The Leeds hero who became Judas – why did Alan Smith move to Manchester United? — The Athletic 13/5/20

By Phil Hay

What strikes you first about Alan Smith’s answer is the brevity of it. Throwaway, casual, almost innocuous. Blink and it’s gone. He’s on Soccer AM in 2002, answering questions for the show’s “Changing Rooms” feature. Is there a club he would never join? “Yeah. Man United.”

He looks and sounds young in the video, clean-faced with spiky blond hair. His comments are unguarded, as if they don’t matter, and he has since said that he regrets the naivety of that interview. Manchester United were the club he would never join, a club incompatible with his Leeds United roots. Except two years later, Smith did. And the interview, the transfer, the implied betrayal has always been held against him.

There was already a path between Elland Road and Old Trafford, trodden before in both directions. Two of Leeds’ most influential signings — Johnny Giles and Gordon Strachan — came from Manchester United at the outset of Leeds’ greatest eras. But both were surplus in Manchester and over the years it was the defections from Yorkshire that caused resentment: Joe Jordan, Gordon McQueen, Eric Cantona, Rio Ferdinand. Players at their peak leaving to join a team that people in Leeds despised. And in the cases of Jordan and Ferdinand, leaving for record transfer fees.

Then came Smith and, in the eyes of many, the ultimate act of disloyalty. There is a world of context to his £7 million transfer — the disarray of the team he was quitting, the appeal of the team for which he signed, his personal ambition and the reality of the offer itself — but the deal cast him as the biblical figure who occupies a certain place in football’s vocabulary: Judas. The local boy, the Leeds hero who promised never to join Manchester United and then sold everyone out. They have no time for Cantona or Ferdinand round here, but it is Smith’s name that rouses most bitterness. Smith’s decision is the one they cannot forget.

Is it fair that one of England’s most promising forwards was castigated for shaking the hand of the Premier League’s most successful club and manager? When Leeds were crying out for cash? Were there other viable alternatives in front of him and could Smith have handled that transfer window differently, in a way that protected his reputation at Elland Road? Was he naive or misunderstood? Did tribal expectations of him miss the point? This is Alan Smith to Manchester United, a transfer still waiting for forgiveness.

To revisit the earliest years of Smith’s career is to find a footballer who was built for Leeds, a collection of everything they love at Elland Road. He has talent, he can finish, he has good feet and he likes a tackle. He is homemade too, a kid from the academy, and the complete package. It made it easy for the crowd to warm to him.

He was a unifying force. When Leeds were relegated from the Championship in 2007, three years after Smith was sold, fans invaded the pitch in protest and pelted Elland Road’s away end with coins. When the club were relegated from the Premier League in 2004, they carried Smith from the pitch on their shoulders. “He epitomises everything Leeds United is about,” said former chief executive Trevor Birch.

That game, a 3-3 draw with Charlton Athletic on May 8, was Smith’s last home match as a Leeds player and yielded his last goal. He shed tears at full-time and was the stand-out image for sports editors across the country as Sunday’s newspapers were laid out that evening. But in the background, things were moving quickly. Leeds were in debt to the tune of more than £100 million and their new owners, a consortium of Yorkshire businessmen, were facing up to the crippling loss of Premier League income. Players would be sold. Smith would be leaving. The transfer to Manchester United would be done and dusted before the end of the month.

For a while, and even in the latter stages of the season, Smith indulged the possibility that relegation might not spell the end for him at Leeds. He was quoted in an interview as saying he would be open-minded about the future, regardless of the level the club were playing at. But by the final weeks of the term, and as the crowd ran to him up at the end of the draw with Charlton, there was no longer any pretence on his part. A move was unavoidable, for a variety of reasons. “I’ve always said I wanted to stay here until it was no longer possible and I think that’s the situation we’re approaching now,” said Smith. “Everyone appreciates that from the financial side, the club’s side and from my point of view it’s time to move on.”

Smith’s defence of his transfer to Manchester United always relies on one key point: that in the seasons when Leeds were involved in the Champions League and competing at the top end of the Premier League, he did not envisage a time when Leeds would try to sell him. When he answered that question on Soccer AM, he believed he was talking hypothetically. Dominic Matteo played with Smith for four years at Elland Road and captained the club on the day of the striker’s final home fixture. The pair were close in that period — or as close as players got to Smith — and Matteo says Smith’s tears in the face of relegation stemmed from genuine regret.

