Leeds United On Trial – 20 years on - The Athletic 26/6/22

By Phil Hay

The book is short, fewer than 240 pages in all, and this version, a small paperback, is dog-eared and worn. Leeds United On Trial, David O’Leary’s published work, is long since out of print, available second-hand. Only the title hints at the dynamite inside.

At face value, it looks like standard football literature and the original concept, or so it is said, was a diary of a football season, told by O’Leary, the manager in the middle of it. Leeds were a Champions League club, O’Leary was a rising star in Premier League coaching circles and the book, before the title was picked, was there to chronicle their 2000-01 campaign through his eyes.

It was supposed to reveal trade secrets, because what else is autobiographical prose for? But Leeds United On Trial did not foresee the flashpoint it caused.

The book was published in January 2002. Six months later — and 20 years ago today — O’Leary was sacked, a young coach regarded as exceptionally promising dispensed with by a club who previously thought that, with him in the dugout, the sky was the limit.

Leeds United On Trial was not the end of O’Leary at Elland Road but the controversial decision to write it and all it contained contributed to his demise, symbolising the loss of control the club were experiencing. “Do I wish it hadn’t appeared?” Peter Ridsdale, Leeds’ chairman back then, would ask himself later. “Of course I do.”

In those 200-odd pages, O’Leary spelt out his personal view on everything around him: individual players, individual games, tragedy, controversy and very topical criminal proceedings.

Whether he envisaged writing a plain football diary or not, the start of chapter two makes it clear that Leeds were no normal club.

“Four players arrested, two fans killed and a football club to guide towards honours at home and abroad,” O’Leary wrote. “These were the matters preoccupying me in the spring of 2000, and it was an experience that can only be described as harrowing.” The arrests he talked about, more than anything else, would be the basis of the book and the catalyst for so much of the criticism it received.

The hook, in the end, was a court case involving several Leeds players, notably Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate.

Bowyer and Woodgate were among a group of men arrested and charged over an attack on an Asian student, Sarfraz Najeib, during a night out in Leeds city centre in January 2000. But at the point where the contract for O’Leary’s book was negotiated, no trial date had been given to the defendants and for legal reasons, it was not certain that the attack on Najeib could feature predominantly in the book at all. If proceedings were live when it hit the shops, too much discussion about them would risk contempt of court. The initial assumption was that the book would focus on Leeds’ fixtures, ideally helped by the club making good progress in Europe.

“To start with it was just known as ‘the book’,” says Alan Samson, who was editorial director of Little, Brown when the publishing company commissioned Leeds United On Trial. “It was later when someone — and, I should say, not us the publisher — suggested calling it Leeds United On Trial. When that was put to us, we thought of it like, the trial of a manager, the trial of managing a season… I guess the ambiguity of what David had gone through during it. You’ll say to me, ‘How naive!’, and I get that, but we really didn’t think the title would cause a stir.”

Samson, a publisher of many years, is a lifelong Arsenal fan who is speaking to The Athletic, in his words, “from the Republic of Islington” — the north London club’s back yard. He respected O’Leary greatly from his days as a player for Arsenal, though he found the juxtaposition between the Irishman’s status as their record appearance-maker and his limited popularity there a strange paradox. “I like to be objective, so I’ve done more books with players who played for other clubs,” Samson says. “But I was a great admirer of O’Leary as an elegant player at Arsenal so when I was offered a book by him, I said, ‘Yeah, great idea’. And I commissioned it.”

The project was brought to him by David Shapland, a former journalist and agent who represented, among other people, the well-known clairvoyant Mystic Meg. The book would be ghost-written for O’Leary by David Walker, one of Leeds United’s directors, who had responsibility for the club’s media and communications output. Walker interviewed O’Leary for his thoughts as the 2000-01 season went on, often in transit as he and his squad travelled to European games.

Walker declined an invitation from The Athletic to discuss Leeds United On Trial but Samson recalls that the advance paid was “as you can imagine, in the six figures”.

One of the striking things about the book is that it reads like the memoirs of an aged or retired manager with a long track record behind him, touching on relationships and incidents which would be less delicate to talk about many years after the event. O’Leary, in fact, was in his early 40s and just three years into his managerial career.

