Big Story
Sometimes Wikipedia, despite often lacking the neutral tone of your average encyclopedia, does describe things best — in fact, precisely because of that. Witness the entry on Peter Ridsdale, former chairman of Leeds United.

Ridsdale became chairman of hometown club Leeds United in 1997 and enjoyed success in the first four years of tenure as Leeds reached the UEFA Cup semi-final in 1999–2000 and the UEFA Champions League semi-finals in 2000–01. During this time he enjoyed a good relationship with the Leeds fans.[1] However, once the full extent of what Ridsdale and his board had done at Elland Road was discovered by the fans this relationship vanished and he is now best remembered by Leeds supporters for the financial nightmare that the club found themselves in.

Under Ridsdale’s stewardship the club borrowed £60m against future gate receipts, effectively gambling on Leeds qualifying for the Champions League in successive seasons, which they failed to do. Ridsdale has repeatedly denied any blame with regard to the later situation of the club[2] but has also conflictingly admitted it was a mistake to allow David O’Leary to spend so lavishly on players.[3] Ridsdale also claimed that he would have saved Leeds from subsequent relegations to the third tier of English football and the debt his board had incurred in the name of the club.[4] The fact remained however that by the time Ridsdale stepped down in March 2003, Leeds were £103 million in debt and failing on the field.[5]

So Ridsdale left and went on to Barnsley, where he showed considerable improvement in his club management skills, this time taking only a little over a year to run the club into the ground and get the hell out of there.

And then he showed up at Cardiff City; this time, he’s managed to make himself perhaps even more unpopular than ever before — quite an achievement.  His latest bout of unpopularity comes after he convinced thousands of fans to buy 2011 season tickets at the end of last year to bring in revenue to be used on bringing in new players in the transfer window, only to then announce the money would be used to pay off unpaid tax bills and that new players would not be brought in. The fans are furious, and are calling for an Emergency General Meeting of the club.

Cardiff City supporters have called for an extraordinary general meeting so the club can explain why they will not be using fans’ money to buy new players.
Fans had expected an estimated £3m raised by advance season ticket sales to be used to finance transfers.

But Cardiff’s decision not to buy players is because of a cash crisis. ”They have made a big mistake by over-budgeting. An EGM is what we need now,” demanded Paul Corkery, chair of Cardiff City Supporters Trust.

More than 10,000 fans invested in deals for season tickets for 2010/11, cash that manager Dave Jones said he expected to be used to buy new players.
And if Cardiff won promotion to the Premier League the fans were promised that money would be paid back to them in a scheme called “Golden Ticket”.

In response, Ridsdale said “I have two choices. I either run away or I apologise.” Unfortunately for Cardiff City fans, he decided to take the former option: “I won’t run away.”

Worldwide News

• Portsmouth FC’s website went down earlier today (it’s back up) due to an unpaid bill — hardly surprising, if a little sad. Portsmouth’s supporters’ trust rushed to help out, hosting ticket information at their site in the meantime. Portsmouth have also cut funding for a development scheme in Guernsey, saving a mere £2,000. And they’ve just now warned staff their wages may not be paid tomorrow.
• Despite a considerable increase in the club’s spending, Barcelona managed to turn a profit in 2009.
• Sky Sports are claiming that their broadcast of Arsenal vs. Manchester United is the first to be aired to a public audience in 3-d. Maybe in the UK — the piece doesn’t specify – but this isn’t the case, as this was tried in Mexico many months ago.
• The Houston Dynamo apparently have an interesting new stadium option.

The Sweeper appears every weekday, and once at the weekend. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Big Story
The Guardian, and particularly Football Supporters’ Federation writer of the year David Conn, have provided Britain’s best newspaper coverage of the ugly underbelly of the finances at British football clubs across England for quite some time. Leeds United have been the subject of considerable coverage by Conn recently, as he has uncovered the club’s ownership mystery via public court records, embarrassing Leeds chairman Ken Bates.

Leeds’ response? To ban the Guardian and Conn from reporting at Elland Road at their game against Norwich in League One. As Conn explains, “the Guardian will not be reporting from the game because, we were informed this afternoon, we have been “banned” from Elland Road. The reason given was that this is the club’s reaction to the articles I have written recently, which have reported that there is a mystery about who owns Leeds United. That is a matter of public record, because it emerged in a court case Leeds United as a club has itself brought against a company in Jersey.”

This is a terribly childish response by Leeds. I’ve led with this piece and hope others link to Conn’s article to put Leeds in the ugly spotlight they deserve, and to give even more attention to Conn’s original reporting, which was nothing but quality, fair-minded journalism. Ken Bates and Leeds should be ashamed of themselves, though sadly, they won’t be.