“That really hurt him,” says Matteo. “You can talk about the ins and outs of the Man United move as much as you like but relegation hurt him. There was a lot of raw emotion. I was there and he was devastated, basically inconsolable.

“Anyone who watched him could tell by the way he played and the aggression in his game that he was in it for the football. The club was a complete mess by that point and I could pick out certain players in the dressing room who were only bothered about money but Smithy was never motivated by a few grand here or there. I know this for sure: going to Man United wouldn’t have been about money or not for him. That wasn’t in his make up.”

Leeds, though, were desperate for it. The club had been amassing debts and liabilities for several years and were running out of lives. There were no borrowing facilities left to exploit and their only route to serious income was through a fire sale in the dressing room. The Adulant Force consortium had taken control of Leeds through a £22 million takeover in late March but between the five new directors, headed by local insolvency practitioner Gerald Krasner, there was precious little knowledge of football and plenty of infighting.

As a source close to the group told The Athletic: “It was a mishmash of people. The personalities involved meant the consortium was virtually unworkable. The one thing you can say about them is they got the debts down and kept Leeds going at a time when the club might otherwise have died because no one else would have touched the books. But if we’re talking about running a football club long-term, they weren’t up to it.”

The wage bill at Elland Road was costing Leeds more than £3 million a month. Their highest earners were pulling in over £100,000 a week. They had players in the academy, some of whom were a mile from the first team, receiving weekly salaries of £10,000. In effect, the club were penniless. Administration was one option but the board were not sure if they would be able to fund the process so they took to flogging anything of value from their senior squad. Matteo left for Blackburn Rovers. Goalkeeper Paul Robinson moved to Tottenham Hotspur for £1.5 million. But the big money, the most meaningful fees, would come from three individuals: Mark Viduka, James Milner and Smith.

Viduka’s switch to Middlesbrough says much about the state Leeds were in. There were complications which dragged that deal out for longer than Smith’s transfer to Old Trafford. One of them was Middlesbrough’s insistence that Leeds, in return, sign Michael Ricketts, the one-time England international who had completely lost his way. An official at Boro confessed that Ricketts was a dud — “someone who would make you look like Twiggy”, as one former Leeds source put it — but the maths made sense. Viduka’s wage was huge and Ricketts, on less than £20,000 a week, would be infinitely more affordable. Kevin Blackwell, the Leeds manager, was perplexed by the signing but understood the rationale behind it. He said the right things in public, describing Ricketts as a statement of intent while starting him just 13 times in the two years that followed.

Even if the Krasner board had wanted to keep Smith, they had a big contractual hurdle in front of them. Smith’s goals and appearances had activated a clause entitling him to a renegotiation of his deal. Leeds barely had the money to fund his existing wage and were in no position to increase it in the aftermath of relegation. By late April, and as the club’s Premier League status slipped away, the directors at Elland Road conceded that the forward had to go. The question was where and for how much. And who exactly would dictate the terms of his departure?

Knowing that business would be manic before the 2004 summer transfer window had even started, Leeds hired an agent, Philip Morrison of PML Sports Management, to oversee all of their deals and, in essence, sell their players. The thinking behind the appointment was that Morrison could help to lower the amount of money lost to agents in different transactions. Everything would go through one intermediary, rather than a cast of thousands.

In reality, there was no chance at all of high-profile footballers putting their next move in the hands of a man they didn’t know. Smith and his representative, Alex Black, refused outright to go through Morrison. In a fractious meeting with Leeds’ managing director, David Richmond, they made it clear that they would take the offer which suited Smith best. As Smith said very publicly: “If I have to leave, then it’ll be to a club of my choice, not theirs.”

Leeds were convinced for a while that Liverpool would table an offer in the region of £10 million for Smith. Gerard Houllier was keen but the Frenchman was on thin ice at Anfield. Although discussions about Smith took place between the clubs, sources close to Liverpool at the time told The Athletic no formal bid was placed and that their interest ended once they moved to change manager. Houllier was sacked on May 24, two days before Smith completed his move to Manchester United. Liverpool identified Rafa Benitez as their next boss, but he knew too little about Smith to give any offer the green light. There were no direct discussions between Liverpool and Smith.

