Coming into Leeds by train from the south the first landmark you see is the Leeds United football ground, Elland Road. Surrounded by low industrial sheds and small, semi-detached houses, at first glance it looks quite absurd.
A single, enormous stand, made of brick and metal and seemingly wider at the top than at the bottom, dwarfs the other three sides of the stadium and the streets around. Even by the standards of modern football-ground architecture, Elland Road seems overblown, speculative, strangely fragile.
With two-thirds of the season gone, Leeds are second from the bottom of the Premiership. Their chances of avoiding relegation were helped when they beat Wolves 4-1 on Tuesday. However, they may still be relegated.
And on Friday, as last Friday and the Friday before, Leeds are expecting to hear from their creditors, to whom they owe about £100-million, about whether they will be permitted to continue as a football club in their present form until the end of the current season, or whether they will be taken into financial administration, with a good chance that liquidation will follow. No football club before has gone into administration while in the Premiership.
Were Leeds to suffer any or all of these fates, it would complete the most spectacular implosion of an English club in the present football era. Less than 18 months ago Leeds were top of the Premiership. For several seasons before that football sages had been tipping their young and abrasive side as one of the most promising in Europe.
But since 2002 the club’s prospects have disappeared in a vivid swirl of disastrous financial and footballing gambles, plunging form and soaring debts, player rebellions and sell-offs, panicky hirings and sackings of managers and evaporating or delayed rescue bids by British and foreign business consortiums, at least two of which are stuck somewhere between rumour and reality at the time of writing.
Last week Leeds’ emergency stand-in manager, Eddie Gray, was attacked by the League Managers’ Association for not having the required coaching qualifications. The week before the Leeds players were persuaded to receive a quarter of their wages in arrears to keep the creditors satisfied.
For critics of football’s rickety commercial and ethical arrangements, the recent history of Leeds makes a satisfying morality tale. But what about the city? How does a collapsing football club affect the place around it?
Leeds, at first, does not feel like a footballing city. Unlike most other British cities of comparable size, it has only one club. When Leeds United are not playing, you can walk through the city’s blustery grid of central shopping streets without seeing anyone in a football shirt.
Recently, on a day when the players were negotiating their wages and the creditors were about to give their latest judgement, the newspaper sellers’ boards read, ‘Leeds city parks plan” and ‘Leeds shivers in big freeze”.
Football came later to Leeds in the 19th century than to other northern cities, and it struggled well into the 20th. Clubs called Leeds, Leeds Albion and Leeds City all folded, the last, prophetically, after several years of desperate financial manoeuvres and lost battles with creditors, culminating in expulsion from the football league for making illicit payments to players.
Leeds United, founded in 1919, proved more durable but took half a century to escape from provincial obscurity.
‘Before us,” says Peter Lorimer, one of the stars of the successful Leeds team managed by Don Revie in the late 1960s and early 1970s, ‘it was a nothing team.”
But before and for long periods after Revie, the city did not seem to need a big football team. The history of Leeds, or at least the dominant local version, is one of relentless and eclectic commercial enterprise: textiles, banking and law, retail, call centres, low unemployment, brief recessions and long periods of prosperity.
‘The current boom’s been fairly continuous for 20 years,” says Professor John Shutt of Leeds Metropolitan University, an authority on the city’s economic development. ‘It is quite independent from the football club.”
In the centre of Leeds its wealthy young men walking purposefully in Prada trainers, and cranes on the horizon hauling new loft developments and office blocks skywards, the problems at Elland Road, out of sight to the south, do not feel critical. But there is more than one Leeds, and elsewhere in the city the weekly escapism of football may be more important.
Traditionally, the treeless council estates and plain terraced streets of south Leeds are the club’s heartland. ‘Everybody round here supports them,” says the woman behind the counter at Elland Road News. ‘I worked down there [at the ground] for 20 years.”
She looks wistful, then her face darkens: ‘It’s so sad now.”
