WSC 194 Apr 03

Real Madrid celebrated their centenary year by win­ning the European Champions League for the third time in five years. At the other end of the football scale, Bradford City’s preparations for their 100th birthday party have been boosted by Leeds High Court’s decision in February to lift the administration order that threa­tened the survival of the club form­ed in May 1903 when the Football League voted them into the Second Division. 

The Bantams went into administration in May last year and the collapse of the ITV Digital deal was inevitably men­tioned as a prime factor. Managing Dir­ector Shaun Harvey agrees that the col­lapse did “focus attention within foot­ball clubs” and adds: “Whether clubs are run well or not, sailing close to the wind or far away from it, they don’t bud­get to win the FA Cup, but they did bud­get to receive that money.” None­theless, Brad­ford’s plight was not helped by the financial largesse shown by previous chairman Geof­frey Rich­mond that con­trib­uted in no small part to sev­eral player redundancies and over 30 non-playing staff get­ting their P45s.

It was as recently as 1999 that Bradford reached the Premiership, but in similar circumstances to their more illustrious Yorkshire neighbours Leeds United they gambled the club’s future and lost. Players only received their January 2003 wages because the club managed to delay a £350,000 mortgage payment on the Sunwin Stand at Valley Parade and sold Benito Car­bone’s £750,000 house, ironically enough in Leeds.

With the threat of administration lifted, the new era of Bradford City will be under the stewardship of in­coming chairman Geoffrey Gibb, by far the youngest in such a job, aged just 27. Harvey pulls out the old foot­ball adage when pushed about the relative inexperience of his chairman: “If you’re good enough, you’re old enough.” He adds: “You have to ask yourself the ques­tion: Is Doug Ellis too old?”

Gibb has said he is not in the game to make friends (probably a good thing because he’ll struggle to have a chat about Ms Dynamite with Deadly Doug). The bur­den of rescuing Bradford should be no prob­lem to someone who was running multi-million pound bus­inesses while still a teenager and has made his family’s tourist attraction, the wonderfully named Fla­mingo Land, one of the most popular outside the capital.

Speaking to the Yorkshire Post in January, Gibb states rather refreshingly: “To be perfectly frank, they got it wrong in the first place and if they had not got it wrong then I would not be here… I am not going to be do­ing the things that they did because, as an industry, those old ways of doing things are just what got us in this mess in the first place.”

A point whole-heartedly supported by Harvey, who states: “Bradford will have a certain budget for next season and suc­ceed or fail on the field the club will still be there, we will never again gamble with is very existence.”

With that in mind, he is looking for­ward to the club’s centenary celebrations that start on May 24. “It’s tremendous,” Har­vey enthuses, “there was a time last year when I didn’t think we’d make it. The timing is fortuitous because we can put the problems of the past few years well behind us. It’s a natural break and a great boost, specifically a new start.”

Bradford’s 100th birthday party will start with a commemorative match featuring former City players. Although one suspects that Car­bone, Stan Collymore and David Hopkin should not cancel any holiday plans just yet.

From WSC 194 April 2003. What was happening this month

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