Smith’s intention, according to Black, was to find a club playing in the Champions League, in which he had played under David O’Leary. “We made it perfectly clear to Leeds that Alan wanted Champions League football,” Black tells The Athletic. “That was the level he thought he should be playing and he wasn’t going to play for anyone who couldn’t make him that offer.

“If you look at the teams who were in the Champions League (the following season), Man United were the only club who had an offer accepted by Leeds. If the process had gone on longer into the summer, then maybe things would have changed. But that’s hypothetical. Leeds wanted a deal done and wanted as much money as possible up front.”

Leeds suspected that Smith and Black were aware of Manchester United’s interest before they were. What is undeniably true is that none of the other sides in Champions League-qualification positions — champions Arsenal, Chelsea or Liverpool — came forward with a bid. There was talk of interest from sides lower down the division — Newcastle United, Everton, West Ham — but Black claims much of it was “a figment of people’s imagination”. Smith, he admits, was not just looking for any club. He was looking for a team and a manager who satisfied his own sense of ambition.

Manchester United’s opening offers for Smith were low. Leeds used their official website on May 18 to announce that they had “rejected immediately” bids of £3.5 million and £5.5 million, describing them as “substantially undervaluing” the 23-year-old. Eventually officials from both clubs, including Manchester United’s David Gill, met in a hotel in London to thrash out the terms.

Leeds falsely claimed to have finalised the sale of Milner to Newcastle (they would sell Milner to Newcastle for £5 million but not for another month and a half) in an effort to make it clear that they had no reason to let Smith go cheaply and for a short time Manchester United called their bluff. But word soon came from Old Trafford that they were willing to put together a £7 million package, with the money paid in full. There was a conversation about whether Leeds might sign winger Luke Chadwick as part of the agreement. In the end, they agreed to take Danny Pugh.

The news was a shock when it broke — though not to everyone. From a young age, Smith possessed drive and a single-minded attitude. A former school friend of his, who asked not to be named, said he remembered Smith “oozing self-confidence”, someone who wanted to “play for the best regardless of who that team was”.

When he was young, Smith’s passions were BMX and Moto GP and he was a national BMX champion in his primary school days. Some old class-mates remember a very young Smith having a soft spot for Liverpool and think the relationship he developed with Leeds would not have stopped him seeing the value in other opportunities. They were right. The chance to join Manchester United was put in front of him and Smith said yes. Sir Alex Ferguson later told him: “I never thought you’d be brave enough to take that decision.” But for Smith, it was business.

“I was close to Smithy back then,” says Matteo. “We’d eat together a lot and spend a fair amount of time together. That summer, with me going to Blackburn and him going to Old Trafford, we both moved over to Manchester and ended up living over the road from each other.

“It was funny, though, because when it came to the Man United move, we didn’t broach the subject much. I tried not to get into it with him because I could tell how difficult it was going to be. Looking from the outside, it seemed like a seriously tough call. He’s a Leeds fan who’s just seen his club go down being offered the chance to go to one of the biggest clubs in Europe but a club who people in Leeds have no time for. It was obvious what the reaction would be.

“Smithy was always a bit of a loner and always a bit different to your average footballer. He liked what he liked, he kept himself to himself quite a lot and he seemed pretty happy in his own world. That Leeds squad loved a drink but he wasn’t into alcohol at all. He never touched it, which is just how he was. I knew the transfer was a personal thing so I didn’t want to make it any more difficult by trying to chat it over. It was best to leave it. Not my business.”

In the days before the transfer was announced, speculation reached the level where the move was no longer in any doubt. The absence of official comment did not change that fact that Smith would be a Manchester United player. On the Saturday before he passed his medical, the Yorkshire Evening Post mocked up an image of him in a Manchester United shirt and printed it on their front page. Leeds and Richmond tried to warn Smith about the likely fall-out in Leeds but at that stage there was nothing comparable to dangle in front of him, no other Champions League opportunity. Neither side pretends that there was.