Leeds had blossomed into a swashbuckling team under him and O’Leary wrote in chapter one about his aim of developing “a competitive side who played thrilling football” but he and they were yet to win anything. Among the accusations aimed at O’Leary was the claim that by being so candid and putting his thoughts down in print, he was betraying the confidence of a club and a dressing room where he was still in charge.

There are swathes of Leeds United On Trial, well over a hundred pages, which focus solely on the football and make no mention of the criminal charges facing Bowyer, Woodgate and others.

The trial, though, is where the reader’s curiosity and attention are naturally drawn, away from the bread and butter of management. Football feels like padding when set against the stark reality of professional footballers accused of serious offences and facing possible jail sentences.

Bowyer was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing. Woodgate was found guilty of affray but acquitted of the more serious charge of causing grievous bodily harm in relation to the attack on Najeib. One of the other defendants, a friend of Woodgate’s called Paul Clifford, was jailed for six years.

The timing of criminal proceedings is relevant to the timing of O’Leary’s book.

Leeds wanted the trial to take place in June 2001, outside the football season. Had it done so, O’Leary’s book might conceivably have appeared before a verdict was reached, although some of those involved in publication believe that the case at Hull Crown Court had become central to the narrative before then. Nonetheless, a launch date soon after the conclusion of the 2000-01 season made sense.

In the end, the trial began in early 2001 but collapsed in the April after the UK’s Sunday Mirror newspaper published an interview with Najeib’s father while the jury were deliberating over their verdicts. Fearing the interview was prejudicial, the judge presiding over the case, Mr Justice Poole, discharged the jury and ordered a retrial.

The release of O’Leary’s book waited until January 2002, within a month of the retrial finishing in the December.

It required the usual legal checks but contempt of court was no longer an insurmountable risk. The speed of publication provoked criticism in itself, leading to assertions that it was cashing in on the court case and showing a lack of sensitivity towards Najeib and his family.

The News of the World, a Sunday tabloid, secured serialisation rights after the Daily Mail withdrew from negotiations. The Mail’s Ian Wooldridge said his paper had declined to pay because the book was “cynically timed” and an “exposé too far”. Writing about O’Leary, Wooldridge claimed it was “unlikely that his players or his club will ever trust him again”.

O’Leary was forthright in writing about both court cases, discussing information which was publicly available and some which was not, like the details of private discussions with Michael Duberry, another of the Leeds players involved in proceedings. O’Leary openly criticised some of the police work and expressed concerns about aspects of the legal defence strategy.

The coverage of events in Hull Crown Court goes into vast detail, quoting from the courtroom. He was defensive of Woodgate and Bowyer in some ways but scathing in others, attacking the Football Association for refusing to call them up to the England squad while proceedings were live but calling them “an utter disgrace” for being out drinking in Leeds on the night Najeib was assaulted.

“As soon as I knew the full picture of this attack, I called all the Leeds players to a team meeting,” O’Leary wrote. “When I had got them all in front of me, I pointed at Bow and Woody and said, ‘These two have disgraced us all. They were running around Leeds drunk that night. The terrible consequence of that evening was that a human being was left lying on the floor as though he was nothing more than a piece of meat’.” He sympathised heavily with Najeib, though he also criticised people around the student for implying that the attack was a racist incident. In both trials, the juries were told the prosecution was not alleging any racial motive.

The tone of O’Leary’s book can be pally — nicknames used like ‘Bow’, ‘Woody’ and ‘Dubes’ — but some of the football-related content is pointed, like him finding fault with aspects of Woodgate’s lifestyle and explaining how he tore into Alan Smith after the striker was sent off at the very end of a 3-0 second-leg defeat away to Valencia, the game which ended Leeds’ 2000-01 Champions League adventure in the semi-finals following a goalless draw at Elland Road.

“I walked in (to the dressing room) and saw Alan crying,” O’Leary wrote. “I made him cry even more… what he did was not good for Alan Smith, his team or for me, his manager. I left him in no doubt about that.” These, in January 2002, were players who O’Leary was continuing to coach.

