It was time bungling big Ed made his exit

EDIN Rahic didn’t want to run a football club. He wanted to head a dictatorship – a real life version of Football Manager.

Yet even the computer sim would probably have left the German megalomaniac feeling short of control.

Over the last two years, Rahic has demonstrated an ego of galactic proportions and the people skills of a molecule. Combined, those qualities sucked Bradford City into a black hole.

That is why he has been belatedly booted out of Valley Parade, the withering words of a one-time ally kicking him down the drive.

“The time for change has come,” said Stefan Rupp, who bought the club in May 2016 and immediately installed Rahic – who has sold his own 22 per cent stake – as chairman.

“I will do everything in my power to wash away the dreadful memories of the last 12 months and consign them to the history books for good.”

It is the business equivalent of a cheated spouse chucking suitcases out of the window and Facebook-shaming the culprit.

Rahic, though, can hardly complain. Prior to his arrival, Julian Rhodes and Mark Lawn - in tandem with manager Phil Parkinson – painstakingly restored respect to a club that had spent a decade on its backside.

Promotion to League One and a remarkable Wembley final injected optimism into terraces long starved of success. Rahic took a hammer to it all.

From the start, he seemingly craved only adulation and power. To sign players. To pick the team. Even to select the penalty takers.

Staff at all levels complained of being intrusively micromanaged by a man who treated the club as his own personal fiefdom, and whose meddling gave the impression that he thought he could do everybody’s job better than they could.

Publicly, Rahic downplayed his role, but an interview in his native Germany let the cat out of the bag. “As owners, it cannot be classed as interfering when we are responsible for what happens at every level of the football club,” he said.

Manager Stuart McCall, meanwhile, was resented not just for his popularity with fans but his failure to play the patsy.

Even as the Scot celebrated leading the Bantams to a League One play-off final in 2017, Rahic was busy undermining him on the touchline.

“I am head of football,” he told perplexed reporters. “If we concede a goal, I will comment because I know about football. You have to take me seriously.”

Yes, he was chairman, CEO and a major shareholder. He had prime spot in the car park, a brass plate above the office door.

But Rahic – who claims to have played for Yugoslavia Under-16s – had done nothing to warrant being taken seriously by anybody at Bradford, least of all a man with 40 caps for Scotland and the club in his blood. Whining about it only made him look pathetic.

Having seized on a dodgy run to dismiss McCall in February, Rahic was frustrated when a string of managers rejected his advances.

Simon Grayson, employed on a short-term deal, walked at the end of last season. Paul Heckingbottom and Mark Warburton didn’t even accept an interview.

Rahic complained – and probably believed – that Brits didn’t want to work as a head coach under a director of football.

But even in Germany, where sporting directors rule the roost, such a system is anchored on trust, democracy and mutual respect. Rahic simply wanted a yes man, and word quickly spread. In the end, he promoted 32-yearold Michael Collins – who didn’t even apply for the job – from his post with the youth team, then sacked him six games later.

Pre-weekend, the Bantams were bottom of League One and seven points from safety, burdened with their highest wage bill since relegation from the second tier in 2004. Long-serving, knowledgeable staff have left their posts. Disaster looms.

It is one thing to conjure up ruin whilst attempting to do the right thing. Tony Xia, the erstwhile benefactor of Aston Villa, is one of many owners whose misguided generosity inadvertently crippled the club.

With Rahic, it is harder to have sympathy. He arrived, seemingly, with the sole aim of using Bradford City to act out his fantasy of running a football club then pursued it despite spiralling costs and tumbling fortunes.

And, to the bitter end, he refused to admit he’d made a pig’s ear of it. “If I do something like that again, then I have to take over the club 100 per cent,” he told a newspaper in his native Stuttgart last year. “I must be owner and CEO in one person.”

God help that club.