A heartwarming story in the local paper about a Cambridge schoolboy’s donation of £20 to his beloved football club, Leeds United.

Leeds, in case you don’t know, are the Parmalat of British football, and are currently bottom of the table and £82m in debt. So £20, although a lovely gesture, is not going to go very far, it will just about cover 6 minutes of paying Nick Barmby’s £32,000 a week wages.

A bit more about Leeds. They are a symbol of how horribly wrong British football has gone. Lured by the millions in Champions League money, chairman Peter Ridsdale borrowed heavily (£60m, the bulk of the current debt) to buy players. Unfortunately, they bought a load of dross - paying over the odds for players such as Darren Huckerby, Seth Johnson, Robbie Fowler, and giving them lucrative contracts. To add to that they hired and fired managers at will, getting rid of David O’Leary before getting in Terry Venables and Peter Reid for a few months apiece. Tbe changes in regime brought in more and more players to strain the wage bill, which last year was 88% of turnover.

And the profligate spending wasn’t just on the players. The club forked out hundreds of thousands in directors’ salaries, company cars and private jet hire. Most infamously of all, they spent £20 a week on maintaing the goldfish in the chairman’s office. And even after leaving Leeds, you can still earn your keep - O’Leary, Venables and Reid all got comfortable payoffs (totalling £5.2m) for being sacked, and Robbie Fowler is still being paid £10,000 a week by Leeds to play for his new club, Manchester City.

So what are the lessons from this? Football got into a bubble, with TV money to the Premier League reaching over £1bn while the quality of product barely improved. Millions have been squandered on dodgy transfers, overpaid players from home and abroad, paying dodgy agents to keep the wheels oiled. It’s no surprise the market suddenly burst, Leeds just happened to be the most ambitious of all the big spenders, and consequently the most hurt. It could have happened to any club.

It’s not just Leeds who are affected. The hangover from the big party is the quite frankly dire quality of the Premiership at the moment - apart from the three title contenders, most teams are playing horrible football, scrabbling for mid-table safety and trying to avoid relegation and the loss of revenue. With little entertainment value in the Premiership, the recent sordid allegations of shame, and the clubs’ new conservative outlook, and with a new set of sporting heroes in the England rugby team, could we fall out of love with football?

Well, probably not. True, a lot of the fairweather fans might desert looking out for Man United’s scores in favour of Wasps or Harlequins, but football will always have its core support. League attendances are rising each year, although declining attendances at some Premiership clubs suggest fans are finally getting fed up with the cost of it. The deflation in the market will hopefully bring some sanity into the game again. Clubs like Charlton, Southampton and Bolton, all run on tight budgets with honest and down-to-earth managers are doing well of late while behemoths like Liverpool, Aston Villa and Tottenham grope about in mid-table. And Leeds will always serve as a reminder of what can go wrong. With the worst of the rampant commercialisation over, hopefully football will be able to reassert itself as the Beautiful Game once again.

As for Leeds? They’ll go down this season, and probably have a tough few years to come. A terrible shame, but it’s not surprising that one club or another was going to pay a heavy price.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2004 at 19:48:22 and is filed under General.