Your reading a pre 2010-11 archived article
Clarkeonenil is rightly critical (to the point of open hatred) of Bates, his glorified fund manager act, the cohorts and the dodgy ownership structures (legal requirement in Switzerland to be secret my arse), but lets us not forget we have had more than our fair share of interesting personalities in our board room over the last 15 years and some of them are still making headlines.
Never go back they say.
So on the day Derby County announce that Adam Pearson was leaving his role as Chairman (once that meant he part owned the club but lately he was just a front man for the American owners) another one of Pearson’s old clubs are reported to be in deep financial trouble. Adam lad is in danger of bobbing around clubs as often as his old mucker from Leeds United Peter Ridsdale. It didn’t take more than a nano second to join up those dots (assisted a helpful post on Facebook from one of my reliable sources) and realise Pearson was on his way back to the KC. Could it be the present owners of Hull City (some builders from Southend whose club coincidently is on the verge of administration) have decided that Pearson sold them this donkey in the first place and he can come back and sort out the mess.
The recent mess emanating out of cod city suggests they need someone with more top flight experience than Pearson has but that is not to say he isn’t capable of turning things around. If he is sensible enough he will plan for relegation, using the two seasons of PL monies (or what’s left after Nick Barmby and the other overpaid 30 players on the books have been satisfied) to stabilise the finances and hoping they can return some day with more sustainability built in. Hull City should be a club the rest of the country outside of Yorkshire (because we know the truth about the place) want to do well but the combination of Phil Brown’s ego, the financial stories and the succession of failed signings all point to Pearson also having to do some effective PR.
Pearson has been a lucky bloke so far in his football related career, he even got lucky when Bates gerrymandered the post administration selling process at Leeds United, he will need more of that in the next few months.
Always with us, like a bad smell.
It has got to the stage with “Publicity Pete” that when you see a headline suggesting his manager has called him a tightarse you assume it was all co-ordinated. Ridsdale has been all over the media since Cardiff City’s new stadium opened in July and all of it with the constant refrain of how Peter wants his reputation back. Ok lets give the man who put Leeds United into £120m worth of debt in 4 years a suckers break, what is the evidence that we (and any of our Barnsley supporting readers) can see that show a reformed character who can make a football club a business success, well very little really because when you scratch the surface you see its same old, same old.
The first thing to notice is that a stadium built on the premise it needs to be full every home game, isn’t. Despite being second in the CCC (very tight league, they will be 13th by Xmas) banks of seats go unfilled, the best players have either been sold or are seeing out their contracts to get Bosman’s, there is a ongoing legal battle between the club and an investment arm over £30m the latter wants repaying (and all the publicity around that isn’t helping attract new investment), Sam Hamamm is still in the back ground plotting his revenge and the usual fall outs Ridsdale gets involved with are occurring, Jordan and Warnock at Palace just being the latest example. If this is the new Pete thank god the old one isn’t around.
Ridsdale is and will always be a useless t**t of the lowest order whose next demise will be the most spectacular and enjoyable, no more needs to be said.
Expert you say, what at, chessy smiles.
Gerald Krasner, I swear if Dickens had thought of a character like him it would have been even more famous than Scrooge. From the day he arrived at Elland Road to today no-one quite has fictional character written all over them, but in reality he is all too real. I could go on about the mistakes he and his consortium made at Elland Road but a little like being Poland in the 1930’s, when your sandwiched between two bigger and nastier regimes your faults get obscured a little. Instead I want to focus on his so called core skill, insolvency, mainly because I can’t actually, from his involvement in us, Boston United and Bournemouth, see where he actually used any.
As we speak the last club he helped out are struggling to avoid administration, despite being top of L2 and having come out of said business state less than 2 years ago. The present ownership are very clear what the problem is, the people who brought Bournemouth out of administration last time, aided and abetted by our old LS1 based friend Gerald, immediately went and repeated the over-spending mistakes. When you bare in mind how just after Mr Krasner got involved Boston United went tits up and down 3 divisions and then you factor in the claim, repeated ad-nausea by Bates that Leeds United were 12 hours away from insolvency when he came in with his secret consortiums money you start to wonder, what exactly, apart from flog assets to mates on the cheap, does Krasner do when practicing his so called trade?
Whilst I’m more than happy to watch him assist Levi and Weston kick Bates all over the courts but that is not the same as forgetting him and his consortiums role in our demise.
So there we have it, another reminder how Elland Road attracts the strangest people. But of course this article is just a side dish, the main course is always Bates and so long as we have Leeds fans with attitude (big hand to the Scratching Shed for a great Google find on the motivation for secret ownership structures http://www.thescratchingshed.com/2009/10/even-african-lawyers-think-theres-something-fishy-at-leeds/) the battle to rescue a club goes on.
