Thanks for this. I eventually finished listening today, and I broadly agree with your conclusion. Back in the dark days of the late 1990s, I had an article published in King of the Kippax that sought to apportion blame between Swales and Lee for the position the club was in, and I concluded that Lee didn't quite have an impossible job (he made a number of errors IMO, without the worst of which he could have succeeded), but the catastrophic legacy Swales had left was primarily responsible for our troubles. I haven't changed my mind.
I also thought you were correct when you suggested that Swales was extremely self-serving during his time as chairman, while Lee had a more straightforwardly genuine affection for the club. I do know there are people around who claim Lee was out solely to make money from MCFC in this period but I disagree. He'd invested, as you noted, quite a large proportion of his personal wealth in the club and hoped for a return (fair enough, as he'd otherwise have invested it in other ways with an aim of generating a profit), but that wasn't ever the main thing for him IMO.
I was at a law firm in Manchester during the Lee period and we acted for various people who had an involvement in the club. One or two of them wouldn't try to hide the fact that they thought him a ****, but no one denied his genuine affection for the club. If we're playing at being amateur psychologists, I'd suggest there may have been an element of ego, too, with the role appealing to him of a returning hero restoring success to the moribund old club to great public acclaim. But I don't accept he wasn't and isn't passionate about MCFC.
I had the odd point on which I might have added extra as I went through the three episodes, but most of them aren't worth making a big deal over now. One I will mention, though, concerns his departure as a player. He left in the same week as Asa Hartford signed for big money, and I assumed that the fee for Franny was needed so we could sign Hartford. In addition, we switched to playing three rather than two in midfield at that point, so he might not have been a tactical fit for how Tony Book wanted to play.
However, I've read somewhere (perhaps Alec Johnson's 'The Battle for Manchester City?) that, when Ron Saunders was sacked, Lee was disgusted by Swales speaking to the players about the sacking behind Saunders's back. He went to Saunders and immediately informed him of what was happening, saying something along the lines that, while the two of them may not have got on personally, he (Lee) thought the episode disgraceful and wanted no part of it.
That supposedly led to a row between Lee and Swales, and when he was sold to Derby, Lee supposedly believed that this was the real cause. As I say, there may have been actual footballing reasons for the sale, but there was a version of events that there was a serious grudge between them from the Saunders incident on, with the flames fanned by Lee being offloaded when he wanted to remain at the club.
City was already a PLC when Lee bought into it, and he made no bones about wanting to either float the club on the stock market or hold some other kind of share issue. Now, City were never in a position to do that as things went to shit and we got relegated, and then when we got out of the second tier, it was by way of another relegation.
But let's imagine for a minute that Lee had been able to keep us in the PL or get us back there after we dropped in 1996. Then, he'd have followed that intended course, but would it have been so bad? Yes, he'd have made serious money in the process in the same way as club owners such as Sir John Hall, Doug Ellis, David Dein and the like also did in that period. But it would have also brought substantial funds into the club, allowing us to bring in top players and to fit out the new ground when we moved.
And if David Conn does say that Lee and his mates actually did make a good profit from their involvement in City, that simply isn't true. Let's look at the figures for Lee himself. He paid £2 million in February 1994 for what was then around 20% of the club. By the time of Thaksin's takeover in 2008, Lee's personal holding in successive share issues had been diluted to 7.24%, and Thaksin paid a total of £21.5 million for the club's entire issued share capital.
If we do the maths, that suggests Lee pocketed a shade under £1.56 million when he eventually sold his shares after 14 years. That represents a loss of just under half a million quid, or about 25% of what they originally cost him.
This sounds familiar and I think you've posted it before, but I think it's a great story so I'm happy to read it again. I certainly think it's a good illustration of Lee's character. He was always a bloke with an amazing level of self-confidence, which some people will always take as arrogance and it'll get their backs up. The thing is, if you're going to say this kind of thing, you have to back it up, or you make yourself look a twat and give any detractors all the ammunition they need to have a go at you.
When he was a player, he could certainly produce actions to support his words, and he generally did so with everything he was involved in until he entered the City boardroom. At that stage, the touch deserted him. He's certainly far from thick, so he must have known that, even in the best case scenario, it would take a few years of sorting the club out before we'd be in a position to qualify for Europe. Why, then, hold the AGM at an airport hotel and say it's so everyone can see where we'll be leaving from once we play in European competition again? I suspect he just couldn't help himself.
Now, I think he got a lot wrong in his time in the chair at City, but I also believe there are some mitigating factors and I don't judge him anywhere nearly as harshly as I do Swales. However, one thing he certainly didn't do was manage expectations, and to some degree his reputation in his spell as chairman suffered accordingly.