Worldwide News

• He’s not going away. Sepp Blatter, FIFA president, subject of numerous serious corruption allegations, and former president of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders, announced today he will stand for reelection in 2011. Blatter told the Gazzetta dello Sport “I’ve not finished my mission in football yet. I need more time. I hope that in 2011 the Fifa congress once more has faith in me, otherwise I’ll go back to my village. Football is my life.”  Great.
• Didn’t I tell you yesterday the Sweden job would be too dull for Sven? (or, really, not lucrative enough…)
• The Offside traces back the origin of the recent Henry-to-MLS-rumour — and finds it had the basis in, well, nothing. While this isn’t too surprising, it’s an interesting look at how these rumours gain credence as they’re passed from site to site with no basis whatsoever.
• This year’s nominee’s for the U.S.’s Soccer Hall of Fame have been released, including MLS Commissioner Don Garber. Sadly, the Hall itself is itself in serious trouble. Let’s hope a way to preserve the history of the game here is found.
• Much of the British press focuses today on Liverpool’s match against Lyon, seen as a crunch game for Rafa Benitez, while Soccernet continues yesterday’s theme by warning that Champions League failure could mean financial meltdown for the club.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Dirty, dirty Leeds. Dirty fucking Leeds. After reading David Peace’s novel The Damned Utd these words cycled through my head for days. They work as an obsessive refrain in Peace’s account of Brian Clough’s infamous 44 days as the manager of (dirty, dirty) Leeds.

I knew nothing about Clough, Leeds, and this bizarre story before reading Peace’s novel. Nevertheless, his writing drew me in – aggressively.  I felt as if Clough himself, in all his puerile genius, had wormed his way into my head.  And that voice was irritating – arrogant, monomaniacal, defensive.  The intensity and distinctiveness of Peace’s writing is such that it makes you care about, even identify with this deeply flawed and narcissistic character.

The writing bears no resemblance to traditional sports narrative – the novel borders on experimental, in fact. Its momentum is entropic. Things don’t come together in this story, they fall apart.

Like any fan of a novel, I reacted to the news that it was being turned into a movie with suspicion.  I couldn’t imagine how a novel with such a narrow range of focus, a novel whose setting is really one man’s emotional landscape, could possibly be translated into a commercial film.  If it has a happy ending, it is well outside the novel’s plot – in what happened after he left Leeds, and reconnected with his partner, coach Peter Taylor.  (They led Nottingham Forest in the late 1970s through an amazing run of League Cups, European Cups, and went unbeaten for an insane 42 games.)

In the movie theater, a couple near me asked if this was a “sports movie, you know, like an underdog story.”  Every sports narrative apparently demands this structure: the unlikely hero who overcomes the odds and wins the big game.

Fortunately, the answer to this question is – No, this is not an underdog story. This is a film about a guy who was an underdog when he took over Derby County and led them from the bottom of the second division to the top of the first in two years. (Imagine!) This is the story of a manager whose “touch” seems actually particular to underdog teams, like Derby County and Nottingham Forest – as well as underrated players (Taylor specialized in picking up players other teams had written off). But he was not, really, the underdog so much as the outsider when he took over Leeds – and failed.

Clough was a hater – and no team was as much the object of his ire than Leeds United. His antipathy towards Leeds was by no means a secret. Incredibly, when Leeds manager Don Revie was asked to take on the England national team, Leeds asked Clough to take over. Moth to the flame, Clough accepted the job, and bungled – he was sacked after 44 days of antagonism and controversy.

So, departing from the sports script, here there is no glorious win. Just the story of an impudent, self-centered (gifted) bastard so driven by hate that he takes over a team in order to take them apart.

The film is gentler than the book. (A film that stuck to the maniacal tone of Peace’s writing would, in fact, be almost unwatchable.) The screenplay splits its time between Clough’s Oedipal struggle against Revie, and his friendship with his Taylor (who refused to move to Leeds with Clough). Their relationship is explicitly cast in terms of love — the film plays with their dynamic as a couple, and this is where any of the tenderness and emotion in the film is expressed.  The happy resolution demanded by mainstream cinema is organized around their reconciliation.

I loved the film. But I also love English weather and Thomas Hardy novels. It’s visually gorgeous, but everything is gray, wet, and dilapidated. If there is paint on the walls, it’s peeling. If there is wallpaper, it’s greasy. Glass is grimey. Fields are muddy. Ceilings are low and stained. Early on, there is a lovely scene of Clough, desperate to impress, trying to tidy up the facilities at Derby before an early match against Leeds – polishing tarnished brass, scrubbing blacked grout. There isn’t a lot of game footage, but what is there is dirty: all I remember about those scenes is mud, rain, and blood.