“There was a lot of interest but nobody else agreed a deal,” says Black. “It’s like that in football and I’ve seen it many times. There’s a lot of contact and things are said but until something happens, it’s hard to know what to believe and what’s actually serious.

“A lot of stuff flies around and some of it can be a figment of people’s imagination. We were getting called by clubs all the time but people forget that it wasn’t just about clubs wanting Alan or having an interest in him. It had to be somewhere he wanted to go as well.”

As the attention on him intensified, Smith flew up to Glasgow to escape the circus and stay in a flat owned by Matteo. Shortly after he landed, Black received a phone call from David Murray, then a major shareholder at Rangers. Rangers admired Smith and Smith, over time, had developed an affinity with that half of the Old Firm — but Murray was not calling to do a deal. When Smith was spotted in Glasgow, Murray was ringing Black to check that he wasn’t about to be ambushed by the club across the city. In short, “Tell me he’s not signing for Celtic”.

Smith and Manchester United agreed on terms, but there is an aspect of the contract that has rarely been discussed before. A clause in it stated that Smith would sign at Old Trafford without an immediate unveiling. The transfer was to be sealed and announced by a statement from both clubs but Manchester United would hold off from staging a press conference until later in the summer, allowing the dust to settle and some of the fury in Leeds to die down. Smith joined on May 26 but did not appear with a Manchester United shirt or speak about the transfer until July 20, midway through Manchester United’s pre-season. He was introduced at the same time as Liam Miller, who had come south from Celtic. Ferguson was dressed casually in a polo shirt and slacks, as if he had just stepped off the golf course. For a £7 million investment in 2004, it was unusually low key.

Were Smith and Black concerned about the reaction in Leeds and the damage the transfer would do to his name within Leeds United’s support? “We had some conversations about it but Alan had done his best for Leeds,” says Black. “When he left, we were honestly just as concerned about how the Man United fans would react to them signing him. It’s not easy to start off by singing the praises of one of their arch rivals.”

Leeds announced that Smith had waived a signing-on fee, to help with the financial mess at Elland Road. Black says the figure ran to hundreds of thousands of pounds. “He wouldn’t have done that for just any club,” says Black. “He thought it was important and he thought it would help Leeds. I can assure you he didn’t waive the fees owed to him when he left Man United.” Smith was gone and whatever the politics, Leeds were grateful for the cash.

Smith’s aims, dreams and expectations of a five-year contract at Manchester United were destroyed by an injury he suffered at Anfield during an FA Cup tie against Liverpool in 2006. Smith, who had been on the field for 13 minutes as a substitute, attempted to charge down a free-kick from John Arne Riise but caught the studs of his left boot in the turf as the ball struck him. He broke his leg, dislocated an ankle and was driven away from the ground in an ambulance. His next appearance came seven months later and he was never the same player again.

“I was amazed he came back from that at all,” says Matteo. “It was horrific and it’s the sort of injury that would have made other players pack it in. He had to change his game and it took some of his pace away. People didn’t think of him as being quick but he was quite deceptive. Mind you, he’s the one lad I’d have backed to get over an injury like that. I’d watched him butcher Paolo Maldini in the Champions League. I’d watched him get stuck into Martin Keown quite happily. If I’d been picking the team at Leeds, I’d always have had Smithy in it, partly because of that attitude.”

Newcastle paid £6 million to sign Smith from Manchester United in 2007, some 21 months after the injury occurred, but he averaged 14 league starts across his five seasons at St James’ Park. He and Leeds’ support came face to face during a friendly there in 2009, the only time Smith played against his old club. He was barracked before kick-off as he tried to applaud the away end and smiled like someone who knew it was coming. Though Leeds were repeatedly linked with re-signing him, nothing ever came of the rumours. Smith had no interest in returning anyway, for fear of failing to do himself justice. A spell at MK Dons followed before a chance meeting with Shaun Derry saw him link up with Notts County, his final club, in 2014.

Smith owned a holiday home in Florida and he and Derry met in a gym at the Reunion resort near Orlando while Derry, Notts County’s manager, was in the States with his family. They got chatting and by the end of the conversation, Smith had agreed to come to Nottingham for the 2014-15 season. “It was as simple as that,” says Derry. “It’s genuinely the easiest deal I’ve ever done: an hour’s conversation on the treadmill and then a shake of hands.