Next door stands an empty office building partly decorated in Leeds colours. The building used to be the club’s travel agency, in the days when the team regularly qualified for matches abroad. Now the estate agent’s board above the front door says ‘under offer”.
Since the full extent of the club’s financial crisis became clear last year, 75 non-playing staff have been made redundant. Those remaining come and go from the stadium and its surviving outbuildings with slightly anxious expressions. ‘RIP Leeds From Chelsea”, reads a big white splash of graffiti on the car park wall.
But the effects of this may go beyond a relatively modest number of jobs.
‘It’s supposed to be the city of the north, is Leeds,” says the woman in Elland Road News. ‘If Leeds United go down, what have Yorkshire got? Yorkshire won’t have a Premiership club, unless Sheffield United go up. Lancashire have Manchester United, Manchester City, Bolton … Leeds have become a laughing stock.”
Taunts and the loss of local bragging rights are only part of the story. ‘The new global economy puts more value on signs, and football is one of those signs,” says John Williams, director of the centre for research into sports and society at Leicester University.
‘For any city that’s undergoing cultural regeneration having an important football team is part of that.” In effect, ‘clubs are seen as attractors for business. When teams play in the Champions’ League, their cities send delegations from their chambers of commerce.”
Until recently this connection between footballing and civic fortunes was a favourite theme for people promoting Leeds. A ‘vision for Leeds” recently unveiled by the city’s planners is expressed in football metaphors — ‘going up a league”, ‘becoming one of the premier cities in Europe” — that now seem faintly unfortunate.
And yet a decade ago, when Leeds United were entering their boom phase, this kind of brashness felt right for how the club and the city were developing.
‘In the early 1990s Leeds had some of the best nightclubs in the world and the best football club in Britain,” says magazine publisher James Brown, who grew up in Leeds. ‘You got this sort of tremendous confidence.”
A significant proportion of the students and young professionals drawn to the city as its population grew during the 1990s were young men with money and a certain Saturday-night swagger — potential or actual fans of a football club also becoming increasingly prosperous.
‘To a degree it did become a networking thing,” says Brendan Foody, the chairperson of Leeds property consultants, Sanderson Weatherall. ‘There was a very strong business group that followed Leeds on the foreign trips.” According to the 2004 club annual, Elland Road retains ‘around 10 suites catering for corporate fans”.
You can get another sense of the boom-time Leeds United, and how it has faded, by going to Roundhay. Here, in one of the city’s wealthiest suburbs, there is a parade of shops and restaurants favoured by Leeds players and their better-off supporters. The biggest shopfront belongs to a cavernous Italian restaurant called Flying Pizza.
‘We open at six, the perfect time for people coming out of the match,” says the owner Martin Pickles. ‘If Leeds have won 3-0, it’s, ‘Who’s coming up to the Pizza?’ If Leeds have been thrashed it’s, ‘We’re going home.”’
How has business been since the crisis began at the club?
‘We’ve noticed it in our revenue.”
What does he think of how the club has been managed?
‘It was audacious. You could say reckless … Leeds is built on good solid Jewish money. And a lot of good solid Jewish people are lamenting what Peter Ridsdale [the Leeds United chairperson during the over-expansion] did.” Pickles pauses. ‘But if he’d been successful, they’d have been erecting statues to him in City Square.”
For all the caution and solidity in Leeds’ image of itself, it is a city with mock-Italian towers attached to Victorian mills, and a current retail and housing boom based on personal debt of almost Leeds United proportions.
‘The city has always had ambitions to be sophisticated and think big,” says journalist Richard Benson, who has followed Leeds United and written about them intermittently for decades. ‘The problem with using sport as a regenerative thing is that people love sports teams because they win.”
But whatever happens at Elland Road, there are people with a connection to the football club who might even welcome the worst outcome. Someone who lives next to the ground admits that, were Leeds United to disintegrate, ‘The mums around here … will be glad. We’ll not have the likes of Manchester United and Liverpool running through our gardens.”
And then her train of thought moves to its conclusion: ‘If the club goes it would be great for our property.” —