Avoiding the Drop

As part of pulling together the “About Last Night” post at the beginning of the day, I read a lot of soccer news stories. Some of those stories I condense into a (hopefully) clever one-line witticism, some I just rehash quickly, and others I set aside. The ones I set aside are then parsed fall into two separate columns: stories about stuff I don’t know anything about, and stories about stuff that might be interesting to research a little fuller for a full-blown piece. Also, there’s another category: stories I completely miss (this category, frankly, is probably the largest of the group).

So when David Conn of  “The Guardian” wrote a story about team ownership in the Football League, I completely missed it. Know who didn’t miss it? Leeds United, who have banned all Guardian reporters from their Elland Road facility in response.

David Conn’s piece specifically discusses the “Fit and Proper” test in the Football League. This test is, incidentally, different and a little more stringent than the same-named test in the Premier League; as part of it, anyone who owns 30% of a club must be identified within 14 days of a takeover. Simple, no?

Unfortunately, Leeds chairman Ken Bates is running into some issues here. In court in January, Bates stated that the holding company that owns Leeds – Forward Sports Fund – was owned by himself and his financial advisor, Patrick Murrin. Were that true, there’d be no issues.

Sadly for Leeds, it isn’t true. Back in May, Bates actually clarified the position. Oh, the Cayman Islands company was, in fact, owned by him…providing you don’t count the 10,000 shares held by persons as yet identified. Bates chalked that little gaffe up to “an error”.

That error could prove rather expensive. While the Football League didn’t really take any action at their meetings last week, the ownership issues involved raised a bunch of red flags with the local Leeds Council. Leeds was looking to enter into an agreement with the city regarding their Thorp Arch training ground. Leeds held a £6 million option to buy the ground; they would exercise said option and then sell the ground back to the city, who would lease it to Leeds. The use of the training ground could have made Leeds a venue for the 2012 Olympics and (hypothetically) the World Cup.

Instead, the option to buy was allowed to expire on Friday as the council refused to enter into a deal with a club with such a nebulous ownership situation; should the training ground – currently owned by businessman Jacob Adler – hit the open market, Leeds would be forced to compete with everyone else to buy their own training ground.

Either way, the fact of the matter is that banning an entire news organization from covering your matches seems like an awfully over-the-top reaction. “The Guardian” has also put Notts County and Queen’s Park Rangers under the microscope over ownership issues, but only Leeds has responded this fiercely. It really makes you wonder who owns those other shares, doesn’t it?