The film is notable for its realism and its refusal to glamorize the game. This is, I think, where the film pays homage to the era (and Peace’s writing) most faithfully:  This story unfolds before the hyper-mediatization of football.  The sport feels fleshy and personal.  Its aesthetic sensibility is the dead opposite of a film like Goal, or even Douglas Gordon’s art house hit, Zidane: Portrait of the 21st Century. There just wasn’t that much money in either the game or in the broadcasting of the game (at least not like there is today).  The sport, as we encounter it today, has been cleaned up for the camera.  The Damned United’s story seems to signal the beginning of these shifts.

There is another “money” story here – that of English class politics.  Clough’s brashness, the criticism that he was “too much”, that he was inappropriate, crass, and too ambitious is the complaint made against a man who doesn’t “know his place.” If he was an upstart and pretender, it was because he refused to let his own working class origins limit his imagination – and he also knew that he’d never get past the door if he waited for someone to open it for him. To this day, Clough is referred to as “the greatest manager England never had,” and most assume he was never invited to lead the country’s team because the FA couldn’t stand the idea of having someone like Clough in this representative role.

Given the centrality of class to Clough’s story, the phrase “dirty, dirty Leeds” (repeated hundreds of times in Peace’s novel) takes on an added importance.

Everything around Clough feels shabby and worthless when compared to what Revie has. Even though Clough knows he’s the better manager, that at Derby he was managing the better team, something in him makes him feel like this was not enough.  Clough is more boy than man, invested in a recognition (from Revie) that he’ll never get (Revie refuses the hand Clough offers him, not in a deliberate slight but because he didn’t notice Clough, who was cloaked in insignificance).

As we watch Clough nervously cleaning up Derby’s shabby facilities, we see him trying to scrub away the dirt of a working class world — his world.  In these details, we see a man who on some level feels he will never be good enough, a man incapable, too, of being happy with what he has. And of course, this restlessness, this discontent was behind the arrogance and ambition that made him such a legend.

You might not have noticed, but the UEFA Europa League (formerly the UEFA Cup) started play this week. Despite the rebranding, you probably still don’t care too much who wins it — oddly enough, the tournament is back where it started in that sense. In the 1950s and 1960s, then known as the Fairs Cup, its purpose and meaning were unclear, and complaints rained down that it was just another pointless competition cluttering up the schedule. Then came the glory years for the UEFA Cup of the 1970s and 1980s — when and why has the tournament actually meant something?

The Inter-Cities Fairs Cup

The UEFA Cup has rather curious origins as the International Industries Fairs Inter-Cities Cup (lets call it the Fairs Cup for short, shall we?), a tournament first organised in 1955 only for teams representing European cities hosting trade fairs. It’s not particularly obvious from anything I can find why UEFA wanted to promote trade fairs — which at the time were a big deal, showcasing a city’s industry to investors and consumers from around Europe — but it was Switzerland’s Ernst Thommen, Italy’s Ottorino Barrasi (both future FIFA vice-presidents) and England’s future FIFA president Sir Stanley Rous from England who got the tournament off the ground, independently of UEFA.

The first tournament stretched over three seasons from 1955-58, in the early days of European competition — the European Cup was founded two weeks earlier than the Fairs Cup in April 1955. Teams from Barcelona, Basle, Birmingham, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Lausanne, Leipzig, London, Milan and Zagreb took part in the inaugural Fairs Cup. Similar to the Europa Cup today, British teams hardly saw the tournament as a priority, as the F.A.’s historian explains: “In those days the Football League and the FA Cup were the priorities for English clubs. They were wary of European competitions, then so new, in case they got in the way of their ‘bread and butter’ competitions.”

The tournament took three years to complete, as matches were timed to coincide with trade fairs, presumably to raise the profile of the fairs and at the same time promote intra-European football. Each city was only only allowed to enter one team (a rule that would remain in place until 1975), and the initial reaction to this was for cities to put together scratch teams from several clubs in to represent them — such as the London XI, which lost to Barcelona in the first Fairs Cup final 8-2 over two legs.  The Times‘ correspondent at the match noted the disability that “representative” city teams drawing on numerous club sides had. “Barcelona are a club side, and they demonstrated better teamwork throughout the entire match.”

The second tournament was for clubs only, but the stipulation that they must be from cities holding trade fairs was continued, and sixteen teams entered. Barcelona won again, in a contest that spanned three years to 1960. Similar to today’s Europa Cup, the Fairs Cup operated under a cumbersome and drawn-out group stage system until the semi-final stage.

After the second event, the tournament was contested within a single season; this added to the fixture list burden on many teams, and complaints began to spread about its purpose.  What, after all, did it really mean to be the best team in Europe that holds a trade fair?  Yet as football under the floodlights against exotic European competition became an increasingly glamorous and money-spinning priority for top European teams, the appeal of the Fairs Cup grew as a secondary European tournament, hanging onto the coattails of the benchmark European Cup.