The angry reaction to Leeds United On Trial took Samson by surprise. Publishers liked to make headlines but he had not expected such a critical response to what O’Leary had written.

He took the train from London north to Leeds for the launch of the book at a press conference and was hit by an undercurrent of animosity. The News of the World’s serialisation had, unsurprisingly, picked out the punchiest passages of the text and created choice headlines elsewhere.

“There was hostility at the press conference,” Samson says. “I know it sounds odd but that was the first time the publishers realised what was going on. I realised that David was in jeopardy. The questions were searching and I saw that this wasn’t going to be a doddle — it wasn’t a celebration of David O’Leary.

“You’ll think I must have been ready for that but really did think it was a nice, ambiguous title. I know from the questions that the title was one of the things that upset people. There was a lot of aggravation and I have to say that when I got on the train that morning, I didn’t anticipate anything other than a few ripples of disaffection.”

Amid the furore, Leeds chairman Ridsdale spoke out to say he was unaware of the book until shortly before its release, and unaware of Little, Brown’s choice of title. He said O’Leary’s contract as manager allowed him to engage with publishers without asking the club for permission first.

Some of those involved with the book think Ridsdale must have had an inkling, not least because of club director Walker’s close involvement with it. Everyone agrees, though, that he would not have been privy to the manuscript and would not have been consulted on what the book was going to be called.

Some of O’Leary’s players resented his decision to write about them, though representations about it were never made to him directly by the squad. One of them, who asked not to be named, said it was “talked about a bit, a few things were said, some players were unhappy but I can’t really say how much it was to blame for anything”.

Leeds’ results tailed off badly in the weeks after publication, perhaps coincidentally, and Ridsdale said that in his view, the controversy did have an impact on performances. One way or another, what was perceived as one of the tightest chairman-manager relationships in football was in a state of serious disrepair. As time went on, Leeds lost faith in their manager.

They finished fifth in the 2001-02 season, outside the Champions League places, having also lost in the last 16 of the UEFA Cup in the February. O’Leary was sacked on June 27, a decision which caused surprise despite the tension behind the scenes.

The paperback version of Leeds United on Trial was going on sale there and then. A new preface produced by O’Leary, in which he wrote that “I just hope that one day all of us — the footballers and staff at Leeds United, and of course, Sarfraz Najeib, his family and friends — will be able to move on” is dated June 2002. There is no hint at all in his words of him knowing his fate.

Samson does not regret publishing the book but, if given his time again, would choose a different title. The irony of it is that O’Leary himself takes umbrage at the idea that the entire club was in the dock, even if sections of the public saw it that way.

“It was … individuals employed by Leeds United who went on trial at Hull Crown Court, not Leeds United Football Club – in spite of the journalistic shorthand used to describe (the defendants),” O’Leary argued on page 124. “Night after night I would turn on the television and hear one newsreader after another intone: ‘The Leeds United trial today heard that…’ It was an unfortunate label and, I felt, an unnecessary smear.”

And yet, when the book appeared, there it was on the front cover. Samson says O’Leary took the attacks over its content on the chin —  “There was no comeback from him, none at all,” he says, “And believe me, I would have known” — but all these years later, the title sits uncomfortably with him.

“The book sold on its controversy, not to the die-hard Leeds fans,” Samson says. “That’s the key element. I’m sure some Leeds fans bought it but we probably lost the core audience because of everything that went on around it. The book sold for other reasons, that’s certainly true.”

O’Leary, who got the Aston Villa job in summer 2003 but hasn’t managed again since his three seasons there, told the Daily Mail two years ago that it was “meant to be about Leeds for the Leeds fans, not something for the whole world, which is what it became”. Asked whether, with hindsight, he would write it again, O’Leary said he “probably wouldn’t”.

“My feeling isn’t regret that we published it but a feeling that we could have done it with a less provocative title,” Samson says.

“The surprise I feel is that at no point did anyone say, ‘Are you sure about calling it this?’. In the world we’re in now, someone would have raised a problem with the title, because causing offence is a bigger issue in publishing.

“If I had my time again, I wouldn’t call it Leeds United On Trial. That’s my mea culpa. The title was a red rag to a bull.”