Leeds have every right to stick it to the entitled Big 6
THeRe was good news and bad news for Leeds owner Andrea Radrizzani this week. The bad news was that he incurred the wrath of football’s Big Six. The good news was: no one gives a stuff.
Radrizzani (below) invited the fury of the entitled by branding their project to hijack football ‘a disgrace’. Happily, their selfinterested duplicity is so nakedly apparent now that nobody cares for their approval anyway.
In many ways, this whole issue has become an intelligence test. There are still some observers who have considered the subject so deeply they are praising the charlatan architects of Project Big Picture for starting a conversation about wealth distribution in the lower leagues.
That is like crediting Al-Qaeda for starting a conversation about airport security in 2001.
Discussions around how to spread football’s wealth more fairly have been permanent since the Premier League began. It is just that Liverpool and Manchester United were not interested until there was something in it for them.
So please be clear — the bung to the eFL was the trade-off for the money and all the power. Take those items off the table and we’ll see how keen Liverpool and Manchester United are on supporting the pyramid. where were they when Macclesfield went skint — and Bury?
Radrizzani is most certainly a hypocrite and guilty as charged. He was party to secret talks about a Championship breakaway two years ago and was also an advocate of Premier League 2. Yet that is not the big clubs’ real beef. He has upset them by daring to speak on Premier League issues when his Leeds regime have been involved in it for only five games. For, as always, it is only where a club is now that counts. The elite think Radrizzani has proved their point that the longest serving members should get the biggest say. As ever, they’re wrong. This is a moment in time. Just as it was in the three seasons Leeds were champions. Indeed, it is just as well we didn’t put football on pause back then, in 1973-74. Leeds won the title with Arsenal 10th, Tottenham 11th, Manchester City 14th and, Chelsea 17th. And
Manchester United? Relegated. Good job nobody decided to raise the drawbridge on money, power and influence then.
United and City were 11th and 13th respectively when Leeds were champions in 1968-69, and Chelsea and Tottenham were 14th and 15th in 1991-92. That was the last year before the Premier League began and Leeds won the title again, so the idea they played no part in making this the most successful domestic competition is bogus, too.
In fact, the battle between Manchester United and unfashionable clubs like Leeds, Newcastle and Blackburn was among its earliest selling points. Leeds have been away a while, but they helped build this league as much as anybody, certainly globally. They had great African players like Lucas Radebe, their South African captain, and Ghana’s Tony Yeboah scored memorable goals. Mark Viduka, an Australian, was their striker, too.
BeTweeN 1998-99 and 2000-01, Leeds finished in the top four in three consecutive seasons. Tottenham were 11th, 10th and 12th. Manchester City were in what is now League One, then the Championship, before being relegated from the Premier League. even when Leeds slipped to fifth in 2001- 02, they still finished above Chelsea and Tottenham.
To argue now that time in the wilderness leaves them without rights as a newly- promoted member of the Premier League is arrant nonsense. It has succeeded for so long now, precisely because it is a democracy. Clubs come and go but, once in, they have an equal say.
The system has to work for both Manchester United and Burnley, for Liverpool and Leeds. every club contributes. Radrizzani is right — to disregard that is a disgrace.