The UEFA Cup

And instead of dying a silent death like so many other ill-conceived intra-European contests (stand up, Anglo-Italian Cup), the Fairs Cup was given purpose in the early 1970s as a serious competition, when it was taken over by UEFA and renamed the UEFA Cup, with the trade fair connection removed. It was now the ‘Runners-Up Cup’ — with only the national champion going to the European Cup, the chance for exciting European action for teams finishing second in their leagues quickly gave the Cup a prestige for two decades that it never otherwise had before or since. A playoff between the last and first winners of the Fairs Cup, Leeds United and Barcelona, was played to decide who would keep the Fairs trophy; perhaps fittingly, Barcelona — the most successful team in the history of the Fairs Cup — won.

Tottenham Hotspur won the first edition of the UEFA Cup in 1971-2; the glorious teams that won the tournament in the 1970s speaks to the quality on show, with Liverpool winning it twice in the early 1970s ahead of their European Cup glory years, and Juventus winning their first ever European trophy in it in 1977. The tournament was where many great teams first burst on to the European stage, just before they become enough of a powerhouse to win their domestic leagues consistently and graduate to regular European Cup competition. With countries having just one entrant to the European Cup, the UEFA Cup was always bound to be filled with prestigious teams.

Spurs' captain Allan Mullery lifting the UEFA Cup, celebrating their victory in 1972

The beginning of the end for the UEFA Cup’s prestige came with the launch of the UEFA Champions League in 1992. With countries now having as many as four entrants to that, the quality of the UEFA Cup inevitably suffered. Its purpose became even more confused in 1999, when it was merged with the European Cup Winners Cup, and a group stage was added in 2005-6, guaranteeing teams more games but only adding to the sense it was all rather pointless. With teams that had failed to qualify from the group stage of the Champions League also parachuting into the tournament, it was not so much the Runners Up Cup any longer, but the Also-Rans Trophy. The attitude towards the tournament shown by Spurs manager Harry Redknapp earlier this year — despite his club’s many glory moments in the tournament over the years — showed how far it had sunk, as Spurs put out a weakened team seemingly bent on eliminating themselves.

UEFA Europa Cup

The format has been changed once again for the 2009-10 season with the rebranding of the tournament as the UEFA Europa Cup, with the Intertoto Cup also folded directly into it. I have to call on Wikipedia to explain how it’s all going to work, because it’s really not worth trying to keep track of this ourselves:

A new format for the UEFA Europa League will be introduced for the three-year cycle, starting in the 2009–2010 season. The biggest change is that there will be a group stage with 12 groups of four teams (in a double round robin) instead of eight groups of five (in a single round robin).

Qualification will also change significantly. Associations ranked 7–9 in the UEFA coefficients will send the Cup winner and three other teams to the UEFA Europa League qualification, all other nations send a Cup winner and two other teams, except Liechtenstein, Andorra and San Marino, who will only send a Cup winner. Usually, the other teams will be the next highest ranked clubs in each domestic league after those qualifying for the UEFA Champions League, however France and England will most likely continue to use one spot for their League Cup winner. Additionally, three places in the first of four qualifying rounds are still reserved for Fair Play winners. For the inaugral 2009–2010 season these places will go to Rosenborg of Norway, Randers of Denmark and Motherwell of Scotland.

Generally, the higher an association is ranked in the UEFA coefficients, the later its clubs start in the qualification, however every team except the title holder has to play at least one qualification round.

Apart from the teams mentioned, an additional 15 losing teams from the Champions League qualification round two will enter in the fourth and last UEFA Europa League qualification round, formerly known as the first round, and the 10 losers of the Champions League qualification round 3 will directly enter the UEFA Europa League group stage. The 12 winners and the 12 runners-up in the group stage will advance to the first knock out round, together with eight 3rd placed teams from the Champions League group stage. The losing finalist for the domestic cup competition will still be entitled to be entered for the UEFA Europa League should the domestic cup winners qualify for the UEFA Champions League.

Right, then. Got that?

The central reason for the latest name changes has little to do with the format — the tournament already had a group stage, after all — but as a branding tool with UEFA taking over the sale of television rights for the entire tournament, instead of teams selling their own rights. With the central sale, UEFA has raised the value of the competition, which one supposes will also mean more prize money and thus more incentive for teams to take it more seriously.

What UEFA hasn’t done is managed to raise the meaning of it all to supporters across Europe; the tournament now seems as pointless to win as the Fairs Cup of the 1960s with the plethora of entry requirements and drawn-out groups stage. The tournament’s glory days of the 1970s and 1980s seem to be confined to the same dustbin as the name UEFA Cup.