, wiping out a huge amount of debt during his takeover, Cellino has this week settled an outstanding £500,000 bill with HMRC and paid the players and manager, Brian McDermott, their overdue wages for March.
"I am so devastated by legal things – talking about shareholders, boards, companies, GFH. I don't want to think about GFH, not because they are bad people, but because for me it means problems. I don't know them. But they have not done a good job running Leeds because they did not know what they were doing," Cellino says.
"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, you can't run the club just by numbers. You are hurting people, I've seen people crying and very depressed after games – kids, mothers. You can't treat a club like the stock exchange.
"I am an unusual owner. I look after everything: the grass, the cooking. I want to know what they [the players] eat, they drink, where they go on their night out, I want to know everything about the players and employees. If they need something, if they need help, I must be there."
Asked how much he was worth, Cellino would not disclose a figure and claimed he would attempt to sell Cagliari in the coming months as a matter of urgency, having not expected to own two clubs at the same time. However, the 57-year-old insisted he does not have the vast wealth of a Roman Abramovich. "I'm a little jealous of him because sometimes I want to feel what it means to just throw money around," Cellino says. "I tried it with a couple of dollars, but no more. I did that when I was a little bit drunk and then felt a little embarrassed. It was only $20, imagine if it was more."
He continues: "I'm Italian, I don't want to bring my rules here and disrespect the people from England. I feel like I have been invited to a party, well I thought I was invited and then I found out I was not invited.
"I want the fans close to the club. Leeds has a beautiful, important stadium. Leeds is going to buy back the stadium [owned by the Virgin Islands-based Teak Trading Corporation] – if they had let me come in at the beginning [in February] maybe we would have been in the play-offs this season. We could have competed to get in the top six, but they did not let me do it. Thank God the team is still in the Championship."
It is easy to enjoy Cellino's company. He plays an entertaining host, yet there remains an air of trepidation about his potential tenure. Complications at Cagliari's stadium meant the club for a period played their home games in Trieste, pretty much the furthest possible point from Sardinia in Italy, and he was convicted of false accounting at Cagliari in 2001. There remain two charges against him for alleged evasion of import duty, one on another yacht and the other on a Range Rover. He denies wrongdoing on both.
Then there is the sacking of McDermott in February, on the night known as "mad Friday", when Leeds fans descended on Elland Road in protest against the decision, desperate to talk with Cellino. The mood among supporters has certainly changed since then. McDermott was reinstated and Cellino says he is looking forward to working with him beyond the summer, but at Cagliari he has employed 36 managers in 22 years.
"Still now, if you ask me what happened that night, I don't know. I don't understand," says Cellino. "That was a bad, bad thing. I like Brian, I like to give him the opportunity to find out if it is good or not. 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 in a match. Bang, he throws it down. I joke with him when I see him: 'Here is a bottle of water for the next game'.
"We have the most important things, the stadium and the fans. That's what I said to the guy [a supporter] who rang me up on the phone when I was a bit drunk and depressed, my clubs had just lost two games in a row. I was trying to explain to him what was going on and he published the phone call on the internet, it was really mean and really embarrassing. But after I thought maybe it wasn't so wrong – that was me."
During that phone call Cellino discussed the role of David Haigh, the managing director at Leeds, and has since claimed that Haigh will not have an influential role but could remain in some capacity along with Salah Nooruddin, the chairman. Either way, there will only be one man calling the shots at Leeds for the immediate future.
"It has the potential, like a Ferrari," Cellino says of Leeds. "They got really pissed in Sardinia because I said we [Cagliari] had a beautiful Cinquecento, big wheels and everything. Leeds is potentially a Ferrari, now it's a Cinquecento. I want to transform Leeds from Highway to Hell to Stairway to Heaven. You are not going to be bored with me."