THE soap opera saga that is Leeds United took a new twist this week.
The Football League’s disqualification of majority owner and club president Massimo Cellino at least deflected attention from my club Derby’s defeat at Elland Road on Saturday.
But that’s the only positive that comes out of this sorry saga.
Just when you thought that you had heard it all, then something else happens.
The 58-year-old Cellino was asked to resign from the Championship club by the League which said the Italian businessman had breached its “fit and proper” ownership test after it obtained documents from an Italian court which had found him guilty of tax evasion.
I’ve often wondered what makes one “fit and proper”. These rules appear to be cobbled together on the hoof – how could the Premier League accept former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra as Manchester City’s owner when he was surrounded by allegations of corruption and abuse of power?
Money is probably the simple answer.
If you applied the “fit and proper” persons rule to everyone who plays, supports or governs football then teams would turn out in front of almost empty stadiums every week.
And I don’t think there would be many left in the press box to report it either.
The Football League appear to be pursuing Cellino with a zeal it doesn’t always display.
He was fined £502,000 (600,000 euros) in March this year after being found guilty of failing to pay import duty on his yacht called Nellie.
The League subsequently blocked his deal to take control of Leeds but an independent QC overturned the decision when he appealed in April, allowing the takeover to go through.
Those close to the situation suggest the League has had its knives out for Cellino since then, having had its original decision thrown out by a legal expert.
In fact Football League chief executive Shaun Harvey, who used to hold the same role at Leeds United, didn’t take part in the debate or vote after admitting a conflict of interest.
Harvey worked at the club under former chairman Ken Bates, the Santa look-a-like who is probably not top of Cellino’s Christmas card list.
I don’t see how that one works. Were the other members of the League’s board going to fly in the face of the views of their own chief executive even if he didn’t take part in their vote?
Cellino is entitled to return to the club and resume control from March 18 next year because his conviction will be deemed spent.
So how is this disqualification going to work?
I don’t think the League have thought that one through.
Buying a football club is not like buying a telly from Comet. You can’t put it back on the shelf and go back next year to collect it.
Should the League’s decision be upheld on appeal then we’ll probably end up with a farcical situation where Cellino steps down, appoints someone to run the club in name only while he stills calls the shots in the background.
Or he may just win his appeal and carry on regardless.
If that happens then it will call into question the whole modus operandi of the Football League.
And Leeds United will continue to make the wrong kind of headlines.
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HAVE you seen the new Made in Leeds TV channel?
It has been running for a few weeks but just gone live on the Sky digital platform.
It has got a good position at channel 117, so the second page of channel listings when you switch on your telly.
When I first turned on, Made in Leeds (which hasn’t got a proper website operating yet, bizarrely) was listed as broadcasting a half hour local news programme, but was actually showing a reality show about a chef in London. After five minutes it switched back to the news programme – what I’d been watching was an extended trailer they’d dropped into the middle of the news to promote the next programme.
The station, which operates local TV services in a number of UK cities, has a limited amount of really local content for Leeds, which you can understand, given its limited resources.
Sadly these limited resources are all too clear on screen.
A newsreader in a sweater standing in front of a pop-up banner reading headlines, what looks like recent journalism graduates doing reports which included visiting the local animal sanctuary and a reality TV show about a spray-tanned “top DJ” heading to Wakefield to run an under 16s disco.
If you gave a monkey a crayon it could come up with a better schedule on the back of an envelope.
In fact I think the monkey drew the weather map for the channel.
I know it is easy to criticise, but surely if you do have limited resources and you are up against giants with the resources of the BBC, ITV and Sky, then you have to try to be different and fresh, rather than trying to ape what your bigger and better competitors do?
It is early days but at the moment the only thing Made in Leeds is doing differently to its larger rivals is having more trailers than a Skegness caravan park.
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A FRIEND who is a junior school teacher in the Midlands told me this true story the other day.
The school were organising a trip to look around the local airport for a group of youngsters from the school and so they were all sent home with letters seeking parental permission for this visit.
One of the parents promptly requested an urgent meeting with the teacher and arrived looking very perturbed.
“I’m not sure about this trip to the airport,” said the worried mum, “is there a chance that the kids might catch that tombola virus?”
With parents like that, what hope is there for the children?