“No disrespect to Notts County but the offer I made him was terrible given the magnitude of his career. We didn’t have a big budget so I was saying to him, ‘This is all we can pay you, there’s no more to be had’. He was really straightforward about it. There’d be a coaching role involved and he fancied it. He’d played at a very high level, but by then he’d come to terms with the fact that the injury had changed things. He wasn’t at that level anymore and he wasn’t fooling himself.” Did Derry think Smith might change his mind before pre-season began? “No,” he says. “I got the feeling he was as good as his word. And on day one of training, there he was.”

Derry says Smith’s career with Notts County was “95 per cent playing, 5 per cent coaching”. He could never quite kick the urge to have a ball at his feet. Derry liked his coaches to wear a different kit in training but Smith resisted it for as long as Derry was in charge. “I never got him to wear it once,” Derry jokes. “I just don’t think he wanted to let the playing side go. He was always the pace-setter in training, always the guy out in front. When we sat and chatted over a cup of tea afterwards, I’d make notes about certain things, little anecdotes or pearls of wisdom from things he’d seen and done. He was great to have around.”

Derry is a former Leeds player so understands the club’s antipathy towards Manchester United and the magnitude of what had happened in 2004. “We spoke about it,” he says. “I listened to Alan’s perspective on it. It was bittersweet for him, really. I know what Leeds are like as a club and I know what it’s like to leave. I was gutted to leave the club and he was too. I believe that. But at the same time he was being recognised as one of the best forwards in the league by one of the best club managers of all time, Sir Alex Ferguson.

“When it’s your decision and your career, it’s hard to say no to that, especially if you’ve got hunger and desire like Alan had. But I don’t think he’d want anyone feeling sorry for him over the reaction to it. He was in a privileged position.”

Smith’s contract at Notts County ended in 2018 and he has drifted away from the sport. Derry is not altogether surprised. “When you get to know him on a different level, it’s obvious that he’s got other interests,” he says. “If you look at Alan Smith the player, you’d automatically assume he’d want to be in football for the rest of his life but from what I saw in him, I can understand why he might choose not to be. It makes sense to me.”

There have been occasional sightings of Smith at Elland Road, sporadic appearances at games, and he turned up unannounced at Thorp Arch in October 2018 for an under-23 game between Leeds and Nottingham Forest. He stood alongside Black and took in the game, keeping out of the way with a cap pulled over his eyes. Unless you looked closely, it could have been anyone.

Leeds are enthusiastic about the idea of reconciliation. The club and their majority shareholder, Andrea Radrizzani, have spoken to Smith about an ambassador role but Smith isn’t keen. His name was mentioned briefly when Leeds discussed the possibility of making a domestic addition to the coaching team Marcelo Bielsa brought with him two years ago but Bielsa’s preference was to promote Carlos Corberan from the academy.

Smith received an invitation to October’s centenary dinner at Elland Road but he spends much of his time in the States and was unable to attend. A football academy has been opened in his name in Orlando, a project largely run by others, but some who know Smith liken him to David Batty: a man satisfied with his lot, happy out of the limelight and content without football in his life. It remains to be seen if professional coaching sucks him back in.

Opinions on his transfer to Old Trafford remain polarised. Not everyone in Leeds resented Smith for taking the plunge — it is not in dispute that the club needed money fast that summer — and it is clear that the situation presented him with a professional dilemma: take the best transfer on offer to him or limit his own potential, for the sake of upholding his name in Leeds. Serve the public or serve his career, in a scenario where it was difficult to do both. Smith is philosophical and unapologetic about the call he made but speak to people involved in 2004 and one thought hits you: rather his decision than yours.

“On the one hand, it would be wrong to say that Leeds United forced Alan to go to Manchester United,” Black says, “but on the other, it would be wrong to say Alan snubbed everyone else to go there. In the end the decision we had in front of us was go to Man United or stay at Leeds, which couldn’t have happened anyway.” Smith’s Soccer AM interview is a warning to everyone: in football, never